"And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting"

This time of year, I always make it a special point to read "The Raven." Part of it is that Poe has always been shoved down our throats as a horror writer (though I've always found him more sad than creepy), but really because it's such a good autumnal poem. It's cold and bleak and lonely--yeah, November!

Also, possibly the best thing ever (at least today): Christopher Walken reads "The Raven."

New Yorker Festival 2008

Sheryl and I had the following text message conversation today:

K: I def just brushed up against Salman Rushdie.
S: Whoa. Where?
K: New Yorker Festival HQ.
S: It's like our version of a strip club.

And she's right. I'd pick a pretentious book event over Chippendales any night of the week. Maybe next year I'll stock up on $1 bills, in case there are really cute hipster writers around.

Anyway, that's why the annual New Yorker Festival is one of my favorite NYC events. You can be any schmuck getting your complimentary cappuccino in the advertisers' lounge, turn to your left, and see the world's most endangered author at your elbow.

And it feels like kind of an anniversary, as well. I didn't make it to last year's events, but two years ago, my visit that weekend was when I decided to go through with my move to New York. So I've got a soft spot for the festivities.

"The past eight years with this president have basically been one big YouTube clip."

Yesterday, I attended a panel on Political Humor. It featured a pretty great group of writer-comedians: Samantha Bee (Daily Show); Allison Silverman (Colbert Report); Jim Downey (SNL); Andy Borowitz (The Borowitz Report); and Todd Hanson (The Onion). (Hanson was replacing The Daily Show's John Oliver, whose wacky British antics were missed.) It was like the heads of the Five Families coming together--but as far as I know, no firearms had to be confiscated.

Of course, most of the discussion was about this election--Sarah Palin in particular. The moderator asked the panel if it would be better for comedy if McCain and Palin won, since Obama is difficult to mock. Nobody really committed to the idea, and Andy Borowitz piped up. "...I'd rather have a country that's run well," he said. See? The "satiro-industrial complex" does have a conscience. It may be a smug one, but it's a conscience!


"To edit humor, you have to be funny. And if you're funny, why are you editing?"

Today's Humor Writing "master class" wasn't actually a class (which means no homework, so yay!). It was more of a mini-panel with longtime New Yorker writers Mark Singer and Ian Frazier. They didn't delve too much into the hows or whys of writing funny stuff, but they did talk a lot about the role that the "casuals," or humor pieces, play in the magazine. They both read entertaining pieces of their own, and shared anecdotes about writing for the New Yorker. (FYI: I don't know what Tina Brown is doing these days, but she doesn't appear to be missed much by her former staffers.) Singer also went into a lengthy discussion of his feud with Donald Trump. I'm not even sure how a feud like that works--isn't it kind of like fighting with a wall (a 100-story, gold-painted one, no less)?

One interesting element that came out of both sessions was that there aren't enough women writing comedy. Everyone was quick to point out that this doesn't mean women are any less funny (ah, liberal elite PC-ness), but either the humor sensibility is different, or they're scared off by the perceived sausage fest. Frazier had an interesting point: that teenage girls don't spend their time sitting around trying to outdo one another with one-liners and jokes like teenage boys do, so maybe the socialization is to blame.

The epigraph above, about editing vs. writing, comes from Frazier. It's probably true. But still...ouch.

I'm sorry I wasn't able to attend more of the events, but the terrible ticket availability (I'm pretty sure U2 tickets are easier to get) and the high prices ($25-$35 per event) just make me thankful I was able to do two of them this year. I still didn't make it to the New Yorker dance party, though. Next year! (Maybe.)

Curtis Sittenfeld at Lincoln Triangle B&N

Curtis Sittenfeld is pretty smart. After two novels which critics and readers alike proclaimed to be autobiographical, she came up with a way to make sure no one thinks her third one is about her: she made it about Laura Bush. Throw in some steamy President-on-First-Lady action, and no one's going to be talking about Curtis the Protagonist.

On tour for American Wife, Sittenfeld gave a reading at the Lincoln Triangle Barnes & Noble the other night. Sheryl and I (also known as the "We Could Have Written That" book club) made the trip up to see her, fueled by our mutual, post-adolescent love of Prep. Sittenfeld was remarkably...normal. A little nasal due to a cold, she was quirky and sincere at the same time. Very funny in her one-liners about her life as a writer, and very candid in her admiration for Mrs. Bush. (Sittenfeld is not a Republican, and not so thrilled with the Bush presidency.)

The crowd questions were pretty evenly divided between "How could you make a sympathetic character out of someone married to a monster?" and "Why didn't you write about yourself this time?" Ahh, reading crowds. At least no one ventured the usual question about influences. Maybe the best part of the discussion was the question about whether Sittenfeld knew if Laura Bush would read the book. Of course, Sittenfeld denied knowing anything about it, but come on. You're Laura Bush. You like books, and someone has just come out with a barely fictional version of your life. AND there's controversial sexual content, which is graphic and just biographical enough to gross out reviewers. You're pre-ordering that sucker on Amazon.

Anyway, it was an intriguing perspective on the First Spouse. I like Sittenfeld even more than I did before, and am looking forward to reading the book.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

What if Israel had collapsed shortly after inception in 1948, and European Jews had relocated to a reservation of sorts in Alaska? And what if, 60 years later, the U.S. was about to say, "Hey, sorry, we want our land back. You don't have to go home, but you've gotta get the hell out so we can let our own natives play house for a while"? You'd have the right mix of events for Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history novel about just those things.

Kind of a Jewish noir, the story pivots around Meyer Landsman, a rumpled, agnostic detective investigating the murder of a junkie in Landsman's skeezy residential hotel in the Sitka District of Alaska. The dead junkie, of course, turns out to be significantly more important than you might expect from his iffy surroundings. And Meyer makes a series of bad decisions that plunge him into a shadowy underworld of Hasidic godfathers, possible messiahs, and red heifers. (Good thing I had that crash course from AJ Jacobs earlier this year.) On top of that, he's got kind of a 21st century Bogart thing going on: problems with his ex-wife becoming his new boss; increasingly unpleasant side effects from his alcoholism; and a sort of loose cannon partner, who's having trouble reconciling his half-Inuit, half-Jewish heritage. I believe that's known as the trifecta in the detective fiction world.

Part of the reason the book is so good is that Chabon really commits to the alternative timeline of the Sitka District, while making everything plausible. Like a throwaway reference to "American first lady Marilyn Monroe Kennedy in her pink pillbox hat, with mesmeric spirals for eyes." Chabon doesn't have to go there, but he does, and it deepens the "here but not here" element.

The rest of the goodness comes from the complex relationships between the characters. Meyer and his ex-wife are wary of one another, but there's still a lingering core of affection (and sex) that bonds them, even though the loss of a baby was just too much for their marriage. The dead guy, a refugee from a pious crime family, worked miracles for various members of the community before losing himself to heroin. The layers are intricate and expressed at a good, tension-maintaining pace.

And as with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the language is just so spot-on--lyrical without being too brainy or overwhelming. Chabon incorporates the Yiddish phrases, syntax, and sensibility so well that you'd think there really was a hybridized Yiddish community in Alaska. Unfortunately, Chabon never mentions whether Governor Palin makes the historical cut in this version. Let's assume she doesn't.

Some of my favorite parts:

"Bina reaches into the breast pocket of her suit jacket and takes out a pair of half-glasses that Landsman has never seen before. She is getting old, and he is getting old, right on schedule, and yet as time ruins them, they are not, strangely enough, married to each other."

"When, after careful consideration, she can't fit Berko into her taxonomy of lowlifes, Mrs. Kalushiner spits into her cup. By one kind of reckoning, she owes Landsman seventeen favors; by another, she ought to give him a punch in the belly. She steps aside and lets them pass."

"Each was the other's first lover, first betrayer, first refuge, first roommate, first audience, first person to turn to when something--even the marriage itself--went wrong. For half their lives, they entangled their histories, bodies, phobias, theories, recipes, libraries, record collections. They mounted spectacular arguments, nose-to-nose, hands flying, spittle flying, throwing things, kicking things, breaking things, rolling around on the ground grabbing fistfuls of each other's hair. The next day he would bear the red moons of Bina's nails in his cheeks and on the meat of his chest, and she wore his purple fingerprints like an armlet. For something like seven years of their lives together, they f*cked almost every day. Angry, loving, sick, well, cold, hot, half asleep....Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away."

Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

You know how in real life, serial killers always end up being unattractive loners, or balding middle managers? Thank goodness for the literary world. A suave Manhattanite who knows how to use rats and cheese in the most horrific way possible? A vinophile cannibal with a taste for FBI agents? Yes, please!

Gretchen Lowell, in Chelsea Cain's novel Heartsick, may top them all. Not only is she brutal enough to kill indiscriminately, destroy a person's torso, and carve a heart into his chest as a calling card, but she's hot. Like, not just hot for a felon. Textbook hot. So when Detective Archie Sheridan not only survives her torture, but becomes her final victim (she inexplicably turns herself in after bringing him to the brink of mental and physical death), it's not really surprising that he develops a totally fucked up emotional and sexual obsession with her.

But by the time the action of Heartsick begins, this stuff is all two years in the past. There's a new Buffalo Bill running around Portland, and Archie (the lead detective on the task force that sought "Beauty Killer" Gretchen for years before she kidnapped him and ended the game) is asked to come out of medical retirement to catch the new guy. Local high school girls are disappearing and then turning up naked and bleached in Oregon's waterways. The press still hates the cops for not sharing enough info when Gretchen was the It serial killer. So Archie gets back in it, bringing a shiny new Vicodin addiction and a spunky reporter, Susan Ward, to embed with the task force. Things spiral out of control quickly.

The premise isn't so unusual (I can practically see "female Hannibal Lecter" on some long-forgotten tipsheet), but Chelsea Cain brings a fresh, snarky voice to the genre. (I heartily recommend her parody novel Confessions of a Teen Sleuth for anyone who ever loved Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys.) None of her characters are simple in personality or motivation, and she keeps everything moving well. Archie is certainly not the most sympathetic protagonist around--lingering sympathy for his trauma and resulting celebrity are pretty much canceled out by his continued, bizarre bond with Gretchen (whom he visits in prison every week), and his iffy treatment of his friends and loved ones. The reporter, Susan, the ostensible "good cop" of the book, is an unapologetic lover of married men and exploiter of dead teenage girls for stories. So yeah--they never cracked open anyone's chest or made them drink drain cleaner for kicks, but they're not saints.

I liked the book very much--and that's coming from a book snob who usually avoids mass market thrillers like it's her job. Chelsea Cain will probably never get great odds in the National Book Award predictions, but the book riveted my interest through most of a flight and much of my poolside time. Perfect vacation reading.

"Good writing is like a windowpane."

"Orwell would be rolling in his grave." "This policy is Orwellian." "I don't like this, so I'm going to call it Orwellian."

George Orwell's name is pretty broadly abused in the punditry world, thanks to 1984. So we can safely assume that Orwell, if he had a blog today, would be a political blogger, right?

Wrong! He's a navel-gazing minutiae blogger, just like the rest of us. The University of Westminster is converting Orwell's old diaries into blog form. Most of it is boring English countryside stuff so far. But overall, it's kinda charming. It's bound to get more interesting (unless those English scholars are just big teases). And I'm all for getting the non-political aspects of Orwell out there.

He was a brilliant observer, and the blog thing actually kinda fits. After all, he totes perfected the "look what I'm doing, give me a book deal" thing in Down and Out in Paris and London. (I kid, I kid, love the book.)

Hemingwayapalooza

One day you're in college, reading The Sun Also Rises and thinking, "Hey, Brett Ashley's got a pretty sweet deal." Then, suddenly you're 27, reading The Sun Also Rises again, and realizing that somehow, instead of breaking expat hearts from Paris to Barcelona, you've become Jake Barnes instead. *sigh*

Anyway, I picked up The Sun Also Rises again in anticipation of hanging out in Key West, Hemingway's old stomping grounds. The vacation didn't work out, but I'm happy to have had a reason to revisit the book--it's definitely one of those novels that clicks a little deeper with age.

Hemingway's bunch of obnoxious, wasteful drinking buddies doesn't seem quite so glamorous anymore. It's clearer now how impotent they all are (not just poor Jake with his unnamed WWI casualty), and how hollow the relationships are. The main "love" relationship, Jake and Brett's codependent talkfest, has even less reality in it than Gatsby's infatuation with Daisy Buchanan. What's clearer to me now too is that Hemingway never took the crew seriously, either. They're a collection of "almosts." Almost a novelist, almost a real journalist, almost a Lady, almost a civilized group traveling in sophisticated circles.

But they're not without charm--and that's probably the best thing Hemingway does. He takes a deeply unlikeable group of people, and makes their petty squabbles and one night stands seem like Important Plot Points. And his attention to the machoness of Spain and bullfighting has been caricatured and become oversimplified--but what people seem to lose is how well he does it. Like so many male writers, he (or Jake, anyway) can't talk about sex directly...but the same sensuous care comes out in the details.

[Random Sun Also Rises note: my copy is a battered one I bought used at the UConn CoOp way back when. The previous owner wrote all over it. She or he starts off the first few pages with a few valid points about Jake Barnes's sexual issues. Then the comments get rarer, and rarer. Eventually, there's a tiny, final note in the bottom corner of a page: "I *heart* Chris." Ah, UConn. Turning out the great literary minds. There are also a few comments in my own handwriting that I don't remember making, proving that I wasn't always the book jotting prude that I seem to be these days.]

To follow up the novel, I went with the man himself. Or the Lillian Ross version, anyway, which is just as good to me. In the early 1950s, Ross befriended Hemingway and his wife, and ended up with Portrait of Hemingway, which ran as a (controversial) article in the New Yorker. Apparently people didn't like Ross's impressionistic presentation of the writer, including his odd personal habits and weird syntax. 1950s America might not have liked it much, but I did. So much of the Hemingway discussion today is filtered through the way he died (see also Plath, Sylvia). I'd much rather see the vaguely inappropriate portrait of a flawed man than the death mask of a tragic man. Hemingway was clearly kind of annoying, but also a gregarious and generous friend.

The book (extremely short, since nothing is added from the magazine piece except a couple of brief intros/analyses from Ross) is also a reflection on Ross's unique journalistic ability. She seems to have the talent of being the kid sister and the authority figure at the same time--something that was evident even when I saw her a couple years ago (at a surprisingly spry eighty years old) interviewing Robin Williams. When she goes, she'll take the last link to the spunky, pre-Tina Brown New Yorker with her, and it'll be incredibly sad. But she's still with us, so I'll save the pouring of the 40 for my homie for when the time is right.

Hemingway, as we all know, is not with us, so the least I can do is dig up his stuff every few years and pay my respects by looking at it with whatever small amounts of wisdom I've picked up in the meantime.

Joyce Carol Oates at Lincoln Triangle B&N

Joyce Carol Oates is the Law & Order of the literary world.

"But," you protest (why must you always protest?), "she's one of our most accomplished writers. She writes ridiculously academic reviews in NYROB. She's the Vegas favorite to win the National Book Award every year. How could she possibly be like the sensationalistic Law & Order?" Because beneath the fancy prose, the deft storytelling, the academic laurels, she's a true crime junkie who watches Nancy Grace to get book ideas.

Tonight at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble, Oates talked about her new book, My Sister, My Love. The book is the story of Skyler Rampike, whose family becomes a tabloid target when his six-year-old sister is murdered under sketchy household circumstances. The sister happens to be a budding competitive ice skater manipulated and sexualized by her parents. Sound familiar? It should. Then there's Oates's past work, including a fake autobiography about Marilyn Monroe's rise, fall, and death. And even my favorite Oates work, the creepy "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is based on a real murder. So yeah. Ripped from the headlines(tm)!

But let's forgive her, because she does it so darn well. Anyway, the talk was entertaining. Oates was chatty, and I like chatty writers. They don't make you feel guilty for forcing them to get up there and plug their own book. And the event space was amazing: big and closed off from the rest of the store. I'll definitely be attending more events there. It beats the three-stories-and-still-too-small space in the Union Square B&N. Good times!

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

A few weeks ago, I knew Anthony Bourdain mostly as the bad-boy TV foodie who eviscerated Top Chef contestants, and the guy responsible for the awesome mac and cheese at Les Halles. Now I know him as an entertaining writer and official cute boy magnet. To wit, a conversation I had on the subway while reading Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly:

Cute guy: I see you're reading Bourdain. And marking the pages. [He gestures to my heavily post-it-flagged copy of the book] Are you thinking of becoming a chef?
Me: Nope, I just like to keep track of what I'm reading.
CG: Too bad. Bourdain was part of what inspired me to become a chef...

Then we had a lovely conversation about how the book was advanced for its time (2000) by having very foodie themes before the trend really hit. Two minutes later, I got off at my usual morning stop. But yay for surprising book conversations--and attractive guys on the R train (trust me, it's rare).

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, the book.

Kitchen Confidential isn't the best organized memoir you'll find, or the most dramatic. What it does have is an honest love for the hustle and burn of the restaurant kitchen, and a "fuck it all" openness. Bourdain doesn't take himself too seriously (or at least he didn't eight years ago), and is very willing to talk about his humiliations as a young line cook, his unheroic recovery from heroin addiction, and the various reasons why you should never order fish on a Monday.

It's also a strange, roundabout tour of restaurant culture in New York City. Bourdain worked in just about every kind of restaurant with just about every kind of kitchen person--a UN of sous chefs, petty criminals (who just happen to be transcendent bakers), nutcases, brilliant chefs, and union shills. You've gotta hand it to a book that makes you feel so repelled by the kitchens of even high-end restaurants, but simultaneously makes you crave good cuisine no matter who's doing what with unrefrigerated seafood.

Side note: The book also spawned a short-lived sitcom with the same name and theme, but with a much more, y'know, sitcom-y vibe. Also highly recommended, but for different reasons. Anyway, I suggest checking it out on Hulu if you're so inclined.

Some tidbits from the top chef himself:

"I'm asked a lot what the best thing about cooking for a living is. And it's this: to be part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one's hands--using all one's senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure (though oral sex has to be a close second)."

"My naked contempt for vegetarians, sauce-on-siders, the 'lactose intolerant' and the cooking of Ewok-like Emeril Lagasse is not going to get me my own show on the Food Network."
[Respectful editorial note: apparently the naked contempt DID get him a show on Food Network, but I digress.]

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

If you're a memoirist and you're not eighty years old, chances are at some point that you're gonna run out of humorous life anecdotes. You've mined your childhood and your family. You've exposed the quirks of your friends. You've framed every traumatic event for comedic value. So what do you do then?

If you're David Sedaris, you keep plugging along anyway. His latest book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames is light on Sedaris family doings. It relies instead on the kind of stories you turn to when you've known someone forever, and don't need to discuss the big stuff anymore. He talks about his partner, his job, and daily struggles to quit smoking and interact with normal people. At this point, he seems to be going on trips (there are two airplane stories) and learning new languages just to be able to write about it. Some of the essays have distinctly enhanced qualities, but at this point I don't care if stuff is fudged. I just want him to churn out his patented funny-poignant essay collections every few years.

Some of the pieces are familiar. My favorite, "Solution to Saturday's Puzzle," was in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. But somehow even the recycled essays feel fresher, brighter than in the magazine. It may be the fresh, bright paper. Or the fact that I'm predisposed to love anything I've seen in the New Yorker. Either way, definitely worth the $15 on Amazon. (Even David Sedaris can't get me to pay full cover price.)

Favored parts:

"And there's an elderly Frenchwoman, the one I didn't give my seat to on the bus. In my book, if you want to be treated like an old person, you have to look like one. That means no facelift, no blond hair, and definitely no fishnet stockings. I think it's a perfectly valid rule, but it wouldn't have killed me to take her crutches into consideration."

"In the grocery section of a Seibu department store, I saw a whole chicken priced at the equivalent of forty-four dollars. This seemed excessive until I went to another department store and saw fourteen strawberries for forty-two dollars. Forty-two dollars--you could almost buy a chicken for that."

"It's pathetic how much significance I attach to the Times puzzle, which is easy on Monday and gets progressively harder as the week advances. I'll spend fourteen hours finishing the Friday, and then I'll wave it in someone's face and demand that he acknowledge my superior intelligence. I think it means that I'm smarter than the next guy, but all it really means is that I don't have a life."