I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris

When I grow up, I don't want to be an astronaut or a ballerina. I want to be Amy Sedaris. She's charming, she's a little demented, and she's hilarious. So until the day I get those proportions right, I'll just have to settle for her recipes and tips on entertaining properly.

...Which, to be sure, are pretty entertaining. Not many people could get away with making a book half-parody and half-cookbook, but Ms. Sedaris manages it. The book itself is pretty simple: it's a series of tips, recipes, and short essays on entertaining. The practical stuff got a little repetitive, especially as I got further in the book and realized that I'll never actually throw the number of dinner parties it would take to use the full breadth of the Sedaris planning techniques. I think she realizes that, though, and moves from topics like shopping for a party to more exotic things like entertaining the infirm and cooking like a hobo. Possibly the most useful section is the one that discusses how to cook while under the influence. That alone is probably worth the cover price.

The "look" of the whole thing is very 1970s. When I was little, I loved looking through my mom's old cookbooks and stuff. It all seemed very elegant. Then time passed, and I realized that a) nothing in life ever, ever comes on a doily, and 2) food just isn't supposed to look like that. So now, in these days of photographs that make food look edible, and lighting that doesn't turn everything reddish brown, the old-school choice seems bold and artistic. Or something. The photos are hilarious, from the polyester dresses to the Betty Crocker stylized facial expressions and the general 1974 joie de vivre. Of course, since this is Amy Sedaris, said joie de vivre also includes a bong, crappy vegetable craft projects, and crying children.

But while the pictures keep everything afloat, the best parts are the random tips and observations. A few of my favorites:

"There is much one can do to remove a urine stain from a mattress. Vinegar can remove odors, but because this is a moisture problem, I suggest dragging your mattress out into the sun. But realize that you're not only airing a mattress, you're airing your dirty laundry as well."

Under "Children's Games": "Play Grown-Up. Have a cocktail party. Make fake liquor using food coloring....Pretend French fries with the tips dipped in ketchup are lit cigarettes. Have children simulate spousal abuse by arguing and, as this escalates, slapping each other. Use Tic Tacs to spit out of the mouth as if they were teeth. Use red Tic Tacs if you want to pretend they are bloody teeth. If there is an infant in the house, it's always fun to play Social Services. Have one child pretend he is going to take the baby away from another child. The pretend 'mother' can fight for custody....Have a child pretend he is walking in on his wife and catching her having an affair with another person."
[Editrix's note: Didn't every kid have scenarios like this when they played imaginary games? No? Just me? Okay then.]

On dating: "If you're the one leaving: Pack an overnight bag, you don't want to be seen walking the beltline in a Greek dress the next morning. Don't leave a piece of jewelry at his house so you can go back and get it later; he may be with his real girlfriend.

If he's the one staying: Pack the medicine chest. Trojans.

If you end up spending a lot of time in bed together with nothing to do, quiz each other on all the state capitals, then move on to learning 10 new vocabulary words a night. Good times. Frigid, incontinent, impudent, Clydesdale, vaginitis, homosexual, ennui, ampersand, charcuterie, abstinence."

So even though I will probably never have the swingin' parties that Amy is probably having right this second, it's clear that I have much to learn to get through life with a modicum of grace. And somehow I don't think I'll find it in any Martha Stewart magazine, so Hospitality Under the Influence it is, then.

The Small Penis Rule

I do love a good literary slapfight. And this one's a doozy, if only because it involves petty references to penis size, one of the better magazines in the country, and a man who has sold more books than anybody but Jesus.

Columnist Accuses Crichton of 'Literary Hit and Run'

Choice excerpt:

Mick Crowley is described as a “wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate” with a small penis that nonetheless “caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.”

Mr. Crowley writes that Mr. Crichton’s Mick Crowley not only has a similar name but is also a graduate of Yale and a Washington political journalist. Mr. Crowley contends that Mr. Crichton has tried to escape public censure for his literary attack by hiding behind what has become known as “the small penis rule.”

The rule, Mr. Crowley writes, is described in a 1998 article in The New York Times in which the libel lawyer Leon Friedman said it is a trick used by authors who have defamed someone to discourage lawsuits. “No male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis — that’s me!’ ” Mr. Friedman explained.

This world would be so much more boring without the passive aggressiveness of writers. It's funny, 'cause an essay I just read for my Book Editing seminar talked about how a publisher pretty much has to rely on the dependability of an author to prevent legal issues like libel and plagiarism. Legal reads can only catch so much--and who's going to question Michael Crichton? Of course, I'm assuming this isn't provable libel, given that nobody really thinks Michael Crowley is a child molester, but it hews pretty close. I'm sure Mr. Crowley's penis would agree.

Feeding the Monster by Seth Mnookin

"The R.S. fans gave their undying loyalty. We will give our relentless effort, redoubled, next year. This loss in the ALCS only intensifies our resolve to win. We will be back."

This note, tantamount to a concession speech, was drafted by Red Sox co-owner Larry Lucchino in the eighth inning of Game 4 of the 2004 American League Championship Series. Everyone in Fenway Park and in front of a Fox TV screen at that point figured the Sox were going to collapse under an ego-bruising sweep by the Yankees. Next year. It's always next year. Only Lucchino didn't have to deliver his speech to legions of bitter and depressed Sox fans, 'cause we all know now that a stolen base and a crisis of Yankee confidence let the Red Sox go on to win the game, and the next three in a row. Then there was a World Series or something.

Moments like Lucchino's assumed capitulation are what makes Seth Mnookin's Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top better than your average Red Sox book from your average native New England writer. Mnookin had an incredible level of access to team executives and players, and uses it to give a candid glimpse into the giant ball of dysfunction that is the Sox.

The book is definitely at its best when it covers the period between 2001 (when the current ownership team took over in a Boston-cum-Wonderland bidding process) and 2005 (when the team started devolving again into its usual self and almost sacrificed Theo Epstein in the process). The early-going parts, which describe the entire history of the team and the unrelenting bitterness tasted by the great players who never got to wear the ring, are nothing very special. The historical anecdotes about old owners and laughably bad Sox managers are entertaining, but they don't feel fresh at all. We get it--Boston's a crucible, the fans are crazy, and the players are usually misfits. Not new stuff. But all of it is necessary, if a bit long, because the book tries for reportorialism over easy partiality. Mnookin is mostly successful here; I can see a non-Sox fan enjoying the book. Nobody but people affiliated with the team takes much criticism, and there's no rubbing of faces in, say, total annihilation in the ALCS. (Seth Mnookin is a far better person than I.) But yeah...he explains a lot of the team's history, and bogs down the first half in the process.

Things don't really come alive until the last few days of the team sale in 2001, when a small cadre of low-level baseball owners are thrown together in a bid at the last minute and beat out the politically favored local investors to buy the team. There are even a few random Katie Couric cameos! Anyway, the new guys' bid wins, the Boston press grumbles, they hire the youngest General Manager in MLB history, the Boston press grumbles, the team starts winning consistently, the press grumbles less, the team trades Nomar, everybody grumbles more, and then they beat the Yankees and finally everyone's cool with everyone else. For about five minutes. Oh, well.

Mnookin is best at the sharp player profiles anyway. Many Sox players in the past five years get the burnish scraped off of them (except Ortiz, though that shouldn't be much of a surprise). Schilling, Manny, Millar, and especially Nomar take the biggest hits. I mean, I knew Nomar was pretty much a crying baby in his last few months with the team, but I didn't know how deep it ran. For example, before he was traded at the 2004 waiver deadline, a poll of Sox players revealed that nobody actually wanted him to stay. Perhaps this is because his agent is the devil, but I digress. The players are easily the most entertaining part of the book. Some of my favorite passages:

"One of this former managers nicknamed Schilling 'Red Light Curt' because of how he gravitated toward television cameras, and Phillies general manager Ed Wade, referring to a starting pitcher's workload of one game out of every five, once said that Schilling was 'a horse every fifth day and a horse's ass the other four.'"

"Early in the 2005 season, the following hand-written sign was tacked on a bulletin board in the Red Sox clubhouse: '1918 + 24 Manny + 34 Ortiz + 33 Varitek - 5 Nomar = 2004."

"In 2001, the Herald's Jeff Horrigan was doing an interview with Pedro Martinez for Sports Illustrated for Kids. Horrigan asked Martinez his favorite color. 'Green.' Favorite book? 'Whatever.' Favorite actress? 'Sandra Bullock.' Secret ambition? 'I would like to fuck Sandra Bullock,' Martinez replied with a grin. Horrigan explained that likely wasn't an appropriate response for a children's magazine and asked the question again. Martinez dutifully amended his answer: 'I would like to sleep with Sandra Bullock.'"

And some of the appeal of the book is just the simple baseball writing: "Of the four major North American professional sports leagues, Major League Baseball gives its fans the greatest illusion of intimacy with its players. Baseball's 162-game regular season is almost twice as long as basketball's and hockey's 82-game seasons, while football players suit up for a mere 16 non-playoff games a year. The rhythms of the game and the all-encompassing nature of its coverage help foster this sense of closeness between fans and players. When a pitcher steps off the mound with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, you can watch as he takes a deep breath, screws up his courage, and enters back into the fray. Every player on the diamond spends much of every game standing on the field waiting for something to happen. These are the times in which he can be observed, times in which small quirks of his personality come through."

And finally, I learned some really important things:

* Larry Lucchino could disappear, and Boston would probably be better off.
* Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy is an even bigger tool, on an even bigger power trip, than I thought. I have an idea for his next book: a treatise on what it's like to be banned from Fenway Park. Ideally the Sox will help him out by kicking him to the curb. Before spring training. Or next week. Whichever comes first.
* Theo Epstein is amazing even when he's cranky. It's too bad this job will kill him before he's forty.
* There is no cure for being a member of Red Sox Nation. Antibiotics might help when there's a flareup of irrationality, but the disease will never completely go away. Always practice safe baseball when interacting with other fans--relations with Yankee fans could be especially combustible, so be sure to refrain from (too much) trash talking.

So yeah. I laughed, I sniffled a little, I bought a copy for my dad. Good times all around.

Obama forum at the JFK Library

[Note: if this looks familiar to the, uh, one person who reads this, it's because it's copied wholesale from my livejournal. I guess there are only so many times I can do half-assed recaps of a particular event.]

So I made the joke the other day that I'd probably walk out of the Obama event talking about how dreamy he was. And while I'm better in my old age at keeping the gushing crushes to a minimum, my geeky adoration for Senator Obama is still going full force.

Friday night, he was very much doing the charming politico thing. It's a pretty good mark of popularity when a guy can walk into a room of people who have been crammed into too-close folding chairs for well over an hour and a half, apologize for being late, and get a standing ovation for his efforts. Bob Herbert, the moderator for the forum, joked after his own introduction that he knew the crowd hadn't lined up for him--and sad as it is that people aren't clamoring for seats to hear a NY Times columnist speak, he was right.

Thankfully, they didn't mess around too much with soft questions, and Herbert asked the necessary ones with good humor. Overexposure? Obama agreed that even he's getting sick of seeing himself (though not as sick as his wife, apparently) on magazine covers, but that it's an honor, yada yada yada. Then there were questions about the current political climate, and Obama spoke passionately for a while about the midterm elections. He also put in a direct plug for Deval Patrick, the Democratic candidate for governor here in Massachusetts. I don't know if Political Operative Mike was there at the forum or not, but wherever he was, I'm sure he felt a warm shiver of joy down his spine at the moment of endorsement. Anyway, Obama was very emphatic about creating change via the elections in three weeks.

Then, before the lame audience questions started coming in, Herbert asked the big question, the one that everyone from Oprah to Tim Russert has been asking: will Obama run for president in 2008? For over a year now, the stock Obama answer has been something along the lines of, "I will serve out my Senate term," "I will not be running for president," etc. Not so much anymore. His answer this time was a rather long soundbite about how a person needs to be completely willing to sacrifice himself to the country to be President (with some witty jabs at the current president's vacation time, I might add), and that such a sacrifice can't be taken lightly. But he didn't say whether he had done this kind of thinking. And when Herbert pushed the issue, Obama answered that he's concentrating so fully on the next three political weeks that he can't even begin to think about the presidency. Which all just means that yes, unless something drastic happens, Obama will be in the field in '08--probably being hip-checked by Hillary and John Kerry.

As things wrapped up, the Kennedy Library rep made an unexpected announcement: Senator Obama would be signing books in the I.M. Pei atrium. Chance to meet Barack Obama? Yes, please. So I fought the crowds making their way, books in hand, down to said atrium. The line was long, but not so long that the outlook was discouraging. After about ten minutes, though, museum employees started working the line, telling people that the senator was on a tight schedule and would have to leave soon. Disappointing, but not so shocking--I assume there was some kind of fundraiser or other media event going on in Boston. But then the senator himself stood up to address the crowd; and instead of sneaking out under security cover like a lot of celebrities would have done, he announced that he was sorry he had to go. Then he proceeded to greet and shake hands with everyone standing in line. So the flyleaf of my copy of The Audacity of Hope is unfortunately still naked, but I totally got to shake his hand. And got eye contact and a "Hi, thanks for coming." Yup. Dreamy.

Anyway, I'm really glad I went, and tried so stubbornly to get tickets. I don't think I'll do the whole "JFK T stop after dark, by myself" thing again, but, y'know, that's something you can only learn by experience. Between this and Bob Woodward last week, I think I've done my good liberal duty for a while. Until Election Day, at least.

Bob Woodward event at First Parish Church

You're Bob Woodward. You've been a respected Washington journalist for decades, and you've published many, many books since your career-making story. You're on Larry King about four nights a week, talking about current events. So when you come to Cambridge to talk about your new book, which criticizes a different scary Republican president, what do you do? Why, open with a Watergate joke, of course.

"I think G. Gordon Liddy did the sound tonight," Woodward quipped by way of opening. Oh, Bob. Crazy Bob. There was nothing wrong with the microphones, and certainly no clicky wiretap noises. Let's just assume he opens every one of his book tour stops that way.

Anyway, he continued by talking about State of Denial's main themes, and the Bush administration in general. Donald Rumsfeld bore the brunt of Woodward's abuse, although it was still kinda mild. Because if those Larry King apperances have taught us anything, it's that Bob Woodward is more concerned with the sound of his own voice than with political posturing. Although now he seems to be acknowledging that the days of getting inside access to the administration have probably ended, after three books of increasingly strong criticism. So the tone is sharpening a bit. And the man is a shrewd book salesman: he'd offer some anecdotes, but always, always point out that the book had more. He made some publicist at Simon & Schuster very happy. His points, however, were pretty interesting. For example, I didn't know that former Chief of Staff Andy Card had a "hit by a bus" list of possible replacements for various high-level positions, or that the replacement list for Rumsfeld had ten people on it--including Joe Lieberman. Lieberman? Lieberman?! Who would want to be sent into battle by a whiny senator from Connecticut? He can't even get all of Connecticut's Democrats behind him, but effectively marshalling the armed forces? No problem.

For once, the audience Q&A was the best part of the evening. The crowd, as you might have guessed, was pretty liberal. That made it all the funnier that the setting was the First Parish Church in Cambridge, with the effect that Woodward was preaching anti-Bush sentiments to godless blue heathens. Anyway, people lined up to ask questions. Here are some approximations of what was said (re-enacted for your pleasure):

Audience guy: In your last few books, some say you perfected the art of the reach-around in order to get access to the Bush administration. How do you sleep at night?
Woodward: Did you read my previous books?
Audience guy: Well, no.
Woodward: You're dismissed.

Audience chick: Thank you for all of your wonderful journalism.
Woodward: Thanks. Is there a question in there?
Audience chick: Uh, yeah. Is Bush the stupidest person who ever lived, or just run-of-the-mill retarded?
[Editrix's note: about six different questions were variations on the stupidity issue.]

Audience guy: Records have shown that two years ago, Karl Rove and Jack Abramoff attended an NCAA game. Basketball, I believe. Karl had the nachos. Anyway, Abramoff was later found to be corrupt. White House transcripts....[talks for five more minutes without getting anywhere]
Woodward: There's a one-minute limit on the questions. Is there a point to this?
Audience guy: ...Abramoff...White House...Abramoff...[insert "adult talking" noise from Charlie Brown TV specials]
Woodward: I'm sorry, if you don't bring this to a question, I'm going to have to move on.
Audience guy: But Abramoff....
Woodward: You're done.
[obnoxious guy stomps down the aisle and out of the church]

But somewhere in the audience members' grandstanding, Woodward had some entertaining responses, and anecdotes about the war. I don't remember many of them specifically, but he did apologize for the media's lack of balls on the pre-war issues and the lack of follow-through that would have exposed the WMD/lying issues sooner. So, you know, there's that, even though none of us will get our three years back.

I am, however, disappointed at the overall lack of Carl Bernstein gossip. Nora Ephron totally had Woodward beat on that count.

"And now, Maya Angelou for Butterfinger"

Slate has an interesting article today about classic authors and self-promotion. Apparently the editors of a new book, about Hemingway's penchant for peddling his own name, see product endorsements by Hemingway as signs of incipient madness. Sounds to me like someone (looking at you, Matthew Bruccoli) is a little bitter that no one invited him to endorse beer after he published his definitive edit of The Great Gatsby. Anyway, Slate's Paul Devlin scoffs at the humorlessness of the the book's editors (Bruccoli and Judith Baughman), and provides several amusing anecdotes about writers' writers pandering to the bottom line. Some names are not so surprising (Truman Capote), while others are definitely out of character (Frederick Douglass totally James Frey-ing his story for different audiences, for example).

It becomes way too easy, post-lionization, to forget that these guys had to move books--and if they'd never sold much of anything, we wouldn't know who they are. The academic fantasy is nice and all, but it's good to know that book publicity has always been the seedy little sidekick to publishing. It's rather sad that the unorthodox methods (airline ads, circus programs) have dropped out almost completely. Wouldn't you take notice if your cereal box had a brief-but-punchy essay from, say, Philip Roth?

Also, thanks to this article, my new mission is finding "Hemingway paper dolls...featuring him as matador, caveman, bon vivant, fisherman, and soldier" from 1934. I would assume different paper drinks come as accessories for each Barbie-style vocation.

And because I never miss an opportunity to abuse this clip, I give you another dark side of celebrity endorsement.

New Yorker Festival 2006

So this weekend may have been the national observance of some smallpox-bearing Italian dude, but it was also a celebration of something much more entertaining than native displacement: the New Yorker Festival.

Despite missing out on tickets for the festival's marquee Jon Stewart/David Remnick duet, Jacob and I managed to score tickets for other appealing events. The first of these, part of "Fiction Night," was a standard-structure reading with authors Lorrie Moore and Julian Barnes. Sadly, both writers were too nice to turn it into a literary throwdown, but what are you gonna do? Ms. Moore was a bit of a revelation, actually. She read a semi-autobiographical piece about middle-aged divorce. I wasn't expecting her personal style to be as sweetly twisted as her prose; and the NPR-ready voice was surprising as well. The piece itself was probably as rough as she claimed it to be, but her word choice is always so sharp and right that it was easy to miss the flaws, especially with the reading done aloud. (I totally fell for her style last year when I realized that her story "People Like That Are the Only People Here" sounded every bit as good as it looked on the page.)

Julian Barnes went next. I'm not familiar with Mr. Barnes at all, 'cept for a nagging feeling that I've seen him somewhere before, probably flogging a book on TV somewhere. He did an even more autobiographical piece than Moore did, but began with the smart memoirist's caveat: all memories are probably fake anyway. He was amusing and the story was enjoyable (though kinda long), but the clipped British thing discouraged real engagement. He never stopped being Julian Barnes reading Julian Barnes. Afterward, the audience questions/requests were surprisingly not bad--or at least no worse than the average event. The crowd was relatively young and hipsterish, so there wasn't as much open fawning. Just the usual call for writerly advice and and obligatory "let's be whimsical and make you think on your feet" question, this time about which music the authors would take with them to a desert island. This is less random than it sounds, since the topic in general was brought up by Barnes earlier, but it's still kinda cruel to put people on the spot like that. At any rate, neither Moore nor Barnes slipped up and said that they'd take the Spice Girls or anything, so the outcome was bittersweet.

Sunday's event, a preview of Man of the Year, proved to be educational. For instance, did you know that Lillian Ross is still alive? I certainly didn't. I've been reading her assembled New Yorker anthologies for a long time now, and just assumed that someone hired by the magazine's founder would have gone to the great editorial board in the sky by now. Anyway, the still-kicking Ms. Ross led a small panel after the movie, asking a few introductory questions of Barry Levinson and a newly sober Robin Williams before Williams completely took over with his high speed impressions and political punditry. Ross might not be so spry anymore, but she's still pretty sharp--more so than most 80-somethings, I'd bet. And back in the day, she had an intriguing relationship with former New Yorker editor William Shawn. So we'll forgive her for suggesting that Robin Williams actually run for president. To be fair, Williams deferred by saying that his past would make Clinton look like a nun (or something to that effect). Just as well that he won't be vetted in the press--I don't think we really need to know just how much cocaine a standup could ingest in 1983 before heading out onstage. But the movie was good, the post-film conversation was entertaining, and the French Alliance theater did not serve crepes. Also a bittersweet outcome.

All in all, the festival (at the events and at its Union Square headquarters) had a quality literary buzz. Of course, we didn't make it to the one event that could have killed said buzz: the New Yorker dance party. I think we're better off that way. Lots of bookish fun was had in the name of Harold Ross's brainchild, and I can't wait for 2007's. Next year in Union Square!

Taxonomy of Book Editors

Amusing little Gawker piece on various types of Bookus Editorus. A Taxonomy of Book Editors

My time in and exposure to actual book editing have been fairly limited so far, but it seems pretty spot-on. Good to know that things in the trade book world will be no less neurotic.

Nora Ephron, Coolidge Corner

At the average author reading/lecture, a person could go an indefinite amount of time without hearing the phrase "baby fish mouth." But last Thursday at the Coolidge Corner Theater, it happened in the first five minutes.

Of course, it may have had something to do with the fact that said author was Nora Ephron: writer, Watergate confidante, and expert on 80s-era relationships. Ms. Ephron spoke in Brookline last Thursday, as part of her tour for her latest book, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman. (This was definitely one of those cases where I was drawn by the author more than the book. I may be a cranky old lady in a lot of ways, but essays on middle-aged womanhood? Yeah, not so much. However, one look at the crowd proved how much I was in the minority, being under forty and all. And men? I saw three, tops.)

Also, the words were not spoken by Ephron herself. That might have made it all right somehow, but alas....The event-planning folks at Brookline Booksmith tend to get cutesy in their intros for bigger-name authors. If you've written a low-level collection of poetry, chances are you'll get a standard intro. But if you've been a successful screenwriter with mega-familiar titles connected to your name like so many unpaid parking tickets, people are gonna want to spit your words back in your face. It just happened to be more painful than usual here. Monotone Booksmith Guy and More Monotone Booksmith Gal attempted banter. Yes, banter. This might have been okay if they'd just tried to emulate Meg Ryan & co., and written something brief and vaguely charming, but they opted instead to take direct lines from When Harry Met Sally. "You made a woman meow?" isn't nearly as funny when delivered from a podium. After about ten minutes (seriously) of this--and long after the whole thing lapsed into forgettable lines from Sleepless in Seattle--the crowd snapped. And trust me, you do NOT want to piss off an auditorium full of menopausal women. "Let Nora taaaaaaaaaalk," someone chanted. Suddenly there was a chorus of discontent. It was pretty amazing. The Booksmith people literally stopped mid-sentence and handed the microphone to Nora Ephron; then the monotone chick fled backstage, visibly upset. Toughest book crowd ever!

Things settled a bit once Ephron started talking. She didn't want to explain much about the book itself, much to the vocal consternation of the women next to me, who clearly wanted to commiserate on hot flashes. Most of the talk was the kind of thing I'd hoped it'd be: a lot of talk about the writing process in general. "Everything is copy," Ephron said, and went on to discuss how everything is fair game if you can turn it into a story. Even past marriages to Watergate-busting reporters, apparently. Oh, and Carl Bernstein? Not so happy with her book and movie Heartburn, as it turns out. Maybe he should have thought about that before cheating on his pregnant wife with an English chick. So there was good dish on that front.

There were also entertaining Hollywood anecdotes, especially appealing 'cause I'm such a sucker for Harry and Sally. For instance, did you know that the most famous scene in the movie, the one which will probably be carved on Ephron's tombstone, wasn't even written by her? Supposedly the faked orgasm idea came from Meg Ryan, while Billy Crystal came up with, "I'll have what she's having." And the whole idea came from Rob Reiner originally, who vehemently denied that any woman ever faked with him. Anyway, I thought that was cute. Ephron was pretty funny about it: "I'm in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations for something I didn't even write." You and Shakespeare both, sister. (Oh, just kidding. Don't get the academic panties in a wad.)

Eventually, Ephron had to turn to the publisher's bottom line, and talk about the book. It sounds humorous enough, given her general demeanor and talent, but still--not sure I'm ready yet for essays on postmenopausal sex and empty nest apartments in New York. But if it's any consolation, I'll probably pick up a tattered copy in the used book cellar of Brookline Booksmith in twenty years--and it will surely be $3 well spent.

Girlfriend in a Coma

Pop quiz: what do you get when you cross Chuck Palahniuk with Canada?

[Hint: It's not the blandest fight club ever.]

Okay, so it's Douglas Coupland. Coupland is one of those "experimental" writers who think it's awesome to do stuff like put several pages of nothing but three-letter Scrabble words in their books. And maybe it is awesome; that's not my issue here. But that's the type of writer he is.

Anyway, Mr. Coupland has been running a blog on the New York Times website all summer. The blog is enteratining enough; it features tidbits about book tours, various insights about Canadian and American cultures, and pictures of random crap. It didn't make me want to run out and read all of his books, but it did make me go and pick up Girlfriend in a Coma for the sixth or seventh time--a book that I first read in high school and adored. Being an English major in college subsequently ruined all of my previous favorite books, but Girlfriend fared better than most. It's not all that strong on a literary basis, but the ideas in it that appealed to a cynical eighteen-year-old have only gotten more resonant seven years later.

The plot is weirdly overcomplicated, but limited to seven people and one town in a concession to simplicity. (One Hundred Years of Solitude this is not.) Canadian teenagers have sex for the first time in 1979; one of them falls into a coma the same night, sending their high school clique into seven different versions of banal adult hell. There's a baby born of the coma chick nine months later, and all sorts of weird circumstances conspire to keep the high school friends from leaving their trapped-in-the-70s neighborhood in Vancouver. There's even an apocalypse involved. Hot stuff.

Coupland uses it all to back up a comparatively simple thesis: that current life is empty. Drugs! Insularity! Facile psychobabble! Our obsessions with pop culture take a particularly hard hit; Coupland shows us how awful it all is by...stuffing glib pop culture references into every other sentence. So the line between condemnation and postmodern awareness is pretty blurry.

His overall point is still pretty valid. What would any of us do with a collapse of the everyday order? I don't think Coupland's vision of claustrophobic squabbles and self-obsession is all that inaccurate. Still, he chooses to take the interesting premise, and the hyperawareness-as-insight schtick, and cram it all into some easy moralizing. That part gets less palatable as I get older. He's got me sympathizing more with the less-than-fulfilling lives of the characters now; but getting me to feel guilty about my own craptastic existence and then offering nothing but cheap platitudes doesn't really lead us anywhere productive. If the world ends tomorrow, leaving me stuck in Connecticut with my group of friends, I won't know how to fix things properly, and it will be all Douglas Coupland's fault. I hope he's happy.

And now the extract section...or, "why you may want to read the book no matter what snarky things I may have said about it":

"I looked at Karen, with her head resting atop her ski poles. She had the extra pulse of beauty people have when they know they're being fondly admired."

"Wendy's working hard--too hard, it seems. She's not much in love with Linus--obvious to anybody--nor is Linus much in love with Wendy. His soul is full of glue. Karen seems to have understood everyone's life immediately; the others think she is too out of it--too clued out about the modern world--but Karen sees all. She remembers the innocent pointless aims of their youths (Hawaii! Ski bum at Whistler!) and sees that they were never acted upon. But at the same time, larger aims were never defined. Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.
Her friends are not particularly happy--not with their lives. Pam had rolled her eyes when Karen asked her if she was happy.
'No.'
'Fulfilled?'
'No.'
'Creative?'
'A little.'
Through the monsters they design and the TV shows they work on, they give vent to the loss they feel inside. Expressions of pettiness, loss, and corruption."

"And then came October 14, 1978, the day Jared snuck up behind Wendy and whispered, See you after the game. Meet me in the parking lot. I've got a bag of candy to give you. And then came the collapse on the football field followed by the thousand passionate nights that never came Wendy's way. And she's never told anybody, because who would believe it? Because she is only Wendy: dutiful, sexless, brainy, and almost a tragedy (in her father's eyes) had Linus not happened along. Romantic beauty is for others."

"In London the supermodels wear Prada and the photographers snap their photos. The young princes read their Guinness Book of World Records. In California, meetings are held and salad is picked at. Across the globe hydro dams generate electricity and radio towers send powerful signals out to the heavens advertising Fiat Pandas and creme rinses. Golden lights oscillate wildly. Giant receiving dishes rotate and scour the universe for voices and miracles. And why shouldn't they?"

Early Bird

Yesterday on the T, I stood next to a feisty foursome, none of whom were under age sixty. They were very much the stereotypical Florida retirement community type: the guys wore bright-colored Bermuda shorts, the ladies wore flower patterned shirts over shapeless linen capris, and they talked incessantly about how Joan Rivers performing live standup was the funniest thing they've ever seen. What really caught my attention was their further conversation, though:

Wife #1: We should go to the aquarium. Did you hear about those seals that died?
Husband #1: No. Did you hear Bruno Kirby died?
Husband #2: Who's Bruno Kirby?
Wife #1: You know, Bruno Kirby. He was in those Billy Crystal movies. When Harry Met Sally, and that one about the cows.
Husband #2: What?
Husband #1, louder: Cows! City Slickers! Billy Crystal and cows!
Wife #2: I don't care for that Billy Crystal. Let's go to Faneuil Hall instead of the aquarium.

I was amused and more than a little charmed by these still-active senior citizens, until I realized that at some point, we're all going to be these people. After retirement, there's a pretty good chance that it's all circular conversations and yelling so that your increasingly deaf friends can hear you. And then the whole retirement community thing made a little more sense. Why subject yourself to the unspoken judgment of some kid next to you on public transportation, when you could surround yourself with people who are more likely to share your affinity for Joan Rivers?

Of course, it doesn't hurt that earlier in the week, I finished reading Rodney Rothman's Early Bird: A Memoir of Premature Retirement, and was predisposed to consider such things. Rothman's book explores what it's like to ditch one's burned-out working life at age 28, and venture early into retirement. Specifically, he seeks the authentic experience: living in a small community in Florida, among the people who actually worked and saved for forty years before going south. The shortcut certainly sounds appealing; working for so long feels kind of like a chump proposition, from the twentysomething end of things.

But if the premise is a bit cynical (particularly given that Rothman is a former writer for Letterman and other snarky TV shows), he turns it around into a sweeter narrative about his own development as a young-old person. Armed with guides like Successful Aging and an openness for activities like 4 pm dinners and shuffleboard, Rothman's goals become less about getting away from his own life and more about fitting into a new one. You know that part of Groundhog Day where the Bill Murray character grows a conscience and starts learning piano, feeding the homeless guy, etc.? The vibe is kind of like that, but articulated better, and less cheesily altruistic.

The best moments come from the casual social observations that come once Rothman is ensconced in Century Village (albeit illegally, as a boarder of a woman he found through a Florida-specific roommate finding service). It's almost comforting to know that the pervasiveness of high school cliques never really ends; the Mean Girls just convene by the pool instead of the cafeteria, and wear floppier hats. Ditto for the high school baseball team, only now there's a wiry, bearded Mennonite playing second base. Rothman tries to capitalize on his youth in all these activities and dominate the old people to reassure himself that he's not really retired, but often fails hilariously.

There's also a lot of surprising info about the citizens of retirement communities, such as the general vibrancy of their sex lives. JDate is quite the popular tool down there, apparently. And Rothman tries out the requisite dating for himself--keeping it to women his own age for the most part, but also pondering whether it's okay to sleep with an unexpectedly attractive 75-year-old woman, in one extremely funny chapter.

Ultimately, Rothman comes to the conclusion one might expect: that retirement is only viable for those who have a decade or two to revel in it, not five or six decades. But he made a good run at the lifestyle, and produced a highly entertaining book in the meantime.

Some favorite passages:

On the Great Florida Migration: "Many of these communities prohibited any resident under the age of fifty-five. To me, that seems delightfully vengeful and vindictive. It's like an act of civil disobedience. Millions of senior citizens shouting, 'You don't want us? We don't want you!' from the Florida peninsula, which suddenly resembled a giant downward-facing middle finger. It was a revolution, an octogenarian Boston Tea Party. The only difference was that these colonists would stick each tea bag in their purses for later use. Why let a perfectly good tea bag go to waste?" (24)

On baseball, played by the elderly or not: "The second baseman pivots and throws to first, and I barely beat out a double play....The old guys laugh. Then I hear Eli say from the dugout, 'If I had his hundred and sixty pounds on my body, I'd hit it a lot further than that.' I'm not sure if anyone has ever been dissed by a peace-loving Mennonite, but does it get lower than that?" (60)

On sex with an older woman: "I've been telling my friends I slept with Vivian. I didn't really. It's another one of my weather balloons. I get to see how they would have reacted if I had actually slept with her, without any of the guilt of having gone through with it.
It's interesting to see how people respond. Most find the idea so ridiculous they refuse to believe me. It's just not possible. My friend Jenni just snorts and says, 'You're a bad liar.' In the case of Nick, his reaction is several short, sharp intakes of breath, an awkward silence, a nervous laugh, and finally a troubled stamp of approval: 'Dude,' he says, 'that's awesome.'" (156)

On an 80-year-old standup comedienne: "Her act was a mix of 'dirty jokes and prop comedy.' She performs bits and pieces of it for me. 'I'd pull out a cucumber,' she tells me, 'and I'd say, "Ladies, who needs a man when you can buy cucumbers for a dollar?" And then I'd point at the knobs on the cucumber and say, "Men don't even have speed bumps!"'
'You said that?' I ask, a little shocked.
'People loved it,' she says.
The more I think about it, the more I like her cucumber joke. It's the perfect joke for an eighty-year-old raunch to tell, combining shock value with coupon clipping. And as far as fruit-and-vegetable humor goes, it sure as hell beats hitting watermelons with sledgehammers." (69)

How To Lose Friends And Alienate People

If The Devil Wears Prada taught us anything, it's that Conde Nast can be an extremely unpleasant place to work. Of course, Lauren Weisberger tried to deny that the setting for her fashion magazine hell was Conde Nast at all--she did a bang-up job of changing names, and turning a lobby ficus into a potted palm. But we (and probably Anna Wintour's lawyers) knew the deal. However, Weisberger was constrained at all times by the Chick Lit Code: veil thinly, but veil like the dickens so nobody can sue you for a fictionalized memoir. Oprah would approve.

In How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, Toby Young doesn't buy into that bullshit, mostly because he wants people to know that he worked for Vanity Fair, and wants it more than anything in the world. If you don't happen to know that he spent a few months on staff there, then his entire life is for naught. And so, much of the book is about his time at the magazine: his flukey invitation from Graydon Carter to be a contributing editor; his charmless alienation of the entire staff; and his wacky (and yet somehow still lame) attempts to get Vanity Fair to incorporate British-style humor in its glossy pages. Young adopts the outsider perspective right away, and fights hard to keep it. For example, he uses the motif of the Vanity Fair Oscar party in several places; ostensibly he's complaining about how he can't get in with his own name. Yet it's pretty clear that sneaking in and working hard to get himself banished is his raison d'etre, if not the raison de book deal. The whole book is like that. He solicits sympathy for the fact that he can't get ahead as a writer/socialite, but would probably be bored if he weren't snubbed and amusingly downtrodden. And he knows we'd be bored too. So he keeps plugging along, assuming that his personality is enough to carry everything.

And you know what? It kinda is. Enough writers do the self-pity, but not many do it with the kind of energy that keeps Charlie Brown heading to the football field every damn time. It probably doesn't hurt that Toby Young even looks rather Charlie Brown-esque. And the surprising elements do help make up for the narcissism. Graydon Carter could have been portrayed horribly, according to every other publishing memoir that ever included a difficult editor-in-chief. But Young gives him a pass while exploring the darker sides of their odd working relationship. Young saves the vitriol for a long diatribe about former New Yorker editrix Tina Brown, which is pretty hilarious in its depth and its lack of concern for the fact that she could easily have his testicles on a platter if she really wanted them.

The stuff that skews toward the publishing insider is what ultimately makes the book entertaining, given that half the people I know would give kidneys to have opportunities like Toby Young has had. I just doubt that any of us would have the chutzpah to screw it up so spectacularly and flaunt that fact. And there is plenty of useful information as well; where else would one find a list of words and terms banned from ever being used in Vanity Fair? (FYI: you will never see "plethora," "golfer," "fuck" (the verb), "funky," "weird," or any synonym for "said" in the pages of the magazine.)

Some of the more entertaining excerpts:

"When the party started winding down, I attached myself to a group of people heading over to Bowery Bar--here, at last, was my chance to get in. The group included the infamous Vanity Fair columnist George Wayne, a flamboyant, Jamaican homosexual. Among his many idiosyncracies, George has the celebrity's habit of always referring to himself in the third person. I'd never met a black homosexual before and, sitting next to him in the cab on the way to East 4th Street, I was slightly intimidated.
'So George,' I asked, trying to break the ice, 'how long have you been a hack?'
'A hack?' he replied in horror. 'G.W. is not a hack. He's a belletrist, darling. A FUCKING BELLETRIST!'
I decided to keep my trap shut after that."

"Conde Nast editors have developed a whole vocabulary to convey their bitchy, slightly camp worldview. An inadequately-decorated restaurant, for instance, is an 'airport lounge,' or--worse--a 'McDonald's,' while an overcrowded club or party is a 'rat fuck' or a 'cluster fuck.' A person who's less than drop-dead gorgeous is 'scary-looking,' and anyone who calls twice in one day, no matter how urgent their business, is a 'stalker.' It's as if they're celebrities having to contend with troublesome fans. The worst epithet that can be applied to anyone is that he or she is 'over.'"

Killing Yourself to Live

Chuck Klosterman is a pop culture guru of sorts. Just ask Chuck Klosterman. But Chuck Klosterman's real passion is writing about Chuck Klosterman.

There. Now you know what it's like to read Killing Yourself to Live. Don't be misled by the title, or the conceit that the author sets up at the beginning of the book: that Spin magazine practically begged him to go on a road trip and muse about all the great rock 'n roll deaths. Oh, sure, there are rental cars and desolate towns where low-grade rockstars died like, well, rockstars, in fiery crashes or pukey overdoses. There are even a few interviews with locals about where, exactly, half of the Allman Brothers Band checked out. But the parade of dead guys never even approaches the main stage. That's reserved for Chuck's musings on all the women he has loved/still loves/doesn't really love, but still sleeps with/will ever love.

Depending on your perspective, this could easily be false advertising. If, say, a person picks up the book wanting to know more about that nightclub fire in Rhode Island and how the members of Great White are subsequently holding up--and finds hundreds of pages of Chuck talking about some chick who is now dating an architect--then something is going to be way off. But if one is reading it for the sake of reading Chuck Klosterman's witty one-liners, it just kinda fits, in a resigned kind of way. And there's another camp as well: if one read Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and thought, "Hey, there's just not enough personal info about Chuck in here," then this is a perfect book. On any given page, I found myself vacillating between all three of those modes. I can't actually stay mad at good old Chuck. Mostly because I probably wouldn't have picked up a book about dead rockstars anyway if his name weren't on it.

That's why it's so frustrating when he gets bogged down in the details of the three main women in his life. There are entertaining anecdotes, most of which have more to do with Klosterman's own history and not necessarily the chicks (like a few pages about his "nemesis," or bits about how a thoroughly midwestern kid adapts to urban writer hipsterism). And even when he's obsessing about Diane, Quincy, or Lenore (none of whom I can tell apart) ad nauseam, he still makes quality, funny observations that transcend the belly gazing. So my patience hovered around The Line for much of the book, mostly giving him the benefit of the doubt based on general wittiness. That is, until everything kind of implodes in a multiple-page wreck of a simile in which he compares every woman he's ever met with every member of KISS. Seriously. What might have been cute for a paragraph or two is merely horrific after about three pages. Maybe I just don't care enough about Gene Simmons's solo work, or about the freelance drummer who performed with the band on one of its reunion tours. But my God....there's no real justification for this. Had he tried to link the women to John Lennon, Buddy Holly, or one of the other dead musicians, he might have been able to justify it on a structural basis. But alas...not so much.

Yet I can't condemn the book (or Klosterman) overall because I can't stand KISS, or because of a torturous love letter to the band that was clearly the author's real goal in getting a book deal to write about musicians. After all, it's still Chuck. I knew what I was getting when I grabbed the paperback at Borders. I just wish he hadn't bothered with the obvious effort of trying to push a memoir through a strained metaphor about how musicians have to die to be real rockstars. I probably would have paid the same cover price for something called Chuck's Chicks: Or, How I Pissed Off Every Woman I've Touched.

Some favorite passages, which guarantee I'll continue to read whatever frustrating wackiness he publishes next:

On trying to explain why the book is metafictionally messy: "In all probability, you will also complain about the author's reliance on self-indulgent, postmodern self-awareness, which will prompt the person you're conversing with to criticize the influence of Dave Eggers on the memoir-writing genre. Then your cell phone will ring, and you will meet someone for brunch." (18)

On how Fleetwood Mac's Rumours was an album about the band's own hookups and breakups: "Predictably, Q always took Stevie Nicks's side in the debate, and I always aligned myself with control freak Lindsey. 'The fact that Lindsey Buckingham even wrote a song like this proves he's a jackass,' Q would say. 'What kind of asshole forces his ex-girlfriend to sing backing vocals on a song that accuses her of being a slut?' In retrospect, this does seem egocentrically vindictive. Still, I think Stevie Nicks totally had it coming, especially in light of the fact that she later shacked up with Don Henley." (142)

On writing and one of his women: "A few months prior, I had also written a piece about Lenore that ran in GQ, because that's the kind of thing self-indulgent, first-person writers inevitably do. I have no idea what compels me to do these things; I will never understand why I need to write about the events that other people merely experience. And even though Lenore understands that this is how I am, she remains uncomfortable about having thousands of people read about my personal feelings toward her, particularly when the things I write are often things I would never say.
'Why didn't you tell me you loved me?' she asks by the lake. 'It's on the second page of your book, but you never actually said it to me. Not even once.'
'That's not true,' I say. 'I told you I loved you seven times.' This is technically accurate but intellectually fraudulent; I've told Lenore I loved her on seven occasions, but three times were in handwritten letters, three times were in emails, and once was when I was drunk." (173)