Moving!

Hi everyone. I’m moving the location of this blog. The new link is Here. Slowly, painfully, I will move the content from this blog to the new one.

Don’t ask why I’m doing this. There’s really no good explanation. It’s madness.

Pocket Books Reviews, No. 6

The Cossacks

By Leo Tolstoy

“The Cossacks,” a novella by Leo Tolstoy, tells the story of Olenin, a city-dweller who enlists to fight with the Cossacks in the Caucases. Like a lot of great literary heroes, Olenin is fundamentally misguided. He doesn’t understand himself, or the people he has chosen to live among, and his idealistic pronouncements are undermined by the action of the story as it unfolds. “The Cossacks” is also a vivid portrait of the Cossacks, who, it turns out, were hipster frontier mercenaries, the bike messengers of their age, with baggy coats and saddle bags, the fastest horses and the finest rifles. Who knew?

It’s another paperback, a Penguin Classic with a cool black cover graced by a nice detail from a work by Franz Roubaud, and if you head to the store you’ll notice all the Penguin Classics are on sale, probably because next year’s catalog is about to be released.

Charge!

The Nervous Breakdown

Brad Listi asked me to join the Nervous Breakdown, and I filed my first entry this week. It’s here.

Also, if you are in Oregon, I hope you’ll vote for my good friend Steve Novick, the next Democratic Senator from Oregon.

Kurt Vonnegut R.I.P.

I don’t really have a story about Kurt Vonnegut, except that when I read Breakfast of Champions in high school I was happily surprised to learn that you could write an entire novel of jokes, amusing observations, and primitive drawings. And when I read Slaughterhouse Five last year (I’m embarrassed to say it was for the first time), I was stunned by the strength, beauty, and simplicity of its language. It’s really one of the most beautiful books ever written.

So the story I have is only about Kurt Vonnegut in its last few lines. Hopefully it will be entertaining enough that you’ll hang on until then, and when we get there I’ve also appended a Gillian Welch song that is really about Elvis, but seems somehow appropriate to the occasion.

Anyway, when I was living in Seattle I went with friends to a concert by a choral group, and after we went to the Sazerac Bar in the Hotel Monaco downtown. Around 11 they started closing down the restaurant and setting something up. This was during the Seattle Film Festival. What was going on? we asked. It was the after party for “Breakfast of Champions,” a waitress explained, starring Nick Nolte, Albert Finney, Barbara Hershey, and Anthony Michael Hall, all of whom would be showing up soon.

We were in the bar, separated from the restaurant — and hence the party — by a low wrought-iron partition. But we figured out, after a few drinks, that on a return trip from the bathroom you could just drift into the party if you wanted. So although there was a guest list at the front door and a line of people trying to talk their way in, we had access to the party.

My friends didn’t want to go in, but they wanted me to, and they wanted to watch my adventure from their safe perch in the bar by the wrought-iron partition. There were preternaturally tan young women roaming the party. They had pig tails held tight with rubber bands, and those cool black half-frame glasses that had just become popular.

As soon as I got into the party I realized two things. One was, I was going to have to find someone to talk to, to give myself some credibility (so I wouldn’t be standing there alone). Two was, I was going to have to ask a lot of questions of the people I talked to, so they wouldn’t ask who I was, and find out I didn’t really belong there.

I looked around and saw a tall guy standing uncomfortably near by. I went up and introduced myself. Turned out he was a lawyer for Real Networks, the software company that makes Real Player. They had been an investor in the film. I quickly abandoned my second rule for this conversation and told this guy about how I was an environmental lawyer, and a writer on the side, blah, blah, blah. He was happy to have another lawyer to hang out with, and he introduced me around to a number of the people at the party. When I talked to them, however, I peppered them with a series of questions. It became a game, to see how long they would go without asking who I was. These were Hollywood people. It was challenging, but it was also doable.

I just remembered that Bruce Willis was also in the movie. That’s important. Anyway, finally, I met the director. Alan something. I should also mention that all of the actors were over in another part of the room, keeping to themselves, and for some reason I never went over there.

Anyway, I meet the director, and before he can ask a question I tell him my theory about Bruce Willis. “Bruce Willis is the most under-rated actor in America,” I tell him. This was back in the 90’s, when Willis had only done Die Hard and few other movies, so this claim had a plausible amount of novelty to it. “No one realizes it,” I said, “but he’s a tremendously gifted dramatic actor.” Then I talked about how his tough-guy persona was like a mask that kept everyone from seeing the real Bruce Willis, and that the real Bruce Willis was nothing like the world thought of him, and also how ironic and tragic this was. Maybe there was something of Vonnegut in this, I don’t know.

“That’s amazing!” he said, “because that’s what my movie’s about!”

Then he talked for about 20 minutes about what his movie was about. I don’t really remember much of it, and I never saw the film. There were three of us talking to him, though, and near the end of our conversation he pointed to each of us in turn, touching each of us on the chest and saying “You’re part of Hollywood! You know what I’m talking about!”

Also, as we were talking, one of the pig-tailed women brushed by, ran her hand across my back, and gave me a look over her shoulder as she walked away.

My little adventure had been a success. I could go back to my friends.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb if I say that the movie version of “Breakfast of Champions” is not remembered as one of Hollywood’s great achievements. As I said, I never saw it. Maybe it’s a great work of art. But under the glamour, the party did have a strange tension to it. Nick Nolte didn’t even dress up. He showed up, and hung out, in his bath robe. So I’ve always assumed that the movie version didn’t exactly work, that it was the work of a talented group of people who couldn’t quite grab onto and recreate Vonnegut’s magic.

I’ve thought a lot about that party over the years. How funny it was that I snuck in, how I carried off the charade of belonging to a crowd I had no license to run with. But it didn’t occur to me until the other day that the crowning irony of the evening was that the entire scene — the fancy hors d’ouvres, the Hollywood people who talked only about themselves, the self-absorbed director and the twenty-somethings in pig-tails and funky glasses — had been inspired by a writer who hated just the kind of showy pretense the party exemplified. Poor Kurt Vonnegut. If he only could have seen the party thrown in his honor that night at the downtown Monaco Hotel. It would have been one more thing to cause him to merrily give up hope, and gleefully declare the human race a failed experiment of people who wanted to impress rather than love each other, and who could only conjure the elusive beauty of art by accident, if they could at all. He would have been fascinated by the whole scene, I think, equally enlivened and appalled.

Here is the song. Hold yourself and sway a little as you sing it.

Elvis Presley Blues

By Gillian Welch

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died
Day that he died

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died
Day that he died

Just a country boy who combed his hair
Put on a shirt his mother made
and went on the air

And he shook it like a chorus girl
He shook it like a Harlem queen
He shook it like a midnight rambler, baby
Like you never seen
Like you never seen

I was thinking that night about Elivs
Day that he died
Day that he died

I was thinking that night about Elivs
Day that he died
Day that he died

Now he took it all out in black and white
Grabbed his wand in the other hand
And he held on tight

And he shook it like a hurricane
He shook it for to make it break
He shook it like a holy roller, baby
With his soul at stake
With his soul at stake

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died
Day that he died

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died
Day that he died

He was all alone
In a long decline
Thinking how happy John henry was
When he fell down dying

And he shook till it rang like silver
He shook it till it shined like gold
He shook it and it beat that steam drill, baby,
Well bless my soul
Bless my soul

He shook it and it beat that steam drill, baby,
Well bless my soul
What’s wrong with me?

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died
Day that he died

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died
Day that he died

Just a country boy
Who combed his hair
Put on a shirt his mother made
And went on the air

And he shook it like a chorus girl
Shook like a Harlem queen
Shook it like a midnight rambler, baby,
Like you’d never seen
Like you’d never seen

David Brooks: Scourge of Satan?

It’s not just that if you draw little horns on his head and give him a goatee, David Brooks starts to look eerily menacing. It’s also that all of his New York Times columns follow the same evil formula: Brooks introduces a high-sounding bit of intellectual, literary, or historical analysis to mask a devious partisan agenda.

The shortcomings in Brooks’ columns are as predictable as his formula. His analysis is always embarrassingly shallow — so superficial he sounds almost mystical. Not down to the level of numerology and the phases of the moon, but close. And his intellectualism is not honest. Invariably its purpose is to confuse, rather than enlighten, the reader.

Today’s column is a case in point (subscription required, sorry). Themistocles, Brooks says, was the more admirable of the Greek generals in the Persian wars because he was devious and duplicitous, in contrast to the honest but less effective Leonidas.

Never mind that the Greeks were illustrating the ironies and complexities of the world — how the qualities we least admire can be the very qualities that save a civilization, and who knows what their specific point was, or even if they had one? The point, in other words, is that they were not issuing prescriptions for qualities to look for in future leaders. (“Note to history, please select the most devious miscreants to lead you. Respectfully, Heroditus.”)

But who wants to discuss the Greeks? They’re just handy implements in Brooks’ toolbox, stardust to dazzle us so Brooks can get to work. He goes on to lament that America tends to select presidents who are “direct, faithful and upright,” and “uplifting.” Then, in the kicker, Brooks argues that this time around we need someone who “understands power, and the subtlety of its use, and who has had direct experience with friends and foes, foreign and domestic,” even if this person is “tainted by scandal.”

Is he kidding? We should be looking for the most devious candidate? Preferably one “tainted by scandal”?

Where to begin with this idiocy? Should we point out that this brainless analysis best supports the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez to be the next President? Or that Brooks misses the real point the Greeks were trying to make, namely that the surficial qualities we might value in a leader can lead us astray? The argument works just as well against the macho former prisoner of war who will continue the self-destructive quagmire rather than see the wisdom of calling our forces home.

What drives me crazy about Brooks is his polished upside-down view of the world, which he shares with Karl Rove. It’s lunacy to say we shouldn’t support Barrack Obama because he’s “upstanding” and “decent,” as if those qualities should make us suspicious and afraid of his candicacy, rather than admiring and supportive.

What’s also frustrating about Brooks’ audacity — his spinning of homilies and his simple-minded presentations of high-sounding rhetoric for the sake of naked partisanship — is that, as Karl Rove has demonstrated, this kind of demon rhetoric tends to work its insidious magic if you don’t call it by its real name. As if there is some strange and mystical power in moronic thinking.

Which, I guess, could lead us to a future column topic, one even more bizarre than the image of David Brooks as a latter-day Beezlebub, involving Paul Krugman in a flowing beard and a white robe.

Author’s Note

Milan Kundera says the novelist should make himself invisible, so his personal life doesn’t intrude on his work like weeds encroaching on a carefully tended garden. But another strategy might be for the writer to carefully propagate a series of fictions about himself. Of course I’m playing around in the shallow end of the pool, where my splashings aren’t likely to be noticed by anyone, and might even be mistaken for the musings of someone who takes himself too seriously, but here’s a slightly modified version of my author’s note for Monkeybicycle Issue Four. John Leary suggested we supplement our bios with stories about our experiences as ballplayers. Here is what I wrote:

Sean Carman is an environmental lawyer in Washington, D.C. His writing appears in the anthologies Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction and Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney’s (Humor Category). More often his work shows up in small literary magazines like the one you are holding now.

For three glorious years Carman was the starting catcher for Tony’s Pizza in the Laramie, Wyoming Little Leagues. He was a natural: a Buddhist’s calm behind the plate, sharp reflexes, and he ran just enough chatter to distract the hitters without getting into trouble. His chatter was good. The umps didn’t mind it but it drove the hitters nuts. Carman had a gift.

And he could catch anything. Wild pitches, pop fouls, you name it. Once, with two outs and the bases loaded, the shortstop threw home for the force even though the easier throw was to first. That’s how reliable Carman was at the plate.

Alas, it all came to an end because Carman could not hit. Never mind trying to hit a curve, Carman couldn’t even stay in the batter’s box on a slow pitch outside. His status as an automatic out doomed his prospects with the American Legion teams, who played in a complex of small-scale ballparks on the outskirts, with hot-dog vendors and everything. Carman went to a couple of games though. Sat in the mostly-empty stands and watched the catcher line a couple of warm-up throws to second, thinking that could have been him, with a little more nerve and a harder throw against a runner trying to steal. The setting sun dressed the horizon in orange, the field lights flickered on, and the night air came alive with the sound of the P.A. announcer shuffling some papers and blowing into his mike. These memories still come back to Carman sometimes, in pieces, like fragments of ancient tile, broken but with colors too vivid to be real. Carman sipped his Coke and pulled his collar up against the wind. One day, and before too much longer, it would be time to start high school.

Behold: The Power of the Happy Baby T-Shirt

Last year I wrote a testimonial for Stephen Elliott in favor of the Happy Baby t-shirt he used to sell to promote his novel of that name. A few months ago I noticed my little homage had disappeared from his site. So, now that I’ve resurrected my blog, I decided to re-post my little essay here. As a special bonus for readers of this nascent and experimental journal, I’ve supplemented my testimonial with an addendum, which comes at the end.

So lean back in that winged-back chair of yours, the one that matches your favorite houndstooth jacket (with the elbow patches, you know the one), tamp some more tobacco down into your pipe, and enjoy the following ode to a mail-order t-shirt and a time that already seems lost, like a faded dream, half-remembered anyway and further washed away by rain and winter cold.

~~~cue wavy screen effect~~~

Dear Readers of Stephen Elliott’s Blog:

A few months back, as the year 2005 drew to a close, two things became clear to me:

1. I needed to leave Seattle and move back across the country, to begin a new life in Washington, D.C.; and

2. I needed more cool shirts.

The first of these realizations held no great mystery. I was in a rut, Seattle had become lonely, and Washington, D.C. offered a good job that would put me closer to my brother and his family, who live in New York. Deciding to move was easy.

The second realization, however, was more personal and more troubling. The state of a person’s wardrobe, after all, says a lot about who he or she is. We construct our identities — our very selves — in part through the clothes we wear, and it was an undeniable fact that I was low on cool shirts.

It gave me pause.

And then there was the way these realizations came to me. The first presented itself naturally, as the logical next step in a normal unfolding of events, but the second snuck up on me. And it didn’t sneak up on me gently, like a playful friend might, but cruelly, which is to say slowly and without warning. When I finally saw it — first out of the corner of my eye, then more clearly as it came into view and presented every awful detail of itself to my awakening eyes — I felt the mixture of panic and remorse unique to horror victims. I was shocked into a new consciousness, not just by the terror of what I saw, but by the guilt that I had been responsible for the awful turn of events. The nightmare I was living was not only real, it had been my fault.

I didn’t have enough cool shirts. How could I have let this happen?

The good news is that once you decide to buy more cool shirts, once you make any good decision, really, the world opens up to you, like a time-lapse flower, offering itself the way beautiful women do to rock stars and Leonardo di Caprio. What I’m saying is: cool shirts are easy to find. You only have to keep your eyes open.

And while I may not be a San Francisco writer with a weekly poker game on the side that I write about for an on-line magazine, I am the next best thing: a guy who reads the blog of that person in his pajamas, on Sundays, over coffee.

And so it happened that about a week after I began my campaign to acquire more cool shirts, Stephen Elliott started selling Happy Baby t-shirts on his website. I had read the novel. I knew this was a good thing. I placed my order right away.

The Happy Baby T-shirt comes in a plain brown envelope addressed with a magic marker. This is no button-down oxford shirt vacuum-packed by slave labor in Guatemala. No, this is a cotton t thrown casually into whatever padded envelope happened to be lying around, the address dashed off in haste, because the addressor had to bike down to City Lights to autograph copies of his latest collection of sexual and political adventure stories.

Or so it seemed. Maybe Steve’s sister sends out the t-shirts. I don’t really know.

The real point is that the shirt looks and feels great, and every time I have worn it someone — usually someone dressed the way I would dress if I had a better sense of style — someone in one of those knit caps you’re seeing everywhere these days, for example, — that someone says, “Hey, nice shirt.”

Because here is the thing: When you wear a Happy Baby t-shirt, you are not merely promoting a work of literary art, you are taking part in a cultural movement. You are connecting yourself with something larger. You are saying, to those who have never heard of Stephen Elliott or his wonderful book, “Here is a line drawing of an open hand covering a young man’s face, with an intriguing and enigmatic Curtis Sittenfeld quote on the back.” Few things would be as sure to spark a stranger’s curiosity, to turn him or her into an inquisitive soul. And you are saying, to Elliott’s audience, something about the strength of your compassion for those society has put into its lowest categories and affixed with its most denigrating labels, something that puts you in solidarity with a more caring view of our troubled and divided world.

What more could anyone ask of a shirt?

As for me, the move to D.C. went well. I stopped off in San Francisco, where my friend Michael, who has an eye for these things, helped me pick out a really great shirt at a store in Hayes Valley. It has french cuffs and everything, and I found these cool cuff links to go with it, a pair of old, round manual typewriter keys set in stainless steel.

And of course I have the Happy Baby shirt. It may be on the opposite coast, but downtown D.C. has more in common with San Francisco than you would think. In places the light seems too intense, and the people too beautiful, and you expect to be interrupted by someone yelling “Cut!” — someone who dispels the hyper-reality with a single command so that everyone can relax and go back to being themselves. So far that hasn’t happened, it’s only been two straight days of hyper-reality. But I’m not too worried. I have my Happy Baby t-shirt. I am well-armed.

And then there is this: I arrived at my new apartment late after a long drive and went straight to bed. My possessions were lost in the unmarked boxes in the living room and there was no time to unpack, so the next morning I didn’t have a towel. What to do? Unpack every box, or go out and buy a new towel just so I could take a shower?

Then I saw the Happy Baby t-shirt on the floor where I had thrown it the night before, and the answer became obvious. Of course I would dry myself with it. It was exactly the kind of gritty, urban thing Steve Elliott himself would do. To be fair, in Elliott’s case the previous night’s romantic conquest would be stretched out across the bed in the next room, and Elliott would already be composing the story of the night’s adventures in his mind, but I worked with what I had. The t-shirt soaked up the water from my skin with an absorbency that was truly impressive.

I know the words “truly impressive” don’t call any transcendent images to mind and for that, dear reader, I am sorry, although when you think back on what I’ve just described, you’ll thank me for keeping the imagery to a minimum.

I’m just saying: This is one hell of a t-shirt.

ADDENDUM!

It’s almost one year later now, and Steve Elliott is still cranking out poker reports for McSweeney’s, but he doesn’t blog as much and the Sex Workers Art Show, the touring vehicle to promote his last book, seems to have ended. Its D.C. appearance was cancelled due to snow. I hope Steve has a new book in the works. I hope it’s good and makes him famous again.

I moved out of my tiny D.C. apartment and bought a place around the corner. I lost the cool Hayes Valley shirt when I moved and, when I checked to see if I could buy another, I learned that the store that sold them had gone out of business. At least I still have the typewriter key cuff links and the Happy Baby t-shirt. My friend Michael moved out of his shoebox apartment in South of Market to move in with his girlfriend. This winter they were house-sitting in Potrero Hill. A few months back he called to tell me they got engaged.

It’s still true that every time I wear the Happy Baby t-shirt it draws attention. People on the street crane their necks to see the image. Even the coolest drop their pretense of oblivious detachment and let their eyes glide over to me. Once in a crowded elevator a woman pointed to me and said, “I’ve had days like that.” Everyone laughed.

So the shirt still seems like something special, maybe already an artefact from a lost time, when I knew a writer with a book in stores everywhere, had just upended my life as way of starting over, and felt a little closer to San Francisco.

But I don’t know if you can still get the shirt, that’s what I’m saying. Before posting this I looked around on Steve’s site, and didn’t see an obvious link to it. A quick Google search, however, called up the page on which he used to sell them, and the buttons still work, so who knows? Maybe if you order one it will arrive in the mail. At worst you’ll be giving $20 to Stephen Elliott, in itself a good cause.

Monkeybicycle Issue Four

There are all sorts of fun writers with stories in this issue, including Steve Almond, Roy Kesey, Ryan Boudinot, John Warner, and Pia Ehrhardt, but you could buy the issue for Samantha Hunt’s story alone, one of the best stories I’ve read in a long, long time. Order it here

Milan Kundera on the Novel

The Art of the Novel is Milan Kundera’s meditation on narrative’s perpetually dying art form, and for anyone interested in the intersection of literature and philosophy it’s an accessible treat. It’s the first in a series. The most recent is The Curtain, and the middle entry was Testaments Betrayed.

The philosophical “purpose” of the novel is not an idle concern! So many perfectly crafted but inconsequential stories, that don’t wade into the mystery of being. So little time. One of these Kundera books, along with Francine Prose’s recent craft book Reading Like a Writer — that’s what I’d give someone who wanted to get into writing stories.