Pete Lit

William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940

William Leuchtenburg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 is a very fine and highly informative overview of the New Deal - the domestic economic and social programs developed by Roosevelt and his army of reformers in response to the crisis of the Great Depression. Refreshingly, the author resists considerable temptation in not making this a mere hagiography of FDR, but discusses both his successes and his failures, both his personal strengths and shortcomings. The author acknowledges that, for all of its success, the New Deal never solved the problem of widespread unemployment, which was only quelled with the rapid military armament in support of the war in Europe. Still, the New Deal did stabilize our country and bring it back from the bring of collapse, while also establishing much of the social safety net (Social Security, insured bank deposits, unemployment insurance) that we often take for granted today, as well as regulatory bodies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board which have been critical in curbing the worst abuses of big business.

My one qualm is that, despite the title, this is not exclusively a study of the New Deal, but more of an overview of FDR's first two terms. Leuchtenburg narrates at length about the rise of fascism in the mid 1930s and the start of World War II at the end of the decade, which of course are essential to any discussion of FDR's presidency (especially since the author details FDR's response to each, most notably charting Roosevelt's evolution from isolationist to internationalist) but don't specifically pertain to the New Deal. The book could well have stayed to its New Deal theme, not by ignoring fascism and WWII, but by explaning how each impacted New Deal policies and programs. Still, that qualm is a minor one, and Leuchtenburg's book is a thorough and well-written study of a fascinating era and one of our greatest political leaders, which I highly recommend.

Quotes

Three more great quotes from Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940 by William Leuchtenburg, which I finished reading yesterday. First, Justice Louis Brandeis, on Scandinavia's "middle way" (emulated by the New Deal) which accomodated both public and private institutions, and also a backhanded refutation of Communism:

"Why should anyone want to go to Russia when one can go to Denmark?"

Next, Harry Hopkins (FDR's WPA director and later Commerce Secretary) on the New Deal's spirit of innovation and non-ideological pragmatism:

"I am for experimenting...in various parts of the country, trying out schemes which are supported by reasonable people and see if they work. If they do not work, the world will not come to an end."

Lastly, Republican Senator Jim Watson of Indiana, expressing, to Wendell Willkie (the GOP presidential nominee) at the 1940 nominating convention, the conservatives' concern over the political ideology of Willkie, who had only recently left the Democratic Party:

"I don't mind the church converting a whore, but I don't want her to lead the choir the first night!"

"In Flanders Fields"

Despite being a pacifist, I still find myself moved by this verse...

In Flanders Fields
by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD, Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Today is Veterans Day, so please give some remembrance to all of the soldiers who have fought for our country. But also recall that this day was originally called Armistice Day ("a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace"), which marked the peaceful end of World War I, and remember that striving for peace means more soldiers come home safely or never go to war in the first place.

Quote

"Why shouldn't the American people take half my money from me? I took it all from them."
- Edward Filene, as quoted in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940, by William Leuchtenberg

I didn't know anything about Filene (other than his department store chain) before reading this quote, but he seems to have been an interesting individual. He was a highly successful merchant, of course, but also was instrumental in the creation of both credit unions and workers compensation insurance.

What happened in Hastings?

Nick Hornby passes along an intriguing anecdote:

I am on a train from the south coast back to London. Across the aisle, three elderly passengers, two women and a man, buy coffee from the trolley.

“What you do,” says the elderly man to his friends, “Is, you sip through the hole in the top of the lid.”

The two elderly women give it a go, tentatively at first, and pronounce themselves amazed and delighted at this technological breakthrough.

“I only found that out myself when I went to Hastings,” said the man.

What happened in Hastings? I wish I knew.

"What Happened in Hastings" - sounds like short story gold to me! Writers, hop to it!

Quote

"These are dead men. They are ghosts that walk the streets by day. They are ghosts sleeping with yesterday's newspapers thrown around them for covers at night."
- Tom Kromer, Waiting for Nothing

Quote

"Here is the difference between Dante, Milton and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years."
- Carl Sandburg

Beautiful...and that reminds me that I really need to delve back into Sandburg's Chicago Poems one of these days.

Great Depression reading

My literary tour of the Great Depression continues. Over the weekend (thanks in part to Internet-connection problems that kept me off my laptop, blissfully as I now realize) I finished Edmund Wilson's The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump, a collection of magazine essays from 1930-31, when the "Great Depression" moniker hadn't been coined yet and the turnaround engineered by FDR (who took office in 1933) was still a few years off. Wilson surveys the national landscape, with particularly memorable pieces on labor strife in the West Virginia coal mines and the construction site of the Hoover Dam, making no effort to hide his Communist sympathies (which were admittedly more socially acceptable in those capitalist-backlash days) and his loyalties to the common laborer. As the book concludes, I was struck by how convinced the otherwise astute Wilson was then that the Communist revolution in America was imminent. Which makes me wonder why, despite conditions being so ripe, that revolution never happened - was it the success of FDR's New Deal? the preoccupation with the rise of Hitler and immersion in WWII? the emerging horrors of the totalitarian Soviet state that revealed that maybe Communism wasn't paradise after all? Interesting question, I think.

Next up is William Leuchtenburg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940, which I'm seventy pages in to. Fresh from his resounding 1932 defeat of Hoover (electoral college margin: 472-59!) FDR has just completed his whirlwind first 100 days in office, during which time he managed to enact a truly mind-boggling mass of legislation designed to stauch the Depression bleeding and prod the country toward recovery. Good reading so far, though a bit heavy on detail.

Ben Tanzer, I Am Richard Simmons

We recently read I Am Richard Simmons, the new chapbook from Ben Tanzer (our colleague, kindred spirit and bestest lunch companion) and swooned all over again, as the story's eponymous narrator projects the energy and mania and exuberance and positivity and, yes, also the veiled desperation and sadness and heartbreak that seems to underlie all of that celebrity's public appearances. The chapbook is part of Mud Luscious Press' ongoing series, and while reading both the book and series are very much worth your time, they may not necessarily change your life. But maybe, just maybe, it will, and at any rate it will definitely change Ben's.

Short Stories 2009

Karl Koweski, "Holly Go Darkly"
Vic's online affair has escalated into a physical one and, desperate to escape the emptiness of his loveless marriage, he impulsively professes to Holly his love which she emphatically does not share. When she resists he strikes back, with just enough tact to avoid the sour-grapes litany of her physical shortcomings that suddenly runs through his mind, yet still utters his frustration that their relationship is to her nothing more than a casual fling. She exits the hotel room, likely ending whatever happiness - though temporary and conditional - he might have had with her. Koweski's spare prose is full of longing and sadness, concisely imparting the hopes and sober reality of Vic's life. (Source: Fried Chicken and Coffee, 10/5/09) (Posted: 10/29/09)

J.F. Powers, "Bill"
Father Joe has a small yet comfortable parish, but no curate to help with the work; an established career, but no professional collegiality; a well-stocked liquor cabinet, but no drinking buddy. A curate is finally appointed, raising the priest's hopes and setting him into action. Curiously, though, over the course of a week we see him performing few of his official duties - saying Mass, taking confession or even interacting with his parishioners. Instead we mostly see him fretting over who the new curate will be and furnishing the curate's quarters - haggling with furniture salesmen, conferring with an interior designer, arranging the rooms. But when the curate finally arrives, Father Joe finds him to be neither the deferential nor convivial colleague he hoped for, and in expressing his frustration provides a glimpse of how he feels about himself and his own life. This light and quietly comic story has really whetted my appetite to read Morte d'Urban, Powers' acclaimed novel of the similarly situated Father Urban. (Source: Modern Irish-American Fiction: A Reader) (Posted 10/16/09)

William Walsh, "Muse"
Spare and lean, and consisting primarily of terse dialogue, this story involves every male poet's fantasy: an attractive woman who not only recognizes the narrator as being a poet and offers inspiration for his verse, but is also willing to sleep with him with very little effort from him. But reality concerns aside, her presence isn't strictly literal, but a metaphor for what inspires all writers - that single spark which creates "fifty, sixty" works or more. The story might also be a commentary on the old conceit that creative writers shouldn't marry, that whatever passion and focus they devote to relationships would be better directed to their writing. That's not an opinion I agree with, but the narrator seems to meet it halfway - he gives up "possibly an endless number" of inspirations from her, instead accepting with their new relationship just a single inspiration, one which he'll use again and again. And will likely be happier for it. (Source: Night Train, October 2009) (Posted: 10/15/09)

Mark Costello, "Callahan's Black Cadillacs""
Devastating from the very first line ("Out of World War II he swings, fat, flatulent, hemorrhoidal, hyberbolic, sleepy, lazy, squat, penniless, hypertense."), this great story alternates between the adolescent narrator's interactions with his ravaged and ruined Uncle Mort (just 26 years old but already well on his way to death) and pious, grieving Great Aunt Hatt during and in the aftermath of World War II. Gradually the two story lines draw together, first via Mort's incessant pleas for money from Hatt and then to Hatt's deep secret which only Mort seems to be the only other person to know, and finally to the demise of each, the details of which blur together in the memory of the narrator as he looks back as an adult. Simply stunning. (Source: The Murphy Stories) (Posted 10/14/09)

Paul Lamb, "The Manuscript"
The premise of this story is terrific - a hardluck guy named Quincy who proves to be the angel of death for every organization he's ever been associated with, the portentous job he's about to assume, and the rash act committed by the narrator which presumably averts global disaster - and the telling is straightforward and logical. Just two problems: first, the narrative device used - a secondary narrator discovers the primary narrator's written confession - adds little to the story; and second, the narrator's over-explaining of the implications of Quincy's employment history, when just a recital of the company names (Braniff, Enron, WorldCom) would have been more than enough to get the point across. Still, an entertaining story overall. (Source: Mirror Dance, June 2009) (Posted 9/21/09)

Dan Chaon, "The Hobblers"
A spare and sorrowful work of flash fiction that explores marital loss and grief. The narrator's feelings about the old couple who walk past his house every day, and his subtly-rendered resentment over what they represent, have a quietly powerful impact. (Source: Smokelong Quarterly.) (Posted 9/10/09)

Walter S. Tevis, "The Big Bounce"
Odd story, sort of Sci-Fi Lite, about two amateur scientists and their accidental discovery of a rubber-like substance with amazing - and soon to be ominous - qualities. The piece is awkwardly structured, with the first half a stiff, dialogue-heavy narrative that reminded me of the here's-how-it-all-happened conclusion to a Hardy Boys mystery (with plenty of scientific jargon that to my layman's ear might be realistic but could just as well be nonense) while the second half is a rollicking adventure yarn as the two chase their creation as it careens out of control. Mildly interesting but less than compelling overall, and not at all what I expected from the writer of such realistic dramas as The Hustler and The Color of Money. (Source: Project Gutenberg.) (Posted 9/9/09)

Eudora Welty, "Why I Live at the P.O."
After reading this rollicking, darkly funny story, the question is no longer why the narrator lives in the back room of a small-town post office, but instead why she lived with her family - ignorant, insensitive, mean-spirited and any number of other negative adjectives - for as long as she did. A terrific little slice of Southern life, as I suspect most of Welty's stories are. (Source: Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine.) (Posted 8/24/09)

Spencer Dew, "Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence"
Jack has woman problems: there's his ex, Larissa, who he won't be getting over any time soon; and Z, very desirable but married with kids and forever unattainable; and Eileen, who may be his ex-lover but is more than likely an old friend or even sister, a painfully self-aware young woman who endlessly spews her acute self-diagnosis, which Jack only listens to some of the time. But despite his difficult interactions with these three women (or non-interaction, in the case of Larissa), Jack is too passive to do anything decisive about any of them. So on he goes, meandering through life and clearly getting nowhere. The title is a nod to Nelson Algren (in The Man With the Golden Arm, Zosh keeps her own "Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence", a collection of newspaper clippings of grisly car crashes and train wrecks), and it's a good fit with Dew's story, which is sort of Jack's own scrapbook of tragic wrecks. Like a scrapbook, the story is a scattershot collection of events and places from Jack's life, each of which may seem disjointed in isolation but taken collectively present an effective portrait of a very lost soul. (Source: Thieves Jargon, Issue 81, January 5, 2009) (Posted 8/14/09)

Randa Jarrar, "The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie"
Having followed the author online for several years, I wanted to like this story much more than I did. And there's plenty here to like - the concept of half-human/half-beasts living in the everyday world (rendered very matter-of-factly, just enough for suspension of disbelief), the "halfie" narrator's use of the movie Splash as a litmus test to see how her dates really think of her and her kind, the tense relationship with her father. But the delivery just seems a bit off. There is too much explanation of the narrator's life, instead of illustration; I would have preferred to see that life shown in a few more vivid scenes rather than having the narrator tell everything. A little more left unsaid, and a lot less explanation. (Source: Oxford American, February 2009) (Posted 6/9/09)

Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
Kind of an odd story - the first two sections are straight, realistic narrative, the first showing the impending hanging of a Southerner during the Civil War, the second showing some of the protagonist's backstory which lead him to his fate, with both sections being fairly static and heavy on physical description. Then the third section continues in the same realistic vein but ramps up the action as the protagonist suddenly makes his escape from the Northern troops. Or so it seems, as the very last line delivers a devastating twist which abruptly proves the preceding action to be false, and the mere fantasy of a doomed man. Extremely well done, and a story very much ahead of its time. (Source: Project Gutenberg) (Posted 4/29/09)

Nelson Algren, "Entrapment"
I'm not sure "Entrapment" fully works as a short story, but it certainly does so better than its original intended form - a novel, for which Algren wrote 300-something pages but never completed. A full-length novel like this would have been unbearable to read - not because of the writing, which is typically wonderful Algren, often at his very best, but instead the tone. While Algren leavened his grim fiction with black humor and glimmers of slim hope, there is none of that in "Entrapment", just bitterness and regret, as the utterly disconsolate narrator talks in circles as he punishes himself for pushing away the only woman he would ever love. This is a touching and emotionally devastating sketch of a man's life, drawn heavily from Algren's own experience, that gives an intriguing glimpse into the writer's inner self. (Source: Nelson Algren, Entrapment and Other Writings) (Posted 4/5/09)

Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Joy"
"Joy" is the lovely story of Bainish, a revered and beloved rabbi in a small European town who has a crisis of faith after four of his children die of an unnamed disease. The rabbi abandons his leadership of the local synagogue and privately renounces his faith, completely retreating from the world in his stricken grief. But one day he has a vision of his recently-deceased daughter, who admonishes him to return to his religious duties and tells him that she will come back for him (clearly, to lead him to death and the afterlife) after the high holidays. Her appearance (or his hallucination, if you prefer) revives him from his torpor and doubt, and he resumes his duties with an enthusiasm and vigor not seen before, his religious faith restored just before his daughter's return. It's not entirely clear what makes the rabbi suddenly recover his faith - the shock of the vision of his daughter, perhaps, or his realization that a state of doubt at the time of his death will doom him to eternal damnation. Maybe seeing truly is believing - though the rabbi didn't actually see God, he did see a manifestation (or delusion) of deity, and that was enough for him. Faith is a tricky and delicate thing - sometimes, Singer seems to be saying, simply wanting to believe is enough to foster belief - and the rabbi clearly wanted to believe, never abandoning the personal pious rituals even during his time of doubt. Though this is a very religious story (as are all the other stories in this collection), even the non-religious can be heartened by it: for the rabbi's vision of his daughter, as a reminder to him of what was lost, makes him realize what is truly important, and gives him the strength to celebrate life again with the time he still has left. (Source: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories) (Posted 3/3/09)

Colum McCann, "Phreak"
McCann's story revolves around the Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center. The first section is absolutely wonderful in its depiction of the bustling street milieu of Lower Manhattan, as some people congregate on street corners, craning the necks upward in wonderment at the tiny blot in the sky between the towers, while just as many hurry past, intent on reaching their destinations. But the second section falls completely flat as the writer attempts to introduce a bored computer hacker in California who dials in to payphones near the WTC, hoping for a firsthand account of the event. The vivid street scenes of the first section are abandoned for a long and unsatisfying series of choppy, back-and-forth phone dialogue. The third section reverts to the style of the first as it tells of the aerialist's arrest, completing the story but mostly failing to connect with the second section - which, quite unintentionally, drives home the point that the second section is mostly irrelevant. The first section would have made a great short story on its own, but the writer simply took it too far. (Source: The Paris Review, Fall 2008) (Posted 1/19/09)

Franz Kafka, "The Judgment"
Starts slowly (too slowly, I think) but ends swiftly and with a bang. Plenty of father-son dynamic tension, from an aging father who feels shoved aside and a son who may not have been aware that he was the one who shoved. Interesting story, though not the true classic I had been lead to believe it is. (Source: Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories) (Posted 1/18/09)

Mark Costello, The Murphy Stories

I recently read Mark Costello's 1973 story collection The Murphy Stories, and was thoroughly impressed. The stories all center on Murphy, a middling Midwest academic with a troubled personal life. Costello's descriptions of Murphy's unhappy marriage and empty affairs alternate between harrowing and relentlessly sad, so much so that, given the general similarities between Costello and Murphy, I truly hope for the writer's sake that these stories aren't overly autobiographical.

Although the well-anthologized "Murphy's Xmas" is probably the best known story here, I think the strongest is the first, "Callahan's Black Cadillacs", which shows Murphy (unnamed, yet clearly the same protagonist as the later stories) during his difficult midcentury childhood, when his only adult role models are his Republican bureaucrat father (who devotes far more attention to getting political jobs for locals than minding his own family), pious Great Aunt Hatt (who becomes his foster mother after his parents temporarily move to Chicago for his father's wartime job) and boozy vagrant Uncle Mort, all of whom provide less-than-ideal influences on young Murphy and set the stage for the unhappiness of his adult life, as depicted so convincingly in the later stories.

Costello hasn't been widely published, with just two story collections to his name, which is presumably the result of his focus on teaching creative writing, primarily at my alma mater, the University of Illinois (where I happened to hear him give a reading in the mid 1980s). Based on the strength of The Murphy Stories, I'd say his students' gain is clearly the reading public's loss, as I'd really love to see much more of his work than what's out there. Then again, writing stories as emotionally wrenching as these has to be hard on the writer, so maybe he's personally better off for not having written more than he has.

Progressivism Then (As Now)

Edmund Wilson, from "Meditations of a Progressive", circa 1930-31 (collected in The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump):

...Still, one who like to see them come out and say, "Capitalism has got to go. It's just a question of time, so we're trying to make the transition easy." If they're going in for scaring the manufacturers, they might as well scare them good and proper. I suppose they're afraid of scaring their constituents, too. But why do the American progressives have to be tongue-tied with inhibitions? - they're shy of the whole language of real political thought. The surest way to shake an American reformer and make him back down has always been to accuse him of socialism - that's what they did with Bryan, and we ought to be beyond the Bryan stage. I suppose that we still have a lingering feeling that God is going to strike us dead if we admit that our old-fashioned republic isn't the last word in political science. A few high words would do no one any harm.

Clearly things have changed little since Wilson's day. We're still not "beyond the Bryan stage" - any proposal for genuine political reform, for wresting power away from the plutocracy, is met with charges of socialism (as if socialism is really that bad - it's done quite well for the standard of living in many countries in Europe), from which progressive reformers nearly always shrink in fear, weakly retreating from their positions and leaving the status quo intact.

Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records

I just finished reading the terrific Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, The Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small, by John Cook with Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance. It's a history, primarily oral, of Merge, the great indie from Chapel Hill, North Carolina which has brought out so many great albums - not just by Superchunk (McCaughan and Ballance's band) but also Neutral Milk Hotel, Magnetic Fields, Spoon, Arcade Fire and many others - over the past twenty years. Mac and Laura started Merge from nothing, from being merely a vehicle for releasing 7-inch singles by Superchunk (whose first three albums weren't even on Merge) and their obscure Chapel Hill friends to becoming one of the most important record labels around, indie or otherwise. It's truly inspiring to read how Mac and Laura have made Merge into a success completely on their own terms, simply by doing what they love and following their hearts. None of Merge's artists were brought on because of their hitmaking potential, but because they made great music that Mac and Laura wanted to bring to the world, and because of the great music and the label's passion and commitment to doing things the right way, some of Merge's albums became bonafide hits (Arcade Fire and Spoon in particular). As the physical album gives way to the digital delivery of MP3s, the book ends on a somewhat nervous note, as even Mac and Laura seem uncertain that Merge can continue to thrive in the post-CD age, but if anyone in the record industry can pull it off, it's them. I'll certainly be cheering for Merge, the little label that could - and can.

(Special thanks to John Kenyon at Things I'd Rather Be Doing for sending me the book.)

Royko vs. Sinatra

Oh god, this is fantastic: Frank Sinatra's angry letter to Mike Royko, in which Old Blue Eyes threatened Royko after the latter had written a column that criticized the Chicago Police Department for providing free bodyguards to Sinatra during a 1976 visit to the city, will soon be up for auction. Royko's followup column, "Don't Bet Against Sinatra" (or something like that - I lent my copy of Sez Who? Sez Me, which includes the column, to a friend), is one of my very favorite pieces of his. Though I'll follow the auction with interest, I won't be bidding, as the pdf copy is more than enough for me.

And coincidentally, the current owner of the letter, Vie Carlson (the mother of Cheap Trick drummer Bun Carlos), is a very distant shirttail relative of mine, whom I've never met.

Mad Men and Typewriters

Boing Boing links to a long interview with Scott Buckwald, the original prop master for Mad Men who had the delicious task of obtaining props which were faithful to the show's early 1960s era. Writer geek that I am, I couldn't help but enjoy this bit on typewriters:

I thought Mad Men made a big mistake on the typewriters. They knew what the right history was, but they ignored it. The secretaries at that advertising firm would have still been using vintage-style typewriters, but they used IBM Selectrics simply because the producer liked the way they looked and they made less noise on set. So we got many letters about how they were wrong, but, again, that’s his call. And right or wrong, it’s his show. He can do whatever he wants with it.

There was a typewriter repairman in North Hollywood, California. He couldn’t believe it when all of a sudden someone deposited 24 vintage typewriters on his doorstep and said, “Make them look new.” He probably hadn’t had that much work in the last 25 years. He was probably just about ready to hang up the “Going out of business” sign and cursing the arrival of the laptop computer when all of a sudden here I come with 24 typewriters.

The Decline and Likely Fall of Sir Minnes

Well, apparently Sir Minnes is still alive, that is, as of 8/22/1666. It occurred to me that it might be entertaining to follow the gentleman's progress or, given that he's dying, regression. (I don't know how lethal the ague was 433 years ago, but I'm not optimistic for his chances.) So that's exactly what I'll do here, updating this post whenever Pepys makes a new reference to him.

8/22/1666: I perceive (Sir W. Pen) do look after Sir J. Minnes’s place if he dies, and though I love him not nor do desire to have him in, yet I do think [he] is the first man in England for it.
8/26/1666: Being come home, hear that Sir J. Minnes has had a very bad fit all this day, and a hickup do take him, which is a very bad sign, which troubles me truly.

(Almost two weeks have now passed with no further mention of Sir Minnes. But Pepys could hardly be faulted for neglect, as something came up in the meantime that deserved his full attention, namely the Great Fire of London. Check out Pepys' firsthand account of the fire here, starting with his entry of 9/2/1666. Great reading - though my hopes for the already-infirm Sir Minnes, in the midst of this devastation, have dwindled to almost nothing.)

9/17/1666: Thence by coach over the ruines, down Fleete Streete and Cheapside to Broad Streete to Sir G. Carteret, where Sir W. Batten (and Sir J. Minnes, whom I had not seen a long time before, being his first coming abroad) and Lord Bruncker passing his accounts.
9/25/1666: Thence took my wife home to dinner, and then to the office, where Mr. Hater all the day putting in order and entering in a book all the measures that this account of the Navy hath been made up by, and late at night to Mrs. Turner’s, where she had got my wife and Lady Pen and Pegg, and supped, and after, supper and the rest of the company by design gone, Mrs. Turner and her husband did lay their case to me about their lodgings, Sir J. Minnes being now gone wholly to his owne, and now, they being empty, they doubt Sir T. Harvy or Lord Bruncker may look after the lodgings.

(Not sure what to make of this: is Sir Minnes dead or not? What exactly does "gone to his owne" mean? Had he written "gone to his Maker", the meaning would have been obvious. A little help here?)

9/26/1666: Up, and with Sir J. Minnes to St. James’s, where every body going to the House, I away by coach to White Hall...

(Well, apparently Sir Minnes is still alive and well. Although Pepys' mentions of him are limited, Minnes seems to be getting around. Is it possible he kicked the ague?)

9/27/1666: Thence I by coach home to the office, and there intending a meeting, but nobody being there but myself and Sir J. Minnes, who is worse than nothing, I did not answer any body, but kept to my business in the office till night...

("Worse than nothing" sounds like a slam, so Pepys' apparent transition from pity for Minnes to scorn makes me think even more that the latter has fully recovered. I don't even know who Sir Minnes is - I haven't looked for any biographical information, lest I spoil the suspense over his fate - but he appears to be a work colleague of Pepys, so from now on there might be regular and very ordinary references to him. I'm starting to wonder if I should even continue this project - if Sir Minnes lived to a ripe old age and died an ordinary death there may not be much more of interest on the subject.)

10/3/1666: Sir W. Batten, Lord Bruncker, [Sir] W. Pen, come in, but presently went out; and [Sir] J. Minnes come in, and said two or three words from the purpose, but to do hurt; and so away he went also, and left me all the morning with them alone to stand or fall.

(Another mildly negative mention, but this doesn't seem to be going anywhere any longer. Unless Sir Minnes suddenly takes ill again, or escalates into an all-out blood feud with Pepys, I will probably stop following this thread.)

10/6/1666: So he gone I by water to Westminster Hall and thence to St. James’s, and there found [Sir] W. Coventry waiting for me, and I did give him a good account to his mind of the business he expected about extraordinaries and then fell to other talke, among others, our sad condition contracted by want of a Comptroller (footnote: "As Sir John Minnes performed the duties inefficiently, it was considered necessary to take the office from him."); and it was his words, that he believes, besides all the shame and trouble he hath brought on the office, the King had better have given 100,000l. than ever have had him there.

(Oh, great - not only is Minnes apparently healthy again, but now he's been relieved of his Comptroller duties. Which makes me think Pepys will now have little reason to mention him very much.)

10/7/1666: Little Michell and his wife come to dine with us, which they did, and then presently after dinner I with Sir J. Minnes to White Hall, where met by Sir W. Batten and Lord Bruncker, to attend the King and Duke of York at the Cabinet; but nobody had determined what to speak of, but only in general to ask for money...Sir J. Minnes and I home (it raining) by coach, calling only on Sir G. Carteret at his lodging...

(So Minnes is still in the official picture, and he's getting along well enough with Pepys to travel together to White Hall and back. This entry also has an interesting passage on Pepys giving the King and his advisers a rather frank assessment of the condition of the naval fleet, and offending some of his audience in the process. Pepys seems to regret his frankness, and frets a bit over what it might mean to his career.)

10/13/1666: But he (Sir W. Coventry) thinks it not a fit time to be found making of trouble among ourselves, meaning about Sir J. Minnes, who most certainly must be removed, or made a Commissioner, and somebody else Comptroller.

(So I guess Sir Minnes is still Comptroller after all, so I guess I'll continue on. After reading this, I wonder if the Commissioner role was where the politically well-connected but managerially-incompetent hacks were stashed.)

Structured reading

My reading habits are pretty random. I'll finish one book but won't have any inkling of what to read next until I've thoroughly scanned my shelves at home. But that will change, at least momentarily, over the next month or so.

Reading Caleb Crain's fine essay on the Depression's impact on art, I first became aware of Edmund Wilson's American Jitters: A Year of the Slump, a collection of magazine articles written by Wilson which documented his 1930-31 travels around the country surveying the Depression's impact on everyday people. I located the book in my local interlibrary system and put a hold on it, and was just now notified it has arrived at my library. So I've decided to read Wilson's book first, followed by two other Depression-themed books that I own: William Leuchtenberg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (mentioned here) and then Jack Conroy's proletarian novel The Disinherited, which I bought five years ago after years of hunting, only to let it languish unread on my shelf ever since. Conroy was a friend and even a mentor to my hero Nelson Algren, and it's inexcusable for me to have avoided his well-regarded novel this long.

So there you have it - three books that look at the Depression in greatly varying perspectives. I'm hoping each book will inform and illuminate the others while I read.

Vintage Vonnegut

This one's for Julie: Kurt Vonnegut's "The Big Trip Up Yonder". It's up on Project Gutenberg, free of copyright, which apparently was not renewed after its original publication in the January 1954 edition of Galaxy Science Fiction.

Chicago: A Biography

Local historian Dominic Pacyga has a new book out, Chicago: A Biography, from University of Chicago Press. Pacyga is interviewed in the video clip above by Phil Ponce on Chicago Tonight. I greatly enjoyed his Chicago: City of Neighborhoods which I read several years ago, and am looking forward to this one. And check out the gallery of photographs from the book - I especially like this one, of the "Burnt District Coffee House", one of the many fledgling businesses to arise in the ashes - literally - of the Chicago Fire. Nothing represents the city's relentless commercial ambitions quite like some chap who opens a coffee house amidst all of that rubble and devastation.

A pantheon of one's own

This is a very welcomed development: The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. The nominees for the inaugural induction class of 2010 are the usual local luminaries, plus several more that I must admit I've never heard of: Gwendolyn Brooks, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Harriet Monroe, Mike Royko, Carl Sandburg, Lorraine Hansberry, Ben Hecht, Shel Silverstein, Jane Addams, Leon Forrest, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, James T. Farrell, Ida B. Wells, John Callaway, Edna Ferber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Franklin Rosemont, Fenton Johnson, Oscar Brown, Jr., Cyrus Colter and Norman Maclean.

I don't have an official vote, but if I did my votes for the Original Six would go to Brooks, Algren, Bellow, Terkel, Royko and Sandburg. And once the old guard is adequately represented, I expect future inductees to include Stuart Dybek (who is one of the current judges), Joe Meno and Aleksandar Hemon, among others.

(Via Robert Duffer.)

"Easier than not doing 'em."

Right now I'm reading Matthew Sharpe's The Sleeping Father but I still haven't really engaged with it. Part of the problem is the characters, none of whom are particularly sympathetic to cheer for, nor sufficiently loathsome to hate. The closest I've come to being drawn to a character is Tim, the boozing, chain-smoking grandfather of Chris and Cathy Schwartz who first appears about halfway through the book. I particularly like this understated, well-crafted passage, as the grandkids and their mother visit Tim, who is anything but a graceful host.

Tim uttered a one-syllable toast that none of them could make out, upended a shot of scotch over his wide-open mouth, popped a beer, sipped it, lit a cigarette, smoked it.

Cathy said, "You're amazing."

"I know, I know," Tim said meditatively.

She stared at him for a minute with his slicked-back white hair and his gaunt, white-stubbled face. "Why do you do all that stuff, Grandpa Tim?"

"All what?"

It seemed to Cathy that right now he was doing about five decadent things, but she could only name two: "Smoke, drink."

"Easier than not doing 'em."

Trouble is, after accidentally glancing several chapters ahead, I already know that Tim won't be around much longer. Which will leave me with just the rest of the characters again.

"Zeitoun"

Boing Boing is hosting a giveway of Dave Eggers' latest acclaimed work of nonfiction, Zeitoun, which follows the life of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant fighting through the natural devastation and bureaucratic morass wrought in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. The contest seeks only an original haiku on the book's subject. With the entry period remaining open until Saturday and there already being 120 entries, I highly doubt I'll be one of the winners, so to avoid losing my entry to the backblog void that is Boing Boing's comments section, here's what I came up with:

Zeitoun
Water everywhere,
But nary a drop to drink.
Zeitoun navigates.

William Walsh, Questionstruck

William Walsh's Questionstruck is a strange book. The subtitle says it all: A Collection of Question-Based Texts Derived from the Books of Calvin Trillin. Indeed, Walsh has methodically extracted all of the interrogatives from Trillin's first 25 books. Sometimes, when Trillin's questions were grouped closely together, the passages read easily, but when the questions were more spread it was much harder to comprehend. But even in the latter case it was intriguing to read. More than anything else, this reads like an extended advertisement for Trillin's entire career, which as a big fan of the writer I have no problem with. Indeed, Walsh's book has whetted my appetite to read even more Trillin, particularly Runestruck (which awaits on my shelf), Floater (an early novel which I've learned is available in my local library system) and Remembering Denny.

Dover Book Shop, 1945

Photographs of Dover Book Shop, 102nd and Broadway in Manhattan, taken by Sam Gottscho in 1945. Love that stylish Midcentury Modern design.

(Via Shorpy, which has full-sized versions of these images here and here.)

"...gulping down wheat berries and bean sprouts?"

William Walsh's Questionstruck consists entirely of interrogatives extracted from Calvin Trillin's first twenty-five books. Here's a particularly fine group of Trillin's questions (from 1978's Alice, Let's Eat: Further Adventures of a Happy Eater) on two of his favorite subjects, cuisine and travel:

But was I really ready for health food? Aside from the fact that it has always seemed bad for my health, what would people say? What would Fats Goldberg, the pizza baron, someone who believes that green vegetables should be consumed only by small furry animals, say if I answered his inevitable questions about eating in England by telling him I hung around health-food shops, gulping down wheat berries and bean sprouts? Could I really discuss whole-grain bread with chili heads and knish freaks? Could we have become a connoisseur of Stuff-Stuff with Heavy? Who would have thought it of a man who travels with Arthur Bryant's barbecue sauce? Could you please pass the sour cream?

The horror! The horror!

I've never read anything by Dan Brown, and after cringing my way through this I now have absolutely no need to ever do so: Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences. My gawd, that's some truly horrible writing.

Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness

Just finished reading Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. Great subject matter - a journalistic study of three underground economies: marijuana, pornography and illegal immigrant labor - but the book doesn't really come across as a coherent whole, just three separate subjects unified by little more than a short and less-than-synthesizing concluding section. Each section was originally published as articles in The Atlantic, and the book indeed feels like it was just cobbled together from those articles, with the conclusion tacked on at the end. Good writing, though, and an interesting read for anyone intrigued by how illegal economies can flourish in America despite the offical disapproval of society.

Quote

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."
- Virginia Woolf

Fear and Booking in Milwaukee

Julie recaps our weekend trip to Milwaukee, my elaborations on which will be limited to the literary. First off, when she calls Downtown Books "ridiculously wonderful" she is not exaggerating at all. This is, hands-down, one of the very best used bookstores I've ever visited - two-plus stories with a broad range of seemingly every possible subject matter, low prices and a very helpful staff. Naturally I was drawn to the fiction (which takes up much of the first floor), and just thirty minutes of wallowing light-headed amidst the stacks caused my self-imposed ban on buying any more books this year to evaporate - POOF - into the atmosphere. I bought two books on Friday and two more on our return visit on Saturday:

+ Budd Schulberg, The Harder They Fall: I've expressed my deep admiration for Schulberg's writing here repeatedly, and I've had my eye out for this one, his highly-regarded boxing novel. Though normally I refrain from buying used books by living writers that I greatly admire (buying a new copy instead means well-deserved money in their pockets), Schulberg's recent passing left me with no qualms over picking this up.

+ John McGahern, Amongst Women: I enjoyed McGahern's debut, The Barracks, when I read it last year, and have looked forward to reading his later, more mature works, of which Amongst Women is often considered to be his best. I had hoped to find this on clearance at Brent Books (formerly across the street from my office) when that store was liquidating, but no luck, so I was very glad to find it here.

+ Peter George, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: George was one of the screenwriters (with Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern) of the great and hilarious antiwar film, and until now I hadn't even been aware of a fiction adaptation of the story. I've had good experiences reading novel versions of some of my favorite films (including On The Waterfront and The Manchurian Candidate), so I thought this one was worth a try - especially for only $1.99. This book wasn't even on the shelf yet, but when I saw it on a cart waiting to be shelved I plucked it off right away.

+ Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square: I've read multiple praisings of this book (mainly in the Guardian, I think) which has been characterized as one of the greatest novels about drinking and drunkenness ever written. Sedate family man that I've become, I've always had a feeling that I'd love this book in a voyeuristic way, but until now I haven't been able to find it in stores or even in my library system. So when I stumbled it across it while looking for some of the few Knut Hamsun titles I don't own, I knew Hamilton's book had to be mine.

So I picked up those four, plus Julie bought Kent Haruf's Where You Once Belonged and Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden (both of which I know I'll read eventually) for both of us, plus several more for herself, as did Maddie. Downtown Books is a truly great store - in fact, I would gladly drive to Milwaukee for the sole purpose of visiting there again. Once I hack away a little more of the book logjam around myself, that is.

Okay, so the two visits to Downtown Books account for the "booking" in this blog post's title. The "fear" refers to our visit to another used store, Renaissance Book Shop. There, in a huge, musty, dimly-lit building that could easily be mistaken for a condemned property, books were jammed into every conceivable location - piled on the floor, stacked on top of display cabinets whose contents could only be guessed at, and overhung from the tops of shelves like avalanche-ready boulders on a cliff wall. Had the hermetic Collyer brothers decided to crawl out of their rat's nest and try their hand at bookselling, this is exactly what their store would have looked like. That's me far in the background of the photo above, in the periodicals section of the basement, which was filled with tables and cabinets of old magazines and trade journals, most of which appeared to have been there for years, completely untouched. After our first-floor experience, I wouldn't have even dared venturing to the basement, except that Maddie had to go to the bathroom and the store's only facilities were down there. (She's a brave child - there's no way I would have used that bathroom, not even standing up.) It looks like the owners of the store have been accumulating books for decades without any particular concern whether or not the books ever make it out again, which I find admirable in an odd sort of way. We were all a bit overwhelmed and freaked out by the experience, so much so that, despite being obsessive book buyers, when we returned to the fresh air and sunlight of Plankinton Avenue we had no new purchases in hand. And were uncharacteristically okay with that.

Quote

"To me, writing is entirely mysterious. If I didn't believe it was a mystery, the whole thing wouldn't be worthwhile. I don't know not just how something is going to end, but what the next couple of lines are going to be."
- William Trevor

"A Bar on North Avenue"

Great piece at Granta by Roger Ebert about O'Rourke's, his old hangout near Old Town. It's pretty safe to say that the boisterous era of journalism that he so lovingly describes will never be seen again. I've never read Granta, but I'll definitely pick up the next issue, which will be entirely devoted to Chicago and is already garnering plenty of local praise. Really looking forward to it.

T.S. Eliot and the day job

Interesting tidbit on T.S. Eliot: the Bloomsbury folks once offered to set up an endowment that would pay for Eliot's living expenses, thus allowing him to quit his bank job and devote his full attention and energy to his writing. Eliot declined.

"This idea that Eliot should be freed from the drudgery of work misses the point that he was actually very interested in the minutiae of every day life - he was a commentator on the quotidian, and really thrived on the routine of office life at Lloyd's and then later at Faber."

Bold move, one which I'm not entirely sure I could make myself. Not that anyone is offering me anything like that, of course - in this economy, I'm just blessed that my employer is still offering me a paycheck - but such an offer would sorely tempt me to quit my own banking job. But while I generally detest my job (which is one reason I'm blogging right now, at 1:09 in the afternoon, smack dab in the middle of the workday), I also recognize the great value to fiction writers of being immersed in the working world and staying connected with everyday life, instead of holing up in a garret to sweat over one's magnum opus or lounging in the echo chamber of cafe society.

Summer of Classics 2009 - The Recap

It's August 31st, and another Summer of Classics has ended. This year I read five undeniable classics which spanned more than a hundred years, from before the Civil War to after World War II, when the world and especially literature changed completely. Though I admired all five, some I liked much more than others, as I hope to adequately impart below.

Henry David Thoreau: Walden, or Life in the Woods
Thoreau writes magnificently of the natural environment around his cottage at Walden Pond, observing everything in sharp, patient detail and yet still conveying the ecstacy he felt every day. However, his philosophy - basically, that everyone should renounce the materialistic excesses of civilization and retreat to the simplicity of nature - is naive and leaves much to be desired. For one thing, not everyone has the luxury of doing so, and Thoreau wouldn't have either were it not for the landowner who let the writer live on his woodlot, or his generous Concord friends. And if everyone did have that luxury, Thoreau's beloved woods would have been overrun with neophtye naturalists from town, destroying the serene solitude that he cherished so much.

George Orwell, 1984
A truly great and terrifying story of a faceless, bureaucratic, ultra-controlling society, where individuals are powerless and history itself is regularly erased and rewritten to serve the government's needs. The book is every bit as relevant to contemporary times as when it was written, nearly sixty years ago. Read read read this book if you haven't already, and if you have, then read it again.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
In sharp contrast to Orwell, Huxley's opus is comic in tone, a narrative mode I certainly didn't expect from subject matter such as this, and one that certainly lightens the mood. But the book suffers from two drawbacks: first, a lack of focus in terms of a central character, which shifts from Lenina to Bernard Marx and finally to John the Savage, and prevented me from fully engaging with the narrative; and second, the fact that Huxley's dystopia (which prominently features copius quantities of sex and sedatives) sounds infinitely more pleasant than Orwell's, which blunts much of the author's cautionary message. If you are forced to live in a dystopia, you could do a lot worse than Huxley's.

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
After the weighty dystopias of Orwell and Huxley, I gratefully turned to Twain's comic masterpiece of Mississippi River adventuring. And in that sense the book did not disappoint - Huck is one of the greatest characters in American fiction, and the book is never less than thoroughly entertaining. But, odd as it might sound, I would have liked the book to be more about Huck, and less about the characters (particularly "the king" and "the duke") around him. I was touched by Huck's moral quandry over his responsibility to the runaway slave Jim versus societal norms, but would have preferred to see more of his inner psychology.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
After a momentary literary infatuation with Emma Bovary, I quickly soured on her, as the instances of her deceit, greed, infidelity, shallowness, and brattiness rapidly piled up. The book itself didn't work for me either, as it lacked even a single sympathetic character to identify with - certainly not Emma, of course, but not the clueless cuckold Charles, the naive wooer Leon, the conniving lothario Rodolphe nor the pompous blowhard Homais either. And the book was much too long, running far beyond my point of caring any longer and yet still not long enough to see Emma suffer the karmic comeuppance that she so thoroughly deserved. That comeuppance might have redeemed the book for me, and when it didn't arrive the book was irretrievably lost. And the overwhelmingly sad final pages didn't help matters either.

When Nelson met Simone

Interesting Algren item at the Chicago Reader.

"He also is barely able to penetrate her pronounced French accent, or understand her broken English, as she enthuses over the 'thrillings' (thrillers) she has seen at the movies. But language is unimportant. He finds her attractive...The description she has been given of him, unstable, moody, neurotic, inclines her in his favour..."

Personally, the terms "unstable, moody, neurotic" would repel me from a woman I've never met, but I guess Algren's attraction is emblematic of his offbeat and warped sensibility that I admire so much about his life and work. Incidentally, Beauvoir first arrived in Chicago on February 21, but I wonder if their first date was on the same day, or later. By coincidence Julie and I had our first date on February 21, 1997. Beauvoir was the (mostly unrequited) love of Algren's life, and I think it would be very cool if both their relationship and ours started on a February 21. I'll have to check out that book to find out.

Quote

"I got on with the task of turning myself into a brief professional writer. The term professional is not meant to imply a high standard of commitment and attainment: it meant then, as it still does, the pursuit of a trade or calling to the end of paying the rent and buying liquor. I leave the myth of inspiration and agonised creative inaction to the amateurs."
- Anthony Burgess

(My lifetime earnings from writing haven't been enough to cover even one-third of a single monthly mortgage payment, but I've also never believed in the myth of inspiration and my creative inaction has grown steadily less agonized over time, so I'm not sure where I would fit in the Burgess continuum.)

(Via About Last Night.)

Boring Update

You might recall the first entry, from 2007, of "In Search of the World's Most Boring Book Title" by Paul Collins, which squared When Mother Lets Us Make Paper Box Furniture against 75 Exciting Vegetables for Your Garden. Well, Collins has finally posted his long-awaited followup, which pits When Mother Lets Us... (also my choice from the first round) against The Baking Powder Controversy. For me, the most boring honor still goes to When Mother Lets Us... because, frankly, I'm thoroughly intrigued by the other title, and am now eager to know what could possibly be controversial about baking powder.

"A Book Lover’s Guide to IKEA seating"

Jimmy Chen is a very funny man.

This is a futurist looking chair which will compliment books about our future: Brave New World, 1984 (um, that’s ages ago, but still), Fahrenheit 451, The Road, etc. All books about the future are dystopian because nobody wants to read a predictable book about the future. Imagine a book called “2010″ about a guy who goes to work everyday and drinks other people’s sodas in the fridge and drafts stories veiled in Microsoft Outlook as work-related emails, and craps as much as he can at work in order to deplete toilet paper, to “get back” at his employers for the low salary. That book would be boring, right? (Any publishers interested please email me.)

And that "All books about the future are dystopian..." is a great bit of insight that I wish I'd thought up myself.

What happened to Sir Minnes?

I've been following the daily entries in Samuel Pepy's Diary for a while now, albeit not intensively. Maybe the sometimes archaic language has put me off, or the timely references I don't recognize, but reading the diary has been a very casual activity. But this entry from August 20, 1666 really grabbed my attention, in its mention of the stricken Sir. J. Minnes. (I've bolded the passages pertaining to him.)

Waked this morning, about six o’clock, with a violent knocking at Sir J. Minnes’s doore, to call up Mrs. Hammon, crying out that Sir J. Minnes is a-dying. He come home ill of an ague on Friday night. I saw him on Saturday, after his fit of the ague, and then was pretty lusty. Which troubles me mightily, for he is a very good, harmless, honest gentleman, though not fit for the business. But I much fear a worse may come, that may be more uneasy to me. Up, and to Deptford by water, reading “Othello, Moore of Venice,” which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play, but having so lately read “The Adventures of Five Houres,” it seems a mean thing. Walked back, and so home, and then down to the Old Swan and drank at Betty Michell’s, and so to Westminster to the Exchequer about my quarter tallies, and so to Lumbard Streete to choose stuff to hang my new intended closet, and have chosen purple. So home to dinner, and all the afternoon till almost midnight upon my Tangier accounts, getting Tom Wilson to help me in writing as I read, and at night W. Hewer, and find myself most happy in the keeping of all my accounts, for that after all the changings and turnings necessary in such an account, I find myself right to a farthing in an account of 127,000l. This afternoon I visited Sir J. Minnes, who, poor man, is much impatient by these few days’ sickness, and I fear indeed it will kill him.

I'm struck by how Pepys suddenly introduces Minnes and his great concern for the gentleman, but then just as abruptly goes on to relate the innocuous remainder of his day, which then concludes with his visit to Minnes and his startling layman's diagnosis. So what happened to him? Did he finally succumb to the ague? Yes, I know I could easily Google the answer, but that would seem like cheating. I'm simply going to wait and let Pepys tell me himself.

Hail, hail!

What do you know? A National Book Award winner that I've actually read: William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow. I read the book last year, and absolutely loved it. Maxwell packs so much meaning and description into so few words that if it's possible that a slender book of just 144 pages can qualify as an epic, then it's this very book. A great one -read it.

Browsing the list, I see that I've only read three of them: The Man With the Golden Arm, Invisible Man and So Long, See You Tomorrow, with several more winners (The Moviegoer, The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor, All the Pretty Horses, Cold Mountain, Waiting) on my shelf and due to be read. One might think this dearth of award-winning books might suggest I'm less than well-read, but given that awards and official hosannas have never meant much to me (I haven't seen most of the Best Picture Oscar winners, either) it doesn't bother me at all.

Boy's gotta have it.

R. Sikoryak's Masterpiece Comics.

Masterpiece Comics adapts a variety of classic literary works with the most iconic visual idioms of twentieth-century comics. Dense with exclamation marks and lurid colors, R. Sikoryak’s parodies remind us of the sensational excesses of the canon, or, if you prefer, of the economical expressiveness of classic comics from Batman to Garfield. In "Blond Eve,” Dagwood and Blondie are ejected from the Garden of Eden into their archetypal suburban home; Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray is reimagined as a foppish Little Nemo; and Camus’s Stranger becomes a brooding, chain-smoking Golden Age Superman. Other source material includes Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, bubblegum wrappers, superhero comics, kid cartoons, and more.

What really grabbed me was Charlie Brown as Gregor Samsa. Genius!

"On the proper way to use this book"

The image above is a page from the 1915 book "1001 Places to Sell Manuscripts", edited by William R. Kane. On behalf of aspiring writers everywhere, I am insulted. "On the proper way to use this book"? Don't you think, Mr. Kane, that any writers who have enough intelligence and savvy to not only write, but to produce a book-length manuscript which they then want to publish, probably already know how to "use" your book? Chances are they've already seen a book or two in their lives (otherwise how would they know what a manuscript is supposed to look like?) and are familiar with how tables of contents, indexes, etc. work. Also, thanks for the reminder to "take time to read this book through carefully from cover to cover" as I'm sure your magnum opus is fully deserving of a very careful, studious reading. And I'll definitely take time to do so, because like most writers I'm a bit slow and will have to pore over each word, one by one, marking my place with my dirty thumb and trying not to drool from my tongue that's sticking out of the corner of my mouth.

Okay, I'll admit that this book (basically the Writers Market guide of its day) was probably very helpful to writers, but still, the condescension of this introductory page was really unnecessary.

(Via The Rumpus.)

A christening party gets out of hand

This brief passage from Madame Bovary has to be the most entertaining chistening party scene I've ever read.

On the evening of the ceremony there was a grand dinner; the curé [parish priest] was present; there was much excitement. Monsieur Homais towards liqueur-time began singing "Le Dieu des bonnes gens" [an anti-clerical poem by Berangér]. Monsieur Leon sang a barcarolle, and Madame Bovary, senior, who was godmother, a romance of the time of the Empire; finally, M. Bovary, senior, insisted on having the child brought down, and began baptizing it with a glass of champagne that he poured over its head. This mockery of the first of the sacraments made the Abbe Bournisien angry; old Bovary replied by a quotation from "La Guerre des Dieux" [a blasphemous poem from 1799]; the curé wanted to leave; the ladies implored, Homais interfered; and they succeeded in making the priest sit down again, and he quietly went on with the half-finished coffee in his saucer.

I particularly like the sly inclusion of "towards liqueur-time," which is being quite generous to Homais, who was likely already well into his cups by the time he started singing such a socially inappropriate verse. But this passage also points out one of the frustrating things I've found about Flaubert, that being his tendency for summation instead of illustration. I would have loved to read this scene spread out over an entire chapter or at least several pages instead of just a single paragraph, one that played out more the tensions between the sacreligious Homais and the borderline-profrane Bovary senior and the rest of the otherwise polite gathering.

An update on my woeful short story reading progress

You may recall the goal I set for myself for 2009 - read 25 short stories during the year (with each story from a different book, no more than three stories I've already read, and no more than three authors I've already read), which seemed like a modest goal at the time.

Not modest enough, apparently.

We're already halfway through August, but I've only read seven stories so far. (True, I've reviewed them all, which I hadn't anticipated, but that aspect is nothing to hand my proverbial hat on.) So now I still have 18 stories to read but only 20 weeks left in the year, so instead of my original leisurely pace of two stories per month, now I'll have to basically read and review a story every week for the rest of the year. I think I'm up to it, maybe. I seldom achieve any of my literary resolutions, but this seems like such a reasonably attainable one that there's not much excuse for falling short.

So with a renewed sense of purpose I'm now trudging forward. At least I'm on track with the limitations I listed above - I haven't re-read any stories yet, but I've already used up my allotment of writers I've read previously (Algren, Bierce, Kafka) while the other writers (Spencer Dew, Randa Jarrar, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Colum McCann) had previously been new to me. So now I'll have to venture into completely uncharted writer territory.

Next up is Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O."

Quote

"James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can."
- Samuel Beckett

Crushworthy?

An early passage from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (which I just started yesterday) that describes one of the few private scenes between Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault prior to their marriage:

One day he got there about three o'clock. Everybody was in the fields. He went into the kitchen, but did not at once catch sight of Emma; the outside shutters were closed. Through the chinks of the wood the sun sent across the flooring long fine rays that were broken at the corners of the furniture and trembled along the ceiling. Some flies on the table were crawling up the glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the dregs of the cider. The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace, and touched with blue the cold cinders. Between the window and the hearth Emma was sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders.

After the fashion of country folks she asked him to have something to drink. He said no; she insisted, and at last laughingly offered to have a glass of liqueur with him. So she went to fetch a bottle of curacao from the cupboard, reached down two small glasses, filled one to the brim, poured scarcely anything into the other, and, after having clinked glasses, carried hers to her mouth. As it was almost empty she bent back to drink, her head thrown back, her lips pouting, her neck on the strain. She laughed at getting none of it, while with the tip of her tongue passing between her small teeth she licked drop by drop the bottom of her glass.

Rowwwwl. I recently did a literature Q&A on Facebook in which one of the questions asked if I ever had a crush on a literary character. Though I answered then that there wasn't anyone I could think of, now I'm thinking it just might be Emma Bovary.

Office work-stopper of the day

Because I'm all about unselfish public service, I give you the P.G. Wodehouse random quotation generator. Here are some of my favorites, so far:

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say "When!''
- Very Good, Jeeves (1930), "Jeeves and the Impending Doom"

I was behind the desk, crouching on the carpet and trying to breathe solely through the pores.
- Thank You, Jeeves (1934)

The Sheridan Apartment House stands in the heart of New York's Bohemian and artistic quarter. If you threw a brick from any of its windows, you would be certain to brain some rising interior decorator, some Vorticist sculptor or a writer of revolutionary vers libre.
- The Small Bachelor (1927)

One of those ghastly literary lunches...This one was to honour Emma Lucille Agee who wrote that dirty novel that's been selling in millions in America...About fifteen of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.
- The Girl in Blue (1970)

Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing glove.
- Very Good, Jeeves (1930), "Jeeves and the Old School Chum''

I now realize, of course, that I must add Wodehouse to my precariously teetering to-read list.

(Via The Book Bench.)

"The other side of the Burnham Plan"

Daniel Burnham is getting a lot of attention here in Chicago right now, with 2009 being the centennial of his landmark Plan of Chicago. I've been meaning to read Carl Smith's well-received The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City.

But I've now come across another book, What Would Jane Say? City-Building Women and a Tale of Two Chicagos, by Janice Metzger, which postulates how the great social reformer (and Burnham contemporary) Jane Addams would have responded to the Plan. On the blog of Lake Claremont Press, Erik Germani writes:

Instrumental as they were in shaping the development of Chicago’s neighborhoods and creating its social institutions, the women were left on the sidelines while Burnham and the Commercial Club laid the course of Chicago’s future. The men knew that there was no profit in catering to the poor and downtrodden, as they certainly wouldn’t be footing the bill for their grandiose designs. So the Plan of Chicago was published, representing only the voices of the elite.

Though the plan’s drafters may have been uninterested in what Addams had to say, Janice Metzger cares, and makes the case that we should care, too. Her book, What Would Jane Say? City-Building Women and a Tale of Two Chicagos, breaks down the plan (and details its break downs), then imagines how the women would have responded to it, substantiating her speculation with detailed research.

Sounds like Metzger's book would be an excellent companion piece to Smith's. I think I'll read Smith first, and then Metzger as a sort of rebuttal.

Rockwell Kent and Moby-Dick

Beautiful collection here of Rockwell Kent's illustrations for Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick, accompanied by a nice essay by Larry Weinberg that draws numerous parallels between Kent and Melville. I've been a big fan of Kent ever since reading his journal Wilderness while staying overnight on Fox Island in Resurrection Bay, Alaska on my honeymoon (the book documents Kent's own, extended stay on the island). I've never read Moby-Dick but have long been meaning to, and when I finally buy a copy it will definitely be an edition that includes Kent's gorgeous illustrations.

(Via Mark Athitakis.)

Andrew Ervin

I'm very pleased to see the formal announcement of my friend Andrew Ervin's fiction debut Extraordinary Renditions: 3 Novellas, which is coming out on Coffee House Press sometime next year. I've really enjoyed Drew's stories as well as our often lengthy email conversations during the past several years, and am greatly anticipating his book. Seeing such glowing praise from the likes of Chris Abani and J. Robert Lennon whets my appetite even further.

Cahokia

Timothy R. Pauketa's book, Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi, sounds utterly fascinating.

In retrospect, Pauketat sees an even more important conclusion emerging from Mound 72 and other Cahokia excavations: evidence of a metropolitan Native American society "characterized by inequality, power struggles and social complexity." These people were neither half-feral savages nor eco-Edenic villagers; they had lived and died in a violent and sophisticated society with its own well-defined view of the universe.

Though I'm a native and lifelong resident of Illinois, I've spent almost no time in the southern part of the state. But the Cahokia Mounds site is definitely one place I'd love to visit.