THE READING APE

2012 Tournament of Books Preview

2012-01-19T13:13:00.002-05:00

Time again to get ready for the Tournament of Books. I've moved my obsessive coverage over to Book Riot, and you can check out my 2012 preview guide there.

On another note, I've finally decided to do with The Reading Ape. It'll continue with a bit more frequent posting than right now, but with a slightly different focus. Look for a post about that in the next week or so.

The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques: "Fred Weasleys" and "Gandeaths"

2011-11-11T08:50:00.001-05:00

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This special two-for-one entry in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques was inspired by a post I wrote for Book Riot: Why Ron Weasley Should Have Died.

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The Fred Weasly:

A secondary character who dies to give a story pathos.

Examples:

Fred Weasley. Boromir. Mr. Tumnus. Star Trek characters in red suits.

Discussion:

It’s not an overly complicated move: give the story weight by making loss real, but at the same time protecting the main characters. Fred Weasley’s are particularly common in children’s literature (ostensibly to protect kids) and serial works (for purposes of maintaining storylines).

To my mind, a Fred Weasley is a cop-out, especially in “epic” stories: it makes the rhetoric of danger and doom effectively null. For all of the peril of Sauron, only Boromir from the Fellowship gets it and as he dies in the first book, we don’t ever develop the kind of connection to him that we do to those who make it to the end. (In hindsight, how laughable is it that Merry and Pippin survive not only the battle of Minas Tirith, but also the battle outside the gates of Mordor?)

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The Gandeath:

A character death that is reversed through resurrection or reincarnation.

Examples:

Gandalf. Aslan. Optimus Prime. Harry Potter. Obi-Wan.

Discusssion:

There are two purposes of a Gandeath. First, it can serve as a variant of the Fred Weasley; you get the pain of loss, but without the finality of it. The second purpose is to imbue a character with a messianic quality.

(I have to admit that I find this really annoying and manipulative. This probably stems from my frustration with Ob-Wan's full-bodied reappearance in The Empire Strikes Back. I didn't, and still don't, understand why, if he could pop up and hangout like that, he didn't do it all the time. Would have been super-helpful.)

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All entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques are original to The Reading Ape, unless otherwise cited. (This means that they aren’t ‘real words,’ so don’t use them in your freshman comp essay)

Previous entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques:

Telechronance

The Generalized Categorical

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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores

My Biggest Book Nerd-Out

2011-10-28T12:52:00.001-04:00

Over at Book Riot, we're running a book blogger appreciation contest. For all you bloggers, just write about your biggest book nerd moment and you'll be entered. Full details here. I'm not eligible (naturally), but I wanted to participate. So here's my non-entry entry.
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On Christmas eve, 1997, I camped out for Toni Morrison. It was the publication day of Paradise, her first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 1993, and the promised final installment in a trilogy beginning with Beloved and Jazz.

So it was a major release by a major writer, but it was also a rite of passage for me. About six weeks earlier, I had decided to change majors, from pre-med to English. For me this was more than a change in required courses or even career path, it was an acknowledgement of who I was and who I wanted to be.

I was a book person and wanted to spend my life in books.

So I went down to my local Borders (now gone like all the rest), and waited for the doors to open at 7am. There was a crowd of holiday shoppers there, but as I zipped to the new hardcover section, no one followed; I was the only there for Paradise. For some reason, I thought there would be others.

I was disappointed. This was no opening weekend of a blockbuster movie or first day of the baseball season. It was just me.

But then I looked around and saw the frantic, last-minute shopping around me. It wasn’t that these people weren’t interested in books; they were buying them by the armful. But they didn't care about them as I did, didn’t live for them as I did (and still do.) And that made me feel good about me.

I couldn’t start reading Paradise that day; the holiday hustle was in full swing. But the afternoon of Christmas day, familial cheer activities fully discharged, I took my gifts up to my room, piled them in the corner, and shut the door. Then, for the next nine hours, I read.

And I haven’t stopped.

BOOK RIOT: Week 1

2011-10-08T22:30:00.001-04:00

Well, Book Riot survived it's first week. For those of you who haven't checked it out yet, can I interest you in a run-down of what we wrote about last week?
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Sometimes, you just need a handbag made out of dictionaries.

I like cheap books almost as much as I like sports novels.

I'm a lit snob, so I'm going to try these YA books. Apparently, there's a lot you can learn from that stuff.

Snooki wrote an embarrassingly bad novel (and has a deal for her next one), but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy real books and the Jersey Shore at the same time.

A lot of people "like" books on Facebook, but some people like books about plucky lady journos better.
A book can be an ideal travel companion, that is unless you can't stand it and chuck it.

People can't seem to leave perfectly good books alone. They are either needlessly modernizing them ormaking terrible movies out of them.

There are a lot of books about hapless white dudes out there. Which is exactly how I would not describe Toni Morrison.

A lot of people put money on who would win the Nobel Prize. Though the announcement day favorite didn't win, there's a good case to be made that Bob Dylan should have.

And if you want to share any of these posts, you can retweet them without fear of reprisal from the language police.
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Thanks to all of you that have taken a look; as for the rest, give us a shot, won't you?

Announcing My New Blog Project: Book Riot

2011-10-03T07:45:00.000-04:00

You may have noticed that things have slowed down here at The Ape of late. And there's a reason for that: for the past few months I've been hard at work on a new blog project that is launching today: Book Riot.

Some of you may have seen mention of it floating around (especially on Twitter), but let me tell you a little about it. Book Riot is a book news and commentary site that slots somewhere between your higher quality book blog and a mass market site like The Huffington Post (but, you know, good). The goal is to write about books in the accessible, entertaining way that bloggers do but with the goal of breaking through the blogosphere bubble by being a little more professional and a little more consistent. Our target audience is someone who likes to read, but wouldn’t read an individual book blog (probably there is someone in your life who does like to read, but isn’t a nut about it like us).

As for my role, well, I'm co-founder (along with my friend and business partner Clint) and will be serving as Editor-in-Chief. In short, I'll be doing a bunch of writing (considerably more than I ever did here), recruiting writers and bloggers (more on this below), and working with our writers to do entertaining, educational, and otherwise engaging writing about books and reading.

So far, we have a stable of thirteen writers, many of whom are bloggers that I've met through doing this humble little blog (Rachel from A Home Between Pages, Greg from The New Dork Review of Books, Amanda from Dead White Guys are all writing and all have been regular commenters here).

In the coming weeks, we are going to be looking for more contributors and I hope some of you will consider joining us. I'll post more about that when we are ready for more, but one of Book Riot's goals is to bring the best of what book bloggers do to a wider audience.

The Reading Ape will still be around, though likely in his current leisurely pace. I do hope you will check out Book Riot---if we do it right, I think it'll become a regular stop on your internet route.

Thanks so much for reading here; my experience writing The Ape led directly to this new venture, and I hope you'll come along as well.

Many thanks,

Jeff O'Neal

My Guest Spot on Bookrageous

2011-09-30T09:40:00.000-04:00

Quick note to let you all know that The Ape made a special guest appearance on the Bookrageous podcast this week. Check it out here.

For the incurably bookish, this is a bi-weekly must listen. Basically, the three regular hosts, Jenn, Josh, and Rebecca talk about what they're reading in the first section and then take on a broader topic in the second session.

I talked about John Warner's The Funny Man, Lily Tuck's I Married You For Happiness, Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence, and Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy. I also spontaneously invented the "wonk-o-meter."

The second section of the show was about Banned Books Week, and in vintage Bookrageous fashion, a potentially plodding topic turned out to be damn near spritely.

I had a great time. Even if you don't listen to my sonorous baritone (heh) in this episode, you should give this podcast space on your precious iOS device.

The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques: The Discrete Appositive

2011-09-22T15:57:00.002-04:00

The Discrete Appositive:
An appositive that exists as a sentence fragment immediately after its antecedent noun

Example:
"Fair-haired, solidly built and not tall--not taller than Nina--his eyes are light blue, like a dog's. A husky."
-I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck

Discussion:
The discrete appositive here is "a husky." I'm interested in how authors represent thought (especially in close third-person narration). Here Tuck uses this little device to mimic a slight cognitive pause. The result is that we can feel the character thinking, trying to remember the particular canine eyes.

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Previous entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques:

Telechronance

The Generalized Categorical

Paracatenation

The Dostoevsky Dash

Proxy Detailing
Side-loading

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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores

"Please, for the love of books, learn from us."

2011-09-14T08:13:00.002-04:00

Today, I'm guest posting for Book Blogger Appreciation week with a piece called "What Professional Critics Can Learn from Book Bloggers." Check it out. Cheers, -TRA

Live-Blogging DEAD POETS SOCIETY

2011-09-09T17:32:00.000-04:00

It's a bit of a ritual for me to watch Dead Poets Society before the start of the new semester, as inspiration, as warning, and as sentimental indulgence. This year, I thought I would make some comments on it as I rolled through it. Time-stamps are meant to help you watch along, should you desire. I didn't do much editing, so forgive the typos and bewildering punctuation.

Alright here we go:

[1:27]
There’s something so compelling about the pomp and circumstance of boarding school. For many public school kids, or at least this public school kid, the solemnity and ritual of candles and banners and uniforms and pledges and hymns around school seems as foreign as the Greek Orthodox church.

[2:47]
Quick, in what year is this movie set? Hard isn’t it? Could be 1927, could be forty years later. It is 1959, Welton’s centennial. 1959 is an interesting choice; a few years earlier and the 1960s, which Keating some sort of harbinger of, would seem too far away. A few years later, and the boys’ initial conformity would seem unbelievably square. So really, this is a story that seems sort of out of time, but really it’s hard to imagine it happening in any other year.

[2:55]
First shot of Neil (Robert Sean Leonard) in the same frame as his father (Kurtwood Smith). Neil’s blankness here isn’t encouraging. Nor is his father boredom. I wonder how much this role got Kurtwood Smith his part on That 70s Show, as Red does seem to be a less-ambitious version of Mr. Perry.

[3:13]
Overlayed credit here for the writer, Tom Schulman. A glance at his IMDB bio gives a snapshot of late-1980s Hollywood: this, What About Bob? and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. There does seem to be a weird affinity in these three movies: all of them have an essential sentimentality largely absent from today’s Hollywood (save in Pixar films, which have a knack for tugging heartstrings without seeming maudlin).

[4:00]
As the headmaster addresses the students, I keep expecting the Sorting Hat to make an appearance. In fact, the color palette of DPS, warm oranges and reds, screams Griffindor.

[4:58]
We learn that Todd Anderson’s [Ethan Hawke] older brother was a wildly successful student at Welton, but Todd is just now enrolling, some 5 or 6 years after he should have enrolled. What the hell happened? It isn’t enough that Todd is shy and bookish, he also has to be living in the shadow of his older brother. Over-determination is one of the movie’s weaknesses. That and mangling poems to make them easier to quote. More on both later.

[5:17]
So hard to imagine leaving home for boarding school at 12 or 13 years old. No wonder this generation of kids freaked the hell out when they got to college in the mid 1960s. Reminds me that youth culture really only became widespread after WWII and that boarding schools like Welton are artifacts of a time when adolescence sort of didn’t exist.

[7:00]
If you were to draft these actors for future performance based on how they did in this movie, here’s the order:
Robert Sean Leonard
Gale Hansen (Charlie Dalton)
Josh Charles (Knox Overstreet)
Ethan Hawke

Here’s how it turned out (I think, at least):

Robert Sean Leonard
Ethan Hawke
Josh Charles
Gale Hansen

[9:58]
Four consecutive shots of birds being startled by chapel bells. This is either symbolic or shameless pastoral indulgence. Hint: it is not symbolic.

[10:25]
It’s time for our first uncomfortable question: isn’t it weird to have full grown men serve as live-in teachers for teenage boys? For all the anxiety about priests and altar-boys, how have I never heard a story about one of these dorm-masters? Does it still work like this? Are there New England prep schools where 40-something chemistry teachers live in the same complexes as the students?

[11:23]
Keating time. I once heard Robin Williams say that he based his performance on what his dream teacher would be, but whom he never had. Considering how much coke Williams did and his decision to make Bicentennial Man, I am not sure this is a good thing.

[14:19]
Meeks is my favorite character in DPS--a male proto-Hermione: earnest, smart, hard-working, a great friend, and game for adventure. He is the first to raise his hand and does so without shame.

[14:52]
Keating just pulled a memento mori on the boys and Neil looks genuinely stricken in the cut-away shot. Just you wait, Neil.

[18:35]
The Headmaster drives Knox to the Danburys’ house in what appears to be a hearse. Odd.

[21:05]
I though a silverback gorilla was reaching over Keating shoulder to open his textbook, but then I realized it was actually HIS REAL ARM. Seriously, I had to freeze-frame this just to make sure it wasn’t some Ric Baker prosthetic. Williams must have to shave 798686 times a day. Also makes me think his beard in The Fisher King wasn’t artificial.

[21:17]
The textbook the boys will eventually rip up here is fictional work called “Understanding Poetry” by J. Evans Pritchard, Phd. It clearly as dry as an actuarial table, but it does point out in its way that, as far as we can tell, Keating doesn’t really teach any literature at all. This creates a binary between arid academic study and bone-marrow sucking, rooftop yawping exuberance. Also, “J. Evans Pritchard” presumably is the most stick-up-the-ass name the writer could imagine, and I think he stuck the landing. The initial. The last name that smacks of privilege. The use of the middle name. All of it is right on the money for a pedantic know-it-all.

[22:19]
Pritchard’s Conjecture: Greatness = Importance x Perfection

Keating’s Hypothesis: Greatness = Ability to Woo Women / Danger of Inducing Teenage Suicide

[23:32]
Cameron ripping out the introduction to Understanding Poetry with a ruler might be the best character detail of the whole movie. Also, can we ascribe his worminess to the difficulty of maintaining a perfectly shaped crew-cut with red hair? No wonder he is clinched tighter than a Tea Partier’s purse-strings.

[26:15]
“Beauty, Poetry, Romance, Love: these are what we stay alive for”
Chills 1

[26:35]
“That the powerful play goes on and that you may contribute a verse”
Chills 2

[28:52]
Apparently, the first version of the script had Keating dying of leukemia at the end, rather than Neil’s suicide. Makes the “O Captain, my Captain” appellation a little more poignant.

[29:56]
“You mean it was a bunch of guys sitting around reading poetry?”

[31:23]
I like how a club devoted to free-thinking was formed largely by peer-pressure.

[32:17]
If Todd Anderson were a suburban public school student, what are the chances he would be wearing a trench-coat and playing D&D after school everyday? 80%? Higher?

[33:56]
Confession: I have actually looked into buying a copy of Five Centuries of Verse, the book the Dead Poets read from in the cave. It does in fact exist, though some of the poems they read don’t actually appear in it.

[35:16]
Horrible synthesizer score for running to the cave. Joins The Right Stuff at the top of the list of 1980s movies needing an apocryphal orchestral score.

[36:55]
If you’ve ever been to Walden Pond, you know it is just a stone’s throw from Concord. Wuss.

[39:45]
“Ulyssess” by Tennyson is one of my favorite poems. I get a little ticked here because they truncate it needlessly. Also, weird content synchronicity: this poem is Ulysses speaking to his men after the long journey back from Troy, exhorting them to turn back to continue their adventures just on the brink of arriving at Ithaca. However, according to Homer, all of his men died on his return journey, casualties of his curiosity and naiveté. Hmmm, deaths caused by disregarding the real needs of those in his charge. Sounds vaguely familiar here...

[42:00]
Keating teaching montage. Make that a Robin Williams being Robin Williams but with literature jokes montage.

[44:36]
If someone re-made DPS today: here are a few unavoidable additions:
One of these characters would have to be gay. [Probably Meeks and Pitts based on their roof-top dance party]
Keating would try to get a black student admitted.
Todd Anderson would be played by Jesse Eisenberg.
There would be at least three Belle and Sebastian songs in the soundtrack.
It would be set in a women’s school. Oh wait.
There would be no kissing of passed out drunk girls.

[49:19]
Another shot of birds being scared into flight. This is becoming some sort of fetish.

[49:43]
The public high school seems like it’s from another universe.

[51:06]
Can hardly watch this soccer scene without anticipating the great music cue coming up here.

[51:30]
Here it is. So great. But how is that record-player being powered?

[52:31]
Seems out of character for Neil to be willing to forge a letter from his father. I know he’s juiced with Keating mojo, but geez. Next he is going to boost the school’s hearse to go get milkshakes and go to the hop.

[53:45]
Knox’s poem to Chris is one of the five most embarrassing movie moments of the last thirty years. Keating coming to the rescue makes you want to kiss him on the mouth.

[54:40]
Apparently, the ass-clown who read the cat poem was actually a student at the school where the film was shot.

[55:30]
“Mr. Anderson thinks that everything inside of him is worthless and embarrassing.”

[56:30]
Hawke is freaking great here. Body language and delivery unbelievable natural and totally captures the bright, shy kid that is in every English class.

[58:00]
When I think of this movie, I think of this montage with Ode to Joy playing behind it. This is the apex of the movie and it’s all down here from here. About half the time I watch the movie, I stop here, right at the halfway point.

[1:01:16]
Knox is now officially in stalker territory.

[1:03:58]
This is one of those staged teaching moments where the lesson is 100% dependent on the students reacting in exactly one way. I’d like to know what proportion of the time the three students just sort of wander around and Mr. Keating stands there and says “Well, uh...OK then.”

[1:05:32]
Weird to demand students to be non-conformist. Logical paradox.

[1:06:28]
This movie used to be a dream of what kind of student I wanted to be. Later, a myth of what teaching would be like. Now, it’s a cautionary tale about parenting.

[1:07]
“If I were ever going to buy you a deskset, twice, it would probably be this one.”

[1:08:21]
What are the chances that Charlie Dalton overdoses on blow at Studio 54 at the age of 35? 2-1?

[1:10]
Assuming Knox doesn’t drink regularly, a beer and a few shots would put him on the floor.

[1:11:03]
Charlie is really skeezy right here and the way the film treats these two girls is pretty offensive.

[1:12:04]
Alright, here we are at the most troublesome part of the movie. First, narratively lazy. Chris just happens to be passed out on the couch when Knox sits down. Second, where is Chet Danbury? Off somewhere groping some other drunk girl? And isn’t this assault? You can’t kiss passed out girls, can you? I mean, if he copped a feel, that’s a felony. And why does Chris leap to Knox’s defense? Wouldn’t she more likely say “Yea, beat the shit out of this asshole, Chet!”

[1:15:36]
I readily admit I have no idea what these schools were like at this time, but this assembly and witchhunt over an article about admitting women seems melodramatic. Also, another scene that depends on a really long extension cord.

[1:16:40]
Does Charlie want to get thrown out? I never really thought so. I think he thought he could get away with it. Also, in the re-make, there’s no way that this interrogation/corporal punishment sequence stays in. Brings home the stakes here though.

[1:19:50]
The headmaster needed some humanizing. Bring home the point that these boys are in his care and that their parents have charged him, at considerably expense, with preparing them for college. It’s a compelling argument and would serve as a foil to the boys’ antics.

[1:24:23]
Williams’ role here is the bizarro twin of his role in Good Will Hunting. Both have dead wives. Both seem to be slumming it rather than doing bigger and better things. Why do they both need to have dead wives? Because presumably if you are paired off in a heterosexual couple you have better things to do than help out adolescent boys. Sort of condescending if you ask me.

[1:26:23]
Why doesn’t Neil take Keating’s advice? It’s not terrible actually. Take your shot by talking and if it doesn’t work out, wait it out. This is a common problem of the depressed: the sense that things can’t ever change.

[1:28:32]
Honestly ladies, is there any way in the world that Chris talks to Knox ever again after the poetry in class stunt? Is this a nerdy male fantasy of women that if you are smart and sensitive and a little scary that the head cheerleader might fall for you?

[1:29:29]
There’s a little flicker in Keating’s face that suggests he knows that Neil is lying. Rough.

[1:33:12]
Here is the sum total of the non-conformity that Keating inspires: publishing a satirical piece in the paper, reading poetry in a cave after curfew, acting in a 500 year old play, and dating a girl.

[1:34:12]
Leonard is so great here. Enunciation and joy in the lines. You can see why he went on to have a great stage career. I once saw him in a production of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love and he was transcendentally good (in another campus role as well).

[1:36:30]
The selection of Midsummmer’s Night Dream and giving Puck’s epilogue to Neil is a little on the nose.

[1:38:34]
Pit in my stomach as Neil stands on the stage looking at his father.

[1:40:55]
Hardest part of the movie. Dad: “Tell me what you feel?” Neil: “............”
Fathers and sons, man. Fathers and sons.

[1:44]
From what I know of depression and suicide, this is a gross exaggeration of how it goes down. It makes for compelling cinema, but wildly misrepresents folks who struggle with suicidal thoughts. So dramatic, the naked torso and the wreathed crown.

[1:45]
In strictly Aritotelian terms, DPS is tragedy (the main characters are worse off at the end than in the beginning), right? I think most people (myself included) tend to think of this as somehow inspirational, but you could definitely see it as some sort of weird conservative cautionary tale.

[1:45:30]
Never thought about this before, but this scene recalls Neil’s consolation of Todd on his birthday. The “deskset” is a symbol of parental expectation and emotional negligence, so it makes a great deal of sense for him to take his life over his own father’s deskset.

[1:47:20]
Slow motion “Nooooooooooo” has to be banned from cinema. No good comes from it.

[1:49:12]
Hawke’s crying here is amazing. When was the last time you saw a teenage male lose his shit like that in a movie? Like embarassingly, blubberingly, vomitously inconsolable. No manly stiff upper lip or bro-hugs. Completely broken down.

[1:50:33]
Score has morphed from nostalgic hammer dulcimer to elegiac pan-flute. Weeping.

[1:51:54]
The boys lined up and singing through tears. Brutal.

[1:53:14]
The inquiry. This is exactly how this would go down today. Blame must be assigned. Punishments meted out. Scapegoat identified and banished. Supposed to make everyone feel better, but no one really does. Nothing is fixed, everything is glossed over.

[1:54:47]
Chances that Cameron eventually works for ExxonMobil? 95%? Higher?

[1:55:25]
One of the more satisfying movie punches ever.

[1:55:45]
Isn’t Nwanda what Kathy Bates called herself in Fried Green Tomatoes?

[1:59:18]
I can’t believe Knox signed the statement. Doing my best Mark Hamill: “That’s not true! That’s impossible!” *jumps deep into the core of Cloud City to be rescued by the Millenium Falcon*

[2:01:15]
“What about the Realists?” One of the fantasies of this is that all of poetry and literature is about self-expression and intellectual freedom. Actually, just as much if not more of it is about the difficulty and price of those things. Neither Keating or the film can handle that though.

[2:03:30]
I know it’s cheesy. I know it would never happen. I know that this is sentimentality of the highest order. But goddamm, gets me every time.

[CREDITS]

Notes:

They should make a sequel set around their 20th high school reunion (the movie was made 22 years ago) Would be part Big Chill, part Indian Summer. Keating teaches poetry to in-mates and Todd Anderson wrote a coming-of-age story based on Keating. Charlie is dead and Knox and Chris are divorced with three kids. Ends with Keating dying and asking the boys for forgiveness. Neil’s dad overhears the conversations and breaks down screaming “It was all my fault!”

The movie made 235 million dollars worldwide and 45 million in rentals. On a 16 million dollar budget. This thing was a giant freaking hit.

Plot, casting, look, and themes weirdly similar to Good Will Hunting, except everything is taken to the extreme in GWH.

Peter Weir has a really diverse record of good movies. The Mosquito Coast, Master and Commander, The Truman Show. Hard to imagine a wider range of completely watchable movies.

I think it’s cheating to set these movies, you know the ones that deal with conformity and pressure and the like, in the past. You don’t have to wrestle with the more difficult questions that contemporary society presents. Here, of course Neil should be able to be in the play. Of course the white women shouldn’t treat their maids so badly in The Help. Of course women should have the freedom to choose their careers in Mona Lisa Smile. By setting these things in the past where the social issues of the day are now already decided, you don’t actually have to represent the issue in all of its complexity. That’s one reason I will alway prize novels that deal with their own times (a la Freedom) rather than dislocating them in the historical past or some dystopian present. That’s dodging the issue. That’s not to say that some don’t work, but by and large, it’s cheating.

[END CREDITS]

Thanks for hanging in there (if you did, though I guess you did if you are reading this). Was a kick.

Friday Forum: Lovably Bad Books

2011-09-09T10:30:00.002-04:00

Last week, I tore through Ernest Cline's futurist 1980s nostalgia romp, Ready Player One. I knew from the first page that a) it wasn't a great book and b) that I was going to absolutely love it.

The experienced reader/critic part of my brain saw the flaws: wooden dialogue, unbelievable coincidence, narrative cliche, and a variety of other narrative black-eyes.

But then another part of my brain took over: the remnant of my adolescent, Mario Brothers-playing, Darth Vader-loving, coin-op obsessing, X-Men reading, Middle Earth-daydreaming self took over. My hard-won critical eye was completely helpless.

And this has happened before (Harry Potter and the early Tom Clancy novels come to mind): for some reason, certain kinds of novels have the ability to short-circuit the taste and discernment I have been cultivating for the last couple of decades. And it feel sooooooo good.

Has this ever happened to you? With what books? And what was it that caught you? __________________

Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores

The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques: Sideloading

2011-08-25T20:48:00.002-04:00

Sideloading:
Relaying crucial plot information indirectly.

Example:
"I was furious with her for not having told me that my grandfather had left home. He had told her and my mother that he was worried about my goodwill mission, about the inoculations at the Brejevina orphanage, and that he was coming down to help."
-from The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

Discussion:
This one's a little tricky to see in a brief quotation because really it is about the lack of information that precedes it. To this point, we know nothing of the protagonist's location or activity. This passage is ostensibly about her quarrel with her grandmother, but the most important readerly information is embedded in a list.

I can't chart a historical line, but it seems that this kind of exposition is relatively modern. My sense is that it born of two trends in contemporary fiction: the elliptical, elusive opening and the evergreen exhortation to "show" rather than "tell." To serve both of these directives often means that it can take quite a while for a reader to have any sense of the salient narrative details until the novel or short story is well underway (here, we are ten pages in before being told where the protagonist is and what she is doing there).

Side-loading isn't then an intentional technique exactly, but the by-product of other writing decisions. And while it is not the most elegant way of providing necessary exposition, it allows for deferred information to be conveyed with seeming heavy-handed. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if many readers miss needed plot information because of its intentional understatement.

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Previous entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques:

Telechronance

The Generalized Categorical

Paracatenation

The Dostoevsky Dash

Proxy Detailing

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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores

Friday Forum: Advertising, Attention, and Book Blogs

2011-08-12T10:16:00.002-04:00

This week's forum topic was inspired by a couple of recent comments here at The Ape about advertising, attention, and literary writing.

First, Kevin, a longtime reader of this site and dedicated literary blogger in his own right, politely requested that I take advertising off The Reading Ape:

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to eliminiate advertising from your very fine blog. It's unnecessary, unless you're living paycheck to paycheck, and they distract from your content.

Second, in a comment to my post on the future of book reviewing, Tom Lutz expressed some discomfort in relying on advertising to support arts journalism:

I continue to believe that people should get paid for their intellectual labor, and I am particularly interested in paying people who aren't otherwise "economically viable" -- that is people who are saying things that won't immediately help someone sell fast food, and therefore won't immediately attract commercial funding.

I'm not sure that I can link these two comments directly, but I think they both spring from a deep distrust of advertising. Kevin (and he can correct me if I am misreading him) suggests that advertising somehow damages the experience of the content and that unless I am in uttermost need, I should forgo whatever income advertising generates.

Lutz's concern is about cause and effect; if advertising is your only means of support, then you are at the mercy of advertisers' (sometimes unsavory) desires. Actually, this is where the two comments connect: both are worried about advertising compromising content, at both the level of creation and that of consumption.

Rather than write my own response, I will let the fact that I have advertising on this site (and am more than comfortable with it) speak for me.

My questions to you:

What do you think about advertising on book blogs? What are the potential problems? Do you think the increasing amount of ads on book blogs is a positive or negative?

Reviewing the Book Review

2011-08-10T16:19:00.002-04:00

It hasn't been a good summer for mainstream book reviewing. First, the LA Times cut back its book coverage. Then, The Washington Post consolidated its arts coverage by splitting up its book coverage and moving the remaining pieces to other section, including moving the fiction coverage to "Style."

For book lovers, these are not welcome moves.

Tom Lutz, editor-in-chief of the inchoate LA Review of Books, took the occasion of the LA Times reduction to write about the goals of the new publication (and to announce that they had brought onboard two columnists recently The Times recently laid off). In short the LA Review of Books aims to maintain a space for the kind of serious book reviewing that has been in decline over the last couple of decades.

This, I think, is an admirable goal, and I would certainly like the site to succeed. Still, two questions remain unanswered it Lutz's essay.

1. Why will the LA Review of Books succeed where mainstream reviewing has failed?

2. Will the writing and reviewing in the LA Review of Books mirror mainstream reviewing or will it do something else?

While the first of the questions is about money and the second about content, they are deeply linked. The unknown here is the market for literary journalism.

The LA Review of Books, Lutz says, will employ a hybrid model to generate revenue, which will include advertising, merchandise, subscriptions, affiliate incomes, fundraising, and grants. This already is acknowledgment that, as a commercial enterprise, literary journalism is untenable; you do not need grant money and non-profit money if there are buyers for your product.

That is, unless your product is really different than what has already failed. From what I can tell, the style of the first 100 posts in the LA Review of Books does feel considerably more modern than, say, coverage in the NY Times. The topics are more diverse, the writing more personal and freeform, and the general spirit more experimental. Unfortunately, I doubt that it is any more viable as a commercial product.

What I think Lutz doesn't really see (and that Edward Champion pointed out in his response to Lutz's essay) is the problem is not that there isn't cultural space for book reviewing and journalism, it's that it is happening everywhere---from book blogs, to Amazon, to GoodReads, to #fridayreads.

One of the reasons that book reviewing had a home in newspapers in the early 20th Century is that there was no where else to turn. Now, reviewing is everywhere.

My sense is that the kind of writing that the LA Review of Books wants to preserve needs preservation for a reason--it is no longer able to survive in the main of American cultural life. And that's not saying it isn't valuable, only that it needs propping up by extra-commercial forces for it to survive.

What I would like to see, and I readily admit that I don't know what this would look like, is writing about books that engages with readers to the point that those readers (and the advertising dollars their attention brings) can support it directly (one possible example is Martha Southgate's essay about The Help in Entertainment Weekly). This would not only mean a future for professional literary journalists, but also that what they write can be culturally current and accessible.

The long and short of it is that people still read. What they want to read about what they read is still very much a mystery and the crux of the problem for contemporary book reviewing.
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Two Additions to Notable Release Calendar

2011-08-08T11:17:00.000-04:00

A little while ago, I created a shareable calendar for The Millions' list of notable forthcoming releases and a modified version of it with a few personal additions.

Today, I'm adding a couple of new titles to the list: We the Animals by Justin Torres and When She Woke by Hillary Jordan.

Significant Twitter chatter spurred me to find out a little about We The Animals. After a little follow-up, this debut novel about a working-class, mixed race family not only sounds compelling from the synopsis, but glowing blurbs from Marilynne Robinson, Paul Harding, Dorothy Allison, Michael Cunningham and others raised my eyebrow. There are a few authors who can get me to read a book by blurbing it and Marilynne Robinson is one of them. The last book I read on the strength of blurb from her was Paul Harding's Tinker, which went on the win the Pulitzer Prize.

I don't remember where I first heard about When She Woke, but a dystopic retelling of The Scarlet Letter warrants at least a sample download. Haven't heard much early buzz, but I will give this a wide berth to be interesting.

If you have other books you are looking forward to that are not on the calendar already, I'd like to hear about them. Can't have too many in the dugout is what I say.

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Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores

Friday Forum: The Reader-Centered Review

2011-08-05T14:38:00.000-04:00

The most interesting blog post I read this week was Greg's interview with an author he reviewed at The New Dork Review of Books. The author responded not because Greg wrote a negative one, but because he wrote that the book was mediocre. (Is there a book out there about mediocrity? I would read this. I am not sure I am happy with what this says about me).

The interview touched on what a fair review is, what an author wants from a review, and the delicate balance between being honest and being respectful. It's a good read for book bloggers, reviewers, authors, and really anyone that's interested in reviews of any kind.

What struck me as being left out of the conversation is audience. Reviews aren't primarily for the author nor are they primarily for the reviewer; they are for potential readers. One thing the author Greg interviewed couldn't see from the perspective of a guy with a book to sell is that calling a book mediocre is a great service to readers, who have to martial their time, money, and attention.

I have to admit I often forget that most people who read my reviews haven't, nor probably will they ever, read the books I am writing about. This frames the task quite a bit differently than how I normally approach it, which is to babble incoherently about stuff I noticed. The first and perhaps most important realization is that virtually everyone who reads my review is not me. This might seems obvious, but for many reviewers, your humble ape included, the expression of personal reaction is foremost in our their minds.

This led me to the idea of the "reader-centered" review, a review that exists primarily to serve readers. It seems to me that this way of thinking affect many aspects of writing a review, but my theorization here is still in a larval state.

So I put it to you: what do you thinking of this idea of "reader-centered" reviewing? Does it seems interesting? What about a review serves a reader? What kinds of reviews do not serve the reader?
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Review: THE CURFEW by Jesse Ball

2011-08-04T17:27:00.001-04:00

I’ve read some quite beautiful prose this year (Patchett and Obreht come to mind), but I’ve read only one truly great novel—and that is The Curfew by Jesse Ball.

One of the difficult things about writing a rave is that it sometimes devolves into writing a list of adjectives about certain elements of the novel; with a pan, it is easier to be both specific and entertaining. The passionate reviewer/recommender will, in their efforts to blow the trumpet as loudly as they can, sometimes focus on decibel and not on articulation. I think there is a good reason for this: in our age of ubiquitous recommendation, volume is the only means of getting attention.And there is plenty of reason to wield hyperbole when writing about The Curfew.

My temptation is to stop at a pat, blurbable hybridization along the lines of “The Curfew is like a combination of Kafka and Calvino, drawing on the former’s dread but tempering it with the latter’s fancy.” And I believe that, to an extent, but it falls prey to over-praise trap. What have I really even just said about it? To say that it is a cross between Calvino and Kafka is really to say it is like neither, since it’s difficult to imagine Calvino writing the futility of The Trial or Kafka to let his imagination rip as Calvino does in Invisible Cities.

Here is where I can start to say something about what I am trying to say: the great achievement of The Curfew is that it is both weighty and fanciful. And not only that, but the issue of “heavy lightness” or “light heaviness” (it’s not clear to me which formulation is more accurate) is itself a subject in the novel. So here’s one thing I can say: one of the pleasures of reading The Curfew is that it takes on an idea even as it uses that idea to take it on.

Some examples. The protagonist of The Curfew is William Drysdale, a widowed “epigraphist” raising his daughter in police state. His signal professional virtue is being able to write, in the space of a headstone, a few perfect words for the families of the recently deceased. This task lies at the cross-roads of two paradoxical needs: the permanence of writing about someone’s life in stone and the ethereal, virtually inexpressible feelings that those left behind had about that person’s life. William’s ability to synthesize those forces in the space of a half-dozen or so words becomes an allegory for the artist’s mission, which is to take the whirling mess of human life and transcribe it, through language, music, paint, or dance, into a fixed, observable, and enduring work. That this happens in Williams’s job over dead bodies is not inconsequential either and evokes Kafka’s essential insight about the life’s frustration and futility.

But even to be the world best eulogist is pretty thin gruel on which to live, and Ball knows better than to leave us here. The other half of William’s life revolves around his daughter, who is precocious, precious, and deaf. In the midst of an oppressive, faceless regime that has outlawed music and the arts, father and daughter construct a world of surprise, devising puzzles, treasure hunts, and games that re-enchant their otherwise terrifyingly real world.

William’s epitaphs and his fabulations with his daughter mask the loss at the heart of The Curfew: the government’s abduction and presumed execution of his wife. Eventually, though, the mask is insufficient, and he steps outside of his carefully sheltered domestic life to find out exactly what happened to her. While he is away, he entrusts his daughter to neighbors, an old puppeteer and his wife. Through the following night, the puppeteer and the daughter construct an impossibly elaborate re-telling of her parents’ childhood, education, courtship, and eventual separation. Imbued by art with the weight of emotion, the puppets, beings of virtual weightlessness, give a performance that challenges the real world’s monopoly on meaning.

One definition of elegance is to do difficult things with apparent ease. Elegance is essentially ironical; it is the appearance of one quality when we know the other quality to be the case. To be both comedic and tragic is elegant. To write a slight novel that shoves out the rest of the year’s novels is elegant. To make us feel both the joy and pain of life is elegant. To make us believe that something is real when we know it to be a fabrication is elegant. And, in the case of The Curfew, to have elegance of art as a subject and still achieve elegance, is to surpass elegance and have a brush with timelessness.

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Why We Care About Literary Awards

2011-08-03T16:20:00.000-04:00

Over at The Millions today, Mark O'Connell uses the occasion of the Booker long-list to ask a question that always seems to crop up around award time:

...why do we even care about this stuff? So Tom McCarthy — or whoever it was you might have wanted to win — didn’t get a prize. Does it really matter? By and large, awards like the Booker are intended to promote solid, well-written, more or less middlebrow fiction — the kind of books that broadsheet newspapers tend to give coverage to. And that’s surely a good thing for the publishing industry, for the literary editors of papers that still have books pages, for the small number of writers who get the nod, for booksellers and (I would guess) for the manufacturers of those stickers that get slapped with startling speed onto the dust jackets of shortlisted titles. But does it really matter at any other level — at the level, for instance, of literary culture as opposed to the publishing industry? I’m not convinced it does.

He then goes on to make a set of fairly common (and true) observations about literary prizes--that not everyone who deserves one gets one, that some of the past winners don't hold up well, that the prizes don't really reflect literary merit, and so forth. His argument, at its core, goes something like this: if a prize doesn't line-up with actual merit or import, then the prize really doesn't deserve the amount of attention it gets.

There are a couple of problems with this way of thinking. First is the old problem of "merit." It should be clear by now that there is no objective standard of literary merit by which we can measure the relative accuracy of given prize. The literary community might determine that certain works are more meritorious than others, and that, over time, should become part of the literary main. This doesn't mean that they are objectively better nor does it mean that their place at the head table is permanent. The canon, and I use that term loosely, is susceptible to change, and can do so dramatically (especially over relatively short periods of time).

The other reason we might care about literary prizes even if they do not accurately gauge achievement is, well, people care about literary prizes. Literary prizes are the last stage of the mainstream curation stage that starts with agents, then to publishers, then to reviewers, and then to awards panels. For many readers, a literary prize gives them the confidence to buy/borrow a novel/biography/history because they think that it is a fairly reliable indicator of quality.

So a pretty good reason to care about what book gets a particular award is that it channels a precious resource to that book--readerly attention. This, for those of us who care about literature, is both extremely interesting and hugely important. The books people read, get discussed, added to syllabi, and become part of our literary consciousness will inevitably shape that consciousness.

I'll end here with a reference to the next section after the quotation above:

I recently taught a night course focusing on novels which have won the Booker over the course of its short history. It was a hugely fun class to teach. The students were predominantly in their fifties, sixties, and seventies — retirees, middle-aged professionals and empty-nesters, mainly, who wanted to be better informed on contemporary fiction.

The students in this class were using the Booker as a proxy for contemporary fiction. Whether or not we think that is reasonable position doesn't really matter; the position exists already. The answer to his question it turns out was sitting right in front of him: we should care about literary prizes because people care about literary prizes.

Dictionary of Fictional Techniques: Proxy Detailing

2011-08-01T08:56:00.003-04:00

The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques is a running feature here at the Ape in which I observe, name, and discuss heretofore uncategorized (at least to my knowledge) literary devices. For a list of previous entries, please scroll to the bottom of this post.
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Proxy Detailing:
Giving the particular name, brand, or style of an object to give it specificity without actually describing it.

Example:
"Two days after his car--an '85 Chrysler LeBaron with leather seats and all-power accessories--vanished from the driveway, Warren Ziller crept past the expensive homes of his neighbors, trying to match his dog's limp."
---from A Model Home by Eric Puchner

Discussion:
This is a particular pet peeve of mine, but I'll try to keep my discussion here somewhat reasonable. Proxy detailing seems to me a rather recent phenomenon (and by recent, I mean the last several decades) as advertising and brand recognition have allowed it to be at all useful.

The strength of this technique is fairly plain: if you tell the reader exactly what the car/object is, then they have a ready image of it. It is as specific as you can really be, without having to describe what the object is.

The weaknesses, though, are considerable. First, if your reader is not already familiar with the brand/object, it is quite a bit more frustrating for them than just saying "car." For example, I have no idea what an '85 Chrysler LeBaron looks like, so rather than brining me closer to the object, this proxy detailing actually creates more distance than just "car" would, as I am now aware that there is a gap in the information intended and the information received.

Another weakness of proxy detailing is that it shortcuts one of the things we ask literature to do, namely, to help us see the familiar in a new light. If I do indeed have a sufficient knowledge of an '85 Chrysler LeBaron to form an image of it, it is my image that is being formed, unaltered and unestranged by the author's artistic vision.
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All entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques are original to The Reading Ape, unless otherwise cited. (This means that they aren’t ‘real words,’ so don’t use them in your freshman comp essay)

Previous entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques:

Telechronance

The Generalized Categorical

Paracatenation

The Dostoevsky Dash

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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores

Super Silly Speculation About Super Secret Memoir

2011-07-29T22:27:00.000-04:00

This week, publisher Little, Brown announced a super-secret non-fiction release about "one of the most controversial people of our time." Booksellers have a strict embargo until the book's publication date on November 14th. Speculation is that the person in question is Bernie Madoff. Or is it……

Here are a few other "rumored" candidates:

1. Kim Jong-Il

Fresh off shooting 38 under par in his first golf outing, Kim Il Jong sat down and completed this 1200 page memoir while watching Game of Thrones and learning to speak Icelandic--all in the same afternoon. It would have only taken about 30 minutes, but a surprise attack by 17 bears kept him busy. Immediately after finishing the manuscript, he had to write an additional 400 pages about his exploits that occurred in the time it took his agent to negotiate a 19 billion dollar advance with every Big Six publisher. Early reviews from the North Korean press have been positive; one critic said it "makes the Big Bang look like a raccoon's carcass."

2. Dobby the House Elf

Beloved by a psychotic few, reviled by thinking people everywhere, Harry Potter's noblest and most irritating character tells the world what it's like to be a terribly rendered character. Shedding his trademark third person, Dobby recounts his exploits in the bizarre and hedonistic world of CGI celebrities. Which Pixar female character has a heroin problem? On what Caribbean island is Jar Jar Binks hiding from public scorn? And which Avatar pixel pixie never leaves his side? Not since Who Framed Roger Rabbit have Hollywood's animated A-listers been so nervous.

3. Donald Trump's Barber/Sculptor

Hailed in cosmetology circles as the "Houdini of Hair," the Donald's stylist lives a life of solitude and secrecy. Rumors have swirled for decades that this mysterious follicular maestro made his bones touring as in-house quaff-manager for 1980s hair-champions, Poison. Long gagged by a prodigious annual hush payment, he finally has decided that the truth, as shocking and disturbing as it might be, must finally come out. Also, he is super bored.

4. The Executive Who Keeps Giving Jennifer Aniston Leading Roles

Little is known about this shrouded figure, but someone keeps giving Aniston parts. In this tell-all confession, Exec X as she is known explains in stunning and revealing detail the economics of Hollywood mediocrity. Do these movies make money? Where? How? Who exactly gave The Bounty Hunter the green light? or Rumor Has It? Does Aniston have some sort of sordid blackmail material? These questions and others (like where David Schwimmer is right now) will be asked and answered.

Friday Forum: An ethics of reviewing?

2011-07-28T21:19:00.002-04:00

Every once and again the issue of what a reviewer owes a writer gets bandied about in the book blogosphere. Should we write negative reviews? Should we disclose friendships/acquintances? If we criticize a book, what do we owe in the way of evidence an argumentation?

Well, a British court went a step further than "should," fining a newspaper more than $100,000 in damages for libel. Turns out, one of their reviewers made a claim about a book that turned out to be wrong, legally and libelously wrong.

This story and decision exceeds the bounds of what your average reviewer, professional or otherwise, will likely encounter, but it does remind us that reviews affect, in a very real way, the material well-being of authors. A bad review can hurt their ability to ply their trade. A good review can bolster it.

If there is an ethics of reviewing, it certain begins well-short of legal wrong-doing, but it's extremely difficult to define. Clearly, making up counter-evidence is beyond the pale. But how about if you just make a mistake? What if you give a book a bad review because you misunderstood, overlooked, or just plain forgot something?

These wouldn't be actionable offenses, but they seem to me breeches of a reviewer's responsibility to make judgments based on the books before them.

So the question is: what might an ethics of reviewing look like? What is the bare minimum standard that people who discuss books publicly and render judgments of them should uphold?

KAFKA ON THE SHORE Close-Read, Vol. 2: The Lyrics to "Kafka on the Shore"

2011-07-27T14:27:00.002-04:00

These posts are part of The Atlantic's #1book140 read-a-long of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. Last time out, I looked at the first 48 words of Kafka on the Shore (interesting to read that now that I've finished the novel). The following posts attempts to make sense of the novel by looking at the lyrics to the titular song.

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Man, Murakami is one slippery writer. His themes and concerns seem to bubble, burst, and then reform, sometimes within the space of a single page. We get philosophy, and then discussions of why philosophy is bogus. We get doublings and dreams, but also bodies, blood, and food (did you notice how much mention there was of meals in this book? I don't know if it was unusually prominent, but the attention to the characters' caloric intake was noticeable).

There's so much allusion, mystery, and contradiction throughout that it's tough for the close-reader to find a hand-hold. That is until you see the inclusion of the full lyrics to "Kafka on the Shore" in Chapter 23. Fictional lyrics within a work are enough on their own to warrant attention, but when the song also gives the novel its title, then it's time to put on the bib and dig in….this could get messy.

First off, here are the lyrics:

You sit at the edge of the world,

I am in a crater that is no more.

Words without letters

Standing in the shadow of the door.

The moon shines down on a sleeping lizard,

Little fish rain down from the sky.

Outside the window there are soldiers,

steeling themselves to die.

(Refrain)

Kafka sits in a chair by the shore,

Thinking of the pendulum that moves the world,

it seems.

When your heart is closed,

The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx,

Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams.

The drowning girl's fingers

Search for the entrance stone, and more.

Lifting the hem of her azure dress,

She gazes---

at Kafka on the shore.

The dominant symbol set is of being between: "edge of the world," "crater, "shadow of the door," "window," "shore," "dreams," "entrance stone," "drowning girl," "hem of the dress." These various images highlight the novel's consistent attention to borders: between people, spaces, times, genders, and consciousnesses. At one level, it seems that these liminal spaces are undesirable: Miss Saeki's psychic purgatory, Oshima's indeterminate gender, and Nakata's half-mind are sources of great consternation. Still, other between spaces seem liberating: Colonel Sanders' transcendence of good and evil and Kafka's journey to the forest are both generative.

We might be able to further separate these borderlands then into positive and negative. On the positive side we might have "dreams," "shore," and "edge." On the negative side we have "crater" (as an image of damage), and "drowning girl," "soldiers waiting to die."

The positive images come from natural sources like the collision of land with water and the shared space of sleep and waking that is dreaming. The negative images are of violence that has happened, happening, or that will happen (crater, drowning, and waiting to die respectively).

The other way to categorize these might be according to permanence: the borders that are more transitional and in movement tend to be neutral to positive, while the borders that suggest permanent change are characterized as negative. This would seem to hold for the wider novel. Consider that the twinned villains, Kafka's father and Johnnie Walker, are in the business of producing fixity, in the form of sculpture and distilling souls into an all-powerful weapon.

This preference for movement helps explain the central (in terms of location) image of the song: "the pendulum that moves the world." According to this metaphor, the root of the world, actually the root of that root, is a mechanism of perpetual, cyclical motion. The characters, then, who are fixated (Saeki, Kafka's father, Johnny Walker, and even to an extent Crow) are centers of unhappiness. Oshima, Nakata, and Colonel Sanders, conversely, are centers of wisdom and possibility, precisely because they neither insist on nor are subject to illusions of permanence. To use the language of the second half of that stanza, their "hearts," a sign of interiority, remain "open" to the world. Kafka's journey, in this language, is from "closedness," in the form of his father and of his anger toward his absent mother, towards the openness of forgiveness and indeterminacy.

The "shadow of the unmoving Sphinx" phrase troubles me a bit here. The logic of the lyrics suggests that the Sphinx's shadow only bothers the closed-hearted, but why the Sphinx? The fixity of the Sphinx is emphasized in "unmoving" but what is it about the Sphinx that bothers the closed-hearted so? Perhaps it's not the Sphinx itself, but what the Sphinx represents. In this case, perhaps it is the central truth of the Sphinx's riddle, solved so long ago by Oedipus (ah, that's the ticket. Our boy Kafka gets his own Oedipean curse), that human life is characterized by change, from infancy, to adulthood, to old-age. Those that are "closed" perhaps are haunted by this simple truth; that change is inevitable, that power, comfort, and knowledge are all conditional.

It is a happy ending then to have Kafka sit on the shore and contemplate the world's ever-changing nature and yet not be bothered by it. Miss Saeki was unable to relinquish her desire for a single thing, and thus was "drowning" in grief before finding relief in death. Their two divergent narratives give perhaps the simplest gloss of the novel, and it's all here in these crucial eighteen lines.

A Little Follow-Up: Someone Write This Novel and The Girl Who Studied

2011-07-26T09:03:00.003-04:00

A couple of follow-up items to previous discussions here:

1. Someone Write This Novel
After New York passed legislation legalizing gay marriage last month, I asked for recommendations for a novel about a long-term same-sex relationship. There were some interesting ideas, but nothing that fit what I was looking for. In the coverage of the first gay weddings in New York City this week, I saw the story I am looking for, though not in novel form.

From The New York Times:

“We feel a little more human today,” Ray Durand, 68, said moments after marrying his partner, Dale Shields, 79, whom he met 42 years ago by a jukebox in a West Village bar.

This is the novel I want to read. Or if you want to write a memoir fellas, I'll break my embargo on them and snap yours up. In hardcover even.

2. The Girl Who Studied
I should have written more about Hermione in my scattered, omnibus thoughts on the end of Harry Potter. My basic thesis would have been something like this: Hermione was our avatar for the serious. A muggle and wizard-world fangirl, she made bookishness seem cool and capable. In short, she was the kind of kid many of us who are bonkers for books were (and are).

This piece, a revisionist satire imagining a recentered Hogwarts world, attempts to show what made Ms. Granger so enchanting:

There’s no prophecy assuring her importance; the only way for Hermione to have the life she wants is to work for it. So Hermione Granger, generation-defining role model, works her adorable British ass off for seven straight books in a row. Although she deals with the slings and arrows of any coming-of-age tale — being told that she’s “bossy,” stuck-up, boring, “annoying,” etc — she’s too strong to let that stop her. In Hermione Granger and the Prisoner of Azkaban, she actually masters the forces of space and time just so that she can have more hours in the day to learn.

And it pays off.

And, as I said on Twitter, I would read this series. And it might well be a better one.

Friday Forum: The Ingredients of a Good Book Discussion

2011-07-22T12:57:00.001-04:00

This week, Edward Champion hosted an online roundtable discussion of Dana Spiotta's new rock novel, Stone Arabia (which sounds fantastic by the way and I am eager to read it).

In the five part series, the participants, which included Champion, Sarah Weinman, Levi Asher, and Diane and others, wrote about the book in turn, sometimes responding to each other, sometimes not.

In all, it was a compelling, insightful read, but I am not sure, in the end, that I would call it a discussion, but more like analytical turn-taking. This is not an indictment of the project; I would gladly read another such document about a contemporary novel.

In addition to getting me interested in the novel at hand, this experiment got me thinking about the structure of online book discussions. There are all sorts of them happening online, from read-a-longs to challenges to book clubs, to forums, and so forth. And while I haven't tried every available format, one thing is clear to me from those that I have tried: none of them comes close to a old-fashioned, in-person, book discussion.

My instinct is to blame the medium--that there's something irreplaceable about being in the same room with someone, something in the more subtle ebb-and-flow of face-to-face interaction that lends itself to intimacy, investigation, and encouragement.

When I think of the best discussions I've ever had about books, though, I'm not sure it's about physical proximity but about shared experience; there's something about knowing the people you are discussing a book with. But, there's something else that is harder to define that makes for illuminating, sustaining book talk, something much harder to define.

So, here's my question: what's the best book discussion you've ever had? What made it so great? How does it compare to online book discussion (or was it online)? What do you think the qualities of a good book discussion are?

A Calendar of Notable Book Releases

2011-07-17T23:20:00.000-04:00

For whatever reason, it's devilishly hard to keep track of when new books are being released, and The Millions does the literary web a great service by providing a road-map of notable new books every few months.

I find the list invaluable both for seeing what's coming and remembering when to look for certain things. One problem: their list is neither terribly glanceable nor arranged in strict chronological order. So, I went ahead and entered their picks into a shareable Google calendar (embedded below).

Acutally, I made two calendars, one with just The Millions' picks and one that uses The Millions' list as a base, but includes other books I am looking foward to. (examples: What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, and The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate).

And if you like, you can use them too.

Here are a few options for doing so:

On the Web

Here are web pages I've set up so that you can view the calendars directly in your browser:

The Millions' Notable Books Calendar

The Reading Ape's Anticipated Books Calendar

Subscribe to the calendars in Google Calendar

This takes a couple of steps, but it let's you see the calendars right in Google Calendar

1. Open Google Calendar.

2. Expand the "Other Calendars" tab at the bottom of the left sidebar.

3. Select "Add a friend's calendar"

4. In the dialogue box that appears, enter one of the following addresses:

for The Millions' notable book list:
r61k41f601hfbo9vtgs4uq4ii8@group.calendar.google.com

for The Reading Ape's Extended List:
lfpqj5j2lh06a5maqum0iavh4k@group.calendar.google.com

5. Click "Add"

Subscribe in iCal

Lots of Mac users out there, so here goes.

1. Open iCal, then select "Calendar" in the taskbar.

2. Select "subscribe."

3. In the dialogue box that opens, paste one of the following links:

for The Millions's notable book list:
https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/r61k41f601hfbo9vtgs4uq4ii8%40
group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

For The Reading Ape's Extended List: https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/lfpqj5j2lh06a5maqum0iavh4k%40
group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Subscribe in Outlook

1. Open Outlook, click the "Home" tab, and then select "Open Calendar."

2. Under "Open Calendar," select "from Internet."

3. Paste one of the below links into the text field that opens:

For The Millions' notable book list: https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/r61k41f601hfbo9vtgs4uq4ii8%40
group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

For The Reading Ape's Extended List:
https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/lfpqj5j2lh06a5maqum0iavh4k%40
group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

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If you have trouble with these, I'm happy to try to help, just shoot me an email: readingape AT gmail DOT com.
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Below are embedded versions of the calendars for you to sample.

Critical Linking: Harry Potter Edition

2011-07-16T20:25:00.001-04:00

The Ape's weekly link-fest finally returns, this time with a special all-Harry edition.

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From one of the first news stories about Rowling, published just a few weeks before the first book appeared:

The eponymous hero of Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone is an orphan who is brought up by a cruel aunt and uncle. He discovers he is a wizard and passes through a time warp into a world of make-believe.

This description seems like a time-warp into a world of make-believe.

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From The New York Times' review of the first movie:

To call this movie shameless is beside the point. It would probably be just as misguided to complain about the film's unoriginality because (a) it has assumed that the target audience doesn't want anything new and (b) Ms. Rowling's books cannibalize and synthesize pop culture mythology, proof of the nothing-will-ever-go-away ethic.

What, pray tell, does "pop culture mythology" mean? And how do you both cannibalize and synthesize something?

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A Philadelphia minister gets nervous:

"It deals with things of the unseen world that can be played with and that puts both adults and children at risk," Mr. Dear said. "The Bible says that Satan is alive. He is a real being, and both he and his agents that are demons use people to advance his cause, and these things we are not to fool with."

Weirdly, his problem is not that the books are unreal, it's that they are too real.

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From the introduction to Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter:

When narrative text and images become such a pervasive part of the cultural environment, they also become part of the identity of the people who read and consume the images and narratives. Harry Potter then is not just books we read or movies we see or things that we buy. The text and images of Harry Potter become part of who we are. This is true of individuals and it is true of “us” as a global culture. Harry Potter books have been read, discussed, celebrated, and vilified in Taiwan, Mexico, Mozambique, and Russia. They are read by children in Harlem, children on Indian reservations, and children in Siberia. To a large degree (as Jorge Luis Borges has famously suggested) we are what we read. So, what does the popularity of Harry Potter suggest about who we are? What do the books themselves have to say and how do they say it?

If there's anything less cool than being a complete Harry Potter nut, it's writing an academic essay about Harry Potter nuts. And if there's anything less cool than that, it's linking to it.

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Finally, from Lev Grossman's moving review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

We did something very rare for Harry Potter: we lost our cool. There is nothing particularly hip about loving Harry. He's not sexy or dangerous the way, say, Tony Soprano was. He's not an anti-hero, he's just a hero, but we fell for him anyway. It's a small sacrifice to the one that Harry makes, of course, but it's what we, as self-conscious, status-conscious modern readers, have to give, and we gave it. We did and do love Harry. We couldn't help ourselves.

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Hope all who want to are out seeing the movie this weekend...

Cheers, The Ape