Why go to sunny Orlando when you can get just as much theme park goodness in foggy England? At least the Charles Dickens theme park won't have giant mice running around (run-of-the-mill London rats, maybe). And perhaps the "It's a Small World" equivalent will have haunted-eyed street urchins instead of smiley United Nations children. This has the potential to be great--yet I can't help but feel it's unfair to Scrooge McDuck, who will probably be the first casualty in the anti-Disneyfication movement.
Until I can visit this monument to London's dark social problems, it'll just have to serve as a reminder that I need to read Dickens. Aside from an annual re-read of A Christmas Carol, I haven't read any of his novels since high school. It seems kind of unfair not to have approached him as an adult. I should take this up with my book club....
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
solving the world's literary crime, one writer at a time
Because I'm way behind on fun reading, I had no idea until this evening that The New Republic ran a story last month about possible Sedaris fraud. On one level, I don't really blame them. Who better to be a watchdog for literary crimes than the former enabler of Stephen Glass? It's the literary equivalent of gaydar. Plus, I assume their factchecking department has improved in the interim.
However, the logic is definitely flawed. Not fatally, but close. David Sedaris has been pretty open about the exaggeration factor. The article explicitly mentions this. But trying to prove the precise extent of the exaggeration feels a bit too nitpicky. The grain of salt offered by this admission should be enough for most marginally intelligent people; do we really need an itemized list of what was enhanced and what wasn't? If Sedaris runs for president or American Idol, maybe this will be more relevant.
And this was all dredged up with the James Frey mess, but nobody's pushing David Sedaris as a beacon of what anybody should do with his life. His writing is a lot of things, but "life affirming" isn't quite one of them. He's a humorist. Dismissing that claim out of hand--as the secondhand Slate article does--is a mistake. No one wants to read ostensibly funny memoirs that detail everything exactly as it happened--mostly because no such book exists. Real life is rarely funny; and when it is, it's the kind of quiet, poignant funny that isn't really funny at all. (See: every memoir ever written by a female comedian detailing her uterus-related illness.) We pretty much expect our memoirists to punch it up. That's why these books aren't published under the banner of "self help," or "go ahead and sue me if you find inaccuracies."
And most of Sedaris's books aren't even published under "autobiography." Walk into any bookstore--the books are in Humor. According to the Library of Congress, David Sedaris is an American humorous essayist. Check and...check. Naked is the only one that lists "biography" among the LOC designations. Admittedly, that's the one under the most contention in the TNR article, but still...kinda weak. If the books were marketed as being inspirationally true, this would be much different. Call me when you can verify every claim Donald Trump has ever made in print.
Alex Heard squanders whatever points I may have given him for journalistic integrity when he details how he dug up long-gone acquaintences, a random nurse, and Lou Sedaris to prove that some moments and pieces of dialogue may have been fluffed. Very Fox News, Mr. Heard. Good job. The whole thing smacks of "vendetta," even though there doesn't seem to be any real animosity. Parts like this are especially telling:
Libby describes a friend who was funny and caring, and who had a soft spot for outcasts. She thinks the depiction of Sharon in David's "novels" (her term) is entertaining but a little off, because Sharon, far from being the full-time grouch of David's stories, was a capable mother. "The sarcasm is a little bit her," Libby said. "But she was nurturing, she was warm, she cooked dinner every night. I thought she was a marvelous woman."
She "thinks" the description is "a little off"? That's not a breaking news story. That's a personal issue between the writer and his writees. And discussing whether the dialogue sounds "too good" is probably less of an accuracy issue than a language one. Unless there's a verbatim record of every conversation ever had, memoir dialogue is going to be somewhat more approximate than, say, a transcript of Meet the Press.
But whatever its many flaws might be, the TNR article does have one of the best magazine illustrations I've seen in a long time. So, you know, there's that.
However, the logic is definitely flawed. Not fatally, but close. David Sedaris has been pretty open about the exaggeration factor. The article explicitly mentions this. But trying to prove the precise extent of the exaggeration feels a bit too nitpicky. The grain of salt offered by this admission should be enough for most marginally intelligent people; do we really need an itemized list of what was enhanced and what wasn't? If Sedaris runs for president or American Idol, maybe this will be more relevant.
And this was all dredged up with the James Frey mess, but nobody's pushing David Sedaris as a beacon of what anybody should do with his life. His writing is a lot of things, but "life affirming" isn't quite one of them. He's a humorist. Dismissing that claim out of hand--as the secondhand Slate article does--is a mistake. No one wants to read ostensibly funny memoirs that detail everything exactly as it happened--mostly because no such book exists. Real life is rarely funny; and when it is, it's the kind of quiet, poignant funny that isn't really funny at all. (See: every memoir ever written by a female comedian detailing her uterus-related illness.) We pretty much expect our memoirists to punch it up. That's why these books aren't published under the banner of "self help," or "go ahead and sue me if you find inaccuracies."
And most of Sedaris's books aren't even published under "autobiography." Walk into any bookstore--the books are in Humor. According to the Library of Congress, David Sedaris is an American humorous essayist. Check and...check. Naked is the only one that lists "biography" among the LOC designations. Admittedly, that's the one under the most contention in the TNR article, but still...kinda weak. If the books were marketed as being inspirationally true, this would be much different. Call me when you can verify every claim Donald Trump has ever made in print.
Alex Heard squanders whatever points I may have given him for journalistic integrity when he details how he dug up long-gone acquaintences, a random nurse, and Lou Sedaris to prove that some moments and pieces of dialogue may have been fluffed. Very Fox News, Mr. Heard. Good job. The whole thing smacks of "vendetta," even though there doesn't seem to be any real animosity. Parts like this are especially telling:
Libby describes a friend who was funny and caring, and who had a soft spot for outcasts. She thinks the depiction of Sharon in David's "novels" (her term) is entertaining but a little off, because Sharon, far from being the full-time grouch of David's stories, was a capable mother. "The sarcasm is a little bit her," Libby said. "But she was nurturing, she was warm, she cooked dinner every night. I thought she was a marvelous woman."
She "thinks" the description is "a little off"? That's not a breaking news story. That's a personal issue between the writer and his writees. And discussing whether the dialogue sounds "too good" is probably less of an accuracy issue than a language one. Unless there's a verbatim record of every conversation ever had, memoir dialogue is going to be somewhat more approximate than, say, a transcript of Meet the Press.
But whatever its many flaws might be, the TNR article does have one of the best magazine illustrations I've seen in a long time. So, you know, there's that.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Another Life by Michael Korda
About halfway through Michael Korda’s insider extravaganza about the publishing industry, Another Life: A Memoir of Other People, I realized that I probably could have skipped grad school. Emerson was great and all, but what I’ll take from it boils down to the structure of book publishing and the fun anecdotes about how it all works. Appropriate, then, that this book was actually an assignment for Book Editing in the twilight of my Master’s career. It’s probably just as well that I skimmed just enough to get by in the class discussions; had I read the whole thing, I definitely would have questioned the sanity of spending four hours a week listening to the instructor’s anecdotes when I had Michael Korda’s tucked in my bag all along.
So maybe I should be thankful that the book is a little slow to get into—so slow that I didn’t pick it up again until a reading drought this spring. It starts, despite its subtitle, as a memoir of Michael Korda. And this early Michael Korda is quite the name-dropper, thanks to his Hungarian-Hollywood-American upbringing. Until he gets an entry-level job at Simon & Schuster in the late 1950s, there’s a very real fear that he’s going to spend all five hundred pages talking about things like people he knew at Oxford, and which Hollywood washout hosted the best pool parties. But once he settles into New York book publishing, the dishy, informative parts start, and the references to “my father’s great friend, the movie producer X” become more sporadic and slightly less obnoxious.
After that, the book moves on two tracks, which wind up fused: practical information about how the industry functioned in the latter half of the 20th century, and anecdotes about particular authors/agents/publishing figures. The former bits make for an incredibly detailed look at the industry. A lot of things surprised me here. Like, it appears that book publishing has changed extremely little over the past fifty years. (For instance, publishing has to be one of the only industries with a business plan based on New Deal bailout policies.) Korda touches on the kind of patchy modernization when he muses that while the actual business of buying and selling books has stayed pretty much the same, it’s the world outside the bubble that’s changed. Crunchy corporate shell, smooth chocolate center. I also didn’t realize how recently publishing was the province of WASP-y males. Total non-kosher sausage fest until the late 60s.
The gossipy anecdotes about literati are the best part of the book. Korda was apparently the Forrest Gump of book publishing: in addition to being there for a crazy amount of bestsellers and nascent trends, his list of authors includes Graham Greene, Larry McMurtry, Richard Nixon, Woodward and Bernstein, Kitty Kelley, Ronald Reagan (at the same time Kelley was writing her Nancy book, no less!), Tennessee Williams on the decline, Philip Roth, and others that I can’t even remember. Korda wasn’t necessarily the editor on all of their big-name books, but still…impressive list. Some of the longer author spotlights are apparently adapted from New Yorker profiles that Korda did; the strongest are the ones on former presidents Nixon and Reagan, a long bit about Jacqueline Susann (which I believe was made into that Bette Midler movie a few years ago), and a great account of working with a painfully delusional Joan Crawford. Just as good are the snapshots of people who work behind the scenes, like various agents and editors. There’s a surprising candidness—it’s possible that by 2000, most of the major players were retired, or lunching at that big Algonquin table in the sky. It probably also helps that Another Life is published by Random House, while Korda did all his editor-in-chiefing at Simon & Schuster (another fun tradition in publishing: or, “what constitutes a conflict of interest, anyway?”).
The vivid characters definitely make up for unevenness in narrative flow, structure, chronology, and even language. Korda’s voice fluctuates throughout: sometimes he’s the cool observer, other times he’s much more present. I guess that’s a product of morphing previously published articles with a bigger timeline.
Anyway, despite the dishy qualities and the insider baseball, this was a pretty good read. Not that my career path is likely to change at this point (given that I did spend the cash and time on that M.A. and all), but it made me more excited about becoming a part of this world—God and interviewers willing. At the same time, I’d recommend it for anyone who’s not really familiar with the book industry. It’s a fantastic crash course, if you ever wanted to know more about those wacky literati.
And now some of the more amusing bits:
On editing:
“It is possible to simultaneously overwork and underachieve—indeed, for an editor, nothing is easier. You can spend weeks—months, even—lovingly rewriting a manuscript that was never worth anything in the first place. You know it’s someone else’s mistake, even as you sit up late every night with half a dozen sharpened number-two pencils, long after your partner has gone to bed with a martyr’s sigh and a strong hint that he or she won’t be responsible for what happens if this kind of thing doesn’t stop so the two of you can have a normal marriage in which a person doesn’t get pushed aside in favor of a manuscript every night of the week and gets fucked like a normal person every once in a while, not to speak of getting taken to the movies every once in a blue moon.”
On Joan Crawford’s advice to women:
“She strongly advised having afternoon sex and making men talk about their work. To the question of how a woman could take an interest in her husband’s work if, for example, he was a cashier, Joan suggested asking him (presumably before or during afternoon sex): ‘Any holdups today?’”
On publishing presidents:
“The only reason any normal citizen wants to visit the White House on business, I told Anderson, is to get the cuff links, or whatever the equivalent is for women. After all, take away the cuff links, and who on earth would want to meet Jimmy Carter? Anderson was not amused—at the time, he took the view that Carter was leading a moral crusade and was going to be part of a great moment in American history—but he managed to persuade the president to send me a handwritten letter of thanks when the book was finally published. To my surprise, Carter misspelled the title of his own book (‘A Goverment as Good as it’s People’). I had it framed.”
So maybe I should be thankful that the book is a little slow to get into—so slow that I didn’t pick it up again until a reading drought this spring. It starts, despite its subtitle, as a memoir of Michael Korda. And this early Michael Korda is quite the name-dropper, thanks to his Hungarian-Hollywood-American upbringing. Until he gets an entry-level job at Simon & Schuster in the late 1950s, there’s a very real fear that he’s going to spend all five hundred pages talking about things like people he knew at Oxford, and which Hollywood washout hosted the best pool parties. But once he settles into New York book publishing, the dishy, informative parts start, and the references to “my father’s great friend, the movie producer X” become more sporadic and slightly less obnoxious.
After that, the book moves on two tracks, which wind up fused: practical information about how the industry functioned in the latter half of the 20th century, and anecdotes about particular authors/agents/publishing figures. The former bits make for an incredibly detailed look at the industry. A lot of things surprised me here. Like, it appears that book publishing has changed extremely little over the past fifty years. (For instance, publishing has to be one of the only industries with a business plan based on New Deal bailout policies.) Korda touches on the kind of patchy modernization when he muses that while the actual business of buying and selling books has stayed pretty much the same, it’s the world outside the bubble that’s changed. Crunchy corporate shell, smooth chocolate center. I also didn’t realize how recently publishing was the province of WASP-y males. Total non-kosher sausage fest until the late 60s. The gossipy anecdotes about literati are the best part of the book. Korda was apparently the Forrest Gump of book publishing: in addition to being there for a crazy amount of bestsellers and nascent trends, his list of authors includes Graham Greene, Larry McMurtry, Richard Nixon, Woodward and Bernstein, Kitty Kelley, Ronald Reagan (at the same time Kelley was writing her Nancy book, no less!), Tennessee Williams on the decline, Philip Roth, and others that I can’t even remember. Korda wasn’t necessarily the editor on all of their big-name books, but still…impressive list. Some of the longer author spotlights are apparently adapted from New Yorker profiles that Korda did; the strongest are the ones on former presidents Nixon and Reagan, a long bit about Jacqueline Susann (which I believe was made into that Bette Midler movie a few years ago), and a great account of working with a painfully delusional Joan Crawford. Just as good are the snapshots of people who work behind the scenes, like various agents and editors. There’s a surprising candidness—it’s possible that by 2000, most of the major players were retired, or lunching at that big Algonquin table in the sky. It probably also helps that Another Life is published by Random House, while Korda did all his editor-in-chiefing at Simon & Schuster (another fun tradition in publishing: or, “what constitutes a conflict of interest, anyway?”).
The vivid characters definitely make up for unevenness in narrative flow, structure, chronology, and even language. Korda’s voice fluctuates throughout: sometimes he’s the cool observer, other times he’s much more present. I guess that’s a product of morphing previously published articles with a bigger timeline.
Anyway, despite the dishy qualities and the insider baseball, this was a pretty good read. Not that my career path is likely to change at this point (given that I did spend the cash and time on that M.A. and all), but it made me more excited about becoming a part of this world—God and interviewers willing. At the same time, I’d recommend it for anyone who’s not really familiar with the book industry. It’s a fantastic crash course, if you ever wanted to know more about those wacky literati.
And now some of the more amusing bits:
On editing:
“It is possible to simultaneously overwork and underachieve—indeed, for an editor, nothing is easier. You can spend weeks—months, even—lovingly rewriting a manuscript that was never worth anything in the first place. You know it’s someone else’s mistake, even as you sit up late every night with half a dozen sharpened number-two pencils, long after your partner has gone to bed with a martyr’s sigh and a strong hint that he or she won’t be responsible for what happens if this kind of thing doesn’t stop so the two of you can have a normal marriage in which a person doesn’t get pushed aside in favor of a manuscript every night of the week and gets fucked like a normal person every once in a while, not to speak of getting taken to the movies every once in a blue moon.”
On Joan Crawford’s advice to women:
“She strongly advised having afternoon sex and making men talk about their work. To the question of how a woman could take an interest in her husband’s work if, for example, he was a cashier, Joan suggested asking him (presumably before or during afternoon sex): ‘Any holdups today?’”
On publishing presidents:
“The only reason any normal citizen wants to visit the White House on business, I told Anderson, is to get the cuff links, or whatever the equivalent is for women. After all, take away the cuff links, and who on earth would want to meet Jimmy Carter? Anderson was not amused—at the time, he took the view that Carter was leading a moral crusade and was going to be part of a great moment in American history—but he managed to persuade the president to send me a handwritten letter of thanks when the book was finally published. To my surprise, Carter misspelled the title of his own book (‘A Goverment as Good as it’s People’). I had it framed.”
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