Thursday, January 28, 2010


What Salinger Read
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- As many readers know by now, author J.D. Salinger died yesterday. And many readers have read Salinger. Even not-so-lit me read "The Catcher in the Rye" when I was too young to really understand all the East Coast stuff it inhabited. Speaking of reading preferences, what were Salinger's? Roger L. Simon comes to the rescue with this anecdote. Key passage: My encounters with Salinger happened when I was a Dartmouth student (1964). The already reclusive Salinger would appear on the campus occasionally, usually to make a stop at the Dartmouth Bookstore to stock up on books. (He lived some twenty miles off in the town of Cornish, N. H.) When he was around, word would go out to the artier types at the college and we would slip over to the bookstore and, well, stalk the famous writer, I guess you could say. By then he had published Franny and Zooey, among other works, which we greatly admired. But many of us were puzzled that the majority of his purchases were mere mystery paperbacks – Dorothy Sayers was one of his favorites. Undergraduate snobs, we had expected Dostoevsky or Camus. This deserves further comment, but I'm not equipped to deliver. Are you there, Michael Blowhard? Anyone? Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 28, 2010 | perma-link | (3) comments

A Disappearing Book Genre
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- We'll probably drive to Reno tomorrow so that Nancy can take a break from skiing. While there, I'll probably stop by the National Automobile Museum, site of what's left of the once-massive Bill Harrah collection. If I do, I'll probably do a walk-through of the books/gift shop. Am I using the word "probably" a lot? Well, here's one more: In the shop I probably won't spy a lot of books dealing with cars of a given brand (or "marque" as it's often put). Actually, automobile books of all descriptions save shop-manuals seem to have been in comparatively short supply for the last ten or 15 years or so. Okay, another exception is the sort of car book you can see piled high in the discount section of your local Barnes & Noble store. What I've been missing are serious histories of marques intended for car buffs like me. Back in the 1970s and 80s there were many such books that I'd drool over in stores, fingers itching, especially in times when my book-buying budget was tight. Nowadays, I just don't see many compelling car books. Why? One possibility is that it's just me; I bought the good stuff and new titles get ignored because I really don't need a lot of redundancy. Most likely, publishers find that books about defunct marques simply don't sell all that well. Marque books I notice on store shelves tend to be about existing makes (Porsche, Ferrari, Chevrolet Camaro, Ford Mustang and such) or dead brands familiar to the under-50 crowd. (Be braced for more titles dealing with Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Saturn and Plymouth.) New offerings treating Packard, Studebaker, Nash, Hudson and De Soto are rare, and often take the form of photo albums. This seems to be true in Europe as well. When I visit, I keep my eyes open for books dealing with 1927-1947 vintage Alfa-Romeos, Lagondas, Lancias and such. I'd like to find a decent book about pre-1958 "street" Ferrari coachwork by various builders such as Touring and Vignale. Of interest to me are those now little-known English makes such as Jowett, Riley, Wolseley (I do have a book or two about these). French publishers seem to do a little better, so I have a fair collection dealing with French brands. Besides the personal experience factor, it's likely that people (usually guys) are less emotionally involved with cars these days than my generation was. Therefore, I await the launch of books dealing with histories of cell-phone brands. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 28, 2010 | perma-link | (1) comments

Wednesday, December 16, 2009


Boilerplate Adventures
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards-- I've thumbed through it at bookstores, been intrigued by the concept, but still haven't come around to plunking down the cash for a book titled Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel. It's a richly illustrated fiction piece about a robot soldier created in the late 19th century called Boilerplate. Boilerplate serves in a number of conflicts, including Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill, and disappears on the Western Front shortly before the armistice is signed, ending the Great War. To me, the most intriguing aspect of the book noticed during my thumb-throughs was how well the book's creators inserted images of Boilerplate in various historical photos and illustrations -- that robot blends into each scene beautifully, regardless of the style of the original image. I notice that reviews in the Amazon link above were quite positive (aside from one fellow who failed to get the joke). Have any of you purchased / read through Boilerplate? Your reactions, please. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 16, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments

Friday, November 6, 2009


Blut, Eisen and Survival
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The Great War brought forth a number of books dealing with the soldier's life, some fictional, others autobiographical. Probably the best known is All Quiet on the Western Front (In Westen Nichts Neues -- nothing new in the west). Most of the well-known ones had an anti-war tone. I bought an account better known in Europe than in America -- Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger (29 March, 1895 – 17 February, 1998) -- two and a half years ago, but didn't get far into it. Having read more about the Great War in recent months, I grabbed it for trip reading here in California and now I've nearly finished it. As you can see from Jünger's dates, he lived almost until his 103rd birthday. But it's a wonder he got past 11 November, 1918. Jünger was in the thick of things on the Western Front from early 1915 until the end with short time-outs for leave, NCO and officers training as well as hospital stays. He was a highly aggressive junior officer who went on dangerous raids largely for the hell of it. By the end of the war, he had been awarded the pour le Mérite, the highest German military order. The Wikipedia article linked above deals with Jünger's political and literary life and goes wrong, in my judgment, regarding Storm of Steel which it characterized stating "This book by which Jünger became suddenly famous has been seen as glorifying war." I do not see glorification of war in the book. Nor do I see it as anti-war. It strikes me as being brutally descriptive of both the élan of Jünger and some fellow soldiers and the literal blood and guts suffered by the unlucky. The notion of luck is key to understanding Jünger's narrative. He experienced a number of close calls, yet survived. Others caught the British sniper's bullet in the throat, were ripped apart by shrapnel or buried in a collapsed trench during artillery bombardment. Derring-do and courage are present and perhaps some might call that "glorification." But balancing those accounts are many passages dealing with the dead and dying. Jünger takes care to describe the case of newly married Lieutenant Zürn after a battle: "Now he was lying on a door, half-stripped, with the waxy colour that is a sure sign of imminent death, staring up at me with sightless eyes as I stepped out to squeeze his hand." Jünger was a realist. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at November 6, 2009 | perma-link | (14) comments

Tuesday, November 3, 2009


Zdeno on Fratire
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Zdeno is back, this time discussing a literary genre that's new to non-twentysomething me. * * * * * In case my previous posts haven't completely strained my credibility among the sane and sensible of the Blowhard readership, I thought I'd finish the job today by venturing into the darkest, foulest, most wretched corner of contemporary literature. The genre I refer to goes by the name Fratire , and it is exactly what it sounds like: Literature written by and for young men, celebrating contemporary masculinity in all its adolescent ingloriousness. The unrivaled king of the Fratirists is Tucker Max. No description could possibly do justice to Max's literary stylings, so I quote at length below: From: The Absinthe Donuts Story 10:20: We station ourselves in the kitchen. A fat girl walks in. It's game time. "Well, say goodbye to all the leftovers." 10:21: Apparently, this fatty seems to think she can hang. The Medina Division made better tactical decisions: Fatty "What did you say?" Tucker "Can you not hear me? Are your ears fat too?" Fatty [Look of astonishment, stares at my friends cracking up] "EXCUSE ME?" Tucker "I'm sorry. Really I am. [I open the fridge] Would you like cheesecake or chocolate cake? Probably both, I'm guessing." Fatty [Turns and leaves in utter astonishment] Tucker "Hey Sara Lee, I was only kidding! COME BACK HERE--MY FRIEND LIKES TO GO HOGGIN. MORE CUSHION FOR THE PUSHIN! IT'S LIKE RIDING A MOPED!!" Tucker has arrived. 10:23: Rich knows me from undergrad, and knows how to ride my hot streaks by provoking me, "come on man, you can do better. There are plenty of people around here to make fun of." Express elevator to hell, going down. I give him my voice recorder and a simple order, "Don't miss anything." 10:26: I see a girl wearing two colored tank tops over each other. This is too easy: Tucker "Hey 1985 Madonna, are you gonna get the person who did that?" Girl "Did what?" Tucker "Spilled 80's all over you." Girl [Confused look] Tucker "I know I'd be pissed if I looked like an extra from Desperately Seeking Susan." 10:29: Eddie points out a girl wearing the standard anti-globalization outfit. It is topped off with a "No Blood for Oil" button. Rich whispers in my ear, "You gotta get her. Come on man. Do it--for us...for your country." Eddie starts humming God Bless America. 10:29: I storm over. Rich says into the voice recorder, "Target acquired...we are weapons hot." 10:30: I introduce myself to her as Alger Hiss. She doesn't get the joke. Time to be blunt: Tucker "Do you hate the World Bank?" Girl "Uhh, umm, well, I mean, yeah, I feel that..." Tucker "You don't hate the World Bank." Girl "I don't?" Tucker "No. You're mad at your father. You just want daddy to hug you more." Girl "What?" Tucker "You were a sociology major weren't you?" Girl "NO!" Tucker "What was your major?"... posted by Donald at November 3, 2009 | perma-link | (44) comments

Sunday, October 25, 2009


Local Detail in Novels
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I recently wrote about a book dealing with Russian art and culture in the early 20th century where the focus was on Moscow and St. Petersburg. In passing, I mentioned that it was helpful to have actually visited those cities and viewed some of the works of art discussed in the book. Which got me to thinking about reading books containing details of places I hadn't visited. Basically, I had only a foggy notion of what was being discussed because I really couldn't visualize the settings. Given that lots of readers haven't been to all corners of the world, this presents a problem for writers: How much detail and geographical scene-setting should be included? Historians sometimes have no choice but to report such details. Consider the political maneuverings leading up to the 10 May 1940 replacement of Neville Chamberlain by Winston Churchill as British Prime Minister. It would be difficult indeed to not mention major actors entering, leaving, meeting at, passing through, etc. places such as Whitehall, the Admiralty, 10 Downing Street, the Thames Embankment, the Houses of Parliament, Pall Mall, Buckingham Palace and elsewhere. Arthur Conan Doyle (or was it Dr. John Watson?), writing about master detective Sherlock Holmes, includes references to many places in London as well as in surrounding counties and even more distant parts of England such as Dartmoor. His primary, magazine-reading audience mostly lived in the Home Counties region and could visualize many of the settings from personal experience. But most foreign readers would have trouble. If Piccadilly Circus was mentioned, some might recall photos of it. And if the action called for Holmes or Watson to stroll from there to Trafalgar Square, no one but those who had visited London could easily picture the relationship of the two places, let alone the sights between them. My memory of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is getting foggy and I don't have a copy at hand. That said, I think he referenced a number of Paris sites in the parts of the novel set in that city. This was hard to avoid if he wanted to evoke the place. Yet how easily could an untraveled 1928 reader in Dubuque picture Montparnasse and the cafe/bar scene there? Or the Right Bank, where other scenes were placed? Where the place is only a minor character, the author has the opportunity to be sketchy on local atmosphere, leaving it to the reader to create details from his imagination. But if a place is a significant character in a story, this poses a serious problem for a writer. Is there any decent solution to the place-characterization versus ignorant reader dilemma? Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 25, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments

Wednesday, October 21, 2009


Unusual Literary List
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Edward Craig, back in Michigan after bravely braving San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore and living to report his findings here, now unearths for us a surprising nugget of ... well, let him report: * * * * * Michael Blowhard often lamented on this site about the lack of appreciation for the writing skills of popular novelists. These novelists often share the same lament. In his book On Writing Stephen King relates a story about Amy Tan at a conference, complaining about how the audience always asks questions about her plots or characters, but never about her choice of language. I purchased a book a few years ago called The Top Ten edited by columnist J. Peder Zane. The book collects responses from a variety of writers about the ten greatest works of fiction. The topic probably proved too broad, like when the Heisman Trophy tries to name the best player in college football. There’s a lot of repetition, such as Anna Karenina making 25 percent of the lists. I wonder if some of the choices aren’t the result of what economists call “signaling.” In other words, I wonder if some of the respondents want to be known by what they read, rather than what they write. An example is Robert B. Parker, creator of the “Spenser” detective novels, whose list appears across from Joyce Carol Oates. I fully expected her to choose titles by Stendhal, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. But I was strangely disappointed that Parker chose works by Henry James and John Dos Passos. He did have Hammett and Chandler on his list, but those are acceptable among the literati. Other modern novelists presented lists that lead one to conclude nothing worth reading has been written since the start of World War II. Lolita is the only post-war selection on Bobbie Ann Mason’s list. Chick lit author Jennifer Weiner struck me as one of the most honest contributors. Her list included not only The Stand by Stephen King, but Pearl a novel by his wife, Tabitha. The most interesting list, hands down, was the one across from Weiner’s. David Foster Wallace, the late poster child of literary fiction, submitted the following: The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis The Stand by Stephen King Red Dragon by Thomas Harris The Thin Red Line by James Jones Fear of Flying by Erica Jong The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein Fuzz by Ed McBain Alligator by Shelley Katz The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy Maybe I’m misreading the meaning of these lists. Maybe Parker was just naming what he considers the best works of fiction in a traditional sense. And maybe Wallace was making some sort of ironic joke. I still enjoy the idea of a pompous grad student having a minor stroke reading his list, though. * * * * * Once again, Edward, thank you for contributing to 2Blowhards. Later,... posted by Donald at October 21, 2009 | perma-link | (5) comments

Monday, October 19, 2009


Euphony and the Art of Writing
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The subject of this post is euphony and the writer is a man who deals with it professionally. He's Charlton Griffin, a long-time 2Blowhards reader who creates audiobooks for a living (the link contains interesting biographical information). Our founder, Michael Blowhard, is a huge fan of Charlton's work, a catalog of which is here. (Don't forget to check out links at the top of the page that lead to much more than the short story selections shown.) I'm utterly hapless behind a microphone, even when trying to record those "we're not here" messages for voicemail. So I found Charlton's peek behind the audiobook curtain fascinating; don't miss his takes on which authors do and don't make for easy reading. * * * * * "[A]greeableness of sound; pleasing effect to the ear, esp. a pleasant sounding or harmonious combination or succession of words: the majestic euphony of Milton's poetry." In my experience, very few persons have ever expressed an opinion on the way literature sounds. Since most of us read silently, it would seem to be a moot point. But it is not. Because my daily bread is earned as a narrator, I have to give voice to books. It can be an arduous affair sometimes. Of all the qualities good writing possesses, I suppose euphony is the least understood and least important. Lucidity, simplicity and euphony were always the holy trinity of writing to Somerset Maugham. Like many great writers, he read his work aloud before he put his pen aside for the day. Don't you wish all writers would do this? Why on earth do some writers insist on linking up a long series of words that begin and end in difficult consonants? Or trip you up with a series of dependent clauses that leave you gasping for intellectual air? If you can't read a sentence aloud without contorting your face or stumbling around to find the right place for emphasis, there is a problem. It is my opinion that the best writers are the ones whose works can be enjoyed audibly. I don't say this because I think their works ought to be enjoyed aloud. But it is in the vocal realm that language meets its sternest tests. A book can be lucid, and yet lose the reader because its sentence structure is so complex that the mind begins to wander. Think of those wonderfully logical college textbooks you struggled through. Can't get any more lucid than Plato, for example. Unfortunately, by piling one idea upon another in unending cascades, this kind of writing can sometimes require superhuman concentration after more than a few pages. Adding euphony to this process would probably not advance its ability to engage. Simplicity is always to be desired. This assumes that you have something interesting to write about. Simplicity linked with inanity is devastating. But if your thinking process is such that you find it necessary to express complex ideas in an obscure manner, you... posted by Donald at October 19, 2009 | perma-link | (16) comments

Saturday, October 17, 2009


Pre-Revolutionary Russian Art and Culture
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I finally got around to buying a book I've had my eye on for several months. "Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920: Art, Life & Culture" by John E. Bowlt It was published by The Vendome Press which is responsible for a similar book about Vienna that I had reservatons about, and another, "The Society Portrait," that I realy liked. I finally decided to buy it because it was richly illustrated and covered a period of art that interests me greatly: the transition to modernism. For example, below is an image of a painting shown in the book, and it's by an artist I wasn't aware of. "Pool" by Viktor Borisov-Musatov (1870-1905) - 1902 Tempera on canvas. Alternate English title: "The Reservoir." I'm about halfway through reading the book's text and thus far my reaction is mixed. It's useful when it focuses on paintings, sculptures and architectural examples. For example, I found it helpful to read the suggestion that the dominant school of painting during that period was Symbolism. I haven't made up my mind that Bowlt's assessment is correct; I need to do some research of my own before I accept it. The idea is definitely food for thought even though I wonder if the writer might have stacked the deck by including a possibly disproportionate number of works by Mikhail Vrubel, a Symbolist to the hilt, who I wrote about here. He also mentions that Russian arts lagged behind trends and fads of countries farther west, a reasonable assumption. And valid (for some artists, anyway) is his contention that what might be termed the weight and pervasiveness of historical Russian culture affected how those westerly fashions were manifested by Russian hands. My problem with Bowlt is that he falls into what I consider the trap of trying too hard to link artists and works of art to contemporaneous events and phenomena. Of course an artist is influenced by the world around him. But it's likely that he's also influenced by past art if he has at all studied his craft. Then there's the matter of the artist's temperament and personality, hugely important for his creations. Here, from the the first page (99) of the chapter "The Shock of the New" is the sort of writing that annoys me: The consequent and fundamental dichotomy between the vestiges of a patriarchal social order and the semaphores of a new modus vivendi, between country and town, stasis and action, aristocracy and democracy, released an energy and dynamism which, in turn, guided many of the explorations and discoveries of the Russian Silver Age. Aside perhaps from the bits about aristocracy and the specific mention of Russia, this sentence might have been applied to almost any Western society at virtually any time between 1750 and 1950. Which means it is useless. I should mention that I might never have purchased the book if I hadn't visited Russia. I have walked the streets of St. Petersburg and, to my... posted by Donald at October 17, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments

Thursday, October 8, 2009


Digging Ferlinghetti's Old Digs
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Today's guest article is by Michigan-based writer Edward Craig who reports on his recent visit to San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore in the North Beach area which was co-founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti who gained his greatest fame publishing Beat poetry in the 1950s. Edward's report: * * * * * I visited San Francisco recently and made a pilgrimage to City Lights, which is what’s known as a “destination bookstore.” Other examples are Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C. and Powell’s in Portland. These stores are marked by their size. City Lights in three stories tall and most of its square footage, including the staircases, is packed with books. More importantly, though, is the zeitgeist of these establishments. City Lights reflects the spirit of San Francisco, that being an in-your-face leftism. You can pick up books with titles like “The ABCs of Communism” and “Film in Post-Colonial Africa.” It made me almost ashamed to be a white male. I wondered how it made the other white males hanging out in the store feel. I might have asked them, but I didn’t want to disturb their leisurely reading. I could have sought the opinion of the one young woman of color at the store, but she was busy running the cash register. There are chairs set out in City Lights so you can take your time reading the books they offer. Which is good, since most of them are really expensive. There are no discount tables at City Lights like you’ll find at Borders or Barnes & Noble. I considered buying a two-volume set on the history of Southern succession. It seemed very interesting, getting into topics such as the eccentric character of South Carolina. But they would have cost me more than $50 and I would have had to haul them back to Detroit. I considered a number of books from the eclectic art section, which includes categories dedicated to graphic novels and graffiti. What stopped me was a growing sense of being ripped off. I kept wondering, “How much less would I pay for this on Amazon?” But you’re not buying books at City Lights, You’re buying into a heritage. The Beats used to hang out at this store. You pay for a connection to people like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. You pay to support a stance against the establishment, against the corrupt system that keeps us down. In the end, I walked out with nothing. I guess I’m too cheap to be one of the people. * * * * * Thank you, Edward, for bringing us up to date on the post-Beat scene where the market somehow still manages to rule. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 8, 2009 | perma-link | (8) comments

Saturday, October 3, 2009


New Venues For Used Books
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm seeing used books in places I never saw them before. When I was young, Seattle had a large used-book store (Shorey Book Store) in the downtown area. I only visited it once, and since then it seems to have migrated a time or two to ever-cheaper real estate. There are other stores specializing in used books, but I don't shop in them. You see, one of my quirks is preferring new things to used. I prefer to buy cars new, clothes new and books new. I'm not a purist, mind you: I bought three used cars and a smattering of books long out of print and unlikely to be republished. And I do patronize stores that offer a mix of new, remaindered and used books -- Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, for instance. Nevertheless, when book browsing and shopping, I go to certain stores with the expectation that the books I see will be new and perhaps remaindered. An example is the University Book Store by the University of Washington. Yes, the textbook area in the basement has both new and used textbooks, but that's accepted textbook sales practice. Recently I've been seeing used books creeping into the trade books sections. They can be spotted because they have little yellow circles or dots attached near the base of their spines and their price labels are yellow rather than white. I feel that those books don't belong there. Even more startling to me was the appearance of what are labeled "gently used art books" on a table in the Barnes and Noble store in nearby University Village. I remember B&N being a breed of cut-rate bookstore back in the 1960s and early 70s with outlets on lower Fifth Avenue in New York and downtown Boston. The chain went on to other things -- until now. I'm not sure what to make of it. Used books can have whatever markup the seller thinks he can get away with, so I assume they can be pretty profitable if they sell well. Is this business tactic why I'm starting to see them pop up in unlikely places? Are there related reasons? The depressed economy? Competition from Amazon? Or is something else happening in the book industry? I'll be happy to get clued in. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 3, 2009 | perma-link | (4) comments

Wednesday, September 30, 2009


Ferdinand Bardamu Guest Post
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Several people have expressed interest in guest-blogging at 2Blowhards to help fill the huge gap created when Michael decided to retire from full-time posting. Today guest-blogging begins with an article by Ferdinand Bardamu, who blogs at In Mala Fide and is a contributing writer for The Spearhead. Not long ago Michael linked to Ferdinand in this posting. What Ferdinard has to say might be provocative in some quarters; comments no doubt will tell that tale. Over to you, Ferdinand: * * * * * The Provincialism of Modern Novelists A few years back, I was waiting at the dentist's office, thumbing through a copy of Time magazine, when I came across an article entitled "Who's the Voice of this Generation?" The author was lamenting the fact that not one of the "young novelists" writing today is representative of the attitudes and neuroses of this generation. As is the nature of modern journalism, this reporter was trained to ignore the truth in front of her face. The reason that not one of these "young novelists" can claim to be the voice of this generation is because all of them are nauseatingly parochial in thought and style. Anyone involved in the world of literature is aware of the old cliché, "Write what you know." There's an unstated implication in that phrase; make sure what you know is interesting. The best novelists had no trouble grasping this concept. Ernest Hemingway only wrote what he knew, but the breadth and depth of his life experiences - fighting in World War I, living in Paris during the Roaring Twenties, reporting on the Spanish Civil War - was a large part of what made his novels compelling. Louis-Ferdinand Cé:line's Journey to the End of the Night (as well as his other works) was a glorified retelling of his experiences during WWI and later working in colonial French West Africa and the U.S. The list of great novelists who infused their writing with their varied life experiences is endless: F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Tim O'Brien, etc. No more. Today's crop of popular novelists, having missed the subtext, are "writing what they know," the likes of which is small enough to fit into a shot glass. Let's take Jhumpa Lahiri as an example. Lahiri has been widely acclaimed for her depiction of Bengali immigrants in the U.S. in her works. Beyond the fact that the "immigrant adjusting to life in a new land" trope is so burned out at this point its unbearable, Lahiri is incapable of writing anything beyond her dull life as an American of Bengali descent. Her first book, Interpreter of Maladies, was about Indian immigrants acclimating themselves to American culture. Lahiri's novel, The Namesake, beyond being poorly written and having improbable plot elements (Indians nicknaming their child "Gogol"? Uh-huh), was about the exact same thing - Indian immigrants acclimating themselves to American culture. Her most recent short story collection, Unaccustomed... posted by Donald at September 30, 2009 | perma-link | (15) comments

Monday, August 31, 2009


Book Report
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Folks who have been 2Blowhards readers for more than a year might remember that I have been thinking about writing a well-illustrated book dealing with painters who were bypassed by art history -- many of whom I've been featuring here. (My most recent (I think) posting about the proposed book is here.) I was about to send a package of material (prospectus, contents, CV, a couple of sample chapters) to publishers last fall. Then the current economic crisis hit. I thought the uncertainty of the times would make publishers more leery than usual about accepting new works, so decided to hold off until things settled down. And, by golly, things have settled down to the point where the shape of the economy over the next year or so is fairly clear. It's not a pretty sight. But it's better than things seemed last October and, as noted, it's fairly clear. I might as well get the process started. Below are extracts from the "Subject" section of the three-page prospectus I'm still fiddling with. I hope it will give you a picture of what I'm up to in this project. Critiques and suggestions would be helpful. There seems to be a hole in mainstream histories of painting starting at the point where Impressionism entered the scene. Such histories usually focus on the various modernist movements beginning with Impressionism and continuing through (among others) Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Op Art and so on up to today’s newest artistic thing. And the painters who didn’t participate in any of these schools? They are seldom worthy of mention unless they are so famous they can’t be ignored: think Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. Also sometimes included might be painters such as John Singer Sargent, Joachim Sorolla and J.W. Waterhouse whose reputations have been on the rise for some time now. Perhaps the same could be said for non-modernist schools such as California plein-air painters active 1900-30. Indeed, there are many books about individual non-modernist painters and non-modernist painters grouped by geography and, sometimes, style. But apparently no one has tried to present a general history of non-modernist painting from 1870 to the present in book form. That is the task of this proposed book. After a few paragraphs outlining the history of modernism and non-modenrist reaction to it, I conclude my discussion of the book's subject as follows: The book proposed here is intended to provide coverage of many of the excellent artists who, for various reasons, failed to embrace modernism. The contexts mentioned in the preceding paragraphs form the framework for the presentation. Why does any of this matter? It matters because there is a good chance that modernism in its various guises lacks staying power. Arguments are presented in the enclosed draft of Chapter 1. But the gist is that modernism has strayed so far from basic human experience that future generations will not easily relate to it, unlike the... posted by Donald at August 31, 2009 | perma-link | (13) comments

Wednesday, August 26, 2009


Bill Links
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Bill Kauffman celebrates the just-deceased Western novelist Elmer Kelton, and the hillbilly actor and '70s movie icon Warren Oates. Bill Kauffman himself is an exciting and significant cultural figure. Access all five parts of our interview with Kauffman from this posting. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 26, 2009 | perma-link | (0)

Thursday, August 6, 2009


Budd Schulberg R.I.P.
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A quick posting to note the passing of filmworld legend Budd Schulberg. Schulberg was probably best-known for writing the classic Hollywood novel "What Makes Sammy Run?" and the screenplay for "On the Waterfront." He was 95 years old. Carrie Rickey's short obit of Schulberg is very informative. Back here, I shared a few thoughts about "Sammy," which as far as I'm concerned is a great (and underappreciated) novel. It's also -- hallelujah -- a fast, smart, dirty-minded, and suspenseful read. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 6, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments

Crime Fiction Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Newsweek's book critic Malcolm Jones reviews some of the strengths of noir fiction, and offers some recommendations in the genre. * A nice passage from Irish novelist John Banville, who writes both literary novels and (as Benjamin Black) crime fiction: I deplore the apartheid that has been imposed on fiction writing, so that in shops the "crime books" are segregated from the "proper" novels. Of course, there are bad crime novels, many of which seem to have been written with the blunt end of a burnt stick, but the same is true of so-called literary fiction. The distinction between good writing and bad is the only one worth making. * In an interview with Tom Piccirilli, Ed Gorman recalls his ornery early days. (I raved about one of Ed's western novels here. Here's Ed's own blog.) * Enjoy some fun visual interpretations of Donald Westlake's great creation, the brutal crook Parker. The LA Times' Geoff Boucher enjoys a new graphic-novel adaptation of one of the Parker novels, and links to a trailer for John Boorman's amazing 1967 Westlake / Parker adaptation, "Point Blank." UPDATE: Whisky Prajer offers a well-illustrated rave about that graphic-novel Parker. * MBlowhard Rewind: I praised the work of the brilliant Gold Medal crime novelist Charles Williams. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 6, 2009 | perma-link | (5) comments

Monday, July 20, 2009


LitFict and Sentences
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- In case some visitors think that, in my many rants about the book-fiction world (sample one example here), I have overstated the intellectual set's commitment to literary fiction, let me present Yale's "The American Novel Since 1945." Take that course and you'd learn little if anything about postwar crime, horror, romance, or western fiction. You'd discover next to nothing about erotic fiction or humorous fiction. You'd remain clueless about the enduring influence of writers like Mickey Spillane and Jacqueline Susann. (I bet you also wouldn't wake up to the history of the postwar American publishing business.) Yet you'd emerge convinced that you'd "done" the postwar American novel. And you'd have Yale's imprimatur bolstering your confidence about that judgment. And, in case some visitors think I've overstated the intellectual set's commitment to writin' -- ie., fussing with words -- let me present The Teaching Company's "Building Great Sentences." Take that course and you'll be unlikely to discover much about how to create living-breathing characters, or how to come up with fictional situations that might conceivably pique a reader's interest. Your sentences will glitter, though. Best, Michael DIMLY-RELATED UPDATE: Sarah Weinman shares some welcome news about the recently-deceased crime-fiction giant Donald Westlake, a hero of mine. Rege Behe offers a well-judged tribute to Westlake.... posted by Michael at July 20, 2009 | perma-link | (38) comments

Thursday, July 2, 2009


Books and Publishing Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Enjoy the latest offering from Charlton Griffin, frequent 2Blowhards visitor and producer of some of the classiest audiobooks available. * Big Hollywood's Matt Peterson continues his series about conservatives and literature. * Cullen Gallagher reads and enjoys "Pick-Up," by the pulp master Charles Willeford. * Whatever became of sexy-trashy blockbuster novels? * Gerard Jones takes stock of how things are changing for book authors. * Thanks to Bryan for turning up this excellent interview with the great, and very down-to-earth, Elmore Leonard. * Here's a downside to the Kindle that I hadn't thought of before. * Why doesn't the opinion-making class appreciate light verse more? * MBlowhard Rewind: I praised the sly and satirical work of the popular novelist Ira Levin. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 2, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments

Tuesday, June 30, 2009


Mad Alice
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Lit-fict vet Alice Hoffman shows how to respond classily to a negative review: here, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 30, 2009 | perma-link | (11) comments

Monday, June 29, 2009


Best Sellers: Why Read Them?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Confession time again. I can't remember the last time I bought for myself a non-fiction book on a best seller list. I know that I bought autobiographies of Lee Iacocca (the Ford and Chrysler honcho) and Chuck Yeager (the guy who broke the sound barrier), those books from 25 years or so ago. But after that.... As for fiction, I did buy every Harry Potter book. That's probably because I've always had a soft spot for science fiction where another world/civilization is made fascinating thanks to the imagination and skill of the writer. The Potter books aren't sci-fi, but they had the quality I just mentioned. In other words, I didn't buy them because they were ultra-hyper-mega best sellers: that factor was incidental. I've mentioned before that I read little fiction, this largely because I don't like getting hooked to the point my sleep suffers. So the Potter books aside, I can't even guess what the last best selling novel I read was. I did read Drury's "Advice and Consent," Michener's "Hawaii" (because I'd just visited there for the first time) and Heller's "Catch-22." Oh, and I did read "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" for a reason I no longer can begin to comprehend. These were read when the books reached paperback. I'm not counting classical fiction written many years before I got to it such as Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" or Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" series. To summarize, as nearly as I can tell, I read my last non-Potter best selling novel before I turned 40. I do read a lot of non-fiction. But not best sellers. More precisely, I now never buy a book simply because it is on a best seller list. I might have read some books in recent years that might have shown up on one list or another, but that would have been happenstance. Why is that? It's because I buy books to get information in greater depth than can be provided in magazine articles, internet postings and outlines. Yet many non-fiction best sellers strike me as beefed-up versions of what I just mentioned or else deal with subjects I'm not deeply interested in. If I've already gotten the basic information in concise form elsewhere, it makes no sense to buy a book on the subject. If I'm not presently interested in a subject, taking time to read about it deprives me of the time I would spend learning about things I deem more important or interesting. We are far past the point where an individual can be conversant with everything, so I feel little guilt about ignoring Things I Should Learn About. This doesn't mean I'll never again buy a non-fiction best-seller, it's just that the odds against doing so are high. On reflection, what I've been discussing is really about life cycle stages and how they can affect one's behavior. Between my mid-teens and mid-thirties, I felt it was important to stay au courant. That might... posted by Donald at June 29, 2009 | perma-link | (9) comments

Thursday, May 28, 2009


Matt's Response to Me
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Big Hollywood's Matt Patterson responds to what I said in his interview with me. He also writes a good introduction to the New Formalism. Nice passage: Conservative authors today want to “conserve” what has come in the past, but this in itself is actually quite a radical notion in today’s literary climate. Ain't things topsy-turvy? Don't skip the comments. BONUS RELATED LINK: Joseph Phillips does an amusing job of describing "the right-wing tango." BONUS, COMPLETELY UNRELATED, LINKS: Jeremy Richey shares some Peckinpah posters, as well as some screenshots from one of The Wife's favorite movies, George Axelrod's zany 1966 SoCal satire, "Lord Love a Duck." I wrote a bit about Axelrod -- who was a major talent and a major pop-culture figure back in the '50s and '60s, but who has been largely forgotten since -- back here. Buy a copy of "Lord Love a Duck." Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 28, 2009 | perma-link | (1) comments

Friday, May 22, 2009


Fact for the Day
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The number of print-on-demand titles published in the US has exceeded the number of traditional books produced for the first time ever. Source. A cool development, at least for those of us rooting for a more open and pluralistic book-publishing environment. Worth keeping in mind, though, is another fact that I ran across recently: The average number of copies that a book published via the POD outfit Lulu sells is one. Best, Michael UPDATE: Kelly Jane Torrance takes a smart look at these publishing developments.... posted by Michael at May 22, 2009 | perma-link | (16) comments

Tuesday, May 19, 2009


New Teaching Company Sale
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The sale that the Teaching Company is currently running is a particularly attractive one. Of the many bargains that beckon, I'd especially love to try out The Physics of History, How the Earth Works, Biology, A History of Mathematics, Chaos, and Understanding Genetics. The new course that I've already pulled the trigger on, though, is The Conservative Tradition. Great topic, of course. Though conservatism has a vast and impressive pedigree, the only version of it that too many people encounter is what they see on Fox News. Hey, world: Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott aren't just enormously impressive and enlightening writers and thinkers, they might even disapprove of Glenn Beck. The course is being delivered by a great lecturer too -- Patrick Allitt, one of my fave Teaching Company profs. I've been through two of Allitt's series and I loved them both; read about 'em here and here. Fabulously smart, articulate, knowledgeable and articulate, Allitt also has a delightful manner: amused, admiring, gentle, and enthusiastic. A stuffy pedant he ain't. Sigh: Sophisticated yet accessible ... It's one of my very favorite combos. (I wrote back here about how much I've gotten out of wrestling with the history of rightie thought. Back here you can find links to all three parts of an interview I did with the brilliant traditionalist conservative Jim Kalb. Buy Jim's mind-opening book here. BTW and FWIW: Although I'm certainly interested, respectful, and sympathetic, I'm by no means a conservative. I co-write X-rated fiction, I live downtown, I move among gays, artists, and performers, and I spend most of my "thinking about politics" time wishing the world's Primarily Political People would go away and die, or at least shut up.) Among the on-sale courses are a few that I've listened to and can recommend: Buddhism by Malcolm David Eckel. A first-class survey by a winning and enthusiastic prof. (I say this, by the way, as someone who has been through dozens of intros-to-Buddhism.) Eckel has clearly gotten a lot out of Buddhism himself, and he delivers his material in an inspired way, mixing up straightforward history, explanations of the content of Buddhism, Buddhist legends and lore, and a little bit of storytelling of his own. It's an approach that might well go awry, but Eckel keeps matters moving forward, and the approach pays off, shedding mucho worthwhile extra light on the topic. He has a burly-yet-boyish energy that I enjoyed spending time with too. Religions of the Axial Age by Mark Muesse. Back in this posting I was hard on Muesse's Hinduism lecture series. (Short version: I found it informative but dry.) I had no such quibbles with this course, though, which is a real beauty. Was I unfair in my judgment of "Hinduism"? Or is Muesse one of those profs who shines when he gets a chance to do big-picture, compare-and-contrast presentations? In any case, I found "Religions of the Axial Age" not just supremely informative but enchanting. (The Axial... posted by Michael at May 19, 2009 | perma-link | (11) comments

Monday, May 18, 2009


Q&A
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Big Hollywood's Matt Patterson interviews a certain M. Blowhard. (Matt's general intro is here.) Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 18, 2009 | perma-link | (9) comments

Saturday, May 16, 2009


Fact for the Day
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- John Wiley & Sons, a textbook publisher that also creates the "For Dummies" series, employs three full-time staff members to trawl the web for unauthorized copies. In the last month, the company has sent notices out on more than 5,000 titles -- five times more than a year ago -- asking various sites to take down digital versions of Wiley’s books. Source. I've been urging youngsters for some years now to consider going into copyright law. It's a happening field, and it looks like it'll continue being a lively one for a long time to come. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 16, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments

Sunday, April 26, 2009


1000 Words: Patrick Dennis
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Another installment in my occasional series of looks at underknown cultural phenomena. Today: Patrick Dennis, an American author of comic novels. For starters, let me pump up that description: Calling Patrick Dennis "an author of comic novels" is like describing "Gone With the Wind" as "a Civil War romance." It may be accurate but it doesn't go nearly far enough. Because in the 1950s and for much of the '60s, Patrick Dennis was huge. HUGE. At a time when writing, reading, and books really counted for something in our national life, Dennis was a star. Many of his 16 novels became bestsellers -- at one point he became the first person ever to have three books on the NYTimes bestseller list at the same time. He made millions of dollars. He was the toast of Manhattan high life. Not only were a number of his books adapted for the stage and screen, several of his characters became iconic. His madcap life-force creation Auntie Mame, for instance, was for many years as familiar a figure in America popular culture as Elvis Presley and Lucille Ball. Dennis was a larger-than-life figure himself -- an irreverent, live-it-all-out cutup whose nonwriting life, once he hit the bigtime, consisted largely of parties, balls, dinners, and sexual adventures, all of them enacted to the accompaniment of oceans of booze. You never knew quite what Pat Dennis was going to get up to next, to put it mildly. "I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind," he once said, and judging from his biography he might have been talking about how he approached every new day too. Despite all this, Patrick Dennis has these days been largely forgotten. If you ask a Greatest Generation person about Patrick Dennis and / or Auntie Mame, you'll likely evoke happy memories. But where his rep among younger people goes... Well, try Googling the name "Patrick Dennis." You'll turn up a helpful Wikipedia entry but very little else. He was so big once and he's so neglected now that it's a little peculiar. It's as though Frank Sinatra, say, had disappeared entirely down the memory hole. Until recently I knew little about Patrick Dennis myself. I knew of, but hadn't seen, the movie of "Auntie Mame." And I retained a memory of Camille Paglia declaring Auntie Mame a genuinely great creation. Here's Camille: "Auntie Mame" is the American "Alice in Wonderland." It is also, incidentally, one of the most important books in my life. Its witty Wildean phrases ring in my mind, and its flamboyant characters still enamor me. Like Tennessee Williams, Patrick Dennis caught the boldness, vitality, and iridescent theatricality of modern American personality. In Mame's mercurial metamorphoses we see American optimism and self-invention writ large. Anyway: For no reason that I can recall, I found myself curious. Over the last few months I've read a couple of Dennis' novels, as well as a biography of him. So... posted by Michael at April 26, 2009 | perma-link | (23) comments

Tuesday, April 14, 2009


Romance Anniversary
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Harlequin (of Harlequin romance novels) turns 60 this year. * Bhetti, a smart and funny young woman who hangs out at Roissy's, has some words to say in favor of reading romance novels. * ABC celebrates the big Harlequin anniversary. Small MBlowhard rant: I do wish that many readers wouldn't be as quick to condemn and/or condescend to romance novels and romance writers as they are. In fact, it's quite amazing how prone many readers are to dismissing romance fiction, vampire fiction, and the like without ever having read any. How to explain this tendency of so many readers? My theory: It must have something to do with excessive exposure to English-lit classes. In any case: Romance fiction is dismissable because it's formulaic, you say? Response: Sonnets aren't formulaic? Rock and roll isn't formulaic? Incidentally, and FWIW, romance-reading isn't my thing by a long shot. But 1) I'm generally reluctant to condemn anything without having experienced it for myself (because I'm such a super-admirable person, of course), and 2) I'm always curious about genre books. So, many years back, I took the time to read a couple dozen romance novels. You know what I found? Surprise, surprise: Some romance novels are solid entertainments, crafted by generous and talented entertainers. I was left wondering: Why would anybody sneer at such creations, or at such creators? Let alone at the people who enjoy these creations? Related: Here's Harlequin's website. Wikipedia is very informative about both Harlequin and romances generally. One of the best of the romance novelists I read turns out to have been a man. Alias Clio is a fan of romance legend Georgette Heyer. Are you really gonna look down on the pleasures of Alias Clio? Other Popular-Fiction Links: I raved about James M. Cain's mean, brilliant, and juicy "Mildred Pierce." I praised some of the work of trash-novel diva Jackie Collins. I ranted about the class-and-snob basis of the "literary fiction" thang. Question for the day: Why are do so many people who are comfy with the idea of "popular music" and "popular movies" as "legitimate forms of entertainment that might well be art" turn their noses up at popular book-fiction? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 14, 2009 | perma-link | (57) comments

Sunday, March 22, 2009


Hardboiled Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Daer Blowhards -- * The Rap Sheet offers a farewell to the recently-deceased crime-fiction giant Donald Westlake, here and here, with tributes by many crime-fiction scenesters. Loads of good reading suggestions. * Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai (a one-man antidote to the general pussification of book-writing and book-publishing) offers his own recollections of Westlake. * Say hi to an impressive new website devoted entirely to Westlake's masterful Parker novels. * Cullen Gallagher writes a nice appreciation of the underknown pulp novelist Day Keene. As far as I'm concerned, Day Keene was a major fiction talent. You're unlikely to hear anything about him if you follow the usual "literary" press, though. * MBlowhard Rewind: I raved about Donald Westlake, who (FWIW, of course) I consider a genius, as well as one of America's greatest entertainer-artists. * Bonus link: An introduction to the influential paperback-original crime-fiction line Gold Medal Books. A question to drive home one of my favorite themes: If you'd been following contempo fiction in 1950, would you have bet that 60 years later the lowbrow Gold Medal Books would be viewed by many as having been a vital and important moment in American literary history? C'mon, be honest. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 22, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments

Monday, March 16, 2009


Terry Southern
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Terry Southern photographed by Stanley Kubrick Christy Rogers writes an appreciation of the brilliant American satirist Terry Southern, best known for "Dr. Strangelove" (co-written with Stanley Kubrick) and "Candy" (which Southern co-wrote with Mason Hoffenberg). In a posting I wrote about co-creating a trash novel with The Wife, I passed along a lot of my own reflections about Terry Southern. Southern, who died in 1995, is one of my art-heroes. This conjunction of Terry Southern, satire, and co-creating may just be a fluke -- but, on the other hand, when The Wife and I co-wrote and co-produced a ribald audiobook last year, Terry Southern was definitely an influence and an inspiration. Total coincidence? Christy Rogers link found thanks to ALD. Buy yourself an Arts and Letters Daily t-shirt here. Here's the Terry Southern website. I found the 1963 photo above here, where M. Bromberg has posted a very on-target and evocative appreciation of Southern's writing. If you're curious about our audiobook -- a funny and raunchy Hollywood satire, full of wildass storylines and far-out performances by gifted actors -- shoot me an email at michaelblowhard at gmail. I'll send you a link to the website that we made for the audiobook, where you can learn a bit about it, enjoy a small audio sampler, and maybe hit a "Buy Now" button. The Wife and I will probably never create anything so ambitious again. My Question for the Day is a variant on many of my rants about the entrenched academic / bookchat / lit-fict thing: Why aren't more of Terry Southern's books taught in contempo lit classes? Why isn't more made of his writing by critics? And why aren't potentially turned-on kids introduced to his work as a regular part of a literary education? My hunch: It's because Southern's books were hilarious, often dirty, showbizzy, accessible, and entertaining. Funny, rowdy, easy-to-read, and recent ... Something about that combo rubs many readin'-and-writin' authorities the wrong way. Too bad. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 16, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments

Thursday, March 5, 2009


More on DFW
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Ron Rosenbaum contrasts the fiction of David Foster Wallace, which he doesn't like, to three novels that he does enjoy. All are detective novels. Gil Roth, who pointed Rosenbaum's piece out to me, recalls his own wrestle with DFW. Great line: "It felt as if he really needed an editor, but was stuck with enablers who believed they were publishing genius. They must’ve felt like 'the footnoting thing' was Wallace’s brand or something." Gil is always smart and shrewd about the way the book publishing world thinks and works. Best, Michael UPDATE: Alias Clio shares some thoughts about depression, depressives, and DFW. Jewish Atheist writes about why DFW was his favorite writer, here and here.... posted by Michael at March 5, 2009 | perma-link | (15) comments

Tuesday, March 3, 2009


The DFW Story
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- D.T. Max's New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace -- the acclaimed literary novelist who committed suicide at the age of 46 last September -- should be of interest not just to fans of DFW's but also to those curious about this weird creature called "contemporary American literary fiction." Has enough time passed since DFW's death so that I can decently express a few scattershot observations about Wallace's life and work that aren't completely reverent? I hope so. All sympathy extended to his loved ones, of course, and I'm happy to agree that he was a brilliant and talented guy. In case you aren't aware of the legend ... Wallace emerged as a literary-world star in the '80s, while still an undergraduate at Amherst. He published a brash young novel; a lot of inventive short stories; a giant novel called "Infinite Jest" that some consider a masterpiece; and many pieces of journalism. He was known for his twisty sentences, his "maximalist" literary ambitions, and his GenX tone of sophisticated, bored, self-questioning plaintiveness. FWIW, I wasn't a fan. I wasn't even sympathetic, to be honest, though I had no reason to wish him ill either. There was just nothing about his work that hooked me. I found "Broom of the System" to be so much undergraduate showing-off; I liked a couple of his stories pretty well but found the others I tried to be a lot of juvenile grandstanding; I glanced at a couple of pages of "Infinite Jest" and thought "No thanks, I've already read too much Pynchon and DeLillo." I don't think I ever finished any of his journalistic pieces, which seemed to me to express a very peculiar combo of exhaustion and exhilaration, as though Wallace was convinced that the point of writing is to expend your vital forces chasing your thoughts around. As a person, DFW was an anxiety-ridden depressive. He had sweaty anxiety attacks while in high school; he was put on anti-depression meds while still in college; he attempted suicide several times; he was a heavy pot-smoker and drinker who eventually needed to go cold turkey; and he spent a couple of stretches in mental clinics. DFW was a total creature of academia, even so far as his family background went. His father taught philosophy, his mom taught English. Once he finished Amherst he went to Arizona for a creative-writing MFA. In the years following, he lived on book advances and by teaching creative writing at a number of different colleges. At one point, he decided that he'd burned up his interest in fiction. What did he do to try to resolve the dilemma? Why, he went back to school, this time in philosophy. In other words, in his entire life DFW almost never ventured out of academia, except to get treatment for his mental problems, or to recover from those treatments. DFW's writing was a total creature of contempo literary fiction. What was his fiction about? Language. Writing... posted by Michael at March 3, 2009 | perma-link | (52) comments

Thursday, February 19, 2009


Hawks on "The 10,000 Year Explosion"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Anthropologist John Hawks reads and reacts to Cochran and Harpending's "The 10,000 Year Explosion." Verdict: "I've read most of the recent popular books about human evolution or genetics. To me, this one stands above the others." Read the 2Blowhards interview with Gregory Cochran here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 19, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments

Monday, January 19, 2009


Podcast Recs 1
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Since I've spent some of the last month filling my iPod with podcasts and taking it with me on daily walks, I thought I'd pass along the highlights of my recent adventures in listening. First up: * Dan Ariely on behavioral economics. (To download the podcast, go here and do a Search on Ariely.) One of the hardest things to get used to where economics is concerned is the preference so many in the field have for constructing mathematical models. Shouldn't they be out in the world (or at least in the lab) investigating what people are like and how they tend to behave instead? Behavioral economics has brought a little realism back into the field. What built-in quirks do people tend to have? In what ways are they not "utility maximizers"? In this podcast, the behavioral economist Dan Ariely offers a lot of examples of ways in which people differ from pure-rationality automatons. The fun of the talk comes partly from the little shocks of recognition that Ariely's research delivers. Hey, life is what seems to be being discussed and described, not some geek's theory. But it also comes from Ariely's presentation style. In his scholarly way, Ariely is a real performer, with a hyperbolic-yet-droll, innocent-yet-canny tone that put me in mind of the Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov, an underknown literary writer of the 1980s. Buy a copy of Ariely's book here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 19, 2009 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, January 16, 2009


Charlton's New One
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Here's the latest by the superb audiobook producer and reader Charlton Griffin. Talk about audacious, ambitious, and substantial! Have I mentioned before that audio can be a terrific way for those with gaps in their educations to fill a few of them in? Charlton has done many of the classics -- type "Charlton Griffin" into the Search box at Audible and you'll turn up numerous titles by giants. Among them: Dickens, Milton, and Polybius. At Blackstone Audiobooks -- another fab resource -- you can find many other bedrocks-of-Western-Civ, including Whitman, Tolstoy, and Kipling. There's no longer any excuse to remain an unlettered clod. Vaguely related: Back here I wrote about co-producing a raunchy and satirical audiobook with The Wife. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 16, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments

Monday, January 12, 2009


More on Westlake
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A couple of good tributes to the late great Donald Westlake: from editor/bookstore-owner Otto Penzler (a pretty terrific crime-fiction figure in his own right), and from Cullen Gallagher. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 12, 2009 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, January 2, 2009


Donald Westlake R.I.P.
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I was very sorry to learn that the crime fiction writer Donald Westlake has died. He was 75, and until his sudden heart attack on Wednesday evening had been as busy and active as ever. FWIW, Westlake was among my very favorite fiction writers ever -- and I do mean ever, as in "of all times." While the novels of his that I've read have ranged from fabulous to pretty-good, each and every one of them had a snazzy hook, a half a dozen fully-inhabited characters, a handful of fun plot twists, loads of satirical observations, and a big and mischievous spirit. Each and every one, in other words, delivered a generous heaping of talent and entertainment. And the man published more than a hundred different books! Though I generally avoid arguing over greatness and comparing rankings and such, let me say this in anticipation of those who would protest "How can you say that Westlake was one of the greats? Which of his books would you set up against 'Ulysses'?" I'm not saying that Westlake was one of the greats in any for-eternity, lit-crit way. I'm saying that as far as I'm concerned he was one of the greats. As for the immortality stuff: Well, history will take care of it ... I won't be around to agree or disagree anyway ... And then history may, or may not, change its mind ... So explain to me why exactly I should care? I will argue that Westlake was an awe-inspiring talent, that he was fantastically productive, and that he consistenly kept his output at a very high level. If we can't agree on this, then let's change the subject right now. The point of comparison here shouldn't be "Ulysses" anyway. No disrespect meant to James Joyce -- but aren't there plenty of reasons to grant a lot of respect to Westlake as well? After all, in the time that it took Joyce to write "Ulysses," Westlake produced dozens of hooks, scads of inspired plot twists, and crowds of lively characters. Let's get our terms straight. Westlake wasn't playing the literary set's sacrifice-it-all-for-one-masterpiece game. He was a hyper-gifted working-class writer who entertained everyday readers for a living. No, the point of comparison should be TV series. Can an episode of "The Sopranos" really be said to rival "Rules of the Game"? Obviously not. But perhaps it can be plausibly argued that "The Sopranos" as a series deserves the respect we accord the best movies and novels. My point: It's better to think of Westlake's work not as a rival to "Ulysses" but as something with a long run, something you tune into, something you can count on to deliver a lot -- something like "The Sopranos." Which maybe we can agree is plenty awe-inspiring in its own terms, and in its own right. Another good comparison: P.G. Wodehouse. Both of them tremendous entertainers; both creators of huge bodies of high-quality work. Hey, isn't it... posted by Michael at January 2, 2009 | perma-link | (7) comments

Monday, December 15, 2008


Online Writing Tools
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Paul Glazowski recommends 35 online tools for writers. Me, I'm using Google Docs as my main word processor these days. It's a nothing-special writing tool in many ways, but it's responsive, its filing system is swell, and I do love being able to get at my writing from whatever computer I happen to be at. I've also tried and liked Zoho Writer and Adobe Buzzword -- but, since there's such a thing as juggling too many logins and passwords, I've settled on Google Docs instead. As for the rest of Glazowski's tips, I can endorse Facebook (which I love), and Squarespace, which strikes me as really brilliant. If you want easy fun on the web -- commenting, linking, posting, etc -- Facebook is hard to beat. A visit to Facebook can be like a stop at the neighborhood bar, full of chance and casual interactions. And, recently, it hasn't just been the young 'uns who have been showing up on Facebook. The chances of a grownup finding old classmates, friends, and colleagues have in fact gotten pretty good. (Wired thinks that people who are thinking of becoming bloggers ought to forget it and take to Twitter or Facebook instead. I'm with Wired on this. I think that Facebook offers 99% of what most people are hoping to get from blogging while demanding about a tenth the work and effort.) If a complete website of your own is a goal, Squarespace is genius. Using drag-and-drop modules, you can create (and then revise to your heart's content) as elaborate a website as you could possibly want. It took me about an hour to become competent at using Squarespace, and within a couple of days I had myself a fun personal website that I continue to amuse myself with. Compare that to the effort involved in getting up to speed with HTML and/or Dreamweaver. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 15, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments

Wednesday, December 3, 2008


Cochran and Harpending's New One
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- John Derbyshire loves Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's new book about how the advent of civilization didn't slam the brakes on human evolution, it has instead speeded evolution up. I'm looking forward to the book myself, as one of the most bedrock of bedrock beliefs back in the day was that human evolution screeched to a halt 50,000 years ago. Fun to witness the Blank Slate mind-frame finally busting up, isn't it? 40 years of near-totalitarian denial and top-down mind-control -- man, that was one long and weird stretch. You can pre-order Cochran and Harpending's book here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 3, 2008 | perma-link | (29) comments

Friday, November 7, 2008


15 Years of Bestsellers per USA Today
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- USA Today's Bob Minzesheimer takes a look at the last 15 years of USA Today's bestseller list. What would such a thing be without J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, and Dr. Atkins? USA Today's list may be the most trustworthy bestseller list in the country, by the way. It mixes up paperbacks and hardcovers as well as fiction and nonfiction, and it includes the genres (self-help, baby-raising tips, etc) that many other lists ignore. If you want to see what the U.S. is really reading -- or at least buying and intending to read -- look at the USA Today list. FWIW -- and make of this what you will -- there isn't a lot of contempo "literary fiction" to be seen on it. Back here, I reviewed some of the failings and quirks of bestseller lists. Did you know that it's possible for a book to sell millions of copies yet never appear on a bestseller list? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 7, 2008 | perma-link | (8) comments

Friday, October 31, 2008


Software for NaNoWriMo
MIchael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- National Novel Writing Month begins tomorrow. If you're nuts enough (or exuberant enough, or whatever) to want to take part -- or if you're just someone who sometimes puts together long pieces of writing -- let me suggest buying and using some software that can make your writing projects a lot more pleasant: Scrivener and StoryMill. They're first-class examples of a new kind of writing tool that I wrote at some length about back here. FWIW, I consider these new programs the first big advance in computer writing tools since the word processor. There's no reason to bother with them if you never write anything longer than a few thousand words. But once your projects grow bigger than that, these programs can be godsends. Imagine keeping all your research, your drafts, your notes, your revisions -- everything -- not in scattered folders but in one file. Lordy, if only the Wife and I had had one of these packages back when we co-wrote our trash novel we'd have spared ourselves numerous headaches. Scrivener is probably the more versatile of the two applications. It's good for any kind of writing, where StoryMill has been optimized for fiction writers. But they're both great, and are very reasonably priced. Scrivener is a bargain at $39.95, and StoryMill is on sale until Monday for just $29.95. Now, as for whether or not it makes any sense whatsoever to write a novel these days ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 31, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments

Wednesday, October 15, 2008


Fragile Popularity
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Yes, yes. I know. Just because something's popular doesn't mean it has high quality. And just because something has high quality doesn't foreclose it becoming popular. Moreover, all things being equal, I think it's nice when a writer / painter / creative whatever finds fame, fortune or both during his lifetime. Still... You see, there's this schadenfreude thing. I find myself pleased when one of those writer / painter / creative whatever types who happens to crank out garbage gets his comeuppance either in his own lifetime or his hereafter. Such reputation-crashing gives me hope that many of those "creatives" who have been doing such damage to the arts will indeed "get theirs" once the wheels of history have finished their grinding. And this is not to mention my happiness when a worthy artist gets his reputation restored after having fallen from fashion's favor. A complicated business all this. Murky, too. That's because everything aside from sales statistics (volume, price per unit, etc.) is opinion-driven. Speaking of numbers-driven information, I thought it would be fun to list the top ten best-selling fiction book authors from 100, 80, 60, 40 and 20 years ago and let you mull them over and make observations. The lists were compiled by Editor & Publisher and can be found on Wikipedia pages such as this one. Here are the lists, ordered from the author of the best-selling book to number ten. 1908: Winston Churchill (the novelist, not the politician), Rex Beach, John Fox, Jr., Harold MacGrath, Frances Hodgson Burnett, F. Hopkinson Smith, Mary Johnston, Louis J. Vance, George Barr McCutcheon, Gilbert Parker 1928: Thornton Wilder, Hugh Walpole, John Galsworthy, S. S. Van Dine, Viña Delmar, Booth Tarkington, Warwick Deeping, Anne Parrish, Mazo de la Roche, Louis Bromfield 1948: Lloyd C. Douglas, Norman Mailer, Frances Parkinson Keyes, Agnes Sligh Turnbull, Betty Smith, Frank Yerby, Ross Lockridge, Jr., A. J. Cronin, Elizabeth Goudge, Irwin Shaw 1968: Arthur Hailey, John Updike, Helen MacInnes, John le Carré, Taylor Caldwell, Allen Drury, Gore Vidal, Fletcher Knebel, Catherine Marshall, Morris L. West 1988: Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, Robert Ludlum, James A. Michener, Judith Krantz, Anne Rice, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Richard Bach, Leon Uris For what it's worth (remember, I'm not at all a lit guy), I can identify only one author (Churchill) from 1908. If the list were book titles, the only familiar book name was The Trial of the Lonesome Pine (by Fox). Five names from 1928 are familiar to me, ditto for 1948, nine from 1968 and nine from 1988. The reason I knew most of names from 1968 and 1988 is because I was an adult then and the information simply seeped into my brain. One puzzling item is the reason why 1908 came off so badly. Was it simply a blah year that randomly happened? As a check, here are the author names I recognize from the entire 1900-09 decade: Winston Churchill (the fiction writer -- and I did read his... posted by Donald at October 15, 2008 | perma-link | (9) comments

Wednesday, October 1, 2008


Jim Kalb's Book Is Almost Available
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Traditionalist conservative Jim Kalb's new book "The Tyranny of Liberalism" goes on sale soon. Read an interview with Jim about the book here. I've long been a fan of Jim's. His thinking strikes me as deep, his writing as helpful and clear, and his manner as both calm and patient. He makes a great and humane case for traditionalism both in what he says and how he says it. This ain't Fox News conservatism, to put it mildly. Jim's blog is here. Long ago, I interviewed Jim at some length. You can get to all three parts of the interview from this posting. I urge you to give the q&a a read: provocations and surprises (of a gentle but trenchant sort) are guaranteed. Don't skip the very interesting commentsthreads that follow the postings. Jim writes eloquently in praise of nostalgia here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 1, 2008 | perma-link | (17) comments

Tuesday, September 23, 2008


Your Most Memorable Character
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- GFS3 asks five writing-world figures a good question -- “What literary character do you find most compelling and why?” -- and gets some fresh answers in response. Time for me to catch up with E.W. Hornung's "Raffles" books. Interesting the way that characters in popular fiction are so much more likely to jump out in three dimensions than modern lit-fict characters are, isn't it? What to make of this? A thought experiment: Would it be fair to say that some of Jackie Collins' characters have more "life" in them than any of Salman Rushdie's do? Seems a perfectly reasonable claim to me. After all, Collins' people get up and walk around under their own steam from page one, where Rushdie's characters emerge vaguely over the course of hundreds of pages from huge (and to my mind exhausting) blasts of writin'-writin'. Now, what if we value "the creation of lively and persuasive characters" more highly than we do "the creation of complex and glittering word-clouds"? (Let alone "authorial showing-off.") There's no reason a respectable reader shouldn't have such a value-set, is there? If we can indeed grant that, then perhaps it would also be OK to rank Jackie Collins as a better writer -- at least in one very important sense -- than Salman Rushdie. Fair? Unfair? Bonus point: Don't miss Dark Party Review's collection of "5 Questions" interviews with authors. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 23, 2008 | perma-link | (27) comments

Monday, September 22, 2008


Good Reading / Good Writing
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Gil Roth has been working his way through a lot of Montaigne, the 16th century Frenchman who's often said to be the inventor of the personal essay. (Learn more here.) Here's Gil's latest encounter with the genius. I'm a big Montaigne fan myself, though Gil has got me feeling embarrassed about how little of the master's work I've actually read. Long ago I wrote an intro to the mindblowing philosopher Stephen Toulmin. Montaigne is one of Toulmin's heroes too. * Gil points out a fab Kassia Krozser blogposting about the book publishing business. One of Kassia's points is that the people most likely to bemoan the end of books are literary people. Great quote: "Don’t insult the readers, man. It’s just bad form, and you really, really need people to buy your books." Say it, sister. More: Publishing, like the rest of its entertainment brethren (and I understand that even thinking they’re part of entertainment world pains some in the industry. Get. Over. Yourselves. Thanks.), caters to a diverse audience. Those who see the sky falling are those who see their niches not performing. In part because those niches never were as big and profitable as legend suggested. Why are so many literary people such a pinched and depressive bunch? Back here I compared books people (often introverted, solitary, and high-minded) with movie people (usually extraverted, sociable, and opportunistic). * Don't let this get around, but: Good writing -- even of a belles-lettres sort -- has never always come wrapped in a pretty highbrow-magazine or prestigious-book-publisher cover. These days especially I'm stumbling into high-quality writing in all kinds of crazy places. One example: If you have a taste for smart and shrewd artsyak, why not treat yourself to a browse of the Amazon reader and viewer reviews written by Ivy Lin. Ivy is an opera, a ballet, and a classic-film buff, but her discussions of these works and performances are anything but stuffy -- they're alive, informed, perceptive, appreciative and funny. I'm not sure I'd dub her a "critic," exactly -- but who cares about that? Ivy makes you want to join her at a performance and then blab with her about it afterwards. Coming from an enthusiastic artsyakker like me, that's intended as totally high praise. Back here I wrote a few words about that perpetually good topic, critics vs. bloggers. * Scientists are starting to pay attention to the very real miracle that is narrative storytelling. Back here I riffed through the work of some fab thinkers who are 'way ahead of the scientists on this one. Neuroscience and evolutionary biology finally show some re-spect for the basics of audience involvement and narrative suspense, baby -- and it's about effin' time. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 22, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments

Thursday, September 18, 2008


DFW RIP
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- What has your response been to the suicide of David Foster Wallace? In an email he gave me permission to copy and paste, frequent 2Blowhards visitor PatrickH wrote an eloquent passage: I am so depressed over the death by suicide of David Foster Wallace. Why, I’m not sure. I just am. He was a kind of hero to me...a man of hugely varied interests, of great curiosity, and in his own way, fearless. I read and learned from (and was massively frustrated by) his book on the mathematical concept of infinity, even though it was organized in such a perverse way as to be virtually useless to the reader. Infinite Jest is a book so overrich with, well, everything, that I could reread it a thousand times and still not get to the bottom of it. Sigh. I knew he was married, and I am angered that he would treat his wife this way (Spalding Gray made me angry in the same way), but I was even more appalled at first because I thought he had children. It doesn’t make me any less depressed by his loss, but it does make me less angry, knowing he hasn’t abandoned any children. I have no idea why he did what he did, and for all I know he could have been very sick physically, or perhaps mentally (I’ve known what it’s like to be clinically depressed), so he no doubt had what must have felt to him to be compelling reasons. But self-murder is still murder, and to take a human life is a kind of cosmic blasphemy that only gets more difficult for me to accept as I get older. Sigh. Damn. I wish he hadn’t done what he did. Because I was never a fan of DFW's writing, my own response was the generic one I usually have to news of suicides: "I'm so sorry"; "Gosh that's awful"; "I wonder what the real story was"; and "What an asshole." Killing yourself -- unless we're talking about horrendous, physical, end-of-life situations -- may be an individual's own business in some ways, but it's also often a terrible thing to do to the people who know and care about you. Gil Roth was saddened by DFW's death too, and links to a couple of worth-reading pieces. I wrote some unappreciative and ungallant words about DFW's writing in the comments here -- but read the posting for the comments by Mr. Tall, who makes a very interesting case for DFW. Best, Michael UPDATE: Because I'm an asshole too with no sense of the decencies, I'm going to venture a probably-unfair and definitely-out-of-line thought. Here it is, and do take it with a giant grain of salt: "DFW's suicide illustrates something for me: that the combo of philosophy, 'literary fiction,' early acclaim, academia -- DFW was the son of teachers and spent much of his own life teaching -- and playing the 'genius' game is one seriously unhealthy... posted by Michael at September 18, 2008 | perma-link | (44) comments

Tuesday, September 16, 2008


More Westlake
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Is the crime writer Donald Westlake America's greatest living fiction-writer? I'm certainly open to the possibility -- I've praised Westlake repeatedly, maybe even monotonously, on this blog. (See here for one long-winded example.) In fact, I'm happy to consider Westlake a genius. Lordy, if he doesn't qualify, which of our fiction-writers does? The LA Times' Richard Rayner -- writing about Westlake's "Parker" novels -- expresses a similar kind of X-treme admiration: The Parkers read with the speed of pulp while unfolding with almost Nabokovian wit and flair ... not so much masterpieces of genre, just masterpieces, period. I'd get rid of that weasely "almost" myself. But Rayner's piece is -- by hyper-cautious mainstream book-journalism standards, anyway -- an excellent and daring one. It's nice when Americans take a little appreciative note of the riches that are already ours, isn't it? Now, how long until we see the NYTimes Book Review Section venturing to publish such an appreciation? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 16, 2008 | perma-link | (14) comments

Monday, September 8, 2008


Quote for the Day
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Tom Conoboy, who has been thinking about American "metafiction," offers a sensible question: I guess this is the problem with anything experimental ... Eventually, the experiment has to either lead somewhere or stop. We've had metafiction for forty years (and more) from Auster, Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon et al. They've broken down the barriers. But is there anything beyond? Or do you, in the end, have to return to traditional storytelling in order to tell a story? Source. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 8, 2008 | perma-link | (7) comments

Sunday, August 31, 2008


Tom Wolfe on Writers and College
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Tom Wolfe responds to questions literary on Time's web site (hat tip, Matthew Continetti, The Weekly Standard). One item: What are your feelings on the current state of fiction? Andrew Herold, JOHANNESBURG There's so little of it now that it's pathetic, and it's pathetic all over. Writers come from master-of-fine-arts programs now. If you add up the college education of Steinbeck, Hemingway and Faulkner, you get to spring break of freshman year. This comes from a guy who has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. I, myself branded with those scarlet letters, tend to agree that college isn't all it's supposed to be -- and should do for you. Discuss. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at August 31, 2008 | perma-link | (23) comments

Monday, August 25, 2008


Manny Farber, RIP
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I was very sorry to learn that the painter and film critic Manny Farber has died. He was 91. I loved his art (a few examples are here) and his criticism. The Wife and I spent a little time hanging out with Manny and his wife, the artist Patricia Patterson (they often wrote together), and I can report that I found him a lovable guy: spikey, difficult, and maybe even a little paranoid, but brainy, funny, and soulful too. There can't be many critics who made as big an impact on a medium with a single volume of writing as Manny did on movies with his legendary "Negative Space." But, as far as I could tell, his heart was really in painting. Half of him may have been a wisecracking, off-center, neurotic intellectual -- but his bigger half was a color-drunk west coast sensualist. Some highlights from the press and the blogosphere: David Chute offers some personal reflections, a lot of quotes, and a sensible evaluation. A 2006 Duncan Shepard memoir of his friendship with Manny and Patricia is also a fine snapshot of an amazing era in American art. Michael Sragow recalls his own friendship with Manny. Carrie Rickey recalls Manny's influence, as well as his impact as a teacher. Robert Pincus offers an appreciation of Manny's art and supplies a good short biography of him too. Green Cine Daily rounds up many more links. In sadness, Michael... posted by Michael at August 25, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments

Wednesday, August 20, 2008


Genre Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Polly Frost bemoans "audio overload" in contempo horror films. One especially concise, "I wish I'd said that myself!" passage: "A person’s nerves can only take so much before they tune out entirely." * Vince Keenan is dazzled by a new Lawrence Block novel. * Andrew Klavan makes some good psychological-crime novel suggestions. As it happens, psychological suspense is my own favorite narrative genre. I wrote about the genre back here. * I see that New York's legendary Mysterious Bookstore has just started a blog. Many of the entries are written by crime-fiction dean Otto Penzler himself. * Listen to an interview with Otto Penzler -- who is, IMHO, a major figure in contemporary American book-fiction -- here. Is it a complete coincidence that the interview was published by a rightie outfit? Sigh: Why doesn't the leftie-arty set see more in genre fiction? It may be worth pointing out that genre fiction is, in the U.S. at least, the book-fiction of "the people." Hey, didn't lefties used to make a big deal out of their commitment to "the people"? * MBlowhard Rewind: I raved about two novels that struck me as genuine 20th century greats -- but that you won't find on any official canon: James M. Cain's mean yet fullbodied "Mildred Pierce," and Francis Iles' sly, creepy, and beyond-brilliant "Before the Fact." (UPDATE: Mr. Tall enjoyed "Before the Fact" too.) * A fab bit from a recent Robert Townshend comment about American crime writing: There are no grand moral backgrounds, no straining for hard-boiled glamour. The prose is level, which always helps. The evil is shabby and domestic. I feel relaxed-in-a-good-way when I pick up a Goodis or James M. Cain, also Woolrich, Fredric Brown, others. The quality is very uneven -- nearly all these guys died of the booze -- but I usually pick up their works with a sense of relief and refreshment. And ain't that well-said? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 20, 2008 | perma-link | (10) comments

Thursday, August 14, 2008


Immersion in Another Life
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I almost never read multi-volume biographies. The only one I distinctly remember having read is William Manchester's two-volume effort taking Winston Churchill from birth to becoming Prime Minister. While Manchester put a lot of effort into the two Churchill books, he also wrote a lot of others; this biography is a lesser part of his literary legacy taken as a whole. Writers such as Emil Ludwig cranked out biographies of several subjects during their prolific careers. Then there are writers who concentrate (consecrate?) their career on only one person. Not being a Lit major or disciplined bibliophile, I can't rattle off names of extreme cases who spent essentially all of their careers chronicling a sole subject. I'm sure some savvy readers can provide examples. So let me at least toss out the name of John Richardson, who has written three parts of a projected (and not likely to be completed) four-volume biography of artist Pablo Picasso. The three volumes can be found here, here and here. Info on Richardson is here. Richardson seems to have written a few other books to help pay the bills for his Picasso project, so Picasso wasn't his life work, strictly speaking. And he had justification writing about Picasso because we knew the man. Some day I might get around to reading one of the books. Although the spending of decades to write a large biography of someone of importance is indeed a great service to many readers, I find it strange behavior. True, throwing oneself wholeheartedly into a cause is a disease of many young people. And having a "career" is a form of long-term devotion, though its motivation might well be wealth and a certain degree of notoriety or perhaps fame. But to devote one's professional life to the cause of re-living another human being's life seems, well, ... odd. Granted, a biographer needs to learn and report on a lot more than the details of a life; context is required to make sense of it. Perhaps the task isn't as limiting as it might seem. So maybe it's me that's the odd one who doesn't quite get the concept that vicariously living someone else's life can be more rewarding than living one's own. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at August 14, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments

Monday, July 28, 2008


Quote for the Day
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Patrick Milliken -- who works at Scottsdale, Arizona's superb crime-fiction bookstore the Poisoned Pen -- graduated from college with a degree in literature. When he started working at the bookstore he knew very little about crime fiction. Since then ... [I] have done my best to make up for lost time ... I remember a great quote from (blues great) Lightnin' Hopkins when he was asked if some of the guys in his band could read music. He said "Some of 'em do, but it don't hurt 'em none." So many students of literature are spoon-fed the canon and never learn about the great stuff that exists out there on the margins. I was amazed by the sheer breadth and quality of crime fiction that's out there, and I think much of the best writing today is done in the genre. That was my experience too. Fancy degrees in lit from fancy colleges ... Easy familiarity with the usual big-city debates and publications ... Unconsciously snobbish attitudes ... Then -- just because I was curious about these categories of fiction that so many of my colleagues and friends sneered at without having tried -- I dared to crack open a few contempo genre novels. (Talk about forbidden literature!) Then a few more. Soon I was buttonholing friends and saying "There's amazing stuff being written and published in non-literary settings! Why aren't we being told about this? And why is our own class claiming that the only fiction worth taking note of is literary fiction? It's a lie!" FWIW: The only thing in Patrick Milliken's quote that I'd dispute is his description of genre fiction as something "at the margins." In practical fact, it's literary fict that's at the margins. Why on earth is such a big deal made of it? More here. Finnish nonfiction author Juri Nummelin writes that American hardboiled fiction is "the best literature in the world." Half of me thinks, "Well, that's a reasonable and defensible position." The other half of me goes "Fuckin' A it is!!" Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 28, 2008 | perma-link | (5) comments

Wednesday, July 23, 2008


Literary RIPs
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back in those happy days when trilobites ruled the planet and I was taking English classes in college, the literary scene included poetry, short stories and the perennial hazy shadow of The Great American Novel. And now, there is desolation or a seriously good imitation of it. Poetry? Pretty invisible aside from precious little journals. True, Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball include it from time to time in The New Criterion, but the cause is pretty well lost for the near term. And I'm no help. Although I'm capable of writing the stuff, I have zero interest in reading it. Moreover, my prospects of becoming the Lone Ranger in that regard are zilch on steroids. Short stories? When I was a kid, mass-circulation magazine such as Saturday Evening Post and Collier's -- not to mention the women's magazine my mother read -- had lots of short fiction to complement their other articles. Today, mass-circulation magazines that include fiction represent a diminished species. My impression is that, aside from anthologies, short fiction is mostly found in "little magazines" and genre magazines (think mystery, sci-fi). As for The Great American Novel, I'm not sure that there ever was such a thing. Rather, it was a semi-mythical Quest that writers with a couple of halfway decent-sellers under their belts wanted to take on. Maybe the whole idea was simply a joke. Still, I've seen it mentioned for about as long as I can remember. Actually, the notion of encapsulating a large nation is a single novel seems absurd. And it was absurd even in the time of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis; Small-town Minnesota or big-city Illinois are not each other, nor are they Pennsylvania coal-mining country, the Deep South or Monterey's canneries. About the only country remotely capable of being encapsulated by a work of fiction is the Vatican, and even that would be a toughie to pull off. Later, Donald UPDATE: Mulling over the concept of The Great American Novel 15 minutes after posting the above, I suppose the phrase might have to do with a great novel written by an American. This would make sense in the context of American cultural inferiority to Europe that lasted into the 20th century. However, the phrase doesn't scan that way. The implication I've always drawn is that the theme of such a novel must be about America and reveal much about the character of the country. That is, the whole package -- author, subjects, theme -- must be home-grown. Since I never was an English major in college, I'll cop out and plead ignorance, letting Michael and others more familiar with the game take over in Comments.... posted by Donald at July 23, 2008 | perma-link | (49) comments

Friday, July 11, 2008


More on Disch
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A couple of excellent memoir-appreciations of the novelist-critic-poet Thomas Disch, who died by his own hand last weekend: John Clute, Elizabeth Hand. (Links thanks to Dave Lull.) Disch was an amazing talent. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 11, 2008 | perma-link | (1) comments

Thursday, July 10, 2008


Janwillem Van de Wetering, R.I.P.
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Just a few days after Thomas Disch's suicide, word comes from Sarah Weinman that another genre-fiction giant has fallen: Janwillem Van de Wetering, dead at 77. I wrote a brief appreciation of Van de Wetering back here. Van de Wetering wasn't just an oddball creator of quirky police procedurals, he was one of my favorite contemporary artist-entertainers. His publisher is the excellent Soho Press. EuroCrime reprints the Radio Netherlands report of his death. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 10, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments

Tuesday, July 8, 2008


Thomas Disch
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A quick posting to acknowledge, with sadness, the recent death -- at 68, from suicide -- of the audacious, accomplished, and super-productive sci-fi writer and poet Thomas Disch. Disch, who was born in Iowa and came to New York City as a young man, was a real phenomenon, and a much under-appreciated artist. He was a prominent part of the New Wave movement in sci-fi in the '60s, which sought to take sci-fi out of the hands of 12 year old boys and introduce adult themes and sophisticated techniques into it. He wrote a popular children's book; an opera libretto; numerous volumes of numerous different kinds of poetry; excellent theater reviews; horror novels; and several volumes of poetry and genre criticism. Years ago I enjoyed a wickedly satirical Disch masque. He even wrote, back in the days of computer text adventures, one of the best of them (so it's said -- no experience in the field myself), "Amnesia." A giant, in my opinion. (Freakily enough, I was asked just a couple of days ago which figure from the field of sci-fi I'd most enjoy meeting in person. Thomas Disch was my answer.) Not that you'd have learned a lot about him by following the usual literary gatekeepers -- The New Yorker, for example. "I have a class theory of literature," he once said. "I come from the wrong neighborhood to sell to The New Yorker. No matter how good I am as an artist, they always can smell where I come from." The NY Times Book Review Section didn't make enough of him either, but it's nice to read this good Douglas Martin obit of Disch in the daily Times. Edward Champion writes movingly about Disch here, and shares a podcast of what seems to be the last interview Disch ever did. Ed Gorman's verdict on Disch: I can't say I kept up wth his novels. For all their skill, even genius, there was a bitterness in them that put me off. I'm sure this marks me as hopelessly square but so be it. He was easier to appreciate, for me, in shorter form and he wrote many excellent short stories from early on to well into his later career. Ed may not have loved the novels -- but you did notice that he used the word "genius," didn't you? Here's Disch's LiveJournal blog, where he published most of the writing that he did during the last several years. Last entry: July 2nd. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 8, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments

Thursday, July 3, 2008


Evolving College Bookstores
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- If you attended the University of Michigan, you might not have the slightest idea of what I'm writing about: the college bookstore. True, there were and are bookstores atop the hill in Ann Arbor that sell textbooks, art and engineering supplies, notebooks, pens, pencils and even college-logo sweatshirts and beer mugs. It's also true that the original Borders store was there -- though that comparatively cozy establishment is gone and a huge newer one is around the corner and down Liberty Street. But none of those are bookstores controlled by the university or perhaps the student association, and that's what this post is about. (Okay, I over-dramatized. Gotta snare eyeballs somehow. Those non-Borders Ann Arbor bookstores are pretty much the same as "official" college bookstores aside from the nature of the ownership and for-profit/non-profit status.) Speaking of Borders (and Barnes & Noble), before they went big-time it was often the college bookstore that was the most comprehensive in town. That was true in Seattle, where the student association-owned University [of Washington] Bookstore reigned for decades. It had its rivals, of course. Across the street for many years was the for-profit Washington Bookstore that also sold textbooks and college-related items. Downtown department stores used to have fairly decent book departments, and there once was a large used-book store downtown. Nevertheless, the University Bookstore was It for a long time and I still hold fond memories of its glory days. My fondest memory is of the day Sophia Loren waltzed through the lobby wearing a bright red dress. The University Bookstore has several branches, some of which seem harder to justify than others. Besides the main site on a business street a block from campus, there are branches at the student union building and the medical school: that's okay. Also okay are branches at the UW brand-extension campuses (University of Washington Bothell, University of Washington Tacoma). On the other hand there was a bookstore branch in the heart of Seattle's business district for a number of years. It was situated a few blocks from where the original UW was, but the university departed for its present site in the mid-1890s. And there is a campus-less branch across Lake Washington in Bellevue. It sells textbooks. Not textbooks for UW classes, but instead for classes in private secondary schools. And of course it sells trade books, school supplies, logo gear and the rest. I also see that there is yet another branch in a suburb north of Seattle, not near a campus. This seems a far step removed from a student-services bookstore, even though the non-student items sold probably contribute to the support of the original functions of selling textbooks and supplies. When I entered Dear Old Penn, the campus bookstore was wedged into one end of the basement floor of Houston Hall, the student union building. Yes it was cramped. But the charm of that was enhanced by something so odd that it is unique in my... posted by Donald at July 3, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments

Thursday, June 26, 2008


Reading Journal: "Gross National Happiness"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Arthur C. Brooks' book is a survey of happiness studies, combined with political-policy suggestions. Did Brooks write the book as a response to Richard Layard's "Happiness"? Where the British Layard -- a Labour life peer in the House of Lords -- uses happiness studies to bolster up a traditional social-democratic agenda, Brooks looks at the same (or similar) data and reaches mostly conservative conclusions: Economic opportunity raises people's happiness levels, where social-welfare taxing-and-spending lowers them. So let's promote opportunity and be wary of government programs. But Brooks isn't dogmatic, and he's responsive to the evidence. If marriage, family, and religion matter to happiness, so do job-satisfaction, professional success, charitable giving, and volunteer work. Short version: There's a lot to be said for solid values, and for living 'em. This is a pleasing point-of-view to me. But in the case of both books, I enjoyed the well-done happiness-studies surveys far more than the op-ed arguments. The main reason is dopily basic: I'm simply hyper-skeptical of using happiness studies as a basis for setting policy. I mean, happiness? Talk about a soft, still young, and easy-to-interpret-in-a-zillion-ways social so-called "science." Although I do think that "if a policy is clearly making us miserable, then why are we pursuing it?" isn't a bad argument. And I do celebrate the fact that economists are studying happiness. Anything that introduces a bit of humanity into the field, eh? Softness isn't just squishiness. It's also a big part of life, and well worth our attention. FWIW, although Layard's book is much the more fluent read, Brooks' book -- despite being a bit plodding and earnest -- strikes me as subtler, fresher, and more original. One especially nice passage comes in the midst of a look at the fact that, in the U.S., political conservatives are, as a bunch, markedly happier than political liberals. Why should this be the case? The American left has occupied itself for decades with the plight of victims -- victims of discrimination, of class, of circumstance, and of exploitation -- who lack control over their fate. In many cases, such as during the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, this focus was not only justifiable, but noble and important for America, and instrumental in giving victims more control over their lives. Bu inasmuch as the American left is now a coalition of groups that define themselves as victims of social and economic forces, and inasmuch as liberals encourage these feelings of victimization in order to mobilize votes, liberal leaders inevitably make themselves and their constituents unhappy. Not a bad shot at an explanation. Semi-related: Friedrich von Blowhard expressed reservations about happiness studies here. I mused at length about free-marketeers and happiness studies here. Richard Layard talks to -- inevitably -- the Guardian. Here's a video interview with Arthur C. Brooks; here's a text interview with him. Buy a copy of "Gross National Happiness" here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 26, 2008 | perma-link | (7) comments

Tuesday, June 24, 2008


Changing Reading Habits
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- About a year ago I wrote about how I no longer could get very motivated to read books by or about currently active politicians. Today I thought about Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism, wondering when the paperback edition might come out and whether I should buy a cut-priced hardcover edition (they seem to cut prices when the paperbacks arrive) or simply buy a paperback. Or perhaps I should wait until the paperbacks go on the remainder shelf and pay even less. Then I began to wonder whether I should buy the book at all. Here is my dilemma: (1) I enjoy reading Jonah's stuff; but (2) I think that I pretty well know his basic argument and many of the supporting examples he probably used. Add that to the fact that, since retirement, my book buying budget is a shadow of what it used to be. Ah, the indecision. A larger issue is that it's no longer politician books that don't seem worth reading, it's almost any book about contemporary politics and issues. Why is that? One reason might be because I've been around long enough to have witnessed a good deal of what goes on under the political sun. Or maybe it has to do with the Internet. Thanks to political blogs and websites, it's easy to stay current with issues. And even issues that were current months back while a political book was being written are fairly easy to remember. So why pay good money for a book that about things you already basically know? Nevertheless, political issues books keep pouring off the assembly lines like those political biographies I grumbled about earlier. So there must be a market for the stuff out there, and I'm just not part of it. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 24, 2008 | perma-link | (16) comments

Friday, June 20, 2008


"Mommie Dearest"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- When Christina Crawford published "Mommie Dearest" in 1978 the book caused a sensation. Christina -- who had been adopted and raised by the movie star Joan Crawford -- accused Crawford of having been a drunk, as well as a physically abusive parent. The book was one of the first warts-and-all celeb-offspring memoirs, and it was soon followed by many others. (It was a major publishing event, in other words.) Christina had herself a bestseller, and was celebrated for her courage. She was also accused of exaggerating and even lying about events. On the 30th anniversary of its publication, "Mommie Dearest" is being reissued. Christina has given The Guardian's Elizabeth Day her first interview in a decade. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 20, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments

Friday, June 13, 2008


I Am Not A Plotter
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I had a cold the first part of the week and, of necessity, resorted to light reading to pass some of the time. On the Internet or someplace else (I already have forgotten where), the name Mycroft Holmes came up. Mycroft was Sherlock's older, heavier, less-energetic, but smarter brother. Of course I knew of Mycroft, but realized that I had never read any of the stories where he was involved. So I checked out the Wikipedia entry in the above link, noted the names of the appropriate stories, grabbed my "complete works" Holmes book off the shelf and dug in. Having dispatched a couple of Mycroft entries, I continued with some other short stories, concluding (as of last night) with "Silver Blaze" -- the one containing the famous passage where Holmes and Inspector Gregory have the following exchange, Gregory speaking first: "Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time." "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes. In case you haven't read that story I won't toss in any "spoiler" material. I will say that the yarn was entertaining in its way, as are most Sherlock Holmes stories, though the greatest draw for the reader is the personality of Holmes himself. It is for me, anyway. I should add that when I do read mystery stories (and I seldom read fiction of any kind, I'm semi-sorry to admit), I seldom cross wits with the writer, trying to guess who the guilty party is. I simply go with the narrative flow, especially if I have a cold and don't feel much like thinking about anything. Mysteries are a specialized kind of story-telling where grand plot themes such as "dealing with evil or misfortune" or "the transition to true adulthood," or whatever they actually are, seldom or never come into play. Characterization tends to be minimal as well -- especially in the space-limited short story form. There, the people the protagonist deals with are usually little more than one-dimensional "types" whose personalities can be selected by the writer to help distract the reader from other clues dropped along the narrative way. Even so, mysteries definitely do have plots. That means I can never be a mystery writer. Or a science-fiction writer or a Western writer. Or, for that matter, a writer of any kind of fiction. The reason is simple: I am all but incapable of concocting plots of any kind. Don't know why: I just can't. This isn't simple ignorance, mind you. I've even read a book about plotting, not that it changed anything one bit. I just [Sniff] don't have that gene. Still, I can almost imagine how Doyle worked out "Silver Blaze" before he set to writing it. He probably first thought of the conclusion and the guilty party. Then he must have worked up key clues along with distractions. After... posted by Donald at June 13, 2008 | perma-link | (7) comments

Wednesday, June 11, 2008


Charlton Goes to BEA
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- So far as trade book publishing goes -- "trade book publishing" is the branch of book publishing concerned with the kinds of books that you run into in typical bookstores -- the main annual event is Book Expo America. BEA is a trade convention where publishers display their upcoming wares to buyers and to the press, and where agents and representatives dicker over publishing rights. BEA is always quite a spectacle. Around 2000 exhibitors show up; around 30,000 people attend. Authors shake hands and sign books, freebies are handed out, and parties aren't in short supply. I've been to around 15 books conventions myself, and I always enjoyed them. People wear badges, swap stories, catch up with gossip, and have adventures. The Expo floor is full of zany displays. Extra added attraction: There's no better antidote to the lies you may have been fed as a literature student. My main reaction the first time I attended a books convention? "Oh, I get it now. It's a business. Sort of." This year, BEA took place in Los Angeles, and frequent 2Blowhards visitor and commenter Charlton Griffin was there to capture some of the action with his digicam. Explore Charlton's record of the BEA here. Here's my favorite of Charlton's BEA vidclips: One of the best readers and producers of audiobooks out there, Charlton has just released his version of Polybius' "The Histories." Buy a copy and download it here. Charlton also points out that Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR's final Commie leader, has outed himself as a Christian. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 11, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments

Thursday, June 5, 2008


"Foundations of Western Civilization"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Thomas F.X. Noble's lecture series is a topnotch Teaching Company offering. It's a great intro to Western Civ -- the one you probably should have taken as a Freshman but skipped, or that you did take as a Freshman and that wasn't very good, or that was perfectly OK but that you didn't pay enough attention to. Guiding the listener from pre-history to the 1600s, Noble delivers both the classical basics as well as a lot in the way of more open, searching, and complex material. His virtues as a presenter and summarizer are many. He's good at reminding us that people in, say, 1400 had no idea what their actions would lead to. He's modest about what's known, and about what can be known. He's informative about disputes and controversies. He regularly reminds us that women were part of the Western Civ story, and he doesn't fall for the idea that history consists of nothing but Great Men and their battles -- though he doesn't forget about them either. And, though the material is crisp, focused, and well-rehearsed, his voice and mind are alive. He never drones; he's full of fervor, humor, and enthusiasm. (A small technical note: I'm awestruck by the way Noble moves back and forth between the big picture and the closeup, and knows exactly when the audience needs such a shift.) Two small misgivings. 1) I wish that Noble made more use of genetics and linguistics. 2) I'm always more curious than historians seem to be about how people paid their bills. But these are just minor quibbles. Noble's series is so good that it made me wonder why such a class should need to be delivered ever again. Can anyone do better? FWIW, my main idiot reaction was, "Wow, that medieval period was really interesting!" You can buy Noble's series here, though I suggest waiting until The Teaching Company puts it on sale, when it'll cost about 1/3 its list price. For more Teaching Company recommendations (from visitors as well as from me), type "Teaching Company" into the Search box in the left-hand column of this blog. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 5, 2008 | perma-link | (9) comments

Tuesday, May 27, 2008


Janwillem Van de Wetering
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Joe Queenan is pigging out on glum Scandinavian mystery writers. (UPDATE: Link fixed.) Of the authors he mentions I've only read a few. I do love the work of one of them -- Janwillem Van de Wetering, though he's anything but glum. Instead, Van de Wetering's tone tends to the whimsical, the playful, and the philosophical. He strolls through situations and personalities, musing about them as he meanders along. Mysteries are often spoken of as a closed form that questions but inevitably reinforces the status quo. That doesn't hold at all for Van de Wetering's novels, which are about as "open" as can be. Yes, a crime-conundrum is posed and is (usually) solved. But the final effect is searching and marveling -- anything but rote or formulaic, let alone status-quo-reinforcing. (Not that there's anything wrong with reinforcing the status quo!) Though he's working in the police-procedural genre, Van de Wetering's touch is far more akin to the spare and intuitive music of Basho's "Narrow Road to the Deep North" than it is to, say, the soulful drive of Ed McBain. I'd imagine that anyone who has enjoyed Kurt Vonnegut would enjoy Van de Wetering's mysteries. His novels are eccentric and delightful entertainments as well as fast easy-reading, but they're deep and rewarding experiences too. That's an awfully nice -- and quite addictive -- combo. His memoirs about some time he spent in Zen monasteries are also awfully good. (Here, here, here.) Read more about Janwillem Van de Wetering at Wikipedia. Here's a helpful list of recommendations by a fan who has read more Van de Wetering than I have. If you want to taste-test Van de Wetering before committing to a book, this very amusing review of a biography of the great Buddhism-diva Alexandra David-Neel should serve. It has the real Van de Wetering flavor. If I had any energy this morning I'd make the case that Van de Wetering is an under-recognized major artist, and that 99% of the lit-fict crowd is as fleas before his talent and achievement. I do indeed believe all that, but I'm a little short on combative zing today. Semi-related: I raved about Francis Iles' "Before the Fact," a brilliant British mystery novel that struck me as one of the best 20th century novels I've ever read. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 27, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments

Monday, May 26, 2008


Fact for the Day
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I enjoyed this retrospective by The Guardian's literary editor Robert McCrum, who is stepping down after ten years. (CORRECTION: Thanks to Britishreader, who points out that McCrum was actually literary editor of The Observer, not The Guardian.) One of the many striking facts from his piece: In 1996, Amazon sold just $16m worth of books to 180,000 customers. By 2007, sales had soared to $3.58bn in 200 countries. A satisfying companion piece to McCrum's is Robert Darnton's new essay about books and digitization. (Link thanks to ALD.) Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 26, 2008 | perma-link | (2) comments

Saturday, May 24, 2008


Hot Numbers
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Diane Patterson likes a spicey read but wants the sex to mean something, dammit. Nice passage: I am one of those readers who is very, very happy about the boom in erotica in books. I don’t always want explicitness in my sex scenes, but when I do I prefer graphic. The problem has been, however, that erotica seems to mean, “As many combinations as possible, with a minimum of one per chapter.” (E.g. anything by Black Lace, which doesn’t publish novels so much as Twister games set in print.) I don’t want to see every character banging everyone and anyone; I want there to be some plot-worthy purpose to all this sex going on. It’s like black comedy: it still has to be comedy. Erotic novels still have to be novels. (Link thanks to visitor Julie Brook.) * Alt-porn starlet Sequoia Redd thinks that Abby Winters, I Shot Myself, and Beautiful Agony have added a lot to the eroticism and porn market. Nice passage: I did not make it to the AEE or the AVNs this year, but when I heard about what the team at Abby Winters were going to go there to do I felt like screaming “Hell YES, finally!”. A group of empowered, healthy, intelligent women challenging men to play speed chess, performing yoga, and engaging their fans in an arena where young women are usually exploited in an unhealthy way, how awesome?! This is exactly what the morons in the porno industry need to see. Peter especially should appreciate this Sequoia posting. (NSFW) Interesting to learn that Sequoia was inspired by the film "Dangerous Beauty." It's one of the rare straightforwardly sexual films that many women like. A few others: "Lie With Me," "The Lover," and "Sex and Lucia." * Semi-related: I blogged about a bunch of books about sex by women. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 24, 2008 | perma-link | (10) comments

Thursday, May 22, 2008


Fact for the Day
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined. My source for this is Michael Wesch, a Kansas State University cultural anthropologist. A project that Wesch runs called Digital Ethnography can be explored here. Who says we aren't living through an astounding period in cultural and media history? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 22, 2008 | perma-link | (5) comments

Sunday, May 11, 2008


A Marathon Writer I Ain't
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I have Terry Teachout envy. No, I don't envy everything about him, though there is a lot to admire. Specifically, I envy his productivity as a writer. For example, he writes 1.5 columns a week for The Wall Street Journal. He has a monthly column in Commentary and posts an occasional book review on their web page. He has a blog (see the above link). He writes books -- biographies of H.L. Mencken, George Balanchine and (forthcoming) Louis Armstrong. What I find astonishing is his ability to crank out thousands of words over a few days on his book projects. And the results are good-quality writing. Teachout has even mentioned on his blog that he has the ability to estimate how many hours it will take him to produce copy of a certain length about a given subject: amazing! Me? I struggle. As regular readers know. I'm toying with the idea of a sort of art history book. I want to send prospective publishers an annotated outline, the introductory chapter and a sample chapter from the main part of the proposed work. And boy is progress slooooow. I started chipping away on things nearly half a year ago and I'm only now within striking distance of completing the first draft of everything. Then I'll have to polish, add more material, perhaps reorganize things. I'll be lucky if I start publisher-shopping by July. There are reasons for my snail's pace. Foremost is that fact that the project is speculative, and that means my motivation is less than it would be if I had a contract and deadline in hand. Then there is the matter of life -- the quotidian stuff and all the travel we do serves to interrupt and distract. And there is the blogging. I love blogging, and will post an essay before getting around to book work. By that point, my energy level can be a lot lower because writing can be tiring. Perhaps the most important reason why I'm making such slow progress is that I'm not a natural writer of book-length pieces. Some people like Terry Teachout and our own Michael Blowhard can sit down at a computer and words simply flow. Not me. The post you are reading now will probably take an hour to complete. My book-writing sessions yield 600 words if I'm doing well and half that if I'm struggling. I suspect that my "natural" writing length is on the order of 600 words -- around the size of a newspaper column. Moreover, I think that I can usually make the points I want to at that approximate length. I find it hard to elaborate or the keep tossing in new examples. Perhaps it would be different if I were writing a narrative of some kind, a biography or perhaps a history or description of a well-defined event such as a battle. In those cases, the what-comes-next problem is largely resolved once research and outlining are completed.... posted by Donald at May 11, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments

Friday, May 9, 2008


Responding to Thursday
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- On an interesting thread over at GNXP, Thursday issued a challenge. I'd been goofing around, writing that "novels themselves were quite disreputable at the outset -- the reality TV and tabloid-TV of their day. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that some novelists started putting on airs." Here's Thursday: Bullshit. No less a "serious" personage than Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a novel and a very good one too. Novelists like Richardson, Fielding, and Burney were considered serious writers right from the beginning. Haven't you read Boswell's life of Johnson. I have a hard time believing Jane Austen didn't take her meticulously planned and written books as high art. Tom Jones is planned to classical perfection. Critics like Hazlitt and Coleridge took the novelists like Richardson, Smollett, Sterne and Fielding seriously right from the start. Stop trying to rewrite literary history as if no-one had any clue what was high art and what wasn't. OK then: Time to get serious myself. Here's my response to Thursday: You're making a basic mistake. You're projecting current-day critical rankings back onto past eras. You're assuming that what we now consider great was self-evidently Great at the time. No. Look, what a work's reputation is today often has zip to do with how it was taken (and what it represented) when it was produced. What we now consider great was often taken for granted at the time, or looked-down-on. Defoe's novels are just one example. At the time they were published they weren't taken to be novels in our current sense. They were made-up fantasies that pretended to be works of reportage -- in other words, they were aesthetically and morally dubious productions akin to today's scandal sheets and reality TV, or maybe even to those books that turn up every few years about alien encounters in Australia. It took more than a century before many people started wondering if maybe "Robinson Crusoe" wasn't a pretty good novel. Works often become "literature" in hindsight, not at the time of their production. No matter how great we recognize "Tom Jones" to be today -- and I'm a big fan myself -- the early British novel was a scrappy and aesthetically scorned form, far more akin in its time to what journalism and TV are these days than to today's "literary fiction." The early English novel was a middle-class market phenomenon, not a serious or intellectual or literary one. We've learned to see structure, complexity, grandeur, and depth in these books only in retrospect. From Wikipedia's "literature" entry: "Early novels in Europe did not, at the time, count as significant literature, perhaps because 'mere' prose writing seemed easy and unimportant." From an online resource about Jane Austen: "In Jane Austen's era, novels were often depreciated as trash ... In Jane Austen's day, novels actually had something of the same reputation that mass-market romances do today." No matter what your opinion of Austen's books these days, and no... posted by Michael at May 9, 2008 | perma-link | (16) comments

Friday, May 2, 2008


Service Charges
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Daniel Flynn snarls at Ticketmasters' absurd "service charges." Daniel is the author of the new "A Conservative History of the American Left." He's interviewed by FrontPage magazine's Jamie Glazov here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 2, 2008 | perma-link | (1) comments

Razib and Tyler on Lit and Guys
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Razib asks a lot of good questions about guys and contemporary fiction. Tyler Cowen picks up the thread. Many commenters run with it. Yours truly contributes this little bit: A couple of additional things y'all may get a kick out of chewing on: When you're talking about contempo fiction, most of you seem to be thinking about contempo "literary fiction." Literary fiction generally sucks. It's wimpy, depressive, and fussy. It's also an artificial construct. Literary fiction as we currently know it is an invention of the '60s and '70s, something in arts terms akin to the Great Society programs of the era. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, O'Hara ... There were higher and lower forms of fiction being written in those days, but it was all part of a continuum. They wrote for popular magazines, after all; they had bestsellers. More about this here. One of the reasons contempo fiction seems weak to many people is that ... well, to be frank, book publishing is one of the most feminized industries around. Back in, say, 1970, the editorial side of book publishing was probably 80% male, and many of them were hetero. These days, the editorial side of book publishing is probably 75% female, and many of the guys are gay. Good for them, of course, and they bring many virtues. Unfortunately, the ol' rampaging-male-stallion energy is not one of them. Book publishing is a bit like Vassar or Smith these days. Guys sense this, and they avoid the field -- red-blooded yet arty types tend to go into music, or TV, or movies instead. Same holds for creative types. The more outgoing, dynamic creative guys are writing TV these days, or creating webseries, not trying to put their thing across in book publishing. Despite all this, there's some awfully good new and newish fiction out there, even for the tastes of people who prefer action to contemplation. The reason you may not know this is that you're being ill-served by the reviewers and the press. They're anxious, striving, Ivy wimps, generally, eager to impress each other with their fussy taste. (Or, worse, wannabes. Imagine that: wuss wannabes.) A couple of suggestions: try more crime and western fiction -- Westlake, Richard S. Wheeler, Leonard, Gorman, Hillerman, Crais and many more in America ... Ruth Rendell, Peter Dickinson in England ... And have any of you read Steven Pressman's "Gates of Fire," about the Spartans' defence at Thermopylae? That's a really amazing, stirring novel. This is high-quality fiction. But a lot of it is flying under the radar. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 2, 2008 | perma-link | (10) comments

Tuesday, April 29, 2008


StoryMill On Sale
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back here I did a lot of enthusing about a new and terrific class of writing tools for the Mac. Short version: They aren't word processors or page-layout programs. They're more like project organizers. Gather all your research, all your drafts, and all your files in one place, and move among these resources quickly and intuitively -- no more contending with files-scattered-everywhere. Then, when you've finished writing, make your project look pretty in a word processing or page-layout program. Novelists and other book-writers are likely to find these products godsends, but they're also helpful for any writing project longer than about 5000 words. Really-truly: Using these products will likely reduce your writing-organization headaches by 90%. One of them -- originally called Avenir and recently renamed StoryMill -- has just gone on sale. I've settled on Scrivener myself, and love it. I have nothing but good things to say about Scrivener; it strikes me as one of the most brilliant pieces of software I've ever used. But StoryMill -- which, unlike the more customizable Scrivener, has been optimized for fiction-writing -- is an excellent product in its own right. Current price: $29.95. That's a serious bargain. Another Mariner Software program that I like a lot is MacJournal, a small miracle of versatility. You can use MacJournal to keep a journal, or even many different journals. But you can also use it as a general bin for all your writing. Why go searching every which-where to find something you've written when you can dump all your writing in one place instead? As with StoryMill and Scrivener, if you use MacJournal you'll want to export (or copy-and-paste) your masterpiece into a word processor for prettying-up before showing it off. But that's a small price to pay for a great big heap of convenience and ease. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 29, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments

Friday, April 18, 2008


Katie's Book
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Good news. Katie Hutchison -- an inspired new-traditionalist architect as well as a most-excellent blogger -- will be writing a book for The Taunton Press, one of the best publishers in America. Read about Katie's appropriately modest and touching subject, namely small retreats, here. (MBlowhard mini-rant: An architect writing not a work of chic hyper-theory but instead something sophisticated-yet-accessible that might be of use to normal people -- now that's an event to be celebrated!) If you know of any successful and appealing examples of small retreats that deserve consideration for a place in the book, be sure to get in touch with Katie, who can be reached at katie-at-katiehutchison-dot-com. I rhapsodized about The Taunton Press back here. Sample some of their beautiful books here and here. Don't be completely surprised if -- as you let your eye and mind play over their products -- you discern a certain kinship with the thought of Christopher Alexander ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 18, 2008 | perma-link | (0)

Monday, April 7, 2008


The Wolfe That Doesn't Prowl
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I never was much of a fiction reader and hardly touch the stuff any more. But I do have relapses. The latest was on my recent trip to Puerto Vallarta. I didn't bring a computer and knew that Nancy would be putting lots of time in with her granddaughters. So there was no real alternative than to bring along some books to read. For the hell of it, I bought four Nero Wolfe detective novels and tossed them in my suitcase. I went through a Wolfe splurge 45 years ago and had happily forgotten all the plots, thus the deck was clear for another shot. My selection criterion was to load up on the books with the earliest copyright dates. This was because I associate Wolfe with the 1930s and 40s; author Rex Stout kept cranking them out into the 70s. Perhaps I should have tried one of the later ones to satisfy a point of curiosity. You see, in the books written in the 30s, Nero Wolfe's cheeky leg-man Archie Goodwin zips around Manhattan in a roadster, parking wherever he needs to; he never has trouble finding a spot in front of Wolfe's West 35th Street townhouse. I wasn't around until the last two months of the 1930s, so I'll have to assume that Stout wrote the truth. But I know perfectly well that Manhattan curbside parking was hard to come by in the 1960s -- except maybe Sunday mornings. Another thing I'm not sure about is how well Nero Wolfe novels rate according to mystery buffs. The stories were popular with the public from the start, but that factor doesn't always count amongst the cognoscenti. Moreover, I haven't read enough detective books to have any sort of handle regarding what's good, mediocre or bad. I like the Wolfe novels because of the quirky cast of characters that, for the most part, was fully formed in the first of the series, Fer-de-Lance (1934). Perhaps most other detectives spring with the same level of completeness from the heads of their various Zeuses, but I wouldn't know that. The thing with Nero Wolfe is that the books involve a lot more people than the detective himself. Here are some quick sketches of the more important ones. Nero Wolfe. Born 56 or so years earlier in Montenegro, but now an American citizen with perfect command of English. Agent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Balkans and involved in the Great War in various ways. Currently lives in a double-townhouse on West 35th Street in New York, "near the river." Weighs "one-seventh of a ton" and never leaves home unless he absolutely has to. The top floor of the building is devoted to orchids, of which there are 10 or 20 thousand, many rare hybrids. He tends those orchids two hours each morning and two every afternoon at unvarying times; orchids come before crime-solving. His live-in gardener is Theodore Horstmann who seems to have little or no... posted by Donald at April 7, 2008 | perma-link | (11) comments

Tuesday, March 11, 2008


R.I.P.: Sorrentino, Yang, Ichikawa
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- When you aren't a devoted newsbuff -- and I'm not -- contempo events sometimes just slip by you. It was only recently that I caught up, for instance, with the fact that three artists whose work I'm very fond of died in the last few years. * The novelist and critic Gilbert Sorrentino. Sorrentino was as experimental and hardcore-modernist as it gets: For him a piece of fiction wasn't a story with characters, it was a construction of words and letters. Downside: His books often lost themselves in intellectual gamesmanship. But -- perhaps despite himself -- a few of his novels delivered real guts and feeling. They paid off emotionally; in them, the modernist strategies felt like fresh ways of presenting juicy subjects. Born in Brooklyn, Sorrentino taught in later years at Stanford, and the longer he was a professor the more ingrown his fiction became. Still, in "Aberration of Starlight" and "The Sky Changes," he combined virtuosity and sophistication with a lot of earthy Brooklyn soul and humor. He was also an excellent critic of modernist poetry. * The filmmaker Edward Yang, who died in June of last year at 59 of colon cancer. Although Taiwanese, Yang worked in the tradition of the Euro-American cinema. No kabuki here, and no crazed action or fable-like ghost stories either. Instead, he made films that feature three-dimensional "humanity" in the western sense. (Yang grew up on Taiwan; went to college at the University of Florida, where he earned an engineering degree; and was living in L.A. when he died.) The film of Yang's to start with is the 2000 "Yi Yi," a quiet, expansive-yet-intimate work that bears comparison to Chekhov and Renoir in its patience, its unforced curiosity, and its willingness to let characters and situations reveal themselves in their own time. * The Japanese filmmaker Kon Ichikawa, who died in February at 92. I'm not as crazy about some of Ichikawa's more famous movies ("Fires on the Plain," "The Burmese Harp") as many are. But I love-love-love many of his other films, and am happy to think of him as one of the true giants of the Japanese cinema, the equal of Ozu, Kurosawa, and Mizoguchi. If Ichikawa wasn't as well-known as the Big Three perhaps it's because he worked in a really wide variety of genres and styles, and that made him a hard one to nail down. But to each of the films of his that I've seen he brought a distinctive technical brilliance, a snakecharmer's psychological insight, and a wicked perversity of attack. My viewing tip: Start with his documentary "Tokyo Olympiad" -- genius stuff. And hope that one day his brilliant Tanizaki adaptations "The Key" and "The Makioka Sisters" will be brought out on DVD. * MBlowhard Rewind: I raved about Mizoguchi's "Sansho the Bailiff" here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 11, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments

Sunday, March 2, 2008


Pulp and Hardboiled Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * PJ Parrish has been lovin' "The Big Book of Pulps." * Dark Party Review interviews the great mystery-crime bookstore owner / editor Otto Penzler. * Joe Valdez revisits "Blue Velvet." You don't think there could have been a "Blue Velvet" without pulp fiction, do you? * August West recommends a couple of hardboiled noirs by Dolores Hitchens. * Classy genre writer Dan Simmons has been reprinting a book about the book publishing biz by literary agent Richard Curtis. I enthusiastically recommend it -- Richard Curtis is one of the smartest and frankest bookworld people around. I recommend the fiction of Dan Simmons too -- I praised a Buffalo-set hardboiled Simmons novel back here. * A great line from pulp writer and former peepshow girl Christa ("Money Shot") Faust, who has written some novelizations: I love tie-in work and have infinitely more respect for hard-working writers like Lee Goldberg and Max Allan Collins than I do for self-styled literary geniuses who are still sitting in mom’s basement polishing their unpublished masterpiece. Here's another interview with Christa Faust. Here's Christa Faust's very amusing website. * Scottish crime novelist Allan Guthrie offers a list of his 200 favorite noir novels. * The Telegraph runs a list of 50 Crime Writers You Should Read Before You Die. * Bill Crider recommends a new Stark House volume of Peter Rabe novels. If I remember right, the great Donald Westlake is also a Peter Rabe fan. * Ed Gorman thinks that crime-movie fans should keep an eye out for the Robert Ryan / Mary Astor vehicle "Act of Violence." Those with a few bucks to spare can buy the movie here. * Vince Keenan enjoys a couple of movies with Robert Siodmak's name on them. I raved about the brilliant Siodmak here. * MBlowhard Rewind: I wrote an introduction to the pulp publisher Gold Medal Books. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 2, 2008 | perma-link | (1) comments

"Sleep With the Devil"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The Wife and I just finished a superfine noir novel by a writer we'd never read before, Day Keene. It's a compact marvel with rock'em sock'em pacing, ingenious plotting, a satisfyingly cynical and embittered tone, and an inspired concept. The usual noir thing involves a normal guy who gets in over his head when he's tempted into crime. In Keene's "Sleep With the Devil," the putz is a criminal and a sociopath. Normalcy is what tempts him. Another bit of originality that the book features: Although the lead character is a megatwisted dude, the writing isn't expressionistic, or bizarre in any way. None of that "mirroring the disordered mind" stuff here. Instead, the writing is as straightforward as can be. Despite this, the pathology of the protagonist comes across clear and clean. That may mean that Day Keene will never attain the kind of cult status held by such hyperbolic and/or quirky writers as Jim Thompson and James Ellroy. Still, woo hoo: what a fascinating reading experience Keene's calm, plain-Jane strategy makes for. Download a copy of the book for next to nothing from this resourceful publisher. I do love a good novel that can be gotten through in one or two evenings. If someone wants to make a case for Day Keene as a neglected master, I'll certainly listen respectfully. Bill Crider introduces Day Keene here. Although Keene -- who was born Gunnar Hjerstedt, and who lived from 1904 to 1969 -- wrote dozens of novels, only a small handful are in print today. Hard Case Crime offers one of his best-known titles. I've ordered a copy. Semi-related: A wrote an introduction to film noir, mused about neo-noir here and here, praised Jack Kelly's "Mobtown," raved about a rediscovered hardboiled French film, and tried to figure out why I didn't enjoy the movie version of "Sin City" more than I did. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 2, 2008 | perma-link | (1) comments

Thursday, February 14, 2008


Lit-fict and Popular Fiction
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- In a posting about the film "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," the Western novelist Richard S. Wheeler gets off a great passage: "The novel of the same title, by Ron Hansen, dazzled readers, but the dazzle lay in the glittering word choices of the author rather than in the storyline or characterization," he writes. The Hansen novel, in other words, was of the "literary fiction" genre, not the "Western fiction" one. That sentence of Richard's says a lot more that's of practical use to readers than most of what you'll read in fancy magazines by big-name critics, IMHO. So far as literary fiction goes, I'd add to Richard's characterization of it a concern with trendy themes, and with fashionable writing strategies generally. But Richard's larger point is the key one: Literary fiction is generally concerned with writerly grandstanding, er, showing-off, er, prowess. The writer, finally, is the real show. Narrative fiction (which in the U.S. these days means genre fiction) is generally more concerned with suspense, involvement, and situations. The story and the characters -- and not the author -- are what the spotlight is trained on. (Which isn't to say, of course, that some lit-fict writers haven't created living-breathing characters, or that some narrative-fiction writers -- Richard S. Wheeler among them -- don't also deliver a great deal in the way of writerly pleasure.) In other words: If you like the emphasis in the fiction you read to fall on character, hook, situations, and story, then literary fiction probably isn't for you. 99% of the time, that's simply not what the lit-fict set is up to; it isn't the package they're selling. Instead, they're generally selling tone, themes, strategies -- striking and/or brilliant "moves." On the other hand, if character-creation and story-engineering don't speak to you while writerly games-playing does, then why not choose your fiction-reading from the lit-fict shelves? Nothing wrong with that part of the bookstore either. I share the taste for fancy writin' myself, if very occasionally, only to some extent, and less with each passing year. Back here, in fact, I listed the lit-fict titles that I enjoyed most during my years of following the new-literary-fiction scene from up close. Give it a read. If nothing else, it isn't the usual best-of list. All of this is fine by me. I think it's great that options exist and that people have them to choose from; I'm always eager to hear about what people enjoy and to learn about what they know. No, it's something else that bugs me, namely: Why should the package of values that the lit-fict crowd prefers be considered to be superior to the popular-fiction package? What case can possibly be made that fussin'-with-the-writin' is automatically more important than attending to matters of character, suspense, story, situation, and entertainment? It's a pointless argument to make, no? As pointless as arguing that vegetables are automatically better than fruit, or that candy is... posted by Michael at February 14, 2008 | perma-link | (13) comments

Thursday, February 7, 2008


Newspapers, R.I.P.?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * The New York Times reports on the shakey state of the newspaper business. Nifty/scarey passage: “I’m an optimist, but it is very hard to be positive about what’s going on,” said Brian P. Tierney, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News. “The next few years are transitional, and I think some papers aren’t going to make it.” * Marc Andreessen inaugurates a New York Times Deathwatch. Funny bit: "Sometimes it's darkest right before it goes pitch black." Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 7, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments

Tuesday, February 5, 2008


Anthony Burgess
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Ricpic points out a first-class David Guaspari essay about the British writer Anthony Burgess, who was best-known for "A Clockwork Orange," the novel that was the source for the famous Stanley Kubrick film. Burgess, who died in 1993, was quite a force in the reading-and-writing (and film) worlds back in the '70s and '80s -- Friedrich von Blowhard was a major fan. About the Guaspari essay, Ricpic writes, The article is an appreciation of the work of the novelist Anthony Burgess and particularly the four books he wrote about a failed poet, Enderby. But it's more than that. Guaspari takes on, for lack of a better word, the dilemma of the artist in the world. Obviously I found it well written and utterly intriguing or I wouldn't be recommending it. Here's the website of the Anthony Burgess Foundation. Many thanks to Ricpic. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 5, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments

Friday, February 1, 2008


I Am Not Worthy
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Some excerpts from an email recently sent around by an organization called Americans For the Arts: One of our main objectives is to support and secure federal, state, and local education policies that provide students a balanced education and prepare them to compete in a globally innovative and creative workforce ... Americans for the Arts maintains that arts education develops the precise set of skills students need in order to thrive in a global economy that is driven by knowledge and ideas ... Formalize an incentive program to hire arts educators and strengthen the Arts in Education program at the U.S. Department of Education through revisions to the No Child Left Behind Act ... Now, I have tended to think of myself as a pretty committed culturebuff. But this email has got me thinking that perhaps I've been mistaken. After all, my hopes for culture have zero to do with the agenda of Americans for the Arts. Personally I'd love to see people free their experience of the arts from the hands of politicians, bureaucrats, educators, and worthy-nonprofit types, 90% of whom seem to me to be devoted to bleeding the arts of everything I love the arts for. * Some headlines and taglines from recent issues of the highbrow lit magazines Bookforum and The Boston Review: Slave Trade On Trial Richard Locke on Pat Barker Jyoti Thottqm on Tahmima Anam's "A Golden Age" Matthew Price on Richard M. Cook's "Alfred Kazin: A Biography" Vivian Gornick: Hannah Arendt's Jewish Problem J.K. Bishop: The Art of Dying Peter Terzian on William Maxwell's Early Novels and Stories Now, I'm a big reader, and during one 15 year stretch I even followed the NYC publishing world -- and new literary fiction -- pretty closely. Yet I'm never, ever going to read any of those pieces. In fact, I look at Tables of Contents like these and think, "Isn't it amazing? Some people are still arguing about Alfred Kazin, Hannah Arendt, William Maxwell, and slavery." I also can't tell you how bizarre I find it that not a single word reflecting an interest in entertainment values appears in any of those headlines. Real intellectuals apparently have a hard time staying awake when topics like suspense, humor, characterization, plotting, sexiness, pacing, and identification come up. I guess I have no choice but to say it loud and say it proud: I am 1) not a Worthy Artsperson, and 2) certainly not a Serious Reader. Funny how good it feels to get these two admissions out there in public. Back here I wrote about what I called "the Arts Litany" -- the list of beliefs and convictions that arts people are expected to hold. FvBlowhard responded here. Do you keep up with any of the heavyweight art-or-lit mags? If so, what on earth do you get out of it? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 1, 2008 | perma-link | (18) comments

Thursday, January 17, 2008


Richard S. Wheeler Blogs
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm very glad to learn that the Western novelist Richard S. Wheeler has begun blogging. Go read, learn, enjoy -- and bookmark. Some great stuff is heaping up already. Richard finally finds an XM station that suits him; he shares some shrewd and rueful thoughts about the fate of copyright; and he expresses skepticism about the idea that fiction-writing is a craft that can be taught. As a novelist, Richard brings together many wonderful qualities: dignity and gravity; wit and experience; invention, sympathy, and imagination. Although he has only recently begun blogging, it's clear that he's bringing those same characteristics to bear on his online writing. It should go without saying that this combo is unusual and refreshing, especially in the buzzing and shallow electronic space that we all spend too much time surfing around in these days. It's a treat and a privilege to have easy access to such human, rounded, and warm-blooded writing. And did I mention brainy? If you haven't done so already, be sure to check out some essays that Richard wrote for 2Blowhards. He shared some wisdom about writing and publishing; and he filed a report from a convention of the Western Writers of America. I raved about Richard's marvelous novel "Flint's Gift" here. Richard recently published a memoir, which you can buy here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 17, 2008 | perma-link | (2) comments

Friday, January 4, 2008


Help Me
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Lifehacker invites visitors to name their favorite self-help books. Lots of interesting and funny contributions. Me, I've long wanted to write a blog posting in which I'd argue that the self-help genre is 1) unfairly scorned, and 2) an important American literary genre. Funny I haven't done so yet. Maybe one day I'll run across a self-help book that will give me the motivation I need to actually write this posting ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 4, 2008 | perma-link | (18) comments

Thursday, January 3, 2008


The End of Flashman
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- George MacDonald Fraser -- author of the "Flashman" comic novels as well as much else -- has died at 82. (Here too.) Fraser was an unabashed reactionary who was also a hyper-gifted fiction writer. Hmmm: I wonder how many university lit courses have Fraser's books on their reading lists ... James Fulford takes a look at some of Fraser's political views. Here's a brief interview with Fraser from 1999. I've only read two of the Flashman novels but both of them bowled me over; I found them to be among the most flat-out entertaining novels that I have ever read. And I liked Fraser's nonfiction book about how Hollywood has treated history very much. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 3, 2008 | perma-link | (14) comments

Tuesday, December 18, 2007


Fab Freebies
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Lexington Green points out an amazing free resource -- the website of Alan Macfarlane, a topnotch British prof and anthropologist with a special interest in economics. Macfarlane, who is well-known in Britain for his popularizations as well as for his academic achievements, has put an almost overwhelming amount of his work online: books, lectures, interviews, research, and more. I've only begun to scratch the surface of what Macfarlane has made available but my head is already spinning in the most pleasant of ways. Check out this jaw-dropping collection of interviews with prominent anthropologists and sociologists, for just one instance of what's there to be explored. Download 'em and put 'em on your iPhone. I'm looking especially forward to the talks with Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Lex describes Macfarlane as "anti-Marxist" and "sensible and empirical," and he calls Macfarlane one of his own intellectual heroes. That's one terrific recommendation. Lex suggests starting with this TV series, as well as this collection of downloadable e-books. * Thanks to visitor Brian for pointing out this Paul Cantor lecture series about culture and the market from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. (Where has Brian been recently? I miss his brains, humor, and spirit.) I'm about midway through the series and I'm enjoying it thoroughly. Cantor is brainy, exuberant, and very likable -- a wisecracking and irreverent, yet truly culture-entranced, guy. He's a spritzer, and he's very spontaneous, so the talks are alive. Yet he manages to keep his material organized too. To do Cantor a small injustice, his theme here is, "Commercialism ain't bad." And his main goal in the series is to get people with an interest in culture over the cultureworld's usual anti-commercial bias. In this, his series resembles Tyler Cowen's "In Praise of Commercial Culture," a book that looks with every passing year more and more like one of the most important arts books of the past few decades. (Here's a semi-informative review of Cowen's book.) Cantor is very generous in acknowledging Cowen's work, as well as the contributions of other researchers and writers. Hey, here's a discovery that you make if / when you go into the cultureworld: Most of what you wind up talking about with other arts and culture types isn't ideas and aesthetics. Conversation inside the NYC cultureworld is often anything but highflown, in fact. Usually what you wind up talking is jobs, money, grants, and gossip. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Artspeople gotta pay the bills too, and this is their shoptalk. Still, it's one of those disappointments that culture-besotted newbies have to look forward to. The sad fact is that if you're hungry for sizzling yak about the arts, generally speaking you gotta turn elsewhere. Cantor is sensible and vivid on some really important questions: The market as a feedback mechanism, for example. It's common to think of "the market" as something that degrades the purity of aesthetic creations, and there's no question... posted by Michael at December 18, 2007 | perma-link | (4) comments

Thursday, December 13, 2007


Donald's Art Book of the Year
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- "I can resist anything but temptation." I'm not certain who first came up with that line, though I associate it with Mae West. Not many things tempt me, but I'll publicly admit that one of them is books. Notably books about art these last few years that I've been blowharding. Moreover, books about realistic/naturalistic art centered around the late 19th century, plus/minus 100 years. Especially books dealing with realist paintings of people done during that period. (That's because painting a person convincingly is one of the hardest things to do artistically, and that's what I attempt when I find the time to paint.) So I whipped out my credit card without hesitation when I spied this book at the Seattle Art Museum store. The cover is Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, and Her Son, Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill by Giovanni Boldini, 1906. The subtitle "From David to Warhol" is, fortunately, not entirely descriptive. That's because only six pages are about post-1950 portraits, a merciful thing in my estimation. In fact, about 140 of the 205 or so basic content pages deal with the period 1795-1915 and 25 or so more are devoted to setting the scene. Even so, the book's point of view can be characterized by this chapter title: "The Belle Époque: Portraiture at the Zenith." Most of the major Western European portraitists are represented, along with a few I'm not familiar with. The 13.3x10 inch format is usefully large for studying the full-page reproductions. Better yet for artists, there are a number of full pages devoted to details of paintings; not as good as visiting a museum to study technique, but quite helpful nevertheless. Here's an example of a portrait and artist unknown to me: Portrait of Madame Leroux by Jean-Jacques Henner - c.1898 I suppose it can be taken as given that a society portrait is not likely to be brutally honest in its depiction of its subject. It can be interesting to compare portraits to photographs. Still, I'm not particularly curious about the exactitude of the portraits in the book. Most of the paintings are interesting to savor as art alone, not as some sort of social record. Speaking of things social, I suppose there are folks out there with a Social Conscience who would get in some sort of huff because the portraits were commissioned by rich folks and even royalty. To which I say: Get over it and enjoy the art. (Science fiction writer Larry Niven asserted to the effect that: "The word 'social' in a sentence negates the meaning of the word following it." Think Social Justice, Social Sciences, etc.) Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 13, 2007 | perma-link | (13) comments

Thursday, December 6, 2007


More Reading and Writing Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Ebook fan Robert Nagle left a very interesting comment on my recent posting about Amazon's Kindle. Recommended. Robert has also responded to my posting at Teleread. Reading-and-technology fans take note: as far as I know, Teleread is the only online site that regularly covers ebooks and ebook readers. * Maxine makes some sense of LibraryThing. (Link thanks to Dave Lull.) Social networking for the cataloguing-inclined? * Mencius Moldbug has a good time dumping on some all-too-typical contempo poetry. Great passage: Certainly the best poetry of the 20th century was written from the '20s through the mid-'60s ... In the '60s, though, something awful happened. Poetry became a Federal jobs program. To use the terminology from my theory of corruption, it became a form of edupatronage. The great disaster was the enormous expansion of higher education in the '60s and '70s. There is a reason so many college campuses have that abominable Brutalist architecture .. The overwhelming force behind this expansion was a massive injection of Federal subsidies ... Education, for New Deal [and Great Society] Democrats, is just like immigration -- a way of making more Democrats. Of course, no one thinks of it this way, but the machine works whatever its parts are thinking. (Link thanks to Derek Lowe.) * Bryan Appleyard wonders why sci-fi doesn't get more respect. (Link thanks to ALD.) Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 6, 2007 | perma-link | (2) comments

Wednesday, December 5, 2007


From Richard S. Wheeler
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * The excellent Western-fiction blog Saddlebums has asked Richard S. Wheeler -- whom they aptly describe as "the dean of the modern Western story" -- to write about Conrad Richter's "The Sea of Grass." Richard's posting is a beautiful piece of appreciation. A while back, Richard wrote some postings for 2Blowhards: here and here. Click on 'em, read 'em. * In an email to me, Richard has pointed out that of the fiction-books included on the NYTimes' Notable Books of 2007 list, precisely zero come from the popular-fiction shelves. (Harry Potter excepted, I guess, though it seems to me more useful to think of Harry Potter as exceptional in every way.) Zero! The Times' editors and critics are nothing if not open to global literature, god knows. But to the popular fiction of their own country they continue to turn a completely blind eye. Gotta love some of the "plot" descriptions of the fiction-books that earned places on the Notable list: "A nerdy Dominican-American yearns to write and fall in love." "The boy narrator of this novel, set in Libya in 1979, learns about the convoluted roots of betrayal in a totalitarian society." "A young woman searches for the truth about her parentage amid the snow and ice of Lapland in this bleakly comic yet sad tale of a child’s futile struggle to be loved." "In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude." "Henkin follows a couple from college to their mid-30s, through crises of love and mortality." "In this debut, a Londoner emerges from a coma and seeks to reassure himself of the genuineness of his existence." Could a parodist have done better? And what a jolly, out-to-entertain bunch the literary set is, eh? * A while back, I wrote a five-part series ranting about the Times Book Review Section's absurd attitude towards popular fiction: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five. * The wonderfully crusty and combative B.R. Myers has a wrestle with Denis Johnson's highly-praised new novel. (Link thanks to Saddlebums' Gonzalo Baeza.) In 2001, Myers wrote an anti-literary-pretentiousness rant called "A Reader's Manifesto." At that time, I was still working in and around the book publishing world, and I can report that there were many people in the business who read Myers' essay and smiled in quiet agreement. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 5, 2007 | perma-link | (16) comments

Friday, November 30, 2007


More on E-Books and E-Book Reading Devices
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Thanks to Amazon's new Kindle, announced a few weeks ago, the debate is on once again about e-book reading devices. Bezos' Baby Everyone has an opinion about the Kindle. Half-Sigma thinks that the prices of e-books are out of line. David Pogue writes that this kind of device might make some sense for the textbook market; the comments on Pogue's column are worth scrolling through too. Tyler Cowen and visitors pitch in. Newsweek's Steven Levy visited with Amazon's Jeff Bezos and thought the Kindle had its virtues. Hotshot book designer Chip Kidd thinks that the Kindle is going nowhere fast. Meanwhile, Amazon quickly sold out of the device. Robert Nagle and I have a bet on about e-book readers. Robert thinks that e-book reading devices will catch on bigtime -- he makes a good case for this, by the way -- while in my opinion e-book readers will never become a hugely successful product. Let me offer two quick, very practical reasons why I think I'll win our bet: Who needs 'em? Books of the paper-and-cardboard sort are miraculously efficient, enjoyable, and affordable content-delivery vehicles. They're unmatchably pleasing in many ways. For one thing, in order to use them you don't have to do any thinking. Interacting with a book is all a matter of reach-and-grab. You get to reserve your mental power for the book's content. With an e-book reader, by comparison, you have to puzzle out how to use the thing, and then you have to keep relearning your lessons. "How do I make the device behave?" keeps breaking in on your experience of the book's content. Think of the consequences. While being able to store your entire library in one small device certainly sounds appealing, it also means: No passing along your books to family and friends; worries about what will become of your beloved collection should the electronic device it's stored on fail; and -- inevitably -- the nightmare of digital-rights management. You don't think that publishers are going sell easy-to-use, compatible-with-everything files, do you? Get real. They're going to do whatever they can to protect their creations from unauthorized copying, and they're unlikely to band together and settle on a single convenient format. In other words: Imagine the Betamax-vs.-VCR wars multiplied many times over. And then imagine contending with all of this: decoding the device, keeping it charged, not being able to rip out pages, and feeling annoyed that the book you want can't be read on the device you own. That's a lot of brainstrain. Now recall what it's like to interact with a book. You grab it off the shelf, and you settle in for a read. I could be wrong, of course. I find Robert Nagle's enthusiasm for e-book readers very winning, I think that David Pogue's hunch about the textbook market makes a lot of sense, and progress will march on no matter what my opinion about it is, darn it. And the designers of... posted by Michael at November 30, 2007 | perma-link | (22) comments

Wednesday, November 28, 2007


Book It, Donno
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- At the ultra-secret 2Blowards staff meeting a few weeks ago someone -- The Wife, I think -- said something about me writing a book. I hear such remarks about twice a year, and my standard response is that I did write a book once upon a time: this one, actually. (Lord knows why Amazon even bothers to list academic books that went out of print more than 25 years ago.) To be honest, I sometimes do consider writing another book. If the book question pops up when I'm in one of those delusional frames of mind, I then usually say something like: "I might. But a really tough part is finding a publisher, and I'm not sure I want to go through that hassle." Then, after saying just that at the restaurant table, I mentioned that I was toying with the idea of building on those Peripheral Artists (and similar) posts. The concept would be to create a kind of alternative to painting history narratives showing an inevitable path from the Renaissance to Modernism. That is, if Establishment/Modernist narratives downplay or ignore artists and styles that don't fit those narratives, then why not create a narrative where Modernism is a source of ideas, yet a sideshow, an interesting experiment that ultimately proved unsatisfying. Since the meeting I've taken a few small steps. First, I've been fiddling with a provisional outline. Once that's done I'll probably have to write a sample chapter. The third task is coming up with a list of potential publishers (I'm doing that now, actually). Then I assemble a proposal and shop it. Given that such a book requires plenty of illustrations, I don't think self-publishing or electronic publishing will work; I almost surely will have to talk a going concern such as Yale University Press into backing the thing. An important consideration is that I don't want to turn this into a crusade; if I get turned down by a number of publishers I want to be able to walk away from the project with few regrets and a minimum of wasted time. Money? I'm not doing this for dollars. As Michael and others have repeatedly mentioned, the hourly wage for most authors is pitifully small. Yes, there's the little dab of glory and the larger surge of ego-satisfaction and pseudo-prestige (in some circles) of having a book published. But my main motivation, oddly enough, is idealism. I genuinely think that Modernism has received far too much honor and attention than it deserves, and needs to be cut down to its proper size: I want to do my part. Another thing I'm doing is writing little notes to myself while at my favorite donut shop. What I need is some sort of organizing scheme. Obviously, there's chronology. Then there's the matter of geography: a lot of important non-Modernist art was created someplace besides France and New York, and that must be be dealt with somehow. And at this point I'm... posted by Donald at November 28, 2007 | perma-link | (9) comments

Tuesday, October 30, 2007


Wisdom from the Grumpy Old Bookman
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Since I'm still floundering around in a flu-ish, cold-ish fog, I'm going to let one of my betters do the speaking in this posting. Michael Allen, aka the Grumpy Old Bookman, has written a book called "The Truth About Writing" that's a weatherbeaten, beady-eyed, plain-spoken wonder. Do you want to know what the writing game and the publishing game really consist of? You can't do better than read Allen's book. I know of few books that speak as directly and truthfully about the arts-life generally, come to think of it. Some nice passages: Most professors of English literature, and most of the highbrow literary critics of this world, would have us believe that there is, metaphorically speaking, a hierarchical tower of fiction. This tower is something like a block of flats. At the top, in the exculsive pethouse, is a small amount of "literature," i.e. Great Novels. In the basement is a large heap of trash ... The truth, however, is that there is not a top-to-bottom hierarchy of fiction, with great books at the glorious summit and "trash" or "pulp" at the unspeakably vulgar bottom. If we must think of the range of available fiction in visual terms, it is best to think of a broad spectrum of books, which runs horizontally. You might care to imagine a street in whcih every buiding is a bookshop containing a particular kind of fiction ... Consider the vested interest of all those who teach the subject of English literature. They are all doing pretty nicely, thank you, preaching the 1947 party line, and they're not too keen on having any revisionists question it ... The facts are really very simple. A book eitherworks in terms of producing the intended emotion in a target reader, or it does not ... Personally I do not believe that a book can be said to be good or bad in any absolute sense -- it is only successful or unsuccessful in terms of its intended audience ... If there are no great novels, there is no hierarchy of fiction, with the good stuff at the top and the trash at the bottom. Indeed, only the briefest of considerations will demonstrate that the trash is every bit as effective in generating emotion as the so-called good stuff. Usually, in fact, a lot better ... Books which continue to be enjoyed for long periods of time tend to become known as "classics." This is a convenient shorthad term, but again, you should not be misled into assuming that it implies some absolute quality ... As for striving to achieve classic status yourself -- forget it. Your first task, when writing a novel, is to make it work for your intended audience today. Let the future take care of itself ... A work of art is .. a work which has been created through the exercise of skill, rather than by accident. The most common use of the term is in relation... posted by Michael at October 30, 2007 | perma-link | (18) comments

Thursday, October 18, 2007


Missed Opportunities
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- For an arty guy with no technical gifts or interests, I smacked into the computer world at a relatively early stage. I don't mean "the computer world" in the absolute sense, by the way. When I was in high school back in 1970, for instance, computers were certainly around. But at that point they weren't of much interest (let alone of much use) to anyone other than extreme geeks. In 1970, the idea of computers seemed futuristic in appealing ways. But the reality of computers was much less attractive. In the case of the high school I attended, for instance: Computing meant one small, airless room with a keyboard and punchcards, and a connection to what was mysteriously referred to as "the Dartmouth computer." I poked my head into that computer room one time and one time only. Not pleasant: bad lighting, and full of geek b.o. and giggly social ineptitude. And why on earth would anyone think it was a big deal to be playing playing tic-tac-toe "with Dartmouth"? Since what I wanted from life was girls, movies, art, physical activity, and sunshine, computers in 1970 seemed like the opposite of everything I valued. They seemed like the antithesis of what I then thought of as "aesthetics." No, for the sake of this posting anyway, what I mean by "computers" is computers in a somewhat later sense: computers at the time videogames and personal computers were starting to make a more-than-a-novelty kind of impact -- the early-to-mid '80s, roughly. By then, computers and aesthetic matters didn't seem to occupy quite such opposite poles. Pong had long since given way to more complex games. Hard drives were beginning to seem like a plausible part of everyday reality. And when the original Macs came along -- in early 1984 -- the machines started to speak directly to the arty set. Right about then was when I woke up to the cultural implications of computing. I found myself on BBS's, for instance, caught up in debates about the impact of word processing. For those who haven't encountered the philosophy-of- word-processing field: The advent of word processing hit a handful of culture-types very hard. Nearly all writers were delighted by the way the new tools enabled them to get their writing down so easily, of course. But a small band of culture-fiends also found themselves looking at the phenomenon from a longer point of view, and musing, "Hmm, you know, this word-processing thing might really change the whole 'writing' game at a very deep level ..." It was a tiny world, this musing-over-the-aesthetic / cultural-implications-of-computers world. But for some reason I really zero'd in on it. For instance, I didn't just read Jay David Bolter and Michael Heim -- the philosophers of what word processing might mean in the big sense. I met and chatted with them. In 1987, Apple's HyperCard gave non-techies a chance to mess with databases and programming. By the late 1980s, software created... posted by Michael at October 18, 2007 | perma-link | (10) comments

Wednesday, October 17, 2007


Grumpy Old Bookman on Short Stories
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Grumpy Old Bookman thinks that the problem with the contempo short story is that "it's pussywhipped." He gets no argument from me on that score. Also not to be missed are GOB's two contrasting Histories of the Short Story, the official one and the true one. "Not only do academic writers tend to overlook whole areas of fiction writing," writes GOB, "but they are also likely to ignore the economic facts of life." There's a lot of experience and wisdom in those words. Thanks to Dave Lull. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 17, 2007 | perma-link | (2) comments

Tuesday, October 9, 2007


1000 Words: Francis Iles' "Before the Fact"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I've blogged recently about food, architecture, performers -- some of my favorite topics, in fact. But if I were to be entirely honest about what's been occupying my culture-mind for the last few weeks, I'd have to say that it has mainly been these questions: "Why isn't the Francis Iles novel 'Before the Fact' better-known than it is? In fact, why isn't 'Before the Fact' celebrated as one of the most brilliant prose-fiction performances of the 20th century?" Since you've probably never heard of Francis Iles, let me backtrack and fill in a few blanks. First: Until a few years ago I was barely aware of Francis Iles myself. The only reason I knew anything about him at all was because I've been through a number of histories of crime fiction. In them, Iles plays a small role as one of the originators of the genre known as the "inverted mystery," which in turn led to the genre of "psychological suspense." Little is usually said about Iles but that. He's presented as a small but significant historical landmark. There isn't much to be learned about Iles on the Web either. There's no Francis Iles Society, and there aren't any websites devoted to him. (Here's Wikipedia on him; here's a Crippen & Landru page.) What little I know about Iles I mainly owe to Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler's excellent "Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection." Among other things, their entry on Iles says, "[His] shunning of personal publicity made his private life a notable mystery in itself." Berkeley. Er, Cox. Er, Iles ... In any case: He was born Anthony Berkeley Cox in 1893. He wrote humorous pieces for Punch; he worked as a journalist; he cranked out comic novels. In 1925 he wrote his first mystery story. Finding that he enjoyed the rather larger paycheck he earned, he turned his talents and energies to the mystery field, writing numerous detective stories under a variety of pseudonyms. Along with such other giants as G.K. Chesterton and E.C. Bentley, Cox / Iles founded the first important mystery writers' organization, London's Detection Club. He also became a regular reviewer of mystery fiction. Then, in 1939, he stopped writing fiction entirely. Why? Did he come into some money? No one seems to know for sure. No one seems to know much else about him period. Did he grow up aristo or working-class? How did he pay the bills? Where did he stand politically, if at all? Was he a breeder or a non-breeder? What did he make of modernism? To all those questions I have not a single answer. Cox died in 1970. Or maybe 1971. Since psychological suspense happens to be my very favorite genre, around a year ago I finally decided that the time had come for me to read one of Cox's, er, Iles' books. (I'm anything but a scholar, but every now and then I do get curious about things.) So I read his... posted by Michael at October 9, 2007 | perma-link | (9) comments

Tuesday, October 2, 2007


Poetry, Fiction, Length, More
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- This piece by the NYTimes' Corey Kilgannon about Frank Messina, a Mets fan who writes poems about his team and about his feelings about them, is a sweetheart: amusing and touching -- "appreciative" in the best sense of the word. It also triggered off an email back-and-forth between FvBlowhard and me that, for better or worse, I'm copying-and-pasting into this blog posting. Hey, 2Blowhards started as an extension of the email exchanges FvBlowhard and I were already having. Every now and then we have to reconnect with our gabby-arts-buddies roots. FvBlowhard: The problem with modern poetry is that guys like the guy in this story are treated as laughable. He, not the poetry establishment, is the one in touch with the spirit of Homer. He may not be all that good as poet, granted, but that's really beside the point; he is marginalized not for how he does poetry but for the purpose he is putting it to. MBlowhard: That's a great article, tks. Nice catch by the reporter. And gotta love people who really do what they do for the love of it. My own current rant has to do with length. The Wife is back to working on another novel. She's really determined to be a pro and to make money doing it, and good for her. Me, I had a mini-crisis the other day. I have a short novel all sketched out, a good first draft of it down on paper, etc. And I was having hard time facing the next stage -- moving from "rehearsals are going well" to "let's get this baby up on its feet." The Wife looked at me, read my mood, and said, "Novel-writing's a job. You've got a fulltime job already. Why not let yourself do manageable projects instead, at least until you retire?" She was right. I set the novel aside and the gloom lifted. Anyway, my thesis about length and scale boils down to a few points. 1) Novels are the limit of what humans can do. 2) Doing anything on that scale isn't going to be fun-fun. Some exceptions allowed for, few novels have been written on a pure breeze of inspiration. Most have, to some extent, been ground out. 3) Most stories don't need to be more than 5-50 pages long. All of which means that most people who write novels are weirdos (because who else would inflict such a lot of loneliness and delayed-gratification on themselves?), and that most novels have a lot of padding in them. Exceptions (the work of professional writer-entertainers especially) allowed for, of course. Given all this, why on earth do readers expect or even want novels? And why on Earth would anyone -- or anyone from a normal range of emotion, drive, ability -- want to write them? I mean, really, compare a novel to a movie. A movie gives you a complete story, the energies and personalities of tons of people who are pitching... posted by Michael at October 2, 2007 | perma-link | (16) comments

Thursday, September 27, 2007


Some Publishing Phenomena
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Talk about a professional! Western and mystery writer James Reasoner has published 200 books and is still going strong -- giants apparently do still roam the earth. Reasoner blogs very generously here; Saddlebums interviews him here. Ed Gorman says that Reasoner's recent southern-noir novel "Dust Devils" is a corker. * One of the more surprising publishing events of 1986 was a volume entitled "White Trash Cooking," by Ernest Matthew Mickler. It really was what it seemed to be -- a cookbook featuring recipes for dishes like Icebox Cake and Potato Chip Sandwiches. But it was more than that too. Full of humor, perceptiveness, and pride, it was touching and funny -- a poetic piece of popular anthropology: a genuine, if oddball, work of art, in other words. Though the book was controversial -- the term "white trash" was just not used at the time -- it also struck a happy nerve, and it went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. The Oxford American's John T. Edge recalls the book, as well as Ernest Mickler. * 50 years ago, Grace Metalious was a hard-drinking, poor New Hampshire mother with a feverish yen to be a writer. One of the novels she submitted to that strange and distant place, the New York publishing world, was accepted, was given a new title, and was then set loose on the world. "Peyton Place" became one of the publishing sensations of the 1950s. It sold skillions of copies, helped set the pattern for generations of soap operas to come, and scandalized Americans from many different walks of life. Within six years, Metalious -- a loose cannon on the best of days -- had spent all her newfound money, and had drunk herself to death. She was only 38. Michael Callahan profiles the case for Vanity Fair. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 27, 2007 | perma-link | (19) comments

Wednesday, September 26, 2007


Trad Meets New Kid
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Newsweek points out that the hip, fun, and innovative traditional publisher Chronicle Books has forged an interesting deal with the newish POD (print-on-demand) outfit Blurb. MBlowhard tip: Expect to see lots more of this kind of thing -- trad publishers using POD publishers as farm teams -- as we move into the next phase of book publishing. We do live in awfully interesting times, don't we? Incidentally, I don't think it's a coincidence that both Chronicle and Blurb are west-coast outfits. It's a sad but solid fact that east coast publishers are stuck in deeper ruts than are west coast publishers, who tend to be far more open-minded and forward-looking. By the way, those interested in publishing their own books owe it to themselves to take a look at Blurb, which is a heck of a service. Blurb turns out beautiful books, gives away its well-designed and rock-solid book-making software for free, and has quickly developed a classy reputation among self-publishers. The one downside in Blurb's model that I can see: It's difficult or impossible to sell a Blurb-produced book on Amazon. But if your main goal in creating your book is to give it away or to sell it to friends and family, Blurb is hard to beat. Semi-related: I've blogged a lot about the self-publishing outfit Lulu, most recently here. And it's worth noticing that Amazon has entered the field with its own outfit, CreateSpace. Small musing: Blurb, Lulu, and CreateSpace may be to traditional book publishing what blogging software is to traditional journalism -- an acid corroding the very foundations ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 26, 2007 | perma-link | (2) comments

Wednesday, August 29, 2007


Thomas Sowell
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Have you read any books written by the economist Thomas Sowell? I've read seven or eight of them, have found nearly all of them rewarding, and suspect that many people who haven't given Sowell a try would find him worth their time too. If you know Sowell only through his work as a syndicated op-ed writer, though, you might not feel inclined to cut him much slack. While I've enjoyed and admired some of his columns, he's unquestionably a combative debater, as well as far more of a Republican hack, er, cheerleader than seems necessary. But his work as an economist and a book-writer is quite different. When he isn't quarreling over what current policies should be but is instead organizing data, examining details, and analyzing processes and results, he's substantial, calm, and impressive. I've found his books -- which tend to focus on economics, ethnic questions, and immigration-and-migration matters -- to be thoughtful, info-packed, and open to the evidence. They aren't thrilling in a literary sense or mind-bending in a visionary sense. Instead, they're solid and informative -- driven, it seems, not by a passion for political battle but for straight facts and clear understanding. In the books, at least, political conclusions (if any) follow the evidence, and not vice versa. My mind is on his work because I've just finished reading another one of his books, the 1984 "Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?" 20 years after the Civil Rights Act and 30 years after Brown v. Board of Education, how did matters stand? It's a short book -- yay to that -- and I found it a very helpful and interesting one as well: super-organized, and pushed along by a lowkey, rumbling, and unstoppable energy. As a book-writer, Sowell is whatever the positive opposite of "glib" is -- patient and methodical, able to herd huge numbers of facts without letting them overwhelm his narrative or his argument. He's even capable of the occasional touch of quiet and droll humor. He jokes about one proposed law, for example, that it was so badly written that it should have been called "the lawyers' full employment act." Sowell is sometimes known as a black conservative, though he himself says he's far more libertarian than conservative. (He's often grouped with Walter Williams, Shelby Steele, and John McWhorter.) He has been a controversial figure, as you might suspect, with some lefties and some in the race industry labeling him a traitor to his race and a dishonest scholar. Quite amazing how quick the racially sensitive can be to resort to name-calling, isn't it? (I haven't run across criticism of the factual content of his work that seemed to amount to anything.) In any case, where racial matters go, Sowell is both firm about the injustices that blacks were subjected to in America's past and pleasingly reluctant to play the racism card in the present tense. In this book, the main questions he wrestles with are "How did... posted by Michael at August 29, 2007 | perma-link | (45) comments

Thursday, August 23, 2007


Narrative Book-Fiction for Grownups: "What the Dead Men Say" and "Gates of Fire"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- It seems to me that an assumption many sophisticated American fiction readers make is that narrative fiction -- ie., fiction whose energies are mostly invested in the creation and "selling" of characters, situations, and storylines -- is, when you come right down to it, for kids. Stories are felt to be like Sugar Pops or Frosted Flakes -- supereasy, overbright, fizzy-poppy. Adults are supposed to have graduated to something more complex and substantial -- with complexity and substance understood to imply "literary fiction," ie., fiction whose energies are mainly invested in fashionable themes; fancy language; and writerly, linguistic, conceptual, and structural games. Oh, realistically speaking, we all know that many educated adults enjoy spending occasional time with a thriller or a mystery novel -- but we agree to call that mere recreational reading. "Real reading," as we all know, is a more challenging, if not an actual slogging, kind of pursuit. I think I know where this assumption comes from: from our English-lit educations. And I think I know how it's reinforced: through colleges, foundations, and virtually all the respectable bookchat outlets. Needless to say, I think this assumption is wrong, wrong, 100% wrong. I also think that it does a disservice to readers, to writers, to literature, and to pleasure more generally. I lay out most of my reasons and my evidence for this position in a series of postings about the New York Times Book Review Section and the way it shuns popular fiction: here, here, here, here, and here. Lit-fict people who are curious about popular fiction will sometimes give it a try -- and good for them, of course. Typically, though, they don't make it very far. Flying without a map, they tend to sample titles from the bestseller lists. And, unsurprisingly, they often find that these books are every bit as bad as the enforcers of Lit-Fict Correctness say they are. Disappointed, our adventurers return to the lit-fict fold, resigned to the apparent fact that contemporary narrative fiction is written only for in-transit businesspeople. It's really remarkable how many lit-fict people, even the open-minded among them, are convinced that contempo book-fiction divides up into only two camps: lit-fict, and top-ten bestsellers (and wannabes). If that were the case, I'd probably be a lit-fict addict myself. Happily, it's anything but the case. As with movies and music, there are plenty of gifted people out there creating first-class work in popular and accessible forms. You just have to know where and how to find it. Hey, in the last couple of weeks I've turned up a couple of narrative book-fiction gems myself. Ed Gorman's "What The Dead Men Say." I've long relished Ed Gorman's work as a short story writer and an anthologist; the man has done more for the cause of short fiction and miscellanies (two forms I adore) than anyone else I know of. More recently I've been a fan of his blog. But -- to my shame --... posted by Michael at August 23, 2007 | perma-link | (46) comments

Monday, August 13, 2007


Me and the Snobs and the Little Guy
MIchael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back in this posting, I took a gratuitous swing at the European concert-hall tradition. Challenged by Jult52 about whether that was necessary -- and of course he's right, it wasn't -- I responded with some thoughts that Donald has urged me to turn into a free-standing posting. So without further ado, although with a little additional dolling-up ... Well, "Suck on this" wasn't exactly meant to be taken as a considered (let alone defensible) critical position ... But, what the heck, to indulge in a little earnestness for a sec: I love the Euro high-art traditions. What I don't like (and what I think screws up a lot of American arts discussions and arts education) is seeing American art through a Euro-derived, high-art fixated lens. Sometimes it's helpful, but much of the time it blinds people to the riches we have, or makes them much too modest about them. A lot of our best art (it seems to me) is folk, popular, self-created, entertainment-driven, commercial, eccentric, and/or hard-to-categorize. Much of it wasn't even intended to be taken as art. Meanwhile, our high-art style work, while sometimes amazing, is often either thin on the ground (hard to make a living at it here) or embattled, stressed, and self-righteous in a way that can weaken its quality. As a result we have a culture that's very different from a Euro-ish one in many important ways -- it's scrappy, decentered, unofficial, making-itself-up-as -it-goes-along, and often coming at ya out of seemingly nowhere ... Work that wasn't intended as art -- movies, jazz -- becomes a hugely important part of world culture, while much of our self-consciously arty art goes nowhere at all. So why do many critics, profs, and even civilians insist on applying inappropriate -- or at least what I consider inappropriate -- standards to what we do have? (I think I have a hunch why, btw ... ) Like I say, this kind of attitude can blind us to much of what we have and can make us too modest about how rich our culture is. It can also kill pleasure, and by god I love pleasure. High-art-obsessed types tend to see things awfully hierarchically. One work is automatically more valuable than another simply because of the kind of work it is. A literary novel is automatically more valuable than a collection Dave Barry columns, for instance. Seriously: It isn't uncommon to run into someone in the books world looking at something like a Dave Barry collection and sniffing, "Oh, that isn't a real book" as though he's just seen a dog turd on a sidewalk. Yet Dave Barry has been around for decades, and so far his writing seems to be holding up better than 90% of the lit novels -- the so-called "real books" -- from the same stretch. Similar kinds of people in the visual-arts field view a gallery-style sculpture or piece of installation art as automatically more worthy of "serious" consideration... posted by Michael at August 13, 2007 | perma-link | (54) comments

Monday, August 6, 2007


More Lulu Wonderfulness
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I've written before about the wonderful print-on-demand outfit Lulu.com. For one lengthy example, see here. Short version: Lulu is to traditional book publishing what blogging is to traditional magazine publishing. One of the great things about Lulu is that you can use the service as you see fit. Publish a book meant only for your family or friends. Make a photo book, or a comic book. Alter and revise whenever the mood strikes you. A couple of other excellent uses of Lulu have just come to my attention: * Use Lulu to bring out of print books back into print. Dave Lull points out that the Mises Institute is using Lulu to make a lot of their harder-to-find publications available in attractive paperback editions. Catch up with some of the giants of free-market theory. * Use Lulu to create an anthology of your own brain. Blogger / commenter / webcreature John Emerson has edited and expanded a lot of the writing available on his website, and has turned the results into a Lulu book. I haven't yet had the chance to make it through every last word of John's book, but I've spent enough time with it to be dazzled by its cabinet-of-wonders quality. Though basically a collection of quirky mini-essays on topics from Freud to Parmenides to Bob Dylan, it also has its own Borges-like, Calvino-like character. John is a perfect person to be using Lulu -- he's a freelance intellectual with his own way of making sense of the world, and his own distinctive way of piecing things together. His book is both a stimulating browse and an act of intellectual pointillism that coheres into something larger. * Small, a-propos-of-nothing rant: John's book reminds me that one of my favorite book-forms is what's known as the "miscellany" -- a ragbag that can be entered and enjoyed from any number of angles. Why on earth don't miscellanies get more respect than they do? (The NY trade-book industry seldom publishes miscellanies these days, and reviews of such books are even rarer.) But why should the thing we generally expect from a book be a work that is meant to be read from page one through to the end? Nothing against this particular kind of book, of course. But it seems to me that we have our expectations ass-end up. It seems to me far more natural that most books should be ragbags, miscellanies, and collections -- books that we pick up, put down, and put-together for ourselves, at our own choosing. After all, why should any of us be expected to serve someone else's ideal of "the book"? Why isn't it the expected thing instead that books should serve us? Best, Michael UPDATE: Conrad Roth reviews John Emerson's book here.... posted by Michael at August 6, 2007 | perma-link | (13) comments

Monday, July 30, 2007


Clean Sweep at Powell's
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards: I finally did it. On our way to the Oregon Coast last week we stopped in Portland at Powell's book store with a box of books to sell. They bought every book! Which is unheard of, for me at least. I figure I'm doing well if I can sell them two-thirds of what I bring. (I described here last summer's book-packing project when I moved from Olympia. I tossed a lot of books in the dumpster and sold a lot of others to Powell's.) For readers not living on the wet side of the Cascade Mountains, I need to note that Portland-based Powell's is a Big Deal for bookish people. The main store takes up a city block in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood on the edge of downtown. It's a jumble of structures where walls have been knocked out so that customers can, at great risk of becoming disoriented, proceed through floor after floor, section after section of books, books, books. I haven't checked with management or even done my own sample, but a good share of what's on the shelves is used books. That used to put me off. You see, I have this, uh, thing about used stuff. Unless an item is a family heirloom, I have a distaste for having to use somebody else's former things: books, clothing, furniture, cars, what have you. I don't like antique shops, for instance. And seeing all those used books at Powell's mixed with new books put me off. At first, anyway. I was used to books being either in stores selling all new books or all used books, and finding them jumbled took some adjusting. Now I'm okay with it. I normally look for the new stuff and screen out used books. Unless I spy a book that I want and know is hopelessly out of print. Yes, I actually can be practical when circumstances demand it. I've worn cast-off uniforms in the army, dealt with antique items in places I've lived -- even lived in furnished apartments -- and bought used cars. Nevertheless, I prefer new stuff. I guess I'm weird: but you knew that. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at July 30, 2007 | perma-link | (8) comments

Saturday, July 21, 2007


Harry and Me
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Yes, I bought it. The latest Harry Potter book. In fact, I also bought the previous book while at Barnes & Noble. But not at midnight, unlike what most of the rest of the world did. And not before I read a synopsis of Deathly Hallows. Harry Potter books get "darker" volume by volume, and I'm not about to blow twentysomething dollars plus 20 hours of my time on a downer. Not me. No way. I've been a peek-at-the-ending sorta guy from way back. I was thinking about buying the whole Potter series because, although I'd read the first five, it can be hard to remember minor characters and plot elements from years before. So it might be a good thing to just start from scratch and plow through the whole thing, no? Then I went to the Internet and discovered this source containing information about all the characters in the series. It looks like it'll be useful, but I might end up buying the first five anyway. I first encountered Harry Potter at Hatchards bookstore at 187 Piccadilly in London back in 1998. Near the entrance was a large stack of books with this cover: First British edition of the Harry Potter series Yep, it sure looked like a kids book. But why were there so many of the darned things at Hatchards? This was before the Harry Potter craze had jumped the Atlantic, so I was clueless. As I've grown older I find myself reading less and less fiction. What I do read tends to be escapist stuff -- most usually science fiction featuring well-imagined societal and physical settings along with a healthy dose of blood 'n' guts smeared on with savoir-faire, not a trowel. I'm not a fantasy reader aside from Harry Potter. I like Potter because of the world J.K. Rowling created for him. And it seems I'm not alone. Later, Donald UPDATE: Yes I know the title of this post ain't grammatical. I riffed on the title of the Michael Moore hatchet-job movie "Roger and Me" just for the hell of it.... posted by Donald at July 21, 2007 | perma-link | (14) comments

Thursday, July 19, 2007


Politician Books
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I don't bother reading politician books, though once upon a time I did. When I was in my twenties or thereabouts I'd buy and read a book by a politician (or his ghost-writer) or perhaps a politician's biography or autobiography. This activity was inspired by John F. Kennedy's presidential run, which I ardently supported. (I reached voting age less than a week before the 1960 election.) By "politician books" I'm referring to books related to the current election cycle or a future one. Such books tend to be either puff-pieces or hatchet-jobs motivated by a desire to mold public opinion. This is different from biographies or studies of politicians whose time has passed. For example, JFK, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon have been gone long enough that their presidencies and related issues are becoming hard to tie to current political matters. That is, they are now the stuff of History (though still subject to the biases of historians). Ronald Reagan is entering the transition zone between relevant and historical. So might Jimmy Carter but for the fact that he's still alive and searching the world for dictators and America-haters to embrace. One reason I abandoned the genre is because I learned that politician books can be pretty deceitful. In particular, the 1960-vintage pro-Kennedy books ignored the seriousness of the man's health problems -- information that came fully to light only a few years ago. Another reason is that the Internet offers easy access to gobs of information on biographical details, positions on issues and so forth that weren't so available in the past. In other words, I have a pretty fair perception of politics and politicians and believe reading books would largely be a waste of my time. The rest of the world seems to operate differently, if the piles of politician books at Borders and Barnes & Noble are any indication. Given the high likelihood of pro / con bias and the easy access to information, why are politician books still being published? Some possible reasons: Some such books actually sell well and earn a profit for the publisher. Perhaps some money changes hands under a table and a politician's campaign gets a boost by having their man presented in a "prestigious" setting -- a book. A publisher friendly to a candidate will okay publication of a prestige-building book even though it will lose money: call it a form of campaign contribution. Perhaps Michael, who knows book-trade stuff, can give us the skinny. And who buys such books? And actually reads them? Doubtless a few pimply-faced enthusiasts such as I was in my JFK phase. And probably political staffers and consultants looking for stray insights and opposition ammunition. Then there might be a scattering of folks who prefer to get most of their information from books while smugly feeling that they are going beyond the call of civic duty thanks to the number of pages they're turning. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at July 19, 2007 | perma-link | (8) comments

Wednesday, July 18, 2007


Quote for the Day: Elizabeth George
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Flipping through a notebook I keep, I ran across a quote from the mystery writer Elizabeth George that I've always wanted to post: Novels were designed to entertain, and those of us who wish to keep the art form alive need to keep this in mind. To aim for lofty literature instead of aiming for a good story with real characters who grow and develop and a setting that's brought to life is to go at the art form, like putting the varnish on the canvas first. I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe. Hey, folks: The early English novels were tacky affairs -- the equivalent of today's reality TV. There is such a thing as high culture, of course, but much of it has its roots solidly planted in the mud. An example: For much of its history, opera -- today's highest of the high -- held a place in the general culture analogous to today's movies. Small MBlowhard hunch: When you pull an artform out of the earth it grows from, even if you do so with the best or the loftiest of intentions, it's likely to whither and then die. Connecting with the basics -- and then reconnecting with them again and again -- matters. Ohio and California-raised, Elizabeth George is known for writing mysteries set convincingly in Great Britain. She has been a very popular author; she sells well, and a number of her Inspector Lynley novels have been turned into TV shows by the BBC. A quick but maybe not-unfair characterization of her work: She's like an American P.D. James. She uses the form of the mystery story to deliver full-bodied fiction experiences that are similar to those supplied by the 19th century novels that many people complain aren't being written these days. Yes they are, love. You just have to open your mind and look outside of the "literary fiction" genre. I've read a couple of Elizabeth George's novels -- this one and this one -- and I found them both impressive, substantial, satisfying, and enjoyable. They may not exactly be my kinda thing; neither are P.D. James' books. (I don't love-love-love 19th century novels either.) But both women are superb novelists, and I'll be reading more of both of them. Here's Elizabeth George's website. I also loved her book about writing fiction, which I found helpful, thoughtful, and (praise heaven) practical. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 18, 2007 | perma-link | (16) comments

Thursday, July 5, 2007


Long, Short, Gore
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- There aren't many cultureworld cliche-phrases that make me groan quite as loudly as "the novelistic accumulation of detail." Why is this phrase often spoken in tones of praise? To me it sounds like "some author or filmmaker who piles up tons of examples instead of getting around to the damn point and moving on to the next one." Lordy, why are so many novels so very long? Even when my appetite for plowing through acres of text was greater than it is now -- back in college, or just back when my eyes were stronger than they are now -- I didn't crave ultra-long novels. I read through a decent number of the Lengthy Greats and am glad I did -- helped make me a semi-cultured person. But as soon as I stopped needing to read long I reverted to shorter works. Exceptions allowed for, of course, as we always must when it comes to culture. But, generally speaking, I simply don't like having a piece of any kind of fiction in my life for too long a time. If I can't get through a work in an evening or two, I become impatient. I haven't even had a fiction-TV series in my life since junior high, come to think of it. In recent years, I've sat through a handful of series: season one of "The Sopranos," "Firefly," and a few of the "Prime Suspect"s. ("Prime Suspect" 1 and 3 were terrif -- why was 2 so bad?) But only a few such -- and in each case I watched it on DVD and got the chore over with in a weekend. This isn't because I don't like fiction, let alone narrative, let alone reading, by the way. I can't resist taste-testing prose when I run across it, and I fancy myself a connoisseur of drama, plot, suspense, and story. But I seem to have a greater taste for shapeliness and intensity in narrative than the "I love losing myself in a fictional world for weeks at a time" crowd does. As a consequence, my own tastes generally run towards movies, plays, webseries -- complete experiences that can deliver considerable involvement yet wrap it up in an hour or two, or perhaps an evening or two. Where book-fiction is concerned, one reason I generally go for crime novels these days is that crime novels tend to be shorter, faster, more to the point, and shapelier than most lit-fiction novels are. A great Donald Westlake quote: If your subject is crime, then you know at least that you're going to have a real story. If your subject is the maturing of a college boy, you may never stumble across a story while you're telling that. But if your story is a college boy dead in his dorm room, you know there's a story in there, someplace. Come to think of it, I like spare French novellas for much the same set of reasons: They're intense,... posted by Michael at July 5, 2007 | perma-link | (22) comments

Tuesday, July 3, 2007


Nikos on Amazon
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm thrilled to notice that Nikos Salingaros' books about architecture -- previously rather hard to get hold of -- can now be bought from Amazon: here, here, here. They're brilliant. You can get a good sample of Nikos' thinking by reading 2Blowhards' interview with him. All five parts can be accessed via this posting. Here's an impressed and impressive recent Ashraf Salama review of one of Nikos' books. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 3, 2007 | perma-link | (1) comments

Thursday, June 21, 2007


Going Live
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The Wife and I are coming off a long-ish spell of old-fashioned barnstorming. In recent months we've put our raunchy fiction up in front of live audiences all around the country. We've conferred our genius on San Francisco, Chicago, Phoenix, L.A., Austin and seven or eight more cities (/irony, of course). Or was it nine more cities? When you're on tour, where you are and where you've been can get to be a bit of a blur. It has been an elaborate and exhausting procedure, mainly because we don't just show up at bookstores and read from books. That would be too easy. No, we arrange with local actors to semi-read / semi-perform our stories. We put on a real show, in other words. It's all very no-budget and catch-as-catch-can, but even so the process involves arranging a venue, buying advertising, trying to rustle up local press coverage, and auditioning actors and getting them to show up on time. To be honest, this has all been The Wife's doing, not mine. For one thing, she's promoting a collection of her own stories that has just been published. (If you'd like an Amazon link to the book, email me at michaelblowhard at gmail and I'll email it back to you. And please do! The Wife's book is a super-fun read -- full of mischief, nifty hooks, lively characters, and hot and filthy sex scenes. Not that I'm biased or anything ... ) For another, The Wife just likes putting on live shows. She's that type -- I often tease her that she's more actress than writer, and I wonder sometimes if she wouldn't be even happier making movies than writing books. Performers, venues, applause, audiences, the crackle of electricity that's special to live performances -- for her, that combo is like the world's bestest-ever drug. Me, well ... Let's just say that I enjoy co-writing, lending moral support, and hanging out backstage. Please don't feel impressed. We put our shows on at small clubs, even at sex-toy stores, not in auditoriums. At our level, the usual audience ranges from 40-60 people. (On the other hand: Be impressed! Most writers would kill to have 40-60 people show up to listen to their fiction.) We've also been doing the touring on our own nickel. What, you don't think book publishers actually promote the books they publish, do you? Please, grow up. The fact is that, for 90% of book-authors, publishers do nothing besides turn the material into a book and place it on bookstore shelves for eight weeks. That's it. No ads, no touring, no support. The book either finds its audience or it doesn't. (It's an absurd business: How is anyone supposed to learn about the book's existence in the first place?) So The Wife and I -- darned proud of our kooky, nasty fiction, and maybe a little tougher about promotion than many tenderfoot writers are -- have been doing our best to give our... posted by Michael at June 21, 2007 | perma-link | (12) comments

Thursday, May 31, 2007


Ed on George
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Ed Gorman enjoys "Blackmailer", a nearly-50-year-old novel by George Axelrod that has just been republished by the excellent Hard Case Crime. Axelrod (who died in 2003) doesn't seem to be well-known these days. But he was a legend back in the '50s and '60s -- a wildly successful TV and radio writer; a celebrated playwright ("Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?", "The 7-Year Itch"); and a high-paid screenwriter who penned scripts for such movies as "Breakfast at Tiffany's," "The Manchurian Candidate," and the hyper-kooky "Lord Love a Duck" (one of The Wife's favorites), which he also directed. As far as I 've been able to tell, "Blackmailer" was his only novel. He wrote it for the famous Gold Medal paperback line, which I blogged about here. He was at his malicious and exuberant best doing dizzy, poppy satire. Ed Gorman describes Axelrod this way: "There were few cooler guys on TV in the Fifties than George Axelrod ... I always thought Now that's the kind of guy I wish I could be. Hip but accessible." Ed calls "Blackmailer" "larky ... pure escape," which sounds awfully good to me. I've just hit Amazon's One-Click button. I couldn't find much about Axelrod online. (Funny how little the web offers on some major figures, isn't it? How is our picture of culture being affected by this?) Axelrod dropped out of circulation in the late '60s, then did a few screenwriting jobs in the '80s: "The Last Protocol," "The Holcroft Covenant," neither one of which I've seen. Here's a short look at his life. Wikipedia is pretty informative too. Here's an AP obit. It's good to see that a movie based on one of Ed Gorman's novels has just gone into production. I'm looking forward to that too. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 31, 2007 | perma-link | (3) comments

Monday, May 21, 2007


Meet Ed
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Ed Gorman has a tasty-sounding new mystery out. Haven't read it myself, but the reliable Bruce Grossman is enthusiastic. Ed Gorman runs a feisty, companionable, and smart blog here. Don't miss recent Ed postings about a couple of legendary gal fiction-writers: Margaret Millar and Marijane Meaker (aka Vin Packer). This posting about the haunting and poetic David Goodis is a special gem. Great Ed line: "The physical settings may change but usually you have the same man -- i.e., David Goodis -- trying to survive being himself for at least another twenty-four hours." Now that's some first-class literary criticism. Recently, Ed ran a two-part article about the amazing Charles Williams by Ed Lynskey: here and here. Lynsky reports in his excellent piece that, for Maxim Jakubowski, Charles Williams is "an American classic," and that, for Max Alan Collins, Williams is "the best-kept secret in ... noir fiction." I'll second and third those opinions. I raved about Charles Williams myself not so long ago. This may be nothing but gratuitous point-scoring on my part, but I can't resist mentioning that, while it isn't unusual to run into sweet-natured and big-hearted people in the crime-fiction field, I've run into much less in the way of generosity and directness during my explorations of the literary world. Best, Michael UPDATE: In the Prospect, Julian Gough asks "what's wrong with the modern literary novel?" (Link thanks to ALD.) For Gough, the answer has to do with writers' tendency to overemphasize the tragic vision at the expense of the comic vision. My own small contribution to this discussion: Perhaps it also comes down to goals and personalities. Writers of narrative (and genre) fiction are generally trying to craft accessible and rewarding entertainments that can be enjoyed by regular folks, while many creators of lit fiction are doing their best to show off for an audience of editors, critics, profs, and other lit-fict authors.... posted by Michael at May 21, 2007 | perma-link | (6) comments

Why Read?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- There I was not so long ago, flying Business class on American. (Thank you, Frequent Flyer miles.) Cruising altitude had been attained. I was leaning back, about to settle into the book I'd brought along, when a steward-person held out one of these to me: It took me a few seconds to make sense of what was was being proposed. My steward-person was wheeling a cart laden with a number of these devices, each one zipped into its own little gizmo-bag. The machines had hard drives loaded with movies, TV shows, and music. In other words: We ritzy biz-class types were being offered the chance to use a snazzy media device for the duration of our flight. Looking around warily -- surely there was a catch -- I accepted the gizmo and plugged it in. The device proved friendly enough; dimwitted me was able to find my bearings quickly. Wariness now allayed, I set my book aside and started surfing programs, music, and movies. I found watching a movie on the device to be a surprisingly satisfying experience. I'm film snob enough that I never, ever watch a movie on an airplane. I find the watery, dim, poorly-aimed video image that front-of-the-cabin airplane screens offer an affront. On this little gizmo, though ... Well, its six-ish inch screen was bright and clear, and the sound was luscious. There was no hope of being ravished by the kind of dreamy hugeness and engulfing hyperreality that actual movies offer, of course. Still, the film's moods came across, the framing was razor-sharp, and the performances were more-than-adequately conveyed. And the suit-yourself intimacy of the device was its own major plus. I loved being able to surf, start, stop, pause, and rewind as I saw fit. No passengers walked between me and the gizmo's screen. The gizmo was as convenient to use and as eager to please as the book that I'd stowed away and forgotten about. One final factor made the device seem plausible: It felt semi-important to me that the gizmo wasn't a mere DVD player, but that it instead contained a library of various media offerings. There was no need to exit the device's thought-space in order to fumble around with something physical, like a disc. Being able to select from among a bunch of already-in-there media options made me want to get to know the device a lot better. As you might be able to tell from my lousy photos, the device is about the same size as a modest hardcover book. Even so, handling it isn't quite the unself-conscious thing that handling a book is. The device is considerably heavier than a book, for one thing. For another, despite its ironclad chunkiness it still feels breakable. Maybe that's partly a function of having a screen; maybe it's also partly a function of me knowing that there's a spinning hard drive inside. (You can feel the battery heat up and the hard drive whirr... posted by Michael at May 21, 2007 | perma-link | (7) comments

Sunday, May 20, 2007


"The Man Who Was Thursday"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I just finished G.K. Chesterton's novel "The Man Who Was Thursday." It's certainly a brilliant book; it's just as certainly one of the most peculiar books I've ever read. Although you might call it a metaphysical thriller, the effect it produces is anything like that of conventional fiction, philosophical or not. In the way it combines debate and fantasy, as well as in the way it continuously -- and whimsically -- keeps reframing its own nature, it comes across like a cross between an Escher print and a medieval romance. Fascinatin'! All that said, the novel is also intensely and explicitly Christian in its concerns. Fine and dandy, of course. But once again I find myself confessing that Christian conversations not only aren't ones that I find very inviting, they're so foreign to what runs through my own mind and spirit that when I attend to them I feel like I'm listening to people speaking Chinese. Which means in effect that, reading "The Man Who Was Thursday," I felt curious and amazed, but shut out as well. But of course that's my shortcoming, not the novel's. Recently, I read and reacted to Chesterton's "Orthodoxy." Philip Bess responded to my posting here. Visit the excellent and thoughtful blogger who calls himself the Man Who Is Thursday here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 20, 2007 | perma-link | (4) comments

Friday, May 18, 2007


Philip Bess on Chesterton
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I received a very interesting response via email to my recent posting about G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" from Philip Bess, an architect, an author, and a professor of architecture at Notre Dame. It was too interesting not to share with others, so I asked Philip for permission to copy and paste it into the blog. Philip has kindly agreed. Here it is: Dear Michael Blowhard: Wow, thank you for the wonderful recent post on Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" (which John Massengale forwarded to me), especially impressive given your own existential caveats. While I don't agree with your characterization of Chesterton in all of its details (this owes, perhaps, to my being familiar with a larger part of the Chesterton corpus; though by no means a majority!), your review is nonetheless generously sympathetic. I appreciate too your gently-phrased advance warning to any would-be evangelists eager to think you may be on the edge of religious conversion, and hoping themselves to give you that just slight but decisive nudge. At the risk of appearing to be one of that type -- and advance apologies if indeed I am one of that type -- allow me nevertheless to give you my take on several of the interesting issues and questions your review has raised. 1) Several of your readers have already pointed out that "Orthodoxy" represents not Chesterton's apology for Catholicism (of which there are several later examples, to one of which I refer below), but rather simply for orthodox Christianity as summarized in The Apostles' Creed, which can be (and is) affirmed by Orthodox and many Protestant Christians as well as Roman Catholics. Chesterton states this almost in passing near the end of his Introduction: These essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles' Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics.... When the word "orthodoxy" is used here it means the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed. And the rest of the book simply proceeds with this understanding of Christianity. It also may or may not help to understand 1908 "Orthodoxy's" relationship to his 1905 book "Heretics," one of whose subjects made the off-hand remark that he would worry about the alleged deficiencies of his own philosophy "when Mr. Chesterton has given us his." "Orthodoxy" followed from that challenge. 2) I think you are absolutely right that Chesterton embraced orthodox Christianity (and ultimately Catholicism) not because he reasoned his way through all the propositions of its creed/s and catechism but rather because he simply came to believe 1) that Catholicism was foundational for, inseparable from and part and parcel of western culture (including the best parts of the modern world, not least science and technology); 2) that he found that Christian orthodoxy suited his own temperament and intellect; and 3) that he believed points... posted by Michael at May 18, 2007 | perma-link | (3) comments

Monday, May 14, 2007


Maugham Moment
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Without intending to, I've stumbled into a Somerset Maugham phase over the last few months. I read Maugham's novella "Up at the Villa," I saw the movie that was based on it, and just yesterday I watched the film of Maugham's novel "The Painted Veil." Two out of three ain't bad. The dud of the bunch was the movie of "Up at the Villa." Its dudness came as a surprise partly because the novella was so darned good. Maugham's insight and command are extraordinary in the book, which is set in pre-WWII Italy and which concerns a young English widow in need of both a husband and some love. Although Maugham tells the story with nary a wasted motion, and using a calm and controlled surface, he generates tons of charged emotional drama. The other reason the dudness of the movie came as a surprise was that its makers Philip Haas and his wife Belinda Haas had made a very stylish splash with the 1995 "Angels and Insects." I didn't enjoy "Angels and Insects" much -- I don't care for conceptual / intellectual entertainments generally. But it certainly wasn't short on snazz or brio. "Up at the Villa," by contrast, has zero style and brio. It's conventional and unremarkable, a movie for the least adventurous of the arthouse / foreign-movie crowd. The Haas's open up the novella's story with some unncessary plot complications and with a lot of emphasis given over to the era's looming fascism. Were they imagining that they were saying something, or perhaps making some kind of statement? Or were they run roughshod-over by producers or moneypeople? In any case, the film (which features one of Sean Penn's more flagrantly bad performances, and that's saying a lot) doesn't come off at all, The only real reason to see it is for Kristin Scott Thomas, who's miraculous: womanly, daring, elegant, impassioned. That woman can veer back and forth between poised and desperate like no one else. Besides the novella, I also loved the film "The Painted Veil." Produced by and starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts, and written by Ron Nyswaner, it's brilliant. Or perhaps I should just say that I found it involving, moving, and surprisingly intense. It's a romantic melodrama, centered on a spoiled upper-class brat (Watts) who lets herself be won and married by a middle-class doctor who's working in China. Once there, her egocentricity starts to find itself challenged in all kinds of unexpected ways. Let me list some of what's remarkable about the film: Its sense of scale. Though it's a period costume drama and was filmed in China, and though it certainly has its share of sets, landscapes, hairdos, and even a few crowd scenes, it's one of the least "sweeping" romantic costume movies ever. (It was directed by John Curran, who previously directed Watts in a movie I didn't care for, "We Don't Live Here Any More.") It's focused almost entirely on the psychologies and... posted by Michael at May 14, 2007 | perma-link | (19) comments

Thursday, May 10, 2007


Nagle Speaks
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm glad to see that Robert Nagle will be doing a live webcast tomorrow. Robert -- who's very smart and interesting about numerous up-to-date subjects -- will be talking about ebooks, text books, and digital storytelling. Robert sometimes comments here at 2Blowhards, and he runs his own blog here. He also writes fiction under a variety of pseudonyms -- I wish I knew what they are. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 10, 2007 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, May 8, 2007


Chesterton's "Orthodoxy"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I recently finished reading G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy." I found it a fascinating book for a variety of reasons. For one: Chesterton describes his book as a far more modest project than it turns out to be. According to what he announces at the outset, he's simply setting forth how he came to embrace Catholicism at its most traditional. [CORRECTION: Make that "Christianity at its most traditional." Thanks to several visitors who pointed out that Chesterton didn't commit to Catholicism until a number of years after publishing "Orthodoxy."] But he doesn't in fact keep the book that personal; he doesn't stick to his announced limitations. Instead, he winds up making an aggressive and ambitious case for Catholicism as the truest account we have of life, and the most trustworthy guide we have to that life. I suppose that Chesterton, a sly fox, was pursuing this bait-and-switch strategy deliberately. Does it really matter if he wasn't? Given what a spokesguy for limits and forms he generally makes himself out to be, perhaps it does, if only a little. Anyway: a quick personal aside. I have a tendency to treat myself to looks into Christianity or Judaism -- into monotheism, Western-style -- once or twice a year. When I do this and I blog about my adventures, I always receive solicitous emails from people convinced that I'm teetering on the verge of committing to some Christian faith or other. I'm guessing that, in the view of these correspondents, I'm blogging out of intensely-felt spiritual agonies, and that all I need is a little love and encouragement to enable me to fall into the embrace of the Church. The care and interest are both much appreciated, of course. But they're based on a misapprehension. I'm not blogging out of a sense of agony and yearning. Really I'm not. I take my looks into Christianity and Judaism out of nothing more than curiosity. Well, a strong curiosity, but mere curiosity anyway. Western monotheism is a knot I gnaw at. One reason for this: Western civ was partly formed by Western monotheism. I inhabit Western civ; I'm an arts-and-culture kinda guy. Hence, I'd like to understand the connections between Western monotheism and the life around me better than I do. The other basis for my curiosity and gnawing is even more dopey. Western monotheism has never worked for me in the most basic sense. Forget about ideas and beliefs, let's talk showbiz. I don't get it, emotionally or imaginatively. I stare at Western monotheism like I stare at a comic book series that fails to hook me. I find that I can tune in to the fascination and the magic for a second or two tops. Then it slips away from me again. As a result, I'd like to develop a better grasp on what it is I'm missing. (FWIW, and purely for the sake of self-indulgence: I not only don't get monotheism, I find it unappealing. It seems to... posted by Michael at May 8, 2007 | perma-link | (36) comments

Wednesday, May 2, 2007


Bookbiz Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Jim Miller points out a Guardian article comparing women's and men's tastes in book-fiction reading. Like Jim, I don't know why anyone was surprised by the results -- dudez like heroes and ideas, galz prefer to compare feelings and receive validation, etc. But apparently some people were. * Jim also makes some refreshingly down-to-earth (and hence un-P.C.) comments about a Seattle librarian's reading list for children. It can sometimes seem as though teachers and librarians want to prevent little boys from reading, can't it? My own working assumption: School is a conspiracy against boys. (UPDATE: Steve Sailer writes about one small publishing house that has made a point of publishing books for boys.) * Thanks to FvB, who points out a NYTimes article about how newspapers' book-review sections are shrinking. Book publicists eager for coverage are now almost as likely to approach litblogs as they are traditional publications, it seems, and the National Book Critics Circle has even launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviews. The smart 'n' sassy Book Babes comment. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 2, 2007 | perma-link | (5) comments

Tuesday, May 1, 2007


Nate Likes Avenir
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Nate Davis gives Avenir -- one of the Mac writing tools that I recommended recently -- a spin, and likes what he encounters. He also does a better job than I did of describing what Avenir is: It's a database-driven interface with containers for notes on characters, scenes, chapters, etc. It even has a very optimistically designed section for keeping track of your submissions! ... I like that this program is fairly minimalist -- it stays out of the way and lets me just free-form ramble to get things started. But it's there to step in with containers for this and that when things get complicated. Nate reports that using Avenir has even helped him become unstuck where one of his writing projects is concerned. I've been making a lot of use of Scrivener myself, and the experience has left me more convinced than ever that the Avenir / Scrivener class of software marks as much of an advance over the word processor as the word processor represented over the typewriter, at least so far as longer pieces of writing go. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 1, 2007 | perma-link | (0)

Long Books
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Tyler Cowen asks, "What's Wrong with Long Books?" Fun thoughts from many visitors. I pitched in with this comment: Well, many books are too long. It's commonly acknowledged in the bookbiz that many nonfiction books, for instance, are just blown-up magazine articles. Also, when you think about it, isn't it incredibly ... audacious or arrogant or something for authors to ask us to read (for instance) 600 pages? Even if you read at a very good clip, this author is asking you for at least a 10 hour commitment. Tyler, who seems to have 60 hours in a day, might breeze through such a book in a weekend, but it'd take me a couple of weeks. And what individual -- and whose individual voice -- merits that kind of attention? Would you voluntarily say, OK, I'm going to listen to Person X yak on for 10 hours straight? I mean, would you do that often? By contrast, a season of a TV series (about the equivalent in length) has all kinds of talents and personalities pitching in for your entertainment's sake: designers, performers, multiple scriptwriters, directors, photographers, costume and music people ... Downside: commercial anxiety, too many cooks, etc. Still, the book-length thang (and our fetishization of it) strikes me as weird. Books are as long as they are in many cases not because that's the right length for them but because book-publishing requires that length. Books are book-length not because it suits us but because it suits the book-publishing business. What if you've got a story that tells itself naturally in 80 pages? It seems to me that most stories run naturally as prose things around 20-80 pages. Beyond that is padding, writin', atmosphere, authorial ego ... All the more reason to value novels that do justify 400 or 800 pages, of course. But why not acknowledge that they're rarities? Besides, I'm simply not 600 pages' worth of interested in many stories, or many subjects. I solve the problem for myself practically where nonfiction is concerned by buying abridged audiobooks. I'll listen to a four-tape version of a biography while commuting or exercising and be quite happy about it (and I'll be done with it in fairly short order too). But the 600 page full-length bio? I'm just not gonna get around to it. One of the great things about the internet is that it's freed writing from the old length-predicament of "either it's an article or a book." Why do we make such a big deal out of the book-length writing performance? Is it entirely because of history and school? Is there any reason to expect people in the future to have the same attachment to the book-length performance? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 1, 2007 | perma-link | (13) comments

"Youthful Desires"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I spent some of the weekend reading Darrell Reimer's story collection "Youthful Desires." I had a very good time, and I suspect that anyone who took to (for instance) the early movies of Richard Linklater will enjoy "Youthful Desires" too. (You may know Darrell already; he blogs at WhiskyPrajer.) Darrell's fiction is of the same general school as Linklater's "Dazed and Confused," or (in book terms) Tom Perrotta's early story collection "Bad Haircut" and Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity." This is a landscape / mindscape / writing-scape inhabited by bright young boy-men with searching brains, more mixed-up than they know, yet sweet and open, caught between adolescent lustiness, nostalgia for childhood, anxiety about entering the adult world, and amazement at the vastness of it all. What makes Darrell's book distinctive is that his language has its own out-of-the-mainstream music, and that his young men have their own special concerns. Darrell -- who, if I remember right, is the son of a Mennonite pastor -- is amazingly unself-conscious about shifting into metaphysical-speculation mode. Wondering about the divine is a natural part of what his young men do. Yet Darrell isn't imposing ideas, let alone using fiction as a mere vehicle for philosophizing. The stories and characters have their own life; the ideas and speculations are part of the loam that the stories grow from, alongside testosterone, confusion, grogginess, and giddiness. Darrell's young men are wondering what they might do in life, hoping to get laid, and asking themselves what God might be up to. In one story, Darrell's protagonist has thrown himself into bodybuilding as -- he hopes -- a redemptive activity, and Darrell's evocation of this kid's disordered thought processes is shrewd, funny, and brilliantly done. Like Perrotta and Hornby, this is Lit Lite -- yet it's also Lit Very Likable, Lit Very Amusing, and Lit Very Touching. (And who says that achieving a shallow-yet-setting-off-deeper-notes tone isn't a considerable achievement?) Darrell keeps his stories very personal and informal. The collection -- which Darrell has published himself via Lulu.com -- never feels not-handmade; it never feels not like a labor of love. This may be workshop-style fiction -- though indie-cinema creators should find a lot of rich material here, Jerry Bruckheimer certainly won't be buying these stories to supply plot-lines for next summer's action movies. But it isn't fiction that has been workshopped-to-death. Darrell isn't out to be the toughest, most virtuosic writer in writing class. He's using workshop techniques to show off his subject matter. This is amateur fiction in the best sense, in the sense of fiction that has been written from love. I want to add a small thing here about the amateur-vs-professional pickle. The professional publishing process involves many stages, and it has much to recommend it. The processes tend to ensure that a certain level of gloss and professionalism is attained and sustained. While this can often be a good thing, at other times the process is destructive. What can happen... posted by Michael at May 1, 2007 | perma-link | (3) comments

Friday, April 20, 2007


A New Class of Writing Tools for the Mac
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- There isn't much that'll prod me into acting all unpleasant and snobby, but a few minutes with Microsoft Word will do the trick. All due respect to those who like it as well as to those who have no choice but to use it, of course. Still: what an unhelpful beast I find it to be. The picky writer in me is beyond-offended. I rise up and say, huffily: "Why, that's not a tool for real writers. It's a program for the creation of" -- patooie -- "business documents." To be fair, my dislike of Word has a lot to do with the word processor category generally. I wrote back here about how much I dislike conventional word processors. (I notice that I cracked a few decent jokes and ventured a couple of potentially-amusing thoughts about writing too.) Short version: I find word processors to be unsatisfying compromises. Half text-slinging tools, half page-layout programs, they aren't particularly good at either task. And Microsoft Word compounds the basic conceptual problem with the usual Microsoft featuritis. God ... Word really does make me turn up my nose. In my previous posting, I extolled a couple of non-word-processor writing tools that I was then finding helpful in a sympathetic-to-real-writing kind of way. That was a few years ago, though, and those tools have since been superseded by yet better writer's tools -- by a whole new class of software, in fact. Since many people may not be aware of these new and newish programs, why not yak about 'em a bit and pass along a few links? My taste in writer's tools has first to do with something very basic and rooted in temperament. For some people, pulling together a piece of to-be-published material is a matter of integrating imagery, graphics, words, and editorial concepts. That's where they start, juggling all those different media elements. Dave Eggers and Chip Kidd, for example, are famous for composing their books -- right from the outset -- in page-layout programs. This approach makes sense for Eggers and Kidd because layout and design are so integral to how they think and work, as well as to what they want to produce. The Wife is someone else who likes seeing her writing in a page-layout sense as she's composing. She says it helps her bring her writing to life. I'm not like that. I'm a words-first kinda guy. Incidentally, this isn't to put people who aren't words-firsty down. I often I wish I shared their kind of talent-set and temperament-set. I love artist's notebooks and sketchbooks, for instance -- they're some of my favorite books. The combo of jotting, sketching, notes-to-self, captions, diary entries, watercolors, etc., can make my head spin in pleasure. I feel like I'm experiencing someone else's perceptual apparatus, and in a nice way. Unfortunately, working in such a way doesn't seem to be in the cards for me. No, when I want to pull together a piece of... posted by Michael at April 20, 2007 | perma-link | (13) comments

Wednesday, April 18, 2007


Crime Writing
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Bruce Grossman raves about novels by Charles Willeford, David Goodis, and Elmore Leonard. All three are among my own crime-writing favorites. Folks who casually assume that genre writing doesn't offer a lot of brilliance or much writin'-writing pleasure are in for some surprises if they try these guys. Between you and me, in my personal art-cosmos all three rate as entertainer/artists on a par with Duke Ellington, Ruth Brown, Count Basie, the Cord automobile, Robert Siodmak, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Cary Grant, Margaret Sullavan, and the Chrysler Building. Ie., they're among the very best that American culture has to offer. But let's keep that between us, OK? I wouldn't want the wrath of the Official Lit Set descending on me. Best, Michael UPDATE: Thanks to jult52 for linking to this great Elmore Leonard 10 Rules of Writing. Read; memorize. You can now skip creative-writing school.... posted by Michael at April 18, 2007 | perma-link | (7) comments

Thursday, April 12, 2007


The NYTBR Section and Fiction 5: Literary Fiction and Literature
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Here's my widely-anticipated (small joke) new installment in a continuing series of postings in which I spout off about the New York Times Book Review Section's ka-razy over-emphasis on literary fiction. Previous installments here, here, here, here. Today's theme: "Literary fiction and literature." Let's examine this idea of "literary fiction" for a few minutes. I'm not concerning myself with any official definition, by the way. I'm interested in what's commonly understood by the term. As far as I can tell, the thing that most people understand by "literary fiction" has two main components. One is that the book in question is more concerned with the details and fine points of writing itself than non-literary writing is. The other is that whatever it is that the future will decide was the lasting literature of our era, it will be drawn from the "literary fiction" candidate-list. If you disagree with me about either of these points, please join in the commentsfest. Almost all pictures need complexifying. Still, I've met many people for whom the above pretty much summarizes what they understand by "literary fiction." So why not examine how these two assumptions hold up in actual fact? A self-conscious concern with writin'. There's no doubt that the lit-fict class makes a bigger show of fussin' with the writin' than the non lit-fict crowd does. 99% of the time, the prose surface of literary fiction is more heavily-worked and more aggressively manipulated than the prose-surface of non-literary fiction. Hooo-eee, how these people love to critique each other's sentences. But what a narrow idea of writing critiquing sentences is, no? After all, how big a part of fiction-creation does the specific act of fussing with words make up? (Incidentally, there are in fact some writers whose fiction arises from the energy they expend on fussing with words. I know that. But they aren't numerous.) Back here I made a quick list -- informal but maybe serviceable -- of some of the activities that are often involved in creating prose fiction. Writin' is just one item on it. Two of the others: the construction of a story, and the creation of characters. Dismiss me as a traditionalist, but I'd be happy to argue that these two activities are, always have been, and always will be more central to the creation of fiction than verbal fussbudgetry is. To heighten the contrast, let's look at "The Maltese Falcon" and Salman Rushdie. The writin' in "The Maltese Falcon" is of course a wonder to behold. But writin' per se is about 10% of what the book puts on display. How about that cast of characters, eh? Brigid O'Shaughnessy ... Joel Cairo ... Caspar Gutman (the fat man) ... And of course Sam Spade himself -- living, breathing people every one of them, or perhaps even better than that. And how about those moments of suspense, humor, surprise, and excitement? Pretty hard to shake, no? These things don't just happen any more than... posted by Michael at April 12, 2007 | perma-link | (31) comments

Wednesday, April 11, 2007


Richard S. Wheeler's Memoir
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm thrilled to see that the western novelist Richard S. Wheeler has just published his memoir. I've pressed the One-Click button myself, and am looking forward to reading the book. Some great p-r copy: "In his early forties, Richard Wheeler had never given a thought to writing fiction. By his early seventies, he had written sixty novels." Now that's an interesting and productive writing life! I raved about Richard's masterful novel "Flint's Gift" here. 2Blowhards re-published a speech Richard gave on the topic of book publishing here, and ran an article that Richard wrote for us about the Western writing scene here. Prairie Mary writes about Richard's new memoir here. Since I've ventured the thought on this blog that more writers ought to study acting, it's especially fun to learn that Richard and Mary both feel that they've profited as writers from taking years of acting class. Best, Michael UPDATE: Ed Gorman recommends Richard's memoir too.... posted by Michael at April 11, 2007 | perma-link | (1) comments

Tuesday, April 3, 2007


Charlton / Juvenal
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I recently had a wonderful time going through Charlton Griffin's audiobook of Juvenal's "Satires." Amazing material, of course. Juvenal was a Roman poet given to wild caricature of the life he observed -- he's like the poet version of Hogarth, only for Roman times rather than for 18th century England. The poems are given a superbly-judged production and reading by Charlton, who presents them with a winning combo of dignity, lasciviousness, and merriment. The effect is like spending a sozzled, off-the-record evening with a dirty-minded senator. You can download the audiobook from Audible, or from the iTunes Store. Charlton -- no stranger to merriment or to witty observation himself -- has forwarded along some tasty links. * Cliff's Notes for "The Sopranos." * Enough already with the super-slow-mo shots of bullets. How about a slow-mo shot of a samurai sword in action? That's one sharp blade. * The immigration crisis, via The Onion. * Do men really like the hourglass figure best? * How to resist game-show bloopers? * When it's over, it's really over. Charlton is currently reading a history of Rome for XM satellite radio. Best, Michael UPDATE: Thanks to The Man Who Is Thursday, who points out this Roger Kimball essay about Juvenal.... posted by Michael at April 3, 2007 | perma-link | (2) comments

Saturday, March 24, 2007


The Novelization Game
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Bookgasm's Rod Lott talks to novelization writer Greg Cox, and asks my favorite question of the day: "When you finally see a film you earlier wrote a novelization for, what's that experience like?" A nice illustration of how zany -- and how ass-backwards -- the media-creating life often is, no? Incidentally, you won't catch me making fun of novelizations, let alone of the writers who write 'em. Fiction writers need to pay the bills too, after all, and I have the greatest respect for people who manage to write fiction for a living. Plus -- and not that I've spent anything like a Rod Lott amount of time looking into novelizations -- I've read a few novelizations that weren't just well-done, they were better than the movies they were based on. They were, in fact, darned good books. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 24, 2007 | perma-link | (1) comments

Friday, March 2, 2007


Quote for the Day
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Midway through G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" I ran across a very nice passage: Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else ... Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all other women, so when you take one action you give up all of the other courses ... It is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation. The essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold, creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe ... You can free things of alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars, but do not free him of his stripes ... The artist loves his limitations. They constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colorless. Sure there are other ways of seeing and thinking about art. I get a lot out of some of them myself. But isn't it terrific that 1) this view of art exists too, and that 2) Chesterton has put the case for it so snappily? And -- a question that I often mull over -- why is this p-o-v so seldom to be encountered these days, whether in the schools or on the arts pages? Instead we're fed the usual lines about self-expression, about conceptual gamesmanship ... It's almost as if the Chestertonian p-o-v is actively being kept from us, isn't it? I'm reading "Orthodoxy" on audiobook, by the way, a fact that makes my middle-aged eyes happy and grateful. You can find the audio version of "Orthodoxy" at the ultra-excellent Blackstone Audiobooks, and at the iTunes Store. Best, Michael UPDATE: Chris Floyd posts a terrific passage from Chesterton. A funny line from Chris, who has also been dipping into E.F. Schumacher: "For those of you keeping score at home, this may signal my move so far to the right that I've wrapped around to the far-left (the environmentalist and anti-globalization left, to be specific." And Chris links to this well-worth-wrestling-with "Reactionary's Catechism." Stuart Buck posts some passages from Chesterton and some thoughts of his own here, here, and here. Daniel Tammett suspects that Chesterton was an autistic savant.... posted by Michael at March 2, 2007 | perma-link | (13) comments

Thursday, February 22, 2007


Long Tail, Short Version
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A podcast recommendation: Russ Roberts interviews Wired editor Chris ("The Long Tail") Anderson. Anderson is an enthusiastic and helpful interviewee, and he supplies a more-nuanced-than-I-expected sketch of his Long Tail idea. Here's Anderson's own blog. I look at Wired only occasionally these days, but I'm pretty dazzled by the magazine when I do. Anderson seems to be an inspired and inspiring editor. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 22, 2007 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, February 20, 2007


Get Rich Writing
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Planning on getting rich writing sci-fi or fantasy novels? Think again. Tobias Buckell writes that the average advance for a first sci-fi or fantasy novel is $5000. Five years and five novels later, the average author is pulling in around $13,000 per novel. Sci-fi pro Charlie Stross describes the dreary lot that is a professional writer's life. Nice quote: It's startling how many people think that the writer's life is one of glamour and artistic credibility rather than a mundane job, with everything that goes with that. If you want to do the art, you've not only got to put in your time learning the tools of the trade -- you've got to remember that it is a trade, and there are trade-like activities that go with it and that you can't afford to shirk if you want to keep doing the important stuff. Links via Peter L. Winkler, who thinks that print-on-demand won't be the salvation of the book publishing industry. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 20, 2007 | perma-link | (18) comments

Thursday, February 8, 2007


Farewell Indies?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The LA Times' David Streitfeld sums up the sad state of independent bookstores. "I'd be really hard pressed to come up with a single social or demographic trend that is in favor of bookstores," says one former bookstore owner. "It's a lost cause." (Link thanks to Anne Thompson.) Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 8, 2007 | perma-link | (2) comments

Wednesday, February 7, 2007


Charlton's Latest
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Charlton Griffin -- who sometimes shows up in the comments here at 2Blowhards -- happens to be one of the very best producers and readers of audiobooks. I've listened to a number of Charlton's productions, and they've supplied some of the classiest and most pleasurable culture experiences I've had in recent years. So I'm glad to notice that Charlton has recently issued two more productions: R.D. Blackmore's classic Victorian romance "Lorna Doone," and -- a book I've long wanted to read -- the Satires of Juvenal. These are downloadable files from Audible, meant to be listened to on an MP3 player or an iPod. I'm a big fan of the downloadable-iPod-audiobook thang myself. I've been listening to audiobooks on my iPod for about a year now and I love it. I've encountered few technical problems, the sound quality is excellent, and the convenience can't be beat. It seems quite miraculous to tote around entire long novels (or Teaching Company lecture series) on such a tiny device. Hey, maybe the iPod-playing-audiobooks is the e-book reader that many have been awaiting. In any case, let me encourage those who have resisted audiobooks to give them a try. If you take to them -- and many, many people do (it's one of the few flourishing parts of the book-publishing industry) -- you may be amazed by what a great resource they are. Reading no longer has to wait until the end of the evening, when your vision is shot and your mind is dozey. Commuting time and exercise time become reading time as well. I get through many more books these days than I did in my pre-audiobook years. Here's an additional benefit: In my experience, audiobooks don't clutter up the house like books-on-paper do. I don't know why, but books-on-paper accumulate while audiobooks don't. One reason may be that I'm simply more likely to read an audiobook I've purchased than I am to read a book. For another, once you're done with an audiobook there's no point in keeping it around. You can't thumb through it, after all. So if it's a digital file you might erase it. If it's on CD, you might give it to a friend. In either case, when you're done with an audiobook, it's gone. Books meanwhile gather dust. Here's the website of Charlton's outfit, the well-named Audio Connoisseur. Charlton has made audiobooks of many substantial volumes of history and mucho great literature, so be sure to type "Charlton Griffin" and/or "Audio Connoisseur" into the Search box at Audible and have a look at the titles he has made available. Thanks to audiobooks you don't have to wait until retirement to catch up with the classics you missed as a kid. Charlton's Maugham and Maupassant are extra-special gems, IMHO. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 7, 2007 | perma-link | (3) comments

Sunday, February 4, 2007


YUP Hatches a Nope: Flawed Take on Norman Bel Geddes
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I like a lot of what Yale University Press publishes on art. For instance, their series of books on John Singer Sargent is wonderful (too bad I can't afford any). Alas, even a high batting average includes misses along with the hits. And I say that YUP whiffed on this book: Designing Modern America:Broadway to Main Street by Christopher Innes, Canada Research Chair in Performance Culture at York University, Toronto. If I understand Innes correctly, his thesis goes something like this: Now largely forgotten, Joseph Urban (1872-1933) and Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) were important shapers of modern American design, and their skill and success were related to their experience in theater-related design. The book is his attempt to demonstrate this, and I'm persuaded that the theatricality angle is interesting and doubtless an important factor in the architectural and design aspects of their careers. I've always been fond of Urban's work and ought to set aside time to work up a Blowhards post about him. Briefly, he was an Austrian involved one of the 1900-vintage secession movements. He moved to America in the 1910s and had a successful career in several design-related fields before his death at age 61. A book providing good coverage of his career and work is here. Besides his theater work, Norman Geddes (the "Bel" was an affectation he added to his name in recognition of this first wife) was a pioneer industrial designer and masterful self-publicist. For a brief biography, click here. I believe Innes' book has two major flaws: In his drive to prove Geddes' originality and influence, Innes fails to place him in context. Previous and contemporary designs from others tend to be ignored. Innes lets too many errors slip in, casting doubt on the book's reliability. In many cases there are near-errors or slightly misleading statements. In a discussion or urbanism (page 180) Innes states that "President Roosevelt's New Deal, announced in the 1932 election campaign, included the redevelopment of ninety-nine communities and ultimately led to new towns like Columbia, Maryland." I don't know about the 99 number, but it is true that Columbia, Maryland exists though it didn't get rolling until the mid-1960s. And it was a private -- not federal government -- undertaking. Innes would have been on firmer ground had he cited Greenbelt, Maryland -- a true New Deal style project. I'll cut Innes a little slack on this because he's originally from the UK. On the following page he mentions Baron Haussmann and his "Parisian boulevards [that] converged on symbols of French national pride -- the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe"... I might be mistaken, but I don't know of any Haussmann boulevards going anywhere near the Eiffel Tower, let alone converging on it. (Besides, Haussmann was 20 years gone when the tower was built.) It gets worse when the topic is automobiles. Geddes indeed prepared a series of designs for the Graham-Paige company in the late 20s that attempted to predict... posted by Donald at February 4, 2007 | perma-link | (2) comments

Wednesday, January 31, 2007


Busted
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Sean Sakamoto catches author T.C. Boyle giving a primo demonstration of lit-person snobbery and lit-person ignorance. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 31, 2007 | perma-link | (9) comments

Tuesday, January 30, 2007


Entrepreneurial
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I don't know about you, but I'm split on Dave Eggers. On the one hand, I can't read more than a few paragraphs of his writing without feeling overwhelmed by dismay and annoyance. Must it be so twee? On the other hand, his go-get-'em, hands-on, pluralistic, and inventive attitude towards publishing delights me; it strikes me as just what writers and readers need. Joe Hagen writes an appreciation of Eggers and his McSweeney's outfit from a biz point of view. I've recently been enjoying a snoop around the website of Wholphin, McSweeney's magazine / DVD of short movies. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 30, 2007 | perma-link | (3) comments

Molly and John
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Can we call 'em or what? Long ago 2Blowhards featured irregular bulletins from the young artists John Leavitt and Molly Crabapple. John wrote about art-school shenanigans and sillinesses, while Molly told tales about her day job as an artist's model. So it's fun to see that John and Molly -- close buds, btw, in addition to being gifted and mischievous artists and writers -- haven't confined their activities to the blogosphere. Instead, they're entrepreneurial dynamos who have taken their acts on to bigger venues. Let's hear it for resourceful, cheeky, and open-minded kids. Have you read about Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School? Molly and John reacted to conventional figure-drawing classes as students often do, thinking "Wow, nude models! This is hot! Why's everyone pretending it isn't?" But instead of shrugging the question off, Molly and John kicked off their own monthly, open-to-the-public session that plays up the sexiness of the figure-drawing experience. They do this mainly by employing neo-burlesque artistes as models -- gotta love the stage names: Clams Casino, Little Brooklyn ... -- encouraging irreverence, laughter, and conviviality, and setting the hours spent drawing to funky music mixes. Figure-drawing sessions don't get more alternative than Dr. Sketchy's. Molly and John have had themselves a big hit. Dr. Sketchy events take place regularly in NYC, are popping up in Detroit, L.A., San Francisco, and have even started to crackle in Melbourne and Scotland too. And recently Molly and John have even turned their Dr. Sketchy concept into a book. You can read about it here, and buy it here and here. Check out the enthusiastic customer reviews on the book's Amazon page! Here's Molly's website. Here's John's. You can read Molly's columns for 2Blowhards here, here, here, here, and here. John wrote for us here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Here's the very lively Dr. Sketchy blog. Here's a New York Press article about the Dr. Sketchy phenomenon. Here's a videoclip from a Dr. Sketchy's event. Molly and John celebrate the publication of their book at the great NYC comic book store Jim Hanley's Universe. Those in the mood for a daydreamy few minutes should enjoy gazing on this page of modeling photos of the lovely and graceful Miss Molly. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 30, 2007 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, January 26, 2007


McWhorter on Language
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Another winner from The Teaching Company: John McWhorter's lecture series "Story of Language." This is an overview of language -- and when I say "overview" I mean "from really far above." You won't learn lists of the major language families; etymologies aren't what's on offer either. Instead, McWhorter's focus is on processes: How languages grow, merge, change, twist, turn, and die. Along the way he of course touches on many of the basics: What are the differences between dialects, creoles, and pidgins? What can be known about early languages? And how about that Esperanto, eh? McWhorter's approach is far more descriptive than prescriptive. He has no apparent desire to tell people how to speak, for one thing. As he points out, what's considered to be proper usage inevitably changes over time -- and what really interests him is the "changing over time" angle. (He has a nice way of describing a language as being not one-thing-with-deviations but instead "a bundle of dialects.") Anyway, McWhorter's approach suits my own "far more interested in how things are than what they ought to be like" temperament to a tee. Much as I loved the series, I confess that I floundered for the first half-dozen lectures. The talks seemed to alternate between vague generalities and blizzards of examples. They were interesting and engaging right from the outset, but I felt lost. I couldn't discern the logic of the series. Then I finally caught on to McWhorter's method. What he's doing in each lecture is announcing a general principle or theme, then riffing on it. When I settled into his rhythym and allowed myself to be swept along, I left my confusion behind and had a swell time. I found myself thinking: "So what if I'll learn and retain few new facts -- I don't retain many new facts these days anyway. And so what if the series is short on conventional argument-structures? It has its own kind of beguiling organization." Besides, in most of the lectures McWhorter's riffing has the effect of deepening and broadening the theme. What's coolest about the series is the way that a kind of immense vision takes shape as it goes along. As McWhorter presents it, language is a huge, organic, ever-morphing, ecologically-opportunistic bio-something, like a gigantic fibrous Blob, rooted in nature (and in human nature) yet under the impetus of its own nature as well. The examples McWhorter supplies in abundance are fun too. A small sampling: Around 6000 languages are spoken in the world today. 800 of them are to be found on the island of New Guinea. Only one-fifth of living languages have words for both "a" and "the." Only 200 languages have a written component. What round-eyes tend to think of as varieties of Chinese -- Cantonese, Fujian, Mandarin, etc -- are really quite different from one another. So different in fact that linguists consider them to be separate languages, as distinct from each other as European languages are... posted by Michael at January 26, 2007 | perma-link | (6) comments

Thursday, January 25, 2007


Kapuscinski
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I was sorry to learn (thanks to ALD) that the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski has died at the age of 74. A foreign correspondent with a knack for showing up in trouble spots -- he witnessed 30 coups, uprisings, and revolutions -- Kapuscinski wrote nonfiction books of a kind unfamiliar to most Americans. Neither of the "objective" sort nor of the New Journalism genre, they're a kind of hybrid of poetry and journalism. They remind me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's journalism, and of some of Oliver Sacks' writing too. Despite being based in fact, they're evocative and suggestive -- intense fairy tales for adults -- and they can really make the mind and the imagination take flight. "Everything is a metaphor," he was once quoted as saying. "It's not that the story is not getting expressed. It's what surrounds the story. The climate, the atmosphere of the street, the feeling of the people, the gossip of the town; the smell; the thousands and thousands of elements that are part of the events you read about in 600 words of your morning paper." "Shah of Shahs," "The Emperor," and "The Soccer War" were very high on my list of favorites from the years I spent following contemporary writing. I wrote a posting about Kapuscinski here. ALD links to obits and reminiscences from The Guardian, the WashPost, the NYTimes, and others. A standout is this obit from the London Times. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 25, 2007 | perma-link | (3) comments

Wednesday, January 17, 2007


The NYTBR Section and Fiction 4: Literary Fiction and Class
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- At the risk of being over-exhaustive, not to say boring, I'm going to venture a few more postings about the New York Times Book Review Section and its attitudes towards fiction. Maybe they'll be of interest to a few visitors. You can catch up with the first installment here, the second here, and the third here. Today's topic: Literary fiction and class. * How about poor, beleaguered literature? Doesn't art already come under too much attack in this crass commercial country of ours? Shouldn't we cut literary fiction (and serious fiction of the heavy-on-the-"issues" type) not just a lot of slack but offer it much in the way of charity? Shouldn't we root for the media to pay attention to literary writing? The popular writer, after all, already has the market on her side -- Nonononono! Oh, please God, no!!! Let's blast this one out of the water as quickly as possible. The literary-fiction / prestige-fiction / "issues"-fiction / NYTBR-fiction world is anything but an oppressed, orphaned, crippled little street urchin. The fact that it has managed to plant such an image of itself in the minds of many intelligent people is a p-r triumph of major proportions. It's instead an upper-middle-class, ritzy-schools, clubby world. Trust funds aren't in short supply. Parents and other relatives often help out not just at first but forever. Degrees from fancy schools may not be mandatory but are certainly plentiful. Marriages to connected and prosperous people aren't unusual. Institutional support isn't in short supply either. Important connections have often been forged before the first novel is finished. I'm not talking about individual writers, by the way. Many lit-fict authors squeak by in fringe ways on tiny amounts of dough. They often spend their lives bouncing from crappy creative-writing-teaching job to crappy creative-writing-teaching job. Part of the difficulty of this life, by the way, is watching as the people working in the offices at the universities and foundations make better and more secure money (and needless to say have better pension and health-care plans) than do the writers -- the people whose work is supposedly the raison d'etre for the institutions. Not an easy irony to put up with! So let's make a distinction between the individual lit-fict author and the lit-fict world. I'm talking about the latter. The people at the publishing houses who publish most of the fiction that the NYTBR section counts as serious are usually from upper-middle-class backgrouns and ritzy schools, and usually do OK for themselves. The profs, critics, and arts administrators who people the institutions that support the lit-fict thing do OK for themselves. Come to think of it, the people at the NYTBR section itself do OK for themselves too. If and when you should spend a few minutes in the NYTBR section's version of the lit-fict world, you'll find yourself in a world where many of the inhabitants know each other, where people award each other grants and prizes, and where... posted by Michael at January 17, 2007 | perma-link | (30) comments

Tuesday, January 16, 2007


Fact for the Day
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Number of independent bookstores in the U.S. in 1991: 5,200. Number of independent bookstores in the U.S. in 2005: 1,702. Source: "Chain Reaction: Do bookstores have a future?" by Paul Collins in the Village Voice. Collins' article is a good one generally, by the way. He explains clearly two of the main reasons why American publishing and bookselling are in the state they're in: the "returns" boondoggle (bookstores can return unsold merchandise, er, books for full credit -- is there another industry where retailers can do likewise?); and the 1979 Thor Power Tool Supreme Court ruling, which changed inventory accounting rules and was thus responsible for the explosion of the "remainders" market. And should the bookselling chains be allowed to become book publishers themselves? Best, Michael UPDATE: The Written Nerd reports from the frontlines of the indie-bookstore scene. Bookseller Chick delivers the news that the bookstore where she has been working is closing.... posted by Michael at January 16, 2007 | perma-link | (16) comments

Wednesday, January 10, 2007


The NYTBR Section and Fiction 3
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Another posting to continue my look at the NYTimes Book Review Section and its attitudes towards fiction. (As well as, admittedly, to document my own decline into dementia and obsessiveness. Hey, maybe I should rename this blog "Blogpostings From Underground.") Previous installments can be read here and here. I promised the other day that my next posting on the topic would concern class and literary writing. But I'm feeling the need to sketch a little something else in first. Today, let's examine how accurate my portrayal of the TBR's attitudes towards popular fiction was. * Surely MBlowhard has exaggerated the TBR's view of fiction!? Surely the TBR's editors are more open to the panorama of what's created, fiction-book-wise, than MBlowhard has made them out to be!? Surely these responsible and knowledgeable professionals can't be presenting such a warped view of things!? If anything, I may have underemphasized how narrow the TBR's point of view on the world of fiction-book-reading-and-writing is. I'm not about to do the comprehensive research that a topic like this deserves. But I did go to the trouble of digging up a semi-recent special issue of the TBR devoted entirely to fiction. (You can look at it, as well as doublecheck my facts and assertions, here.) Let's see how popular literature fared. The issue's big production number is a poll to determine The Best American Work of Fiction in the Last 25 Years, as voted-on by a long lineup of writing-world dignitaries. The winner: Toni Morrison's "Beloved." "Beloved" is of course contempo lit-fict to the max. Lit-fict 1, popular fiction zero. How about the runners-up? Now let's see ... Quel surprise! The runner-up novels are all lit-fict too. There isn't a thriller, a romance, a western (except for Cormac McCarthy's hyper-literary version of western), a cop novel, or an erotica/porn work among 'em. Humor and comedy don't make strong showings either. Lit-fict 23 (if I'm counting right), popular literature zero. In semi-fairness, the rules of the game the TBR proposed virtually guarantee this kind of outcome, don't they? Judges were each given one vote and one vote only to name the Best. That's semi-inevitably going to mean that novels making Big Pretentious Statements will win more votes than, say, novels that are amusing or entertaining, however beautiful and moving they may also be. (Then why set such rules? Why even play such a game?) All of which has got me wondering ... Those dignitaries awarded voting power ... Who were they anyway? You can learn a lot about a publication by inspecting who the editors consider to be People Worth Consulting, after all. So join me in eyeballing the list of the people the TBR polled here. Hmmm, onetwothreefourfivesixseven ... I count 125 voters. And -- onetwo, er, two, er, two -- as far as I can tell, only two of them might be said to represent the world of popular fiction. I'm familiar with most although not all of this... posted by Michael at January 10, 2007 | perma-link | (12) comments

Monday, January 8, 2007


The NYTBR Section and Fiction 2
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Lots of interesting back-and-forths in the comments on my recent posting about the NYT Book Review Section and its attitudes towards fiction. At the risk of morphing into a monomaniac, I'm going to venture a few responses. I'll spread them out over a handful of postings both for my own convenience as well as to focus discussion (if any) a bit. Up first: * A definition-thing: the term "popular literature." Perhaps I should have been more clear about this. "Popular literature" is a potentially confusing term that civilians often haven't had the chance to give much thought to. So here goes: The term "popular literature" doesn't mean that these books are popular, let alone that their authors are getting rich. There's a bit of a tendency for people, especially those who are interested in books, to picture the book-fiction world this way: "Literary fiction" is automatically worthy yet unfairly overlooked and otherwise abused by a crass and unfeeling populace, while "popular fiction" needs no support or interest, because it's created by a bunch of crude showpeople who rake in buckets of dough yet who want highbrow acclaim too. Um, no. Simple terminology problem. Let's straighten it out. The "popular" in "popular literature" is like the "popular" in "popular music." It doesn't mean "wildly successful." It doesn't mean successful or profitable, or even much-read, at all. All "popular" means here is "of the people" -- ie., "not-highbrow." It's quite possible to be a talented, industrious author of "popular novels" yet to sell fewer copies and make less money than a talented, industrious author of "literary novels" does. "Popular" doesn't automatically mean "rich," and "literary" doesn't automatically mean "overlooked." As far as money and audience-sizes go, these comparisons have to go book-by-book and author-by-author. "Popular music" isn't a bad comparison. We all know that for every Celine Dion there are thousands of gifted, hard-working entertainers who are making very little money. Similarly, for every Anne Rice who is awash in millions and stalked by rabid fans there are crowds of hard-working, gifted writers of popular fiction who you (unless you've done some serious poking-around in the field) have never heard of. The "popular music" vs. "highbrow music" comparison isn't a bad one either. We all know that most creators of "popular music" are people the rest of us are unaware of. We also know that some highbrow musicians are well-set-up in life. (And we also know that both fields are competitive, flukey, and tough ...) In other words, a singer fronting a locally-successful dance band might be doing less well for herself than a composer of atonal music who is married to a stockbroker and has landed a tenured teaching job at a university. In this not-unusual example, the "popular entertainer" is less well-off than the highbrow-art person is. What doing popular entertainment, no matter what the field, basically means is making work that the common audience finds approachable; using a language (in the large sense)... posted by Michael at January 8, 2007 | perma-link | (11) comments

Tuesday, January 2, 2007


Publishing Elsewhere
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Michael Hyatt explains some of the reasons why all bestseller lists are inaccurate. I wrote about the ins and outs of bestseller lists myself back here. I'm pleased to see that Michael thinks, as I do, that the best of the bestseller lists is the one compiled by USA Today. If you want to see what America is really buying, go there, not to the NYTimes. Michael shows what an even better bestseller list might look like here. (Link thanks to Joe Wikert.) * Richard Curtis -- not just one of the smartest agents I've ever met but one of the smartest people in publishing generally -- thinks that print-on-demand might save the publishing industry. * Thanks to Ed Gorman for turning up this good North Coast Journal article by Jay Herzog about the super-resourceful Stark House Press. Let's hear it for publishers like Stark House. Jay Herzog, a very interesting guy, blogs here. Fun to see that Jay's as big a fan of Sister Rosetta Tharpe as I am. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 2, 2007 | perma-link | (6) comments

Friday, December 29, 2006


The NYTBR Version of Fiction
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Steve Weber thinks it's a scandal that the NYTimes Book Review Section doesn't even try to cover self-published books. I do too. I also think that Steve's blog is a must-visit for those interested in self-publishing, and in innovative publishing generally. As for the NYT Book Review Section ... Well, for the last few years I've been happy doing without. No longer professionally obligated to keep up with new books, I've been thrilled to let go of the concern. (God, do I hate "keeping up" with things ... ) The other day, though, I felt a twinge of curiosity and picked up a copy of the NYTBR Section. What kind of impact has Sam Tanenhaus, the current editor, had on the Section? Verdict: Where nonfiction goes, Tanenhaus is doing exactly what he said he'd do when he was appointed to his position in 2004 -- emphasizing newsy nonfiction and opening the pages of the Section to a broader range of points of view. It's crisp and intelligent (if over-earnest) work. Good for Tanenhaus and his staff, about time, and a refreshing pick-me-up for the Section's readers too, I'd imagine. Where fiction goes, the picture isn't nearly so pretty. I give the Section a D-minus. "Staid," "entrenched," and "boring" about sum it up. The Section under Tanenhaus is devoting fewer pages to fiction coverage than it used to -- debatable, of course, whether this is a good or a bad thing. What isn't debatable, as far as I'm concerned, is that those pages are full of the dismal usual: over-serious people carrying on in self-important ways about a bizarrely narrow range of titles. Does Tanenhaus not have the confidence where fiction is concerned that he has where nonfiction goes? Is the "literary" cabal really that hard to break up? (I'd clean house myself.) Or are readers -- horrible thought -- relatively content to see fiction discussed in this dreary, aggrieved, PBS-ish way? (Hey, I once made fun of what I called "The Church of PBS.") Of my many beefs with the way the Section covers fiction, my main one has to do with its attitude towards popular fiction. To say that the Section neglects popular fiction would be to understate matters by approximately a billionfold. As far as the Times Book Review Section goes, the book-fiction that represents probably 99% of what's read in America barely exists. You think I'm kidding? The issue I looked at was the year-ender Best-Of issue. To run the numbers: Of what were proclaimed the year's five best fiction titles, not a single one was an example of popular fiction. Of the four fiction books that were awarded individual reviews in the rest of the issue: zero popular fiction. The big fiction-book review went to a new collection of Alice Munro stories. No complaint there -- I think the world of Alice Munro too. But what were the other fiction books that rated? One is a Very Serious Ambitious First... posted by Michael at December 29, 2006 | perma-link | (34) comments

Sunday, December 24, 2006


On the Road: Projections
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Since completing our trash novel a couple of years ago, The Wife and I have co-written another novel's worth of fiction. It's a comic-erotic soap opera about Hollywood that we think of as a cross between "Candy" and "The Player." It's funny and sexy; it's full of lively characters and saucey situations; and it's as up-to-the-moment as fiction can be. Not that I'm biased or anything in these judgments, of course ... Will it ever actually be a novel? Maybe, maybe not. Our project has an oddball hybrid nature. It's half prose narrative (ie., meant to be enjoyed as on-the-page writing) and half dramatic storytelling (ie., meant to be performed). This is an approach to fiction that, so far as we know, is all our own. We didn't develop it in order to be innovative, though; we're anything but intellectual avant-gardists. We developed it for practical reasons. Here's the problem / challenge we were facing. We both love audiences, performers, and theater -- yet we both dread the kind of labor, fuss, and expense that goes into creating full-dress conventional theater. We both love reading-and-writing, yet we both despise the typical author-reading. So our goal was to come up with a way of presenting our work that would enable us to enjoy interacting with live audiences, that would cost nothing to produce, and that would nonetheless be a lot more rewarding for audiences than most author-readings are. Our solution was to cook up and write our stories in half-dramatized form -- they're almost like scripts -- and to have actors do the reading and presenting. We're very, very pleased with our approach. Our events are zero-budget and informal; the actors sit on stools with scripts and read. Yet the evenings are also lively and outrageous. They're like high-spirited rough play run-throughs. The actors -- who seem to see our evenings as opportunities to jam like after-hours jazz musicians -- bring a huge amount of zing, talent, and energy to the presentations. And audiences generally seem to go away happy, feeling that they've had a fun, happenin' experience that they couldn't have gotten better from TV. So far, we've done more than 20 of these evenings for the boho set in downtown-NYC venues. I should add that these shows are entirely The Wife's doing. I co-write with her, and god knows that I do my share of wife-maintenance as the performance dates approach. But it's her drive and her work that make the evenings come together. I sometimes joke that she's one-third writer, one-third actress, and one-third impresario. In any case, we're by now both semi-familiar with the putting-on-a-no-budget-show-in-NYC thing. Recently, though, we've begun to present our stories outside of the big city. World domination has yet to be achieved, but we're having a good time. There we are, out on the road. Hello, America! Biggest discovery so far: The rest of America isn't very much like NYC. What has hit me hardest is what... posted by Michael at December 24, 2006 | perma-link | (15) comments

Thursday, December 21, 2006


DVD Journal: "Writer of O"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Pola Rapaport's "Writer of O" -- a documentary about Dominique Aury, the Frenchwoman who, under the pseudonym Pauline Reage, wrote the 1954 erotic classic "Story of O" -- is a much more peculiar affair than the Bukowski documentary I wrote about recently. Peppered with filmmaker autobiography and staged tableaux vivants, it's part chic performance piece itself. And, even at its most straightforward, it maintains a tragic and solemn tone that suggests a collaboration between Ken Burns and Pina Bausch. Still, I found the story of Dominique Aury fascinating, and I'm glad to have watched the film. Are you familiar with the novel? Or with the meta-story about the novel? Those who are may want to skip the next few paragraphs. As for the novel, "Story of O" is about a young woman fashion photographer. Identified only as O, she's taken by her boyfriend to a mysterious chateau outside Paris where she is bound, beaten, and used, until -- it's presumed -- she becomes more truly herself. Or does she? On its publication, the book became an immediate bestseller and scandale. It won a French literary prize while at the same time being the object of obscenity charges. (Ah, the French, so much more comfy with paradoxes than we are ...) There are obvious reasons why this should have been the case, of course: sex, sex, and more sex. But there were more subtle reasons for the worldwide fascination with the novel too. (The novel has sold millions of copies and has never been out of print.) One was the way the precise, clinical, "objective" language contrasted with and brought out the vulgarity, brutality, and subjectivity of the experiences portrayed. Another was a simple sociological fact: The novel wasn't just the usual sex-book thing -- a sweaty tale for lonely guys to jerk off over. It had sophistication, style, and content, if of a hard-to-nail-down kind. It was also embraced and celebrated by modern women, who -- as far as da boyz could gather -- saw much of themselves in it. And what was the book's purpose anyway? Is O -- who is at every moment free to cast off her chains -- determined to prove her love? Or perhaps her boyfriend, in submitting her to these trials, is proving his love for her? Is the author arguing that masochism is at the heart of female sexuality? Perhaps. Yet there's no question that, despite her tribulations, O is in charge of her fate as well as the center of her own universe. It would have been hard in any case to persuade the crowds of dynamic women who loved the novel that they were identifying with weakness. Feminists were understandably baffled by the whole affair. Should they celebrate the woman author's triumph, and the way O managed to be both her own subject and object? But there was that awkward bit about the heroine being repeatedly beaten and violated ... Even the main character's name... posted by Michael at December 21, 2006 | perma-link | (22) comments

Tuesday, December 19, 2006


DVD Journal: "Bukowski -- Born Into this"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The biggest surprise of John Dullaghan's excellent documentary "Bukowski -- Born Into This" is that Charles Bukowski appears to have been not-all-that-bad a guy. He was certainly capable of self-centeredness, misbehavior and testiness; he did his share of brawling; and the camera does catch one awful moment when Bukowski works up an abusive head of steam towards his wife. God knows that, for much of his life, Bukowski was one seedy, sad, and lower-depths figure. But most of what we see and hear suggests that Bukowski was a hyper-talented, go-it-his-own-way writer who -- despite the booze -- remained about as true to his muse as a writer can be. Friends show up from Bukowski's childhood, and from his years at the Post Office -- people who knew him when he was trying to get published and from after he'd become a cult star. They testify that he liked booze, that he was devoted to art, and that he worked on his writing really, really hard. That wife Bukowski mistreated? She tells the filmmakers that she never let her husband get away with crap like that again. Good for her, of course -- but good for Bukowski for taking it and shaping up too. Given how autobiographical much of Bukowski's fiction is, the film doesn't supply a lot of surprises. The fun and interest is in meeting and seeing the man himself, his haunts, and his people. Bukowski, who died in 1994 at the age of 73, was born in Europe, arrived in America in Baltimore, and grew up in L.A. His parents were strict, working-class Europeans; if Bukowski is to be believed, his father doled out numerous vicious beatings to his son. Young Hank suffered from horrendous adolescent acne, dropped out of college, wrote a bit, then bummed around the country, doing odd jobs and living a rooming-house kind of life. With his scarred face and his lousy education, he didn't exactly have his pick of the dames and the jobs. In the 1950s he returned to L.A. and took a job at the U.S. Post Office. A near-fatal case of bleeding ulcers seems to have turned him around. After recovering, Bukowski began writing poetry and trying to publish fiction. Still at the Post Office, he became a regional small-press regular. By the late 1960s, his reputation had grown a little. Among the people wowed by Bukowski's writing was John Martin, a businessman in the process of becoming a publisher. Martin felt that Bukowski was the real thing, a writer whose work would last for centuries, and he arranged to give Bukowski $100 a month, enough to enable Bukowski to quit the Post Office and write full-time. Bukowski, already 49 years old, delivered his first novel to Martin in less than a month. By the mid and late '70s, Bukowski had become near-legendary, especially on the west coast. Poets, actors, filmmakers, and writers revered him. His public readings were mobbed. Sexy chix were suddenly... posted by Michael at December 19, 2006 | perma-link | (9) comments

Tuesday, December 12, 2006


Book Publishing Advice
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Probably because I've written a lot of postings about book publishing, I receive emails asking for advice about publishing books on a regular basis. Most of these correspondents seem to have run across my posting "Writing a Book," which tends to turn up high on the hit list when "writing a book" is Googled. By dint of practice, I've come up with a semi-standard response to people who ask me about book publishing. Maybe some visitors will enjoy reading these thoughts and this advice too. Others may well feel that they've had enough of me on this subject already. First off: Who am I to yak about book publishing? I've published precisely one book, and even on that one I was a co-writer and not the full-credit author. Good point. But I was close to the book publishing industry (especially the New York City-based end of the trade-book publishing biz) for more than 15 years. While a lot of people know swathes of the book-publishing biz better than I do, few people have snooped around book publishing from as many different angles as I have. Some bookbiz trade reporters aside, that is -- and I was friendly with a number of them too. So when I generalize it's based on some actual experience. But the real reason I'd encourage you to pay a bit of attention is that I have no agenda. I really don't. When the usual crowd talks about book-publishing, they have something to sell. Agents peddling advice to wannabes ... Published authors conducting workshops for the eager-believer set ... Editors pontificating to credulous reporters ... They all have a vested interest in perpetuating the mystique of book publishing. They want you reading books, but they also want you dreaming about writing and publishing books. And they want you to be impressed. Sadly, that means that the book business is happiest if and when you're stuck in a state of yearning and aspiring and never-quite-getting-there yourself. Nothing wrong with this, of course. It keeps the faith alive, the congregation vulnerable, and the sales turning over. But, generally speaking, the usual suspects are about as frank about their business as a GM CEO is when he speaks to The Wall Street Journal. Ie., not very much at all. Me, I like reading and writing a whole lot, but I couldn't care less about the container I'm dealing with. Books can be fun, god knows, but so can websites and photocopies. And, unlike many in the biz, I didn't enter book publishing because I yearned to be close to The Greats. I'm not one of what I've called "the book-besotted." I happened to stumble into the field, I found it interesting, and I started taking note of what I encountered. Publish a book or don't publish a book, it doesn't matter to me. So even if I'm not perfectly objective (is anyone?), I'm at least sympathetic and agnostic, and I have some potentially useful... posted by Michael at December 12, 2006 | perma-link | (24) comments

Thursday, November 30, 2006


Elsewhere
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Three more of my favorite Teaching Company series can also now be bought for bargain prices: Patrick Allitt's American Religious History, Kenneth Harl's Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor, and David Zarefsky's Argumentation. I raved about Allitt's series here; about Harl's here; about Zarefsky's here; and about Zarefsky's inspiration, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin, here. I should add that I've received an email from a visitor who disagrees with me about the Harl series, which he found naive, and biased towards the Turks. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 30, 2006 | perma-link | (1) comments

Timothy Taylor on Sale
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I notice that Timothy Taylor's lecture series about Economics for the Teaching Company are currently on sale. I've listened to them all, and I've found them all to be superb: clear, enthusiastic, and hyper-informative. Taylor seems to see economics not as a hard science full of immutable and unbendable truths so much as an ongoing, open-ended conversation. He's no Aspergery fundamentalist, but he's no relativist either; in the course of the Econ discussion, a lot of smart, useful, and helpful things have been said. That's a view of econ I can get with. This is human behavior -- and not the properties of minerals and asteroids -- that's being observed, described, and analyzed after all. Economics as he presents it isn't physics. It's more like a blend of psychology, philosophy, and sociology -- only with far more reality checks than those fields sometimes permit themselves. Bless his heart, Taylor also presents his subject in non-techie terms. (Let's hear it for that underused resource, namely plain and vivid English.) Which means that his lectures are an excellent way for the math-phobic among us to crack this annoying but essential and finally fascinating subject. My humble suggestion: Start with his Legacies of the Great Economists. It's a fun history-of-thought survey that'll give you an overview of the terrain. Then move on to Economics for the real content. History of the American Economy in the 20th Century will bring you up to the present here at home, and Contemporary Economic Issues will help you make sense of the headlines. Back here, a bunch of us traded tips about a lot of intro-to-econ resources that we've found useful. Best, Michael UPDATE: Tyler Cowen points out an article that attempts to explain why most people don't get economics.... posted by Michael at November 30, 2006 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, November 21, 2006


Bond Figures
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Is the Bond franchise the most financially successful one in fiction history? The Times of London estimates that Bond, James Bond has generated $10 billion in revenue. Question for the day: How many contemporary-fiction classes spend any time at all on Ian Fleming? Wouldn't you think a publishing phenomenon on this scale would merit a few moments of attention? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 21, 2006 | perma-link | (9) comments

Monday, November 20, 2006


Charles Williams
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The reason I was thinking of Gold Medal Books last week was that I'd recently read two novels by the Gold Medal suspense specialist Charles Williams: "The Hot Spot" (source material for the sexy and seedy smalltown Texas noir by Dennis Hopper) and "Dead Calm," a sailboat thriller that was turned into an early Nicole Kidman movie. I loved 'em both. A Texas-born high-school dropout, Williams knocked around a lot as a young man: Merchant Marines, electronics inspector, etc. He didn't publish his first novel, "Hill Girl," until he was in his 40s, but it was a big success. He continued to write popular novels, and he spent time working on screenplays in the States and in Europe. Yet he didn't wind up happy and comfortable. By the early 1970s, his wife had died of cancer and the kinds of books he knew how to write had fallen out of favor. While still in his early 60s, Charles Williams committed suicide. Williams has always been one of the lesser-known of the better-known Gold Medal novelists, if that makes any sense. While Jim Thompson's work was rediscovered in the 1980s, Charles Williams' books have remained far harder to find. You don't see downtown hipsters walking around with Charles Williams novels under their arms, for example. Yet those who have read him have always recognized how good he was. The great John D. MacDonald, for example, several times called Williams the Gold Medal writer who most deserved more recognition: "Nobody can make violence seem more real," MacDonald said. And such contemporary crime-fiction eminences as Ed Gorman and Geoffrey O'Brien have been generous with praise for Williams' work. Gorman called Williams "my favorite of the Gold Medal writers." The two novels I read were very different in most ways yet they shared a a few characteristics too: a grownup view of the world somewhere between hardboiled and John O'Hara; a tone that's both juicy and unsentimental; and a fascination with storytelling, especially (oh bliss!) the mechanics of tension and suspense. "The Hot Spot" (originally entitled "Hell Hath No Fury") is much the tangier, sexier, and more colorful read. It's full of sweaty, smalltown atmosphere, and is populated by no-good characters with a lot of shifty trouble and pleasure on their minds. If you liked the movies "Body Heat" and "The Last Seduction," well, this is those films' grittier, earthier, sexier grandma. And the storytelling! Good lord, what a tour de force. I don't know that I've ever read a better-plotted novel. Jaw-dropping yet plausible and "right" plot twists drop out of the blue about every ten pages. "Dead Calm" is a more impersonal, sleeker piece of engineering. Yet it's shrewd, nervy, and enjoyable -- a humdinger -- in its own way. A couple sailing the South Seas on their honeymoon sees a becalmed sailboat on the horizon. Is anyone on board? Williams -- a sailing fanatic himself -- gives the sailing and ocean-going a lot of convincing... posted by Michael at November 20, 2006 | perma-link | (4) comments

Friday, November 17, 2006


The Return of Ed Gorman
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm thrilled to see that Ed Gorman -- brilliant editor as well as topnotch author of resonant, dark, and intense westerns and mysteries -- is back, and is blogging again too. Gorman has faced some health challenges recently, so it's an extra-special treat to see him making such a vigorous reappearance on the web. Don't miss Gorman's enthusiastic case for the great Ross Thomas. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 17, 2006 | perma-link | (1) comments

Wednesday, November 15, 2006


1000 Words -- Gold Medal Books
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Another installment in my all-too-occasional series of looks at culturally-significant, underknown phenomena and events, "1000 Words." *** 1000 Words -- Gold Medal Books What if you could trace the French New Wave, Sam Peckinpah, cyberpunk, "Pulp Fiction," "Mulholland Drive," and "Sin City" back to one business gamble taken by a third-tier publisher in 1949? In fact, you can, and without being guilty of too much overstatement. A little, sure, but not that much. The publisher was Roscoe Kent Fawcett of Fawcett Publications, and his gamble was to try something no one else had tried before. He decided to publish original novels in paperback. In 1950, his new line of paperback originals was launched. It was called Gold Medal Books, and it became not just a tremendous commercial success but a culture-shaping one too. Before discussing the impact of Gold Medal Books, let me take a few paragraphs to situate Gold Medal in time. The immediate post-WWII era was an interesting moment in publishing history. A variety of vectors were in collision: One was the existence of paperbacks themselves. In 1949, paperbacks were still a recent innovation. The first large-scale experiment in paperback publishing had only taken place 1935 with Britain's Penguin Books; soon after in the States, Pocket Books began selling paperbacks. During WWII, soldiers developed the habit of carrying around, reading, and trading paperbacks. Tastes were shaped; new readers were reached. Another vector: the era of "the pulps" was drawing to a close. The pulps were cheap magazines that published sensationalistic fiction. They had their origins in the late 1800s; Frank Munsey's "Argosy" is usually cited as the first pulp magazine. The pulp magazines often specialized in male genres: adventure, sci-fi, war, crime, western. And they were often seriously popular. The most successful pulps often had monthly print runs of over a million copies. They also had their artistic achievements. The pulps were where sci-fi flourished. And, under the editorship of Capt. Joseph T. Shaw, the hardboiled detective fiction of Black Mask magazine developed into something remarkable. But by the late 1940s, the pulps had begun to run out of commercial steam. Even so, the demand for hard-hitting and juicy fiction persisted. Another: the new taste for comic books. Comic strips may have been around for a while; Fawcett Publications itself got started in the late 19-teens with a joke-book / comicstrip publication called Captain Billy's Whiz Bang. But comic books per se were an innovation of the 1930s (and Fawcett -- as much a distributor as a traditional publisher -- had had a major hit with Captain Marvel). Superheroes, adventure, crime ... Once again, fans were won over and expectations were affected. And a final vector: Mickey Spillane. Spillane (who died only this past July, aged 88) was the author of the Mike Hammer detective novels. As a publishing phenomenon, Spillane was like nothing ever before witnessed. His first novel -- the two-fisted, paranoid-macho, hardboiled "I, The Jury" -- sold only a... posted by Michael at November 15, 2006 | perma-link | (24) comments

Airplanes and Celebs
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Long airplane flights ... All that time to kill ... Hey, why not do some reading? Still, the constant on-board whooshing noise ... The cramped quarters ... Since concentration doesn't exactly come easy in such circumstances, going through the classics isn't a workable option. What to spend in-flight reading-time on? The Wife meets the cross-country-flight reading-material challenge by picking up a minimum of four celebrity-scandal magazines. Not all that expensive a habit, really: There are always new ones trying to compete, and the new ones all price themselves at $1.99. "But why buy so many celeb-scandal mags?" I asked the beloved as we settled into our seats yesterday. "Given that they all seem to package the exact same news-and-gossip bits, why not just buy one?" "They are all the same in many ways," she granted. "But I had to buy this one to get Reese's point of view, and this other one to get Ryan's. You get the idea." Flying between coasts yesterday, The Wife spent two hours snoozing and three hours happily immersed in her celeb mags. When she's thumbing through the trash rags, she's really immersed in them. What does she get out of the experience? "They give me everything that movies today don't give me," she told me. "Trash, glitz, craziness, and campy make-believe that I can pretend to have a little emotional involvement with. They're basically all about glamorous people making fools of themselves. If the movies themselves offered more of more of this kind of thing, I'd be a moviegoer." I'm sympathetic: God knows that it's been far too long since Hollywood turned out juicy trashfests like "The Betsy." Still, when I look at The Wife's celebrity-scandal mags I'm unable to lose myself in them. I spend my time instead wondering who in hell most of the people in the pictures are. George Clooney, Sharon Stone, and Jennifer Lopez I recognize, of course. But who in god's name is Mischa Barton? And why would anyone care about her? As far as I can tell, Mischa Barton radiates absolutely nothing. Though The Wife has a much greater appetite for celebrity trash than I do, it isn't as though I was able to look down at her airplane reading from a lofty perch. My own reading as we crossed the country yesterday was Karrine Steffan's "Confessions of a Video Vixen." I bought the book carelessly, expecting it to be an EZ-readin' look at the life of a rock-video backup dancer. What wouldn't be interesting about that? Instead it turned out to be a garish brag-session / cautionary-tale by an ambitious young woman who made a life for herself as professional arm-candy to the hiphop world. Yikes: The beatings, shriekings, pill-poppings, coke-snortings, booty-swivellings, Cristal-swillings, pole-dancings, dick-suckings, trick-turnings, and VIP-room-misadventurings never end. Well, almost never. Once in a blue moon Karrinne recalls hazily that she has a child, and stops in for a visit with the kid. I stared at the book in... posted by Michael at November 15, 2006 | perma-link | (23) comments

Saturday, November 4, 2006


Nikos' New Book
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm delighted to pass along the news that a new book by my friend and intellectual hero Nikos Salingaros is now available. For people who have begun visiting this blog only recently, a word of explanation. A conviction that I think all Blowhards share is that the fine arts in America have gone badly off the rails in recent decades. Though I "get it," though I enjoy occasional examples of it (Joe Brainard! Jeff Koons' puppy!), and though I'm often eager to endorse weirdo-ness and experiments, it's just plain bizarre how specialized, antagonistic, and off-kilter fine-art-making generally has become. Who but brainwashed insiders can care about much of this stuff? And why shouldn't civilians throw mud while muttering bitterly about turncoat elites? How did this state of affairs come about? After all, the usual thing is for the fine arts to crown, extend, and complete culture more generally, not to outrage and betray it. One of many plausible explanations is that the fine-arts world has been led astray by politically-motivated thinking and theory, much of it of a seductive, French-derived, chic-academic, wheel-spinning nature. So one of the things we like to do at this blog is to celebrate the contemporary thinkers who seem to us to put the fine arts back on more solid footing -- from philosophers like Denis Dutton to literary types like Frederick Turner to anthropologists like Ellen Dissanayake to evo-bio cats like Steven Pinker to architectural thinkers like Christopher Alexander and Leon Krier. Even among this high-powered crowd, Nikos Salingaros is a standout and a special case. He's a University of Texas mathematician who has worked closely with Christopher Alexander and who has become a major architecture-and-urbanism thinker in his own right. A hyper-civilized guy, responsive to and knowledgeable about the arts, he's appalled by fraudulent and destructive culture-thinking. Nikos is urbane and witheringly funny when he examines what passes for contemporary architecture theory, for example. How can such utter nonsense possess and transfix so many? He has an intriguing theory about that too. But Nikos isn't just a devastating critic of folly. He has also made profound contributions. Though he's aligned in many ways with the New Classicists -- his book has an introduction by the New Classicism fan, the Prince of Wales -- Nikos's own urgings are, like those of Christopher Alexander, style-independent, and should be of great use to any designer, patron, or township. How can ornament be justifed, and why is it necessary? What are the ratios and hierarchies that promote neighborliness and beauty? What is it about our biological nature -- perhaps even about the nature of matter itself -- that makes us feel one thing in the presence of one kind of structure and something else in the presence of another? "A Theory of Architecture," Nikos' new book, is on its most basic level a textbook for architecture students. Slim, witty, and thorough -- as well as sophisticated-yet-accessible (a favorite combo of mine) --... posted by Michael at November 4, 2006 | perma-link | (1) comments

Wednesday, October 25, 2006


Fiction, Empathy, Chix, Names
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- It seems that reading fiction can help you develop empathy. Dudes who want girlfriends, listen up: Take yoga classes; learn how to cook, dance, and flirt; and read a few novels, OK? In any case, girls sure look cute when they're wrapped up in a book. (Link thanks to Dave Lull, that literate lech.) Find out how many people in America share your name. I should warn you, though, that when I typed my real name into the search box, this was the result: HowManyOfMe.comThere are:0people with my namein the U.S.A.How many have your name? Pardon me while I treat myself to an identity crisis. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 25, 2006 | perma-link | (45) comments

Music and Lit
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- P.I. novelist Robert Crais is asked to explain the appeal of private eye fiction. Nice response: "What jazz is to music, detective fiction is to literature. Another color on the palette. The more colors you have, the richer you are." Amen to that, bro. Now why don't more people agree? Funny how so many people can accept jazz and movies, perhaps even rock and design and television, as legitimate forms, yet shy away from the idea that anything but the snootiest kinds of books can be worthy of attention. Crais is an inspired novelist, by the way. I've enjoyed and can recommend several of his novels: this one and this one. Funny and stylish, laid-back yet tense ... First-class popular literature. Oops, did I say "literature"? Here's Robert Crais' website. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 25, 2006 | perma-link | (2) comments

Friday, October 20, 2006


A Week With Bill Kauffman, Day Five
Michael Blowhard writes: It's Day Five of Bill Kauffman Week here at 2Blowhards. I introduced the political writer Bill Kauffman in a recent posting. Let me also recommend a couple of Kauffman resources that have turned up as these interviews have been running. An intelligent Caleb Stegall review of Kauffman's "Look Homeward, America" can be read here. Clark Stooksbury provides a discerning review of "Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette" here. Lee at Verbum Ipsum is level-headed yet sympathetic about "Look Homeward, America." And, for all those New York City partisans out there, here's a Kauffman essay about the city -- found, as you might imagine, by the wonderful Dave Lull. Part One of our interview with Bill is here. Part Two is here. Part Three is here. Part Four is here. Now, on to Part Five, the final part of our interview. *** A Week With Bill Kauffman, Day Five Bill Kauffman, photographed by daughter Gretel 2B: So you think our involvement in WWII was a mistake too? BK: As for WWII, my sympathies are with the America First Committee and more generally the Middle American isolationists who wanted to stay out of the war, as they would want to stay out of any foreign war. They said we'd get a draft, curtailed civil liberties, confiscatory taxes, and a greatly enlarged centralized state that would never return to an appropriate size. They were right. The demonization of the AFC, which with 800,000 members was the largest antiwar movement in our history, is a crime. No one, outside the most noxious propagandists, regarded it as anything but wholesome at the time. Hell, its founding members included Gerald Ford, Sargent Shriver, and Potter Stewart. Young John F. Kennedy sent in a check for $100. Its sympathizers ranged across the American spectrum: Sinclair Lewis, Norman Thomas, Edmund Wilson, Alice Roosevelt Longworth ... a long and honorable list. Eighty percent of Americans opposed involvement in the war as late as fall 1941. But you see, in the United States of Armaments we always go back and paint villain's mustaches on the antiwar side. The losers in historical debates either get flushed down the memory hole or demonized beyond recognition. Peace is patriotic. That's not a simpleminded slogan, it's the truth. The antiwar folks in '40-41 had seen how the First World War had trashed civil liberties, centralized economic and political power, fed a mass culture of conformity and obedience, and pissed all over traditional American liberties. War is the health of the state, in the great aphorism of Randolph Bourne. As it was the health of the state in WWII. That war -- like other wars -- did incalculable damage on the homefront: it served to uproot Americans, to separate them from their homeplaces, often for good, to destroy healthy manifestations of local culture, to intensify the industrialization of our country, to kill the vital spirit of local, human-scale democracy. The antiwar people were in no way, shape, or form pro-Hitler. They understood him... posted by Michael at October 20, 2006 | perma-link | (21) comments

Thursday, October 19, 2006


A Week With Bill Kauffman, Day Four
Michael Blowhard writes: It's Day Four of Bill Kauffman Week here at 2Blowhards. I introduced the political writer Bill Kauffman in a recent posting. Let me also recommend a couple of Kauffman resources that have turned up as these interviews have been running. An intelligent and appreciative Caleb Stegall review of Kauffman's "Look Homeward, America" can be read here. And, for all those New York City partisans out there, here's a Kauffman essay about the city -- found, as you might imagine, by the wonderful Dave Lull. Part One of our interview with Bill is here. Part Two is here. Part Three is here. Now, on to Part Four. *** A Week With Bill Kauffman, Day Four Bill Kauffman, photographed by daughter Gretel 2Blowhards: How do people of the left receive you? People of the right? I notice that, although you're a Democrat, you mostly publish in rightie outlets. Bill Kauffman: I have a strong libertarian streak, and when I started writing for magazines in the mid-'80s the right had at least an ancestral memory of liberty. Many of the postwar political writers I admire were on the "right": Robert Nisbet, Murray Rothbard, the Michigan master of the ghost story, Russell Kirk. My work has appeared now and then on the left -- Utne Reader, The Nation, In These Times, The Independent of London -- but more often on the right. In the '90s I wrote frequently for Chronicles and Liberty; of late I've written up secessionist Vermonters and George McGovern and Frank Bryan, the great interpreter of town meeting democracy, for The American Conservative. The problem is so much of the DC-NYC right is bought off by the GOP and the neocons. A lot of the older cons are secretly antiwar but they long ago lost their voices, not to mention their balls. Loose lips bring pink slips. I still have friends on the right and publish, quite happily, in their journals, but what attracted me to the right 25 years ago -- its capaciousness, the willingness to entertain dissident views -- has vanished. I have friends on the left, too -- I spoke recently at Paul Buhle's "Antiwar Patriots Day" at Brown, and I'm very sympathetic to the decentralist wing of the Green Party. Mailer calls himself a "left conservative." I know just what he means. I am for place, family, liberty, peace. Is that right or left? 2B: Your version of U.S. history is nothing if not unorthodox. It sure wasn't what I was taught in school. How did you develop that? BK: "So let us think about the people who lost," said William Appleman Williams. That's what I do. I had a lost year once which wound up being fruitful. After I'd left Moynihan's office I rode the Hound to Salt Lake City. Lodged in a flophouse, wrote derivative poetry, thought on things. Then I came back for an ill-starred year in grad school at the University of Rochester. I was in the political science department... posted by Michael at October 19, 2006 | perma-link | (24) comments

Wednesday, October 18, 2006


A Week With Bill Kauffman, Day Three
Michael Blowhard writes: It's Day Three of Bill Kauffman Week here at 2Blowhards. I introduced the political writer Bill Kauffman in a recent posting. Part One of our interview with Bill is here. Part Two is here. Now, on to Part Three. *** A Week With Bill Kauffman, Day Three Bill Kauffman, photographed by daughter Gretel 2B: Why did you abandon fast-lane, big-city life? Was there a specific moment or event that made you pull the trigger? BK: I'd always wanted to go home. Life anywhere but in my natal place seemed fugitive, evanescent, meaningless. I don't mean that as a knock on other places; if I were native to them, I'd be in their thrall. But you play the hand you're dealt. I don't believe in "rising above" your origins -- without at least one foot on the ground you'll go floating off into the empty realm of global citizenship. I need anchorage. Mooring. Plus I despise modern urban architecture: in its scale and characterlessness it is intended to make people feel dwarfed, insignificant, powerless. But I guess it took my wife, an LA girl, to bring me back home. Lucine and I married in May 1987. Went to Salem on our honeymoon -- spitting in the face of augury? She laid her bouquet at Jack Kerouac's grave in Lowell. "He honored life." Great epitaph. We lived in DC for a while but finally I convinced her to join me in a "one-year experiment" in repatriation. A year to be measured in Old Testament terms, it seems. Nineteen years later I figure we've just passed Washington's Birthday. Or "President's Day," in post-republic zombiespeak. 'Course now we live five miles north of Batavia in Elba -- apt address for an exile! The Onion Capital of the World. Lucine is Town Supervisor. With Deukmejian on the sidelines in California she may be the highest-ranking elected Armenian-American official in America. At least until California sends Cher to the U.S. Senate. As First Man, I'm more Pat Nixon than Hillary Clinton. My advice is limited to urging her to be the first elected Republican to call for Bush's impeachment. 2B: How did your stay in big cities and your experiences with real-life politics affect your views of politics? I turn off politics and politicians generally. "Fuck 'em all, and let's vote for the least-bad" -- that's all I come up with. You seem to have maintained a more nuanced view of the field and of politicians generally. BK: Well, on the proper attitude toward politicians I'm of two -- or five, or 20 -- minds. Hey, I contain multitudes. I'm of the "fuck 'em" school, in part. Like Edward Abbey, I grow more radical with age. I still curse, execrate, and maledict the bastards as I read about them in the paper. (Hah -- that last line reminds me of something Thomas Wolfe once wrote: "I do not believe the writing to be wordy, prolix, or redundant.") National figures who exist mostly as... posted by Michael at October 18, 2006 | perma-link | (1) comments

Tuesday, October 17, 2006


A Week With Bill Kauffman, Day Two
Michael Blowhard writes: It's Day Two of Bill Kauffman Week here at 2Blowhards. I introduced the political writer Bill Kauffman in a recent posting. Part One of our interview with Bill is here. Now on to Part Two. *** A Week With Bill Kauffman, Day Two Bill Kauffman, photographed by daughter Gretel 2Blowhards: What kind of a kid were you, and what led you to venture out of Western NY? I'm not a political person, but I can imagine that if you find politics intoxicating you might want to head to the big city. Bill Kauffman: l loved baseball and reading and football and astronomy. I grew up a block from Dwyer Stadium, home of the Batavia Trojans (now Muckdogs) of the oldest continuously operating Class A baseball league. 'Twas in my blood. We had lots of kids in the neighborhood and my brother and I and the gang would play ball from dawn to dusk. My parents were (are) terrific; my relatives all lived nearby. So I always had an intense attachment to Batavia. My dad used to point out the significance of spots that to outsiders would seem humdrum. That's where the town whore lived. That's where Donny Bosseler (Batavia's greatest athlete, later a Washington Redskin) used to practice. That's where a guy hanged himself. So I grew up with a sense that Batavia was a place of mystery, repository of every story you could hope to tell. It wasn't just a launching pad. I did leave home, though like Jack Kerouac I have always been homesick. Upon graduating from the University of Rochester I went to work as a research assistant and later legislative assistant for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, about whom I have written with an occasionally admiring ambivalence. Though Moynihan was rude to underlings -- an unforgivable offense; there is no bigger asshole than the sort of personal-parking-space executive who yells at the secretary, is there? -- he was not an oozing sac of liberal cliches in the way that Ted Kennedy was. And his staff was filled with bright, amiable folks. I enjoyed my two and a half years in the employ of the Senatron, but if I entered a liberal with a rural populist streak I left an anarchist. Still am 23 years later. (Though I'd also confess to being a Jeffersonian, a decentralist, a localist, a cultural regionalist.) Moynihan, by the way, was the only statewide politician in years to understand Upstate. He claimed to be the Senate's only dairy farmer, though I can't really see him at 4:45 a.m. squat on the stool coaxing milk from Bessie. That his seat is now occupied by the carpetbagging militarist Hillary Clinton is a disgrace. She has blood on her talons. 2B: What was the big-city, glam-job world like to you? Early in my life in NYC I had drinks with a young woman, a NYC native. We were swapping the usual biographical stories. When I revealed where I grew up she said, "Of... posted by Michael at October 17, 2006 | perma-link | (18) comments

Monday, October 16, 2006


A Week With Bill Kauffman, Day One
Michael Blowhard writes: It's Day One of Bill Kauffman Week here at 2Blowhards. I introduced the political writer Bill Kauffman in a recent posting. Now, on to the interview itself. *** A Week With Bill Kauffman, Day One Bill Kauffman, photographed by daughter Gretel 2Blowhards: How far back do you and your people go in Western NY? How did they wind up there? Bill Kauffman: I'm a typical American mongrel. My English forbears came to God's country on neither the Mayflower nor a Mayflower moving van. They were farmers who settled around Churchville in the dim mists of time. (Speaking of Churchville -- I digress the way other men blink -- my wife, the lovely and long-suffering Lucine, was roped into coaching the Batavia High basketball cheerleaders a few years ago. BHS is the Blue Devils, a colorless French-derived militaristic nickname that we and 1,200 other schools ought to drop tootsweet. When BHS played the Churchville-Chili Saints, Lucine's girls chanted "Go Devils! Beat the Saints!" A chill ran down my superstitious Catholic back.) Anyway, the Kauffmans came to Batavia from Germany in the mid-19th century. Fought for the Union. John Kauffman, my great-grandfather, ran one of the first garages in town. The Garraghans, my Irish line, left the emerald isle in the 1880s. And the Stellas, responsible for my Italian quadroonhood, came over from Asiago to Lime Rock at the eastern edge of Genesee County circa 1900. As my 93-year-old grandmother, Mary Stella Baker, says, we're Northern Italian -- almost Swiss. So I ain't DAR and I ain't FOB. 2B: What kind of regional identity does Western New York have? I'm often surprised by how well people from the area understand each other, for instance, in terms of humor and political points of view. Your combo of isolationism, regionalism, humor, modesty, rambunctiousness, etc -- I suspect many people would find it a hodge-podge. But it makes a lot of instinctive sense to me. BK: Yeah, well, we're homeboys, right? We speak the secret Upstate code. So many parts of our country have faded into the Great American Nothingness, and Western NY is no exception. Television, school consolidation, the dislocations of empire, the fetish we make of "success" (which is often determined by mobility: the farther one moves from home the better one is thought to have done) -- we've been ravaged by the usual villains. But we retain a history, customs, accent, even sins all our own. The forces of homogenization, which is to say the forces of evil -- Dick Cheney, the "Vagina Monologues," Taco Bell, Katie Couric, the Department of Homeland Security -- have yet to entirely replace unpasteurized cider, volunteer fire departments, New York-Penn League baseball, and the front-porch anarchism that has animated such Western NY patriots as the Wyoming County abolitionists, novelist John Gardner, and the rural folk who kept the despised Mario Cuomo from siting a radioactive waste dump in lovely sylvan (and cash-poor) Allegany County. (Speaking of that sanctimonious bully, can you believe his... posted by Michael at October 16, 2006 | perma-link | (12) comments

Saturday, October 14, 2006


Bill Kauffman, An Introduction
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Thanks to Dave Lull, I've recently discovered the work of the political writer Bill Kauffman. With a few of his books still to catch up with, I've become a big fan. Kauffman's nothing if not contrarian, one-of-a-kind, and hard-to-categorize. He once worked for Reason and he publishes mostly in rightie outlets, yet he's a registered Democrat. Decidedly libertarian in most ways, he often votes Green. Drawn to the political scene, he's frank about the way that his own experiences in the political world turned him into an anarchist. Rock on! I like people who won't be confined by conventional labels. Kauffman's writing is just as hard to slot: prickly yet rambunctious, traditionalist yet gonzo, ornery yet extravagant. He generally works as an up-to-date journalist, but his books are ambitious in a pre-modernist literary way. Temperamentally drawn to the small-scale and the personal, he's also unstoppably outgoing, rowdy, and exuberant. He's an upbeat pessimist, both a nostalgist and a punk rocker. But encountering his work isn't just to be swept away by energy, talent, and brains, it's also to discover a fresh, unexpected, and fully-developed vision. In "America First!: Its History, Politics, and Culture," Kauffman rehabilitates the reputation of a mid-century antiwar group that, these belligerant days, is looked highly-askance-at. In "Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists," Kauffman celebrates a motley group of go-it-your-own-way cranks and dreamers that you're unlikely to hear praised by profs, let alone by partisan cheerleaders. His version of American history is the -- to me very convincing -- story of the Empire (and its supporters and propagandists) vs. Us Human-Scale Creatures. None of Kauffman's books are straightforward affairs. You'd be frustrated if you turned to them for clearly-laid-out arguments or encyclopedia-style information. Instead, they're fullblown reading experiences: part history, part personal essay. They're also big, heraldic, all-over-the-place prose poems -- patchwork, Whitmanesque, "barbaric yawps" set to driving rock, country, and blues beats. They're florid and funky, perverse yet open, bristling with deeply-felt exhortations and digressions, and full of comic but heart-busting praise-songs. To the extent that I'd want to categorize his work at all, I'd put it on the same rhapsodic / eccentric, full-of-contradictions-but-that's-the-point-dammit shelf as Edward Abbey, Henry David Thoreau, and H.L. Mencken. Kauffman's most personal book is "Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town's Fight to Survive." It's about Kauffman's love affair with his hometown, Batavia, New York, a small place about 20 miles outside Rochester. In "Muckdog," he blends history, tales, autobiography, and ruminations. Kauffman grew up in Batavia, and Batavia has been the fulcrum of his work all along. His theme is almost always "home" -- he often describes himself as (among many other things) a "localist," and his devotion to Western New York runs deep. He studied at the University of Rochester, worked in D.C. as a staffer for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, spent some time in L.A. (where he met Lucine, his wife-to-be),... posted by Michael at October 14, 2006 | perma-link | (8) comments

Thursday, October 12, 2006


Formerly Writely
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I liked the online word processor Writely quite a lot back when it was still Writely. I found it very handy to have access to all my word processing documents from any computer (so long as it's connected to the web, of course). I had some reservations about the way that tags are superseding folders as a standard way of organizing and finding files. How many paradigm shifts can one person adjust to in a lifetime, after all? But Writely was a more-than-adequate word processor, it was pleasant to use, and it was free. Will I like the webapp's new incarnation? We'll see. Google bought Writely some months ago, and has just now re-launched it. Bundled together with a Google spreadsheet, it has a new name: Google Docs and Spreadsheets. First impressions: It's still free -- that's good. Microsoft ought to be worried -- that's beyond-excellent. The interface has been tweaked -- hmmm, was that necessary? Tags, sigh. And the app now looks very Google, ie., it's all white and blue and barren. That's not so good. You can read about Google Docs and Spreadsheets here, and you can try it out and / or sign up for it here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 12, 2006 | perma-link | (2) comments

Wednesday, October 11, 2006


How Can Brittanica Compete?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Someone has already done the research for you! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 11, 2006 | perma-link | (3) comments

Wednesday, October 4, 2006


Fun Quote of the Day
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- This passage from a Rod Lott posting at Bookgasm had me cheering: There seems to be this unspoken rule in America that unless a book is either: a) literary, b) covered by The New York Times Book Review, or c) Oprah-approved, that it shouldn't be talked about, let alone read at all. In other words, genre fiction. It's weird, because our society has no problem talking to one another in public about genre movies or genre TV shows. But genre books? No one wants to admit they're reading it, for fear of being looked down upon. Unlike films or television, a book requires a degree of intellect to be experienced; therefore, they reason, books must be intellectual. Wrong! So there is sanity to be found among those who discuss books, even if not among the official bookchat class ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 4, 2006 | perma-link | (4) comments

Book Meme-ing
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The recent book meme has been taken up by some inspired bloggers: Kelly Jane Torrance, Anne Thompson, Andy Horbal. I have the nagging feeling that I'm neglecting some other snazzy bloggers who have given this particular meme a whirl. Lordy, I can be such a scatterbrain. Anyway, send in links, and I'll update as people let me know who I've been forgetting or ignoring. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 4, 2006 | perma-link | (2) comments

Tuesday, October 3, 2006


Why Aren't More Books More of a Turn-On?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- If books people -- ie., librarians, publishers, profs, etc -- are serious about wanting people to read, why don't they publish and promote more -- and better -- sexy books? Erotica writer Polly Frost recalls being aroused into readerhood by "Lotta Drum and the 69 Pleasures." Nice passage: She had to endure lesbian love from her captors, as well as some highly detailed bamboo S & M ... The fact is, I can still remember passages from "Lotta Drum" that I can't remember from the books I'd been assigned in school. I slept through "The Red Pony," and even though it was a "classic" it had no impact on my life and today I can't recall anything about it except for a lot of tedious metaphors that my teacher wrote up on the blackboard. Lotta Drum, however, has stuck with me ... Librarians, listen up! Erotica writers are your best friends -- we're the ones who get people hooked on reading. That's for sure, at least in my case. As a kid, I spent a Lotta Time reading the sexy potboilers that Polly praises in her posting: Jackie Susann, Harold Robbins, Mickey Spillane. Those in fact are the books -- along with the comic books I was enjoying at the same time -- that turned me into a lifelong reader. One thing's for certain: There's nothing quite like a novel that's full of good parts to make a kid's reading-comprehension skills skyrocket. I can't imagine that there aren't, oh, a few million other people with similar stories to tell. Given this, why is the books establishment such a dreary, do-gooding, back-to-school thing? And what were some of the books that turned you into a reader? Saucy and dirty candidates especially encouraged. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 3, 2006 | perma-link | (11) comments

Thursday, September 28, 2006


1000 Words -- Coffee-house Culture
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm not the first observer of the web and of blogdom to be reminded of the 17th and 18th century coffee-house. "It's open! And everyone is having a say!" -- the parallels between now and then are striking. Even so, I haven't yet run across a brief blog-intro to coffee-house culture. What was this coffee-house phenomenon about anyway? Introduced to Europe in the 1600s, coffee took the continent by storm, and coffee-houses sprang up in many major cities. The caffeine high contributed to the fervor, of course, but the historical moment (which can be seen as a transitional era between the Renaissance and the modern world) was important too. The aristocracy was beginning to lose its grip; the middle-class was a-borning and wanted to stretch its wings. Wikipedia, for instance, calls the Paris coffee-houses "a major locus of the French Enlightenment." Nowhere did coffee-mania hit as hard as London, where the city's first coffee-house was opened in 1652. Within a couple of decades, coffee-houses had become the centers of London social life -- and that's "social" as in business, politics, art, and crime. By the mid-1700s, there were 550 coffee houses in the city. Wives complained that hubbies were spending too much time at the coffee-houses. (Women weren't allowed in them.) Coffee-house-going became so popular that for a time Islamic styles of dress and fashion became a fad. Established authority figures had bouts of paranoia about the coffee-houses. Surely conspiracies and other seditious doin's were being hatched there! What in fact was taking place in most of them was vigorous conversation. Partly thanks to the caffeine, it was an extraverted, dynamic time. People were out and about, learning how to be sociable. They were comparing notes and trying out ideas; there were deals to be made. The birth of modern English-language publishing was intimately bound up with coffee-house culture. Pamphlets, newsletters, and early periodicals (such as The Guardian and The Spectator) were distributed largely to and through the coffee-houses, and the writers and editors treated the goings-on at coffee-houses as part of their subject matter. Did you realize that the modern short story, British division, has its roots in the unsigned, semi-disguised nonfiction accounts run in these publications? That's right: "The short story," today often thought of as a super-specialized, la-de-dah form, is a direct descendent of the 17th and 18th century equivalent of Page Six. (Good lord: Anal-sex guru Tristan Taormina is Thomas Pynchon's niece!) Different coffee-houses attracted different kinds of crowds. The scientists of the Royal Society met at The Graecian. Other coffee-houses were patronized mainly by politicians; there were Whig coffee-houses and Tory coffee-houses. Still other coffee-houses attracted businessmen -- Lloyd's of London had its birth at Lloyd's Coffee-house. Says one source: "It was in such coffee-houses as Lloyd's, Garraway's, and Jonathan's that Britain's modern business institutions spent their infancy and that the foundation was laid which would lead them towards ascendancy in world commerce in the nineteenth century." Arty types... posted by Michael at September 28, 2006 | perma-link | (9) comments

Friday, September 15, 2006


Literacy: Normal? Natural? Desirable?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Alec makes an important point in response to some interesting comments from Rachel: It's funny. We think that reading is (and should be) the norm, and that books have been around forever, but literacy has been rare throughout human history. For most of human existence, people have been illiterate and used pictures and symbols (graphic arts), and of course speech, to convey and interpret information. For example, according to a Wikipedia article, as late as 1840, 33% of men and 44% of women in England signed marriage certificates with a mark because they were unable to read. The irony is that the post-industrial age, dominated by video and audio stuff without a need for text, is allowing large numbers of people to be comfortably illiterate. I'm not certain how widespread it is, but I am always amazed at how easily Jay Leno is able to find young adults -- even many with college degrees -- who profess that they never read novels and who are increasingly ignorant of anything but pop culture, but who nonetheless are immensely pleased with themselves. I'm not sure how this will develop in the future, since the Internet is actually encouraging a continued literacy (blogging, individual fiction) even as audio-visual culture intensifies (MySpace, YouTube, iTunes, etc.) We oldies may take written-word-centricity for granted, but there's nothing natural about literacy of the "addicted to plowing through long gray rivers of text" sort. And a book-based culture -- however familiar it may feel to some of us -- is, historically speaking, an anomoly. One consequence of the electronics revolution seems to be that we're turning into -- or turning back into -- an image-and-sound-and-presentation-based culture. Is this good? Is it desirable? And does the kind of playing-with-graphics- images- text blocks-sound-and-motion that seems to be becoming the standard thing represent a new, or different, or maybe even better kind of literacy? Best, Michael UPDATE: Tyler Cowen asks, "When should we consume culture in small, sequential bits?"... posted by Michael at September 15, 2006 | perma-link | (13) comments

Saturday, September 9, 2006


The Zaniness of FLW
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Thanks to Prairie Mary for pointing out this fascinating Christopher Hawthorne article about "The Fellowhip," a new study of Frank Lloyd Wright. The authors did their best to discard the Eternal Genius lens through which Wright is usually seen, and to consider him as a mere mortal, if one with enormous talent. That's something I tried to do myself -- in a much more modest way, of course, and confining myself entirely to his work -- back in this posting, which I wittily entitled "Frank Lloyd Wright Is Not God." It generated some controversy, to say the least. Mary has put up a wonderful posting of her own about how she learned to write. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 9, 2006 | perma-link | (3) comments

Friday, September 8, 2006


"Real Food"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Of the many books about food, eating, and food production that I've read in recent months, my favorite has been Nina Planck's "Real Food." It's a book with a simple message: If a food is traditional, then the odds are it's tasty, satisfying, and nourishing. If a food has been invented or developed in the last hundred years -- if it's what she calls "an industrial food" -- then you'd probably do well to be wary of it. (Hey, that's a good two-line summary of conservatism -- the political philosophy of conservatism, anyway, if not the sorry present-day Republican reality of it. When there's a question, odds are you should trust to experience and not to theory.) No accusations of Luddism, please. A nice passage from a q&a with Planck: Look, I love my ice cream maker. I love electricity. What I don't like is technology that reduces a food's flavor or nutrition. Chicken stock is great. The bouillon cube is an abomination. As I read it, Planck's book exists on two levels. One is the facts-and-arguments level. Here, I found the book extremely helpful and informative. Be warned, though: It isn't for the un-crunchy, let alone for those averse to a little eccentricity. (Those who dislike the book may accuse Planck of being vulnerable to cranks.) Planck doesn't play by the health-tip world's rules or current advice, to say the least. Lard? Most excellent -- "hardly anyone knows that lard is good for you." Tropical fats? Yum-o. Red meat? Dig in, but search out the grass-fed kind. Salt isn't a poison to be avoided; it's a godsend that brings out the flavors of many foods. Unrefined sea salt is best. Search out fermented foods: kefir, sauerkraut. Your gut will thank you for it. Eggs? "A nutritional bonanza." "I don't buy the low-fat version of anything," Planck writes. Planck is especially keen on milk, which she thinks we have become neurotic about. Full-fat milk doesn't just taste loads better than skim, it's also better for you. But make it organic if not raw. Feeling inspired by Planck, I drank my first raw milk last week. It was, as she wrote that it would be, a far more creamy, complex, and rich experience than supermarket milk. Maybe pasteurization and homogenization aren't all they're cracked up to be. To those who respond with shock or surprise to her very unorthodox views and advice, Planck has a -- to me, anyway -- plausible and convincing response. Since the health establishment changes its tune every five minutes -- are eggs good for you this week? -- we'd probably do well, much of the time, to ignore the people in the white lab coats and trust to experience and taste instead. At times the book feels like a concerted attempt to restore the reputation of fat. Planck argues that the more we know about fats, the more complicated the are-fats-good-or-bad-for-you? question becomes. There are many kinds of fats, and... posted by Michael at September 8, 2006 | perma-link | (8) comments

Saturday, September 2, 2006


Charlton on Audible
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Visitors to 2Blowhards have almost certainly encountered Charlton Griffin, who has left a lot of informative and smart comments on various postings. They may not realize that Charlton is one of the most distinguished readers and producers of my favorite current media form, namely audiobooks. I notice that many of his productions can now be purchased at Audible for download. (Type "Charlton Griffin" into the search box.) I urge audiobook fans to start downloading now, and I urge those who have been hesitant to try audiobooks to start with Charlton's productions. This is some of the classiest work available: great material, beautifully produced and presented. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 2, 2006 | perma-link | (0)

Derbyshire on Betjeman
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- John Derbyshire writes an appreciation of the English poet John Betjeman here. Although a man of the 20th century, Betjeman composed touching, funny, instantly-comprehensible -- ie., completely traditional and non-modernist -- poems. Needless to say, he has been almost completely overlooked by the American academic-media lit establishment. A nice passage from Derbyshire: Practically all Betjeman's verses rhyme, scan, and yield up all their sense at a first reading, if you can get past the Britishisms. He ignored the "modern movement" in poetry altogether ... It follows from this that Betjeman is not really the sort of poet you can teach, and he is therefore of no interest to the academic Eng. Lit. clerisy. It is hard to imagine anyone getting a Ph.D. by "interpreting" Betjeman. There is nothing to interpret. And what a lovely compliment that is. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 2, 2006 | perma-link | (15) comments

Thursday, August 31, 2006


Rewind: More on Books
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- On vacation in Lotusland, I'm finding the siren song of the hot tub sweeter this morning than the appeal of blogging. So, fond though I am of generating new posts, I'm going to baby myself and link to an old one instead. Since we've been comparing notes about books and publishing, here's a related post from a while back: my version of the future of books, book publishing, and book reading. Hey, here's another. A little repetitious, OK, but such are the perils of blogging ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 31, 2006 | perma-link | (5) comments

Wednesday, August 30, 2006


Books and Sales Redux
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A few postings ago, I wondered out loud why so many people are horrified when they discover that book publishing is a business, and that -- as with all businesses -- salesmanship is involved at many levels. Visitors volunteered many good reasons why this might be the case. Please take a look at the comment thread. The ideas and observations of our visitors got me pulling together a few more fresh, if mighty basic, thoughts. There are always far more book-writer wannabes than the book-publishing industry needs. Econ 101, folks: If supply is huge and demand is tiny, prices will fall and remain low. Translated in terms of the book-writing biz: So long as there are a lot more people around who want to write books than there are places for them on commercial-publishing lists, the prices/salaries given to book-writers are going to tend to be small, smaller, smallest. Are you a book-writer wannabe? It doesn't hurt to remember that there's always someone who can do the job as well -- or almost as well -- as you can, and who will do it for less money too. Wait, this item doesn't really have anything to do with salesmanship and books. Oh well, it's a basic fact of commercial book-writing and commercial book-publishing anyway. Maybe someone will find it interesting. As I mentioned in the comments on the previous posting, book-publishing has to be one of the few industries where the vast majority of the people who supply the industry's product don't and won't ever make a living at it. In the U.S., there are only a couple of hundred people who make a living from writing trade books. ("Trade books" are the kinds of books you might buy at a Barnes and Noble.) Meanwhile, the book-publishing industry employs (and pays living wages to) many thousands. If you want to make a living from books, do indeed go into the books business -- but don't go into it as a writer. Many book people are introverts. Actors love audiences; few pop musicians are shy; painters and photographers generally know in their bones that they have to play the game if they want to move some product. But people who work in publishing? And people who dream of writing books? What they often love most is spending quiet time with books. They like reading better than being with other people. Many of them would be happy, they feel, if only they could spend all their time inside a book. I feel divided about introverts and books. On the one hand, I sympathize with the introverts. God bless 'em, they're people too, and why shouldn't they have an art-medium of their own? It's understandable that they would dream of a place (booksville) where they could flourish, feel appreciated, and be taken care of. On the other hand: C'mon.. I mean, really. We all have to deal with the external world -- and, whatever else it is,... posted by Michael at August 30, 2006 | perma-link | (18) comments

Wednesday, August 23, 2006


Books and Sales
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards - I just had one of those conversations with one of those people. You know the type. An intelligent, friendly person. A pleasant vibe. And then, whammo, the moment comes -- the moment when you discover that, so far as books and book publishing are concerned, this otherwise sensible person is completely out of his mind. Why is that so many down-to-earth people turn into delusional space cadets when the topic is books and book publishing? After all, they know from their own experience how the world works. Yet, magically, where book publishing is concerned, none of these how-the-world-works rules is supposed to apply. These people are OK with -- or at least not surprised by -- the way that politics, egos, money, ambition, and luck play important roles in life and business. Yet, magically, in book publishing, genius and worthiness always rise to the top. You can inform these people that, in the U.S., no more than a couple of hundred writers of trade books make a living writing books. You can let them know that the book publishing business generates somewhere between 50,0000 and 200,000 new titles every year. Dents are not made. (By the way, here's a fun mind experiment. Let's say you're a real new-books buff. You follow reviews, magazines, and bookstores. In a given year, you might be aware of a couple of hundred of new titles, right? If you're a real enthusiast, you might even read 50 or 100 new books. That means, in a busy publishing year, you're aware of 0.1% of the new books published that year. I take this as reason to be a little skeptical of anyone who makes pronouncements about such-and-such being the "best new book of the year.") The particular delusion that possessed the specific otherwise-sensible person I talked to the other day had to do with sales. To be honest, I wasn't entirely sure what it was. I don't think I can nail it down once and for all. For a minute, it seemed as though this person felt that an author shouldn't have to "sell" his book in any sense. At another point, I had the impression that this person felt that sales play no role in the "literary" process. (Or was it that they should play no such role?) At yet another moment, this person seemed to hold the strong opinion that an author's role is (or should?) be done when he finishes typing. It was hard to tell specifically what the dream was that this person was clinging to. The only thing that was really clear was that this person felt that "sales" (as in the act of selling) and book publishing should have nothing to do with each other, and that to the degree that "sales" enters into book publishing, that's too damn bad, and perhaps even worthy of grief and/or moral censure. Look: The business of books and book publishing is a business. It's an unusual business... posted by Michael at August 23, 2006 | perma-link | (30) comments

Thursday, August 17, 2006


Prairie Mary's Blackfeet Stories Are on Lulu
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The best linkage news of the day is that Prairie Mary has just published her collection of Blackfeet stories with the first-rate POD outfit Lulu.com. As visitors to 2Blowhards (or to her own blog) know, Mary Scriver is an unruly fireball of writing talent -- full of horsepower, information, soul, brains, and juice. I just ordered a copy of the book, and am expecting an involving and exciting read. You can order a hard copy or download a PDF version of the book from this page. Best, Michael UPDATE: I'm hoping to see many writers sidestep traditional commercial publishers and go the self-publishing route. It's a lot less trouble, far less wearing on the soul, and (potentially, at least) a much more direct way of connecting with audiences and readers. Why re-enact all the old battles? Why not sidestep them, and then get on with life instead? Are you, as your own publisher, stuck doing all your own promotion? Sure. But -- sad fact but true -- so are 9 out of 10 commercially-published authors. Most commercial houses put their marketing muscle behind very few of the books they publish. Taking charge of your own fate can be a real high. Dave Lull spotted a Times of London article by a downright exultant Martin Wroe celebrating his experience with Lulu.com. Wroe writes: "Holding the finished product -- a proper, perfect-bound book, gleaming colour cover hugging 76 crisp white pages of text -- it was obvious that a revolution is under way for prospective authors everywhere ... The maths of publishing is changing. Profitability has been factored around millions of sales by hundreds of authors; in future it may be based around hundreds of sales by millions of authors." Mary's first reflections about self-publishing with Lulu can be read here.... posted by Michael at August 17, 2006 | perma-link | (2) comments

Monday, August 14, 2006


Colin Wilson
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Here's a great tale: the electrifying rise and almost instant fall of the British writer Colin ("The Outsider") Wilson. Acclaimed as a brilliant talent while still in his early 20s, he became rich and famous very fast. But he was critically eviscerated within a couple of years and has been ignored (and/or treated like an embarassment) ever since. I've never read a word of Wilson's myself, but The Wife, who has, says that Wilson can be a lot of fun to read, in a wild-eyed/autodidact kind of way. Talk about a bulletproof ego! Despite the blows he has taken, Wilson has gone on to publish more than 100 books. "I suspect that I am probably the greatest writer of the 20th century," he says. "In 500 years time, they'll say, 'Wilson was a genius', because I'm a turning-point in intellectual history." Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 14, 2006 |