My Back Pages

Five Questions for Alix Ohlin

2008-03-15T18:44:00.002-04:00

I've interviewed Alix Ohlin and written about the Morning News Tournament of Books on -- where else -- the Hobart blog.

The Rain Man Gave Me Two Cures

2008-03-04T00:53:00.004-05:00

It's Cat Power Appreciation Week over on the Hobart blog. We seem to be getting readers and people are commenting.

I'm always writing on other blogs, but never here. Why is that?

Book of Poems

2008-02-24T20:23:00.000-05:00

Now I've written about Rhett Miller on the Hobart blog.

The Life of the Novel

2008-02-21T08:03:00.004-05:00

Adrian Tomine's hilarious New Yorker cover.

Flipping Out for Etgar Keret

2008-02-18T10:35:00.002-05:00

I've written more about Etgar Keret for the Hobart blog.

"Enough. Grateful."

2008-02-10T19:33:00.000-05:00

Late Show writer and Strike Captain Bill Scheft on the end of the writers' strike:

"I am a writer, which means my very nature is to be a self-obsessed isolator whose most free exchanges are among the voices in my head. If this is indeed over, the end is even more humbling than the hours spent walking in circles toward it. The best definition of success I ever heard was service plus faith. By our actions and the belief in our actions, we have taken care of ourselves and the generations of self-obsessed isolators who will follow us."

Read the rest of Bill's eloquent post here.

Happy Birthday Steve!

2008-02-08T08:16:00.001-05:00

The Novick campaign asked some of us who know Steve to post a happy birthday wish to him on our blogs. I decided to write a real e-mail to Steve first, and then re-print it here.

Subject:

Happy Birthday!

From:

Sean Carman

Date:

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 07:38:44 -0500

To:

Steve Novick

Happy Birthday Steve!

I know you'll be reading this in a rush, but here's quick note to say you're the hero of all of us back here, what you're doing is amazing, and we're all pulling for you. Work hard, keep up the good fight, and take care of yourself on the campaign trail, OK?

Much love,

Sean

Literary Roundup!

2008-02-08T07:40:00.000-05:00

You can't beat the classics. "The Mouse That Roared" is Leonard Wibberly's 1955 satire of the cold war. Read it and learn that, sadly, but also beautifully and hilariously, in more than 50 years nothing has really changed. The whole book is as touching and as whimsical as its dedication, which Wibberly wrote "to all the little nations who over the centuries have done what they could to attain and preserve their freedom. It is from one of them that I am sprung." In the movie adaptation (Netflixing on my coffee table as we speak) Peter Sellers plays three parts and the Duchess of Grand Fenwick is played by Jean Seberg.

"The Nimrod Flipout" is the first Etgar Keret book I've read. How have I never heard of this guy? These stories are short, quirky, hilarious, touching, and profound.

Atonement is as good as everyone says. What I'm noticing is how elegantly plotted the story is. By about page 70 every turn starts to feel inevitable, and from then on it's like watching fate unfold. Yes the writing is beautiful, but I think McEwan's real achievement is the great choices he mades in writing his characters and their story. Not a single false step.

"A Matter of Detail" is the fourth novel by Maniza Naqvi, who is living proof that having a day job needn't slow you down. Earlier this week Maniza gave a delightful reading at Candida's World of Books in Logan Circle. She joked about knowing everyone in the audience, lit a candle to the memory of Benazir Bhutto, and read three beautiful passages from her new novel about life in Karachi. Maniza is a terrific writer and her novel will tell you things about Pakistan you'll never read in the news.

Fiction tells the truth in a way that nothing else can.

My Brother's Music

2008-02-04T07:26:00.001-05:00

My brother the folk musician has a Myspace page. Check out his excellent music here.

Lucy, Daughter of the Devil

2008-02-02T21:15:00.000-05:00

I love this show.

A Beer With Novick

2008-01-28T17:47:00.001-05:00

Steve Novick's new ad for his campaign to be a United States Senator from Oregon

Steve Novick Tells the Truth

2008-01-14T18:22:00.000-05:00

My friend Steve Novick, who is running for the U.S. Senate from Oregon, and trying to unseat Gordon Smith, has an ad on television that is a clever take-off on the old show "To Tell the Truth." Take a look:

Realize Your Destiny

2008-01-05T16:19:00.000-05:00

Los Angeles musician Matthew Kates has started a blog based on step two of my twelve-step program for realizing your destiny.

Godspeed, Matt!

Seeing Things

2007-12-24T21:27:00.000-05:00

Shortly after I got my new glasses I noticed that the thicker frames blocked my peripheral vision.

It took me a while to notice this, actually. One tricky thing about peripheral vision is that when it is partially blocked, your brain fills in the void. I didn't notice what I wasn't seeing. I saw my normal peripheral vision, even though it was obscured by the thick frames of my specs.

I only figured this out after several weeks of bumping into people and working backwards to solve the problem.

In my ordinary life I just chalk this up to an unavoidable concession to fashion, but the problem is especially bad in New York because the city is so compressed. To navigate here you really have to look out. I've been bumping into at least one person a day, and we don't even go out that much.

So, today, having already bumped into two people accidentally, I was on my guard. And so when, during some afternoon shopping, I felt a brush against my arm, I stepped away and turned, and reflexively started into my standard apology.

Only to find that I was speaking to a handbag hanging from a rack in the corner of the book store.

Waiting to Exhale

2007-12-24T21:26:00.000-05:00

My friend Pasha Malla has written a moving and beautiful account of his mother-in-law's receipt of a lung transplant. Here's the link: Waiting to Exhale.

Whitney Pastorek's Keen Eye

2007-12-10T14:30:00.000-05:00

As you may know, the print incarnation of the small magazine Pindeldyboz died a quiet death this month, with the announcement by Editor in Chief Whitney Pastorek that the upcoming issue (No. 7) will be the last. Issue Seven will be released as a PDF before the end of the year. The website will keep going.

Check out the Hobart website for a short tribute to Whitney and Pindeldyboz, an essay entitled: A Short Essay in Which We Celebrate Whitney Pastorek's Keen Eye for Beautiful Things. Also, as my last act as Hobart web photo editor I used photos from Whitney's Flickr page (with her permission, of course) to illustrate's this month's Hobart stories. You can see Whitney's photos by jumping around this month's links on the Hobart page.

A few months ago I saw Jim Shepard saying in an interview that literary communities are ephemeral, and that's true. My writing friends and I seem to be linked by MySpace or Facebook pages, by the e-mails we send each other, by the brief times we cross path at readings, workshops, or conferences. What was the point of this paragraph? Just that, for many of us, the Pindeldyboz print issue was a familiar waypoint on the journey. We'll miss seeing it on the magazine stand, holding it in our hands, and reading its ecclectic mix of wonderful stories.

The New Phone Book is Here! The New Phone Book is Here!

2007-12-03T19:10:00.000-05:00

For the past month or so I've been writing blog posts for the new 23/6 comedy news site. I have to say, it's been going better than I anticipated. I'm finding that I have things to write about, and the good people at 23/6 (shout out to Alex. Hi Alex!) have been very nice to me.

So, wanting to keep track of my writing over there, I've created a new link thing in the right-hand column, containing my blog posts for the 23/6 site. Soon I will have more posts over there than I can keep track of in the column thing, at which point I don't know what I'll do.

What are blogs? Unless they are focused on some subject external to the author, they are complicated exercises in vanity, that's what. This blog has fallen into that pit and is too far down to rescue itself, I'm afraid.

Moving on, we will soon post an essay about Whitney Pastorek, as a small tribute to her move to L.A. and the end of the print version of her magazine Pindeldyboz, perhaps the mightiest of the basement productions that dot America's literary landscape.

Oops. Sorry.

2007-11-23T18:03:00.000-05:00

So, I got swamped with obligations recently, which doomed my attempt to turn this blog into a diary of my attempt to make a documentary about Steve Novick's run for Senate. It also sort of turned out that making a documentary film in one's spare time is so difficult and time-consuming that keeping a diary of the effort is pretty much impossible.

However, in the time I was gone I noticed that Stephany put me on her blogroll. Thanks, Steph!

I guess I will now, out of the blue, turn this post into a run-down of the success of my writing friends. Because I've been marveling lately at how many of the friends I've made through writing have gone on to become so successful. Laila Lalami wrote a great collection of short stories and now writes for the Nation and other magazines. Maud Newton's blog took off and made her famous among the literati. I've heard Pia Ehrhardt on Selected Shorts and Tin House published her collection "Famous Fathers." Aaron Burch, who I met when I found a bookmark he had placed in a copy of "John Henry Days" in a Seattle Barnes and Noble, started Hobart, which has become, for my money anyway, the most exciting lit mag in America. Pasha Malla landed a deal for a novel and a collection of stories.

There are many others, of course, who deserve mention on this small backwater of the internet known as my blog, but I will say here that the most talented and charming writer of all the friends I've made through writing is Stephany Aulenback. She's simply brilliant. So I was happy to see that after what seemed like a hiatus she took when her son Luke was born, she is back and writing with such energy. Every word she chooses is a pleasure to read. Go Steph!

I Will Be the Next Michael Moore

2007-10-13T21:03:00.000-04:00

Above is the first text I've written in the script that actually has a decent chance of making it into the movie, although I'm sure I'll re-write it.

The good news is that I have the angle from which I want to tell the story, and I have the introduction, first, second, and third acts roughly outlined. So that's good. You have to have a really good story. My feeling is, if you don't have a good story, you shouldn't even start, because if you don't have a good story, nothing can save you.

Making films, at least the short films I've made (five so far), convinces me how little I know my way around story writing, and why I've never even started a novel. I have a strange intuitive knowledge and confidence about making films that I just don't have when it comes to stories. I'll try to write a story, and it won't work, and I'll tackle it a second time, convinced I know where it went wrong, and the result will merely be a different kind of failure. A dead lump of a different shape, but still a dead lump.

But with films I seem to have a clear idea of what I'm doing from square one, and each step feels natural. Like someone has given me clear instructions on what to do, and in what order.

Which is strange because, of course, no one ever has.

It could all be a delusion. I worry about that, too. That I'll get halfway into it and realize I've gotten completely lost down some path and have no way to find my way back to the main road.

At least I have the tools I think I'll need. I already had the camera (see earlier post) and the years' old version of Adobe Premiere, purchased on Ebay for about $50 (limited special effects and it tends to crash).

In the past few weeks I've picked up a Zoom H4, for ambient sound and, who knows, maybe I'll try to find some sort of marker so I can link up the audio from the Zoom with the video track.

I also got a Sony microphone for the camera. I discovered, in making my classic debut, "Incident at Swamp Gas Lane" that, predictably to anyone who would have known what he was doing, the camera's built-in microphone produces horrible, unusable, sound.

I've also downloaded RealPlayer 11, which lets you capture video from the web, and I downloaded a decent video converter (you need to convert web video clips from flash to mpg before you can plug them into the Premiere timeline).

I also downloaded a screenshot program (hence my ability to quote the working script above).

I wrote a model release, based on a form I got off the web, and I also ordered a 10-watt light for the Sony camera, which may or may not arrive this week.

I ordered two extra batteries and a second battery charger, which should arrive this week and hopefully will give me about six hours of shooting time each day.

Which, I hope is enough. I'll have to be careful about what I decide to shoot. I can't just leave the camera running all day.

Finally, I picked up a 2gb external hard drive (Toshiba) and today I bought about 24 Fuji DV tapes, which I hope is enough for my first trip to Portland, this coming weekend, when I'll spend three days on the trail with Steve and his campaign manager Jake.

I have a plane ticket and a room at the Ace Hotel the first night.

Portland here I come!

From These Humble Beginnings

2007-10-06T20:35:00.001-04:00

A few years ago I purchased a Sony dv video camera. I had it delivered to my office, and after work I shot some footage of myself driving through the University of Washington campus on my way home. Over the next month I made the footage into a short film using a trial subscription to Adobe Premiere.

"Quimby Explodes" sat around for years, but recently I purchased a copy of Premiere and learned how to put films on YouTube. I added some new titles to the film, and so I guess it's finally finished.

I'm posting it here as a way of changing gears. I'm embarking on a project to make a documentary film of my friend Steve Novick's run for the United States Senate. Since making Quimby Explodes I've made a few short films for work, and I think I've sort of gotten the hang of it. Enough to attempt something real, anyway.

So I think I'll turn this blog into a kind of diary of the experience of trying to make a feature documentary. So watch this space, for either a triumph of independent film-making, a spectacular failure, or (curse the thought) another in a series of abandoned projects.

More soon on my new project. In the meantime . . .

Texas Hold 'Em at the Paradise Lounge

2007-09-27T21:45:00.000-04:00

One pleasure of my job is that I occasionally get to travel somewhere in the United States to interview a former worker at a plant about where the drums were buried or how they didn't really truck the TCE to Kansas City but just dumped it out back.

Sometimes these trips produce fun side-adventures, which explains how Tuesday night found me in the twice-weekly game of Texas Hold 'Em at the back table at Christine's Paradise Lounge in Herington, Kansas. I bought into the game after polishing off the best chicken fried steak I've ever tasted.

You forget how friendly small town America is. Too many years on the coasts have wiped out any trace of my Wyoming upbringing, but I still felt at home under the open sky, talking to the locals over beers in the roadside dives. The poker players were especially welcoming. I don't really play, so Cathy (on my left) helpfully reminded me when it was my turn to bet, and how much would keep me in the game. Once or twice she peeked over my shoulder and whispered helpful things like, "that's not a straight," and "if I were you, I'd fold."

During the trip I finished Junot Diaz's first book, a collection of stories called "Drown." I read it because I wanted to see what all the fuss is about, and Diaz didn't disappoint. Diaz's writing is so fresh and alive -- he practically invents new uses for the language on every line, but none of it sounds forced or pretentious. It doesn't sound like he's working to make his language so musical.

Diaz's stories are also incredibly rich, putting you on the street in the Dominican neighborhoods of New York and New Jersey, a strange and beautiful place to be at the same time you are criss-crossing the heartland.

It took me an hour and a half to lose $20 in the poker game, where a different kind of lingo prevailed, a world away from the charged jive of Diaz's characters but just as musical and engaging. I go back to Kansas the week of October 8th. If I'm in Herington that Tuesday night, you'll know where to find me.

The Conscience of a Liberal

2007-09-21T16:54:00.000-04:00

What moves the September 15 anti-war march off the top spot in My Back Pages?

Only Paul Krugman's new blog at the Times, "The Conscience of a Liberal." On September 18, apparently, Krugman's occasional responses to his readers blossomed into a full-fledged blog.

Krugman's Times opinion pieces are a pleasure to read. Smart, progressive, and so well written. It's stuff you just don't see in the mainstream media. His first blog entry contains a helpful graph of income disparity in America since the early part of the 20th Century, along with an explanation of that disparity's political sources.

It's the kind of stuff my friend Steve Novick knows so well. In fact, I would say Steve, who is running for the U.S. Senate from Oregon, easily knows as much about economic policy as Krugman, high praise but it's no exaggeration. When I saw Krugman's chart, and read his initial blog entry, my first thought was that, thanks to Novick, I already knew what Krugman was talking about.

I guess what I'm saying is this: Oregon voters are the luckiest, because they get to elect Paul Krugman to the U.S. Senate in '08, by voting for Steve Novick.

Washington, D.C., September 15, 2007

2007-09-18T20:06:00.000-04:00

We stood in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, and mingled with the anti-war protesters gearing up to march. You couldn't imagine a more diverse crowd. Old, young, clean-cut, ragged out, dressed up, dressed down, white, black, brown, you name it. They dressed like hippies, like soldiers, like tourists, like death.

And they seemed to represent every cause imaginable. Ten minutes after listening to a speaker lament the occupation of Palestine I ran into a friend who works for AIPAC. Veterans back from the war stood near the wingnut with the megaphone ranting about government ID implants in newborns. In a lot of ways, it was like an outdoor rock festival, just without the rock bands.

Down Pennsylvania Avenue, along a two block stretch, a much smaller crowd had gathered. I would put them all between 40 and 55, white, clean-cut, in pressed shirts, shorts, and tennis shoes. All dressed the same, all of them intensely angry. As the march passed by they shouted at the protesters, calling them out as individuals and hurling insults at them. They called the men cowards and the women Iraqi whores. I have never been near an angry mob. It's a scary experience.

I took this photo after the marchers had passed by their vicious counterparts, and things had relaxed a little. Maybe you can see, in the faces of the people behind the banner, the jubilation, optimism and peace that carried the day.

The Lives of Others

2007-09-17T06:58:00.000-04:00

"The Lives of Others," is the best film I've seen in years, probably one of the best films I've seen, ever. It's beautiful on so many levels, but what struck me was how tightly woven the story is. There isn't a single wasted moment; every scene, every shot, every line of dialogue propels the story forward.

I think we get used to thinking that a story either has a great plot or is "literary" in some sense -- a study in character, or language -- and can't be both. But great literature, of course, does it all, and "The Lives of Others" is that kind of story. It's simply brilliant.

On the website for the film (click on the title, above) there's an engaging interview with director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which begins with his lucid and (I thought) amazing description of the inspiration for the story (punch the tab marked "The Crew" and then hit "Interview with the Director").

Buddha Boy

2007-09-15T09:11:00.001-04:00

The Braindead Megaphone, by George Saunders
(Pocket Book Review # 12)

George Saunders saves the best for last in his new essay collection. "Buddha Boy" describes his journey to a remote village in Nepal to investigate a fifteen year-old buddhist who has been meditating under a tree for seven months. In that time, apparently, the boy hasn't eaten, or even moved.

Saunders weaves Nepal's beauty and ramshackle poverty together with armchair soliloquies on Buddhism, suffering, and revelation, he lampoons his own failings as a journalist, and he tries to catch the locals sneaking the boy food, all the while maintaining a perfect balance of skepticism, sympathy, and reverance for his subject. It's a nice little story about our tentative and uneasy relationship with the miraculous.

"Manifesto," the last piece, is something I think I first saw in the New Yorker. It's a perfect, timeless, satire, a political screed from the mythical group People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction (PKRA).

Pocket Book Review # 11

2007-09-10T20:36:00.001-04:00

The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright

I started to write this review by borrowing an old Monty Python joke, but then I realized -- by sheer coincide, or possibly by some deep operation of my subconscious -- that I have finished “The Looming Tower” and am writing this short review the night before the anniversary of 9/11.

What are the odds? How could this have happened, if not by some sort of deeply-hidden design?

And moreoever, given that I’m writing this review on such a solemn occasion, dare I make a joke about it? I just finished one of George Saunders’ essays (more on them in a few days), in which he emphasizes the value of humor in discussing dark truths, but still, it feels a little wrong to reach for an easy joke about 9/11 on the eve of the day itself.

I will say this, though. I believe our country desperately needs some sort of satire on the so-called War on Terror. Because satire can do things no other form of criticism can, and also the Yahoos running our country are in desperate need of a hard literary thrashing.

In any case, “The Looming Tower” is brilliant, not least because it so crisply and so beautifully puts the tragic events of September 11 into perspective. Bin Laden and his cronies, one sees, are not the menace the current Administration would have us believe. They are, rather, deranged fanatics who enjoyed the meager benefits of a safe haven in Afghanistan and an enemy paralyzed by bureaucratized law enforcement and -- critically -- a newly-elected President whose arrogance was matched only by his obliviousness in international affairs.

In other words, Lawrence Wright’s gripping account of the history of America’s worst domestic terrorist attack feels like essential reading. The story it tells is incredible, as well plotted as a great novel and full of as many unlikely characters.

Much the same story, by the way, is told (in less detail) in the slightly quirky BBC documentary “The Power of Nightmares,” which you can find in the latest three issues of Wholphin, the McSweeney’s DVD magazine of unseen films.

The Pocket Book Review Busts Out

2007-09-05T09:41:00.000-04:00

I have a review on Bookslut of Claudia Smith's "The Sky is a Well." There's other cool stuff on Jessa Crispin's lit zine this month, including a story about a BBC reporter's return to her home country of Sierra Leone, and an interview with Jim Shepard, whose new collection comes out September 25th.

Pocket Book Review # 10

2007-09-03T20:45:00.000-04:00

The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai

A young woman, Sai, shares a ramshackle house in the Himalayas with her grandfather, his cook, and the cook's ragged dog. There, they are robbed by Maoist Nepalese rebels. In New York, the cook's son Biju shuttles from one humiliating restaurant job to another, until he returns to India with even less than when he left. Kiran Desai's novel makes a quiet mockery of colonialism, globalization, and what the world calls progress. It is also filled with wisdom, and sentences that are as perfect as anything English can offer up.

It's not long on plot -- its mission is to paint a portrait, and as Desai tied up the loose ends on the way to the finish I found myself wishing there had been a point on which the story took a hard turn. But it's still a timely, rich and beautiful novel.

Life Lists

2007-09-02T10:27:00.000-04:00

I have a new essay on the Nervous Breakdown site. Thanks for reading!

Pocket Book Review # 9

2007-08-26T11:04:00.000-04:00

Palimpsest, by Gore Vidal

I have to begin this post by confessing my inability to remember much of what I read. What I retain, instead, are imagined thoughts about a book. This makes my recollections profoundly unreliable, and it means that when I compare a book to another I read a while ago I'm stepping onto thin ice.

I would feel worse about this if Nick Hornby hadn't confessed to the same thing in one of his "Stuff I've Been Reading" columns for the Believer. Don't ask me which one. I only remember him confronting his inability to remember what he'd read and asking, "If I'm not going to remember any of what I'm reading, what's the point?" I sort of feel that way.

All of which is a long way of introducing Gore Vidal's memoir "Palimpsest" by saying it reminded me of "The Education of Henry Adams," which I read a few years back. "The Education" is a classic, the delightful autobiography of the comically detached Henry Adams, who keeps himself at arms' length throughout his narrative by writing about himself in the third person. Adams was born into wealth and privilege (he was the grandson of John Quincy Adams and great grandson of founding father John Adams). Yet he seems not to have had much of a knack for wealth and privilege. He bounced around Harvard, Europe, and Washington, never knowing what to do with himself, even as every opportunity lay open to him, all the while seeking education in all its forms, until, as I remember it, he suddenly realizes that he's always been a writer.

You might think of Gore Vidal as a writer who writes about himself in the third person without formally employing that point of view. The comic detachment that Adams had to achieve with the third person is there in Vidal's memoir, even when Vidal writes in first person about himself. It's one of Vidal's great talents.

"The Education" doubles as a history of 19th Century America, but "Palimpsest" takes place in the milieu of 20th Century American writers and actors, and the Kennedy-Gore clan. Which, to Vidal, amount to the same thing. History itself is barely present.

So it gets a bit gossipy, but Gore Vidal is nothing if not entertaining. Anais Nin, Truman Capote, and the Beats all come in for various degrees of Vidal's patented comic disdain.

Vidal seems to understand that "Julian" was his greatest book, and it easily could be. I haven't read a smarter or more entertaining fictional treatment of the Roman Empire, and "Julian" will always be one of my favorites. "Creation" -- a kind of sequel -- is also well worth the time.

Sheesh . . .

2007-08-26T08:46:00.000-04:00

If you want to be reminded that, despite everything, we are still in the infancy of the internet age, try modifying your Blogger blog to allow expandable posts that jump to the full text on a key word such as "continued . . .", so that readers fascinated by, say, the intricacies of street parking in Washington, D.C., can read all about it on a separate page, but those with less interest in the subject (freelance photojournalists in Bavaria, perhaps, to take one hypothetical example) can read the first few paragraphs, decide they are not interested, and be on their way to the post about my virtual heartthrob Vienna Teng.

I tried to make this change today because, you know, I try to be accomodating here. It's the least I can do.

I thought it would be a simple thing to fix, but soon I was down the rabbit hole, in a land of help pages and HTML code as frightening and inscrutable as any episode of H.R. Puffenstuff. There weren't any talking flutes, but it was almost as terrifying.

(Maybe this will reveal my Luddite tendencies, but the blogs devoted to computer code are at least amusing. In the main post, Code Wizard will say something like, "I've developed a fix to create expandable posts on Blogger, using CSS style sheets to modify the Beta layouts version," (at which point I'm already lost) and then, in the comments, Bat Girl will say, "Great, Wiz! But have you tried using a recursive betaflecker, to make the fix optional on each data post entry?" And then will follow about 150 comments that seem to reflect an intelligent, thoughtful, problem-solving discussion that would be helpful if I could understand any of it. I would laugh if the writing on these blogs wasn't so concise, and the comments so admirably to the point. It's like listening to brain surgeons. You might think it's funny they're speaking nonsense, but you can't laugh because, well, these are brain surgeons. Another thing: You never see posts on computer code blogs veer off into tangents and personal attacks, like they so quickly do on the political blogs. Make of this what you will.)

Anyway, you would also think it would be easy to explain how to make an expandable post on Blogger. I can get to the HMTL template of my blog and make changes to it. I actually know what a style sheet is. All that I need is a simple "find this code, add this, now find this code, now add this, boom, voila" type of thing.

I finally found a page that took this approach, on a blog titled, ominously, "Make Money on Your Blog." But the person who wrote the helpful instructions also wrote, as a conclusion: "This will direct people to your page and make money for your blog." I don't believe this, and it's not exactly why I wanted to break up the posts on my blog. And doesn't this last line sort of destroy the author's credibility? Because how could someone so misguided about the reason for making an expandable post be a reliable source?

But whatever. I made the change, and it worked. The problem was that the fix, which is apparently the standard fix on the Blogger site, puts the tag ("continued . . ." or, if you don't modify it yourself, the embarrassingly enthusiastic "Read more!") at the bottom of every single post.

Meaning that you, my readers (all four of you), would be led to believe that my one line posts directing you to my latest self-absorbed Nervous Breakdown essay were just teasers when, in fact, no, those posts are only one line long. This is not what we need, since I'm embarrassed enough to be writing those essays and directing people to them from here. Tricking you into twice reading my one-line post directing you to the essay I've written about MYSELF -- well, that's where I draw the line. Yes, I've drawn the line pretty far down the field, but still, that's where the line is for me.

This expandable post thing on Blogger must be a common problem, by the way. It would explain why you can find about 500 web pages devoted to the subject, and why Eric Spitznagel's posts on his blog, for example, are never broken up with jumps marked by key words.

The short of it is, I gave up. Until I figure this out, you'll just have to read every word of every post, or do a lot of scrolling down through material about street parking in D.C. and the frustrations of working with Bogger to get to the pocket book reviews and Vienna Teng videos.

By the way, this was meant to be a post comparing Gore Vidal's memoir "Palimpsest' to "The Education of Henry Adams" and reflecting, wistfully, perhaps, on the genre of detached comic memoirs of alienated children born into wealth and privilege.

Hopefully I'll get to that later today . . .

The Parking Gods Always Provide

2007-08-24T17:16:00.000-04:00

It's an axiom of urban living that everything works fairly well, even if you have no idea how it will. Or maybe I just lead a sometime-charmed life.

Take, for example, my current parking situation.

When I moved back to D.C. last spring I rented a studio apartment in a building with a parking garage. Last fall I found a bigger place to move into. It was perfect, except that it had no dedicated parking space. I had no idea about the street parking situation -- I knew I would need a residential parking permit, but I didn't know whether street parking would be easy, or even possible -- but I took the new place without investigating the situation. I trusted urban fate, figuring the parking would somehow work out.

The first thing I discovered was that, except for a few hours on late Friday and Saturday nights, street parking in my neighborhood is abundant. This was a shock. I live in D.C.'s U Street neighborhood, one of the places everyone in D.C. goes to party, even George Stephanopoulos. I expected the parking to be competitive (hordes of women abandoning their cars in the street, running after Mr. Stephanopoulos, trampling everything in their path, casually using up all the available parking in the process), but generally, at any given time of day, there are vast open spaces on every block. Unless it is late Friday or Saturday night, you can park wherever you want.

The second thing I discovered was D.C.'s street cleaning program, something new since I last lived here. Once a week each block gets swept by a street cleaner, and never are both sides of a street swept on the same day. This means once a week you must move your car for the street sweeper. Sometimes you have to move your car twice. If you parked along a curb swept on Tuesdays, for example, and on Monday you move your car across the street, you've likely moved it to a curb that will be swept on Wednesday, which means that on Tuesday night (or early Wednesday morning) you must move your car back to where it was Monday.

You get the idea. It's basically a fancy way of freeing up parking spaces by making everyone move their car every week. It's probably why there's so much parking in my neighborhood, for those with permission to park here. But it is a mild pain in the neck, and a burden for absent-minded people like myself.

I should say, for the record, that my friend Doug thinks there are no actual street sweepers, and it's true I have never seen one.

Anyway, I also learned that if you forget to move your car the city doesn't actually tow it. Another shock. When I went to law school in upstate New York, you had to move your car across the street once a week and if you forgot, you had to take the bus out to the remote fenced-in lot with the attack dog that charged the fence and tried to kill you, and the huge bald guy with tattoos, who sort of resembled the dog, now that I think about it, and who mightily restrained the dog while he accepted your cashier's check for $100 and returned your car. I wanted to tell the huge guy with the murderous dog that this whole move-your-car-or-get-towed-and-pay-$100-to-get-your-car-back thing seemed like a giant state-sponsored scam, but I thought better of it.

But in D.C. they slide a $30 ticket under your wiper and call it good. Which ticket, you can pay on-line.

Civilized, right?

I was relieved to discover this, because I had looked into renting a space in a garage. Not only are there no garages in my neighborhood, but the monthly fee was several hundred dollars, much more than the $120 monthly cost if I ignored the street sweeping signs completely and let my car collect weekly $30 tickets (although presumably at some point even the D.C. government's patience would be exhausted and they would tow it, but I am not so absent-minded as to let that happen and anyway I digress).

Stick with me, dear reader, for I am about to make my most magical discovery about parking in my neighborhood. It turned out that I didn't need to park on the street at all, because on the other alley on my block (my block has two alleys, one on either side of the historic theater that fronts U Street) there is an apron of asphalt against the wall of the fancy new condo building that, I discovered, unknown to anyone, was owned by the city. Just that small patch. Because it had no signage, you could park there without fear. The city couldn't tow you, or issue a ticket, because parking there had never been prohibited. And the condo building couldn't move your car because they didn't own the land.

For months after this discovery I had luxury parking in one of D.C.'s most popular neighborhoods, a secret space in an alley on my block that no one else (it seemed) knew about.

Of course it didn't last. Too soon after I discovered the secret parking on my block, it disappeared. The chili dog stand next to the historic theater put up signs, threatening to tow anyone that didn't obtain a permit from them. No more secret free parking.

But then another magical thing happened. I discovered a nearby block (I'm not saying where) along which the street sweeping signs have disappeared. Probably because there are no signs anymore, on this magical block the D.C. police don't ticket cars during street sweeping days. It can be difficult, but if you find a space you can leave your car there forever and not get a ticket. I tried it during my recent 2 1/2 week vacation. Sure enough, when I came back, my car was right where I left it, no tickets fluttering under the front wiper.

I guess the other rule of urban living is that nothing lasts. Soon, I'm sure, signs will appear along the magic parking block and my secret no-hassle long-term parking will disappear.

But by then I'll have figured something out, even if it's only how to remind myself to move my car on street sweeping days.

Trying, Trying . . .

2007-08-23T09:00:00.000-04:00

I have a new essay up at the Nervous Breakdown.

Pocket Music Review # 1

2007-08-19T12:57:00.001-04:00

"City Hall" by Vienna Teng

"City Hall," the fifth track on Vienna Teng's 2006 album "Dreaming Through the Noise," is a moving and beautiful piece of songwriting. It does so many things: tells a heartfelt story, memorializes an historic event, and raises a chorus for a political cause, all within the form of an infectious pop song.

Vienna's albums, "Warm Strangers" and "Dreaming Through the Noise," are a blend of jazz, pop, chamber music and folk. She's like a more jazzy Sarah McLaughlin, with classical training and better lyrics. (There's nothing inscrutable and wildly romantic about vampires striking suicide poses, for example.) I'm sure her first album is also fine, I just can't vouch for it because I haven't heard it yet. You can also find, on YouTube, some glamorous and often hilarious footage of her life on the road, taken on this summer's tour by Vienna and her friend, the underwater marine photographer Eric Cheng. It all looks remarkably like driving cross-country with a buddy to change jobs or go to school, except that every other day you put on a show.

Here is Vienna Teng performing "City Hall" at the Living Room in New York:

Pocket Book Review # 8

2007-08-17T17:51:00.000-04:00

Babylon and Other Stories, by Alix Ohlin

"Babylon" is a fine, fine collection of stories propelled by Alix Ohlin's deadpan, offbeat humor. The stories fit her style perfectly; they all seem to be about things flying apart. And there is a wonderful combination of absurdity and drama in them. What's strange but also compelling about Olin's stories is the way the comedy doesn't release the tension, but tightens it.

In "Land of the Midnight Sun" a Russian boy named Yuri just shows up one day on the front step of the house of Maxine, a high school student home alone doing her trig homework. She answers the door, a car honks and drives away, and there he is.

"I am exchange student," Yuri says. "I live in your house one year." Yuri explains that, after one year, Maxine can live in his house in Russia if she wants. "It is glasnost program," he says.

"It's like nobody tells me anything," she says.

She shows him around the house. When she explains that everyone calls her younger brother Bat, because his room is like a cave, Yuri says, "You are talking of the mouse with wings."

What follows is a charming coming of age story that ends with Maxine, years later, visiting Moscow, married and struggling to remember the encounter she and Yuri shared at Carlsbad Caverns, where they went to see the bats fly out in droves before sunset.

She remembers how she and Yuri "had walked up the hill out of the darkness of the Caverns," Olin writes, "his fingers brushing against hers, furtive, barely there, yet electric. They emerged into the sudden, blinding desert sun and it shocked her, as if they'd been expecting midnight."

Doomed Story Sketch # 1

2007-08-16T19:27:00.000-04:00

Lesser-Known Facts About Casablanca

On the surface Casablanca tells the story of a doomed love affair between a casino owner and the wife of a French resistance leader. At its heart, however, the movie is a complex allegory about the ennui of small business ownership in Morocco in the late 30's.

While the film starred Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, the producers' original choices for the roles were William Holden and Shirley Temple. Holden, however, was only 24, and therefore too young to be credible as a former Ethiopian gun-runner and Spanish Civil War combatant. Temple, who was also 24, was long past her prime and anyway there were no dancing numbers.

The "world war" that provides the backdrop for the story is not the actual world war fought in the 1940's between the Axis and Allied powers, but a fictionalized account of that war that is identical to it in every respect.

While many people know that the airplane on the runway in the final scene was made of cardboard, and that the airplane attendants were played by midgets to keep the scene to scale, fewer know that midgets also played the parts of Sam, Victor Lazlo, Ugarte, Louis Renalt, Major Strasser, and all the casino patrons.

Humphrey Bogart's character, Rick Blaine, keeps a Russian dancing bear in his apartment above the bar. In one scene cut from the film just before its release, Ilsa walks in on Rick as he is teaching the bear to stand upright on a wooden circus ball. Rick, more than a little embarrassed, asks her to please leave him alone. The scene ends with the bear tilting its head and offering Rick a sympathetic pout.

Unsure of how to end the film, director Michael Curtiz shot alternate endings in which: 1) Ilsa starts toward the plane but changes her mind and doubles back, then decides she will get on the plane after all and, flustered, apologizes for being so indecisive; 2) flat-out refuses to get on the plane and throws a screaming tantrum; 3) gets on the plane but has a panic attack, thereby forcing the plane back to the terminal; 4) happily announces that she'll be glad to get on the plane and thanks Rick for his understanding; and 5) writes down her address for Rick and asks him to please visit after she and Lazlo are settled in New York.

In Lisbon, over cocktails on a beach veranda, struck by the close call he and Ilsa have just had, Victor has a sudden change of heart about devoting his life to the French resistance. Ilsa admits that, to be honest, she is also very tired, and that Lisbon is not so bad. They repeatedly postpone their flight, sleep later each morning, and after a week cancel the flight altogether. Victor uses the money to make a deposit on a small bungalow. They find a restaurant in the city that they like and begin to dine there regularly. Ilsa takes a small job to pay the rent. Slowly, over time, Victor loses touch with his contacts in New York. Years later, on a vacation to Casablanca, Ilsa runs into Rick, at his cafe of all places. He is with another woman and treats Ilsa as a casual acquaintance; embarrassed, she pretends she cannot quite remember who he is.

Update!

2007-08-05T12:53:00.000-04:00

I write in Praise of Stephen Elliott's Poker Report.

I interview Roy Kesey for Hobart.

I am quoted in Esquire: How About a Little Hope?

Pocket Book Review # 7

2007-07-26T18:32:00.000-04:00

Saving Angelfish, by Michele Matheson

“Saving Angelfish” is a character study of a Hollywood junkie at the end of her rope. Michele Matheson describes the low life in L.A., the desperate days of her junkie heroine, in prose that is childlike, innocent, angelic, and that conveys the allure and impossibility, the otherworldly kick, of a good high.

This book is not heavy on plot. The main line of suspense is whether someone or something will arrest Maxella Gordon’s downward spiral. Matheson spares no details in describing Max’s gutter life of heroin dependency and sickness. I never read any William S. Boroughs but, honestly, I have a hard time believing he could have written anything more raw than this.

I was lucky to meet Michele at this summer's Tin House workshop. She is charming and hilarious and, not that this is a standard for literary reviews, but she deserves all of her success. Hurry up and buy her book already!

Kapuscinski's Legacy

2007-07-24T17:01:00.000-04:00

On cue, as if the splashes in this blog had made a ripple in the world, the editors of Tin House have published dueling essays about Ryszard Kapuscinski in their current issue.

Steve Almond, lined up to defend our intrepid Polish foreign correspondent, doesn't dispute the errors in Kapuscinski's reporting. Instead, he celebrates Kaupscinski's dedication to the noble mission of increasing the West's understanding of Africa. Fair enough.

Binyavanga Wainaina makes a narrower, and to my mind stronger, point. He first notes Kapuscinski's ability to turn out brilliant work. In "Another Day of Life," comprised of early Kapuscinski reportage from Angola, Kapuscinski is "a writer of profound and careful wonder."

But then Wainaina reads "The Emperor," about Ethiopian dictator Haile Selassie, and it all goes downhill. "The Emperor" is filled with factual errors, the most notable being Kapuscinski's description of a Selassie aide whose job is to wipe the pee from the dictator's dog off the shoes of visiting dignataries. In fact, Selassie treated his guests with respect, and would not have let his dog degrade them. So, what are to make of a writer who, apparently deliberately, gets this wrong?

There are other mistakes, if you can call them that. Kapuscinski says Selassie was "no reader" when in fact he studied the Ethiopian and Western canons and held a profound esteem for reading and learning. Kapuscinski says he never signed anything when the opposite is true. Wainaina demonstrates that Kapuscinski has given the reader a caricature of Selassie, the African Dictator Stereotype in place of the real and more complex person. Wainaina argues that "Shadow of the Sun" is similarly beset by cliches about Africa and its people and it is hard, in the end, not to wonder how much a simplistic and inaccurate impression of Africa adds to our understanding.

Almond and Wainaina both tacitly acknowledge the power of Kapuscinski's writing. Whether he was nailing it in "Another Day of Life," or phoning it in in "The Emperor," the man could write. Kapuscinki's writing is always spare and beautiful, devoid of sentiment, full of grace and power, and it casts a spell. I read "Shadow of the Sun" mesmerized by that spell. It's interesting to note the power of good writing to seduce the reader.

The question that comes to my mind is, "What was Kapuscinski thinking"? Granting that he got so many fundamental facts about Africa -- his life's subject -- wrong in "The Emporer" and "Shadow of the Sun," the natural question is, What was going on upstairs?

Wainaina says Kapuscinski's mistakes reveal his state of mind. He suggests that Kapuscinski may have believed the cliched myths he propogated about the African rulers he profiled. Wainaina describes the idealistic rulers of African nations who, in the 80's and 90's, "self-orientalized" and came to "believe their own bullshit completely." (I'm paraphrasing slightly). "Their parliaments and other institutions that regulated them let them get away with murder," Wainaina says, "by mindlessly validating not just the good they did, but everything they did."

The implication is that the Kapuscinski of "Shadow of the Sun" is one of these enablers, a writer whose critical days are behind him and who is only calling in the company line.

I'd like to know. I wish it weren't too late to sit down with the old man, read him one of the passages that Wainaina quotes, and ask him what he thought. Was history in Africa really, as he said in "Shadow of the Sun," "free of the weight of archives, of the constraints of dates and data"? Had history really achieved, in Africa, "its purest, crystalline form -- that of myth"?

Pocket Book Review # 5

2007-07-17T15:07:00.000-04:00

You Are Not a Stranger Here, by Adam Haslett

Judging solely from the story "Vincennes," which he read at last year's PEN/Hemingway event in Washington, D.C., Adam Haslett is working on a second collection of amazing short stories. In the meantime you can read "You Are Not a Stranger Here," his first collection, published in 2002 and out in paperback from Anchor Books. All of the stories in this collection are confident masterpieces of the form, the kinds of stories Chekhov might write if he woke up to find himself among us.

Which, you have to admit, would be pretty weird, for Chekhov to rise from the dead and start writing Adam Haslett stories.

Will all of these pocket reviews be of paperbacks? you ask.

Mostly, yes. These are reviews of whatever I happen to be reading, with little more design or intention than to put down whatever thoughts I have about them, and I read mostly paperbacks. Also, these are "pocket" book reviews, so it makes more sense they would be of paperbacks.

How did we get off on this tangent?

Good question. But I will say that the word that comes to mind after reading "You Are Not a Stranger Here" is "fine." These are fine short stories. Fine, fine.

Pocket Book Review # 4

2007-07-04T22:01:00.000-04:00

Travels With Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski

When he was a young correspondent, Ryszard Kapuscinski left Poland for his first foreign assignment in with a dog-eared copy of Herodotus’ “The Histories” as his only field guide. Kapuscinski’s idea for this memoir -- the last of his collections of essay and reportage -- was to describe those early travels with the father of literary travel writing, to place his early experiences in the shadow of Herodotus’ stories.

It was a lovely idea, and reading Kapuscinski is always a delight. But I have to say that this one didn’t quite seem to work as well as Kapuscinski might have intended. The early chapters, when Kapuscinski first sets off, are delightful, and of course Kapuscinski quotes the best parts of “The Histories.” He also finds some connections between Herodotus’ classic and his own adventures. But if you’ve read Herodotus before, and “The English Patient,” and seen the movie, the idea and the material will seem a bit familiar.

In the end, though, Kapuscinski turns the story toward something more personal, and more meaningful. As if he were Homer, conjuring his muse to sing, Kapuscinski writes a kind of love song to what it means to be a foreign correspondent, that is, a journalist charged with traveling to and reporting from a foreign place. The last chapter of the book is wonderful, and Kapuscinski’s final descriptions of Herodotus are the closest he comes to autobiography. When he describes Herodotus as “a vivacious, fascinated, unflagging nomad, full of plans, ideas, theories,” he is, of course, talking about himself.

Pocket Book Review # 3

2007-06-29T21:58:00.000-04:00

No One Belongs Here More Than You, by Miranda July

It would be a disservice to say the stories in Miranda July's collection are propelled by a quirky voice. They are propelled by a voice that is captivating, funny, wise, and honest. What July has figured out is that a voice can sound strange but also be a delight, that it can be slightly alienated and confused but also have the timing of nightclub stand-up.

Here is the narrator of "Majesty" explaining her job as an earthquake safety counselor:

"There's a school in the neighborhood, Buckman Elementary, and every year they invite the firemen in to explain how to Stop, Drop, and Roll, and later in the day I come in and talk about earthquake safety. Sadly, there is very little you can do. You can stop, you can drop, you can jump in the air and flap your arms, but if it's the Big One, you're better off just praying. Last year a little boy asked what made me the expert, and I was honest with him. I told him I was more afraid of earthquakes than any person I know. You have to be honest with children."

Pocket Book Review # 2

2007-06-25T21:54:00.000-04:00

In the Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscinksi

"The Soccer War" is an egaging and fascinating read, but "The Shadow of the Sun" is a masterpiece.

"The Soccer War" bounces all over, from Africa to Latin America, and occasionally Kapuscinski steps in with a journal entry on the Big Book he wished he'd written and that, perhaps, he thought he never would. It's great reading, but it's also a disparate collection.

All the stories in "Shadow" are set in Africa, which makes the work cohesive and coherent in a way that "Soccer War" is not. This collection of reportage is essentially a checkered history of 20th Century Africa, reported by an eloquent, thoughtful, and thoroughly engaging correspondent.

Colonialism in Africa reduced ten thousand entities to fifty, Kaupsinski writes, "but much of the underlying variety, this mosaic -- this shimmering collage of pebbles, bones, shells, bits of wood, pieces of tin, and leaves -- has remained. The more closely we stare at it, the better we see how the bits and pieces of this tableau change place, shape, and hue, giving rise to a spectacle staggering in its mutability, richness, and pulse of color."

Pocket Book Review # 1

2007-06-21T21:45:00.000-04:00

The Soccer War, by Ryszard Kapuscinski

From 1958 to 1980 Kapuscinski was the Polish Press Agency's correspondent in Africa and Central and South America. He flew from one crisis to the next, a literary man with a journalist's notebook, reporting on wars and revolutions, profiling political leaders, revolutionaries, and madmen, and living with the common people in their tin houses on their ramshackle streets.

The Soccer War is a collection of reports from Kapuscinki's far-flung travels, interspersed with soaring diary entries styled, whimsically, "Plan for a Book That Could Have Started Right Here," "Plan for a Book That Could Have Been Written," "Plan for a Book That Will Never Be Written," etc. It's touches like these that make Kapuscinski's essays so special. He writes about tragedy, but never loses his sense of the beauty and absurdity of the world.

It's a Vintage paperback. $14. You cannot go wrong.

Update

2007-06-17T21:07:00.000-04:00

OK, so I don't update this blog very often. I know this greatly disappoints my three readers. But today -- glorious day! -- is different. Today I check in to update Ye Olde Blogg. Here is the rundown:

Sarah Vowell Was My Soul Mate is on The Nervous Breakdown

Judas Breaks His Silence is on the Opium website.

And finally, I put a movie on You Tube that I made several years ago, called Quimby Explodes

Please enjoy.

For those who have read this far, some recommendations. First, the New York Times has struck blogging gold in Paper Cuts, the new blog by Times book review editor Dwight Garner. It's lively, funny, and the behind-the-scenes look at the Book Review you always wanted.

Second, I admit to having a love-hate relationship with reading. I love to read, and I'm always plowing through something or other, but so many books just aren't particularly great. They are good, but they don't offer the transcendent experience that can make reading a truly special experience. Well, thankfully, there are exceptions, and "In the Shadow of the Sun" by Ryszard Kapuscinski is one of them. I read "The Soccer War" earlier in the week, and while that book is very good, "Shadow of the Sun" is a masterpiece. It recounds Kapuscinski's twenty years of adventures in Africa as a foreign correspondent for Poland's state newspaper. The adventures and Kapuscinki's writing are amazing. And, best of all, it's a $15 Vintage paperback. The best kind of book.