Category: Reading and Books

Title: Willful Creatures: Stories

Author: Aimee Bender

Backstory: Purchased during the bilio-orgy that was A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books’s 30th anniversary sale.

Notes: Aimee is one of my favorite authors and one of my favorite people. I’ll read whatever she writes

Verdict: Most of it is classic Aimee, imaginative, funny, a little twisted but a lot of fun. A few stories seem slight rather than substantive but the rest more than make up for it. Highly highly recommended.

And she’s out and about, at least for a day (via Readerville).

Things are humming over at the Litblog Co-op with their new Read This! selections out. They’re doing podcasts, online discussions, buncha stuff. Impressive (via TEV).

So Monday the NY Times broke the story that JT LeRoy is a big ole’ hoax. The London Telegraph has covered the story as has the SF Chronicle since LeRoy Inc. has their headquarters here. Writer Susie Bright talks about being one of the dupees on her blog.

I exchanged a few emails with this JT person when I the author Arthur Bradford (whom I knew from graduate school). I saw “JT” in one of his rare public appearances at Arthur’s reading that September at Booksmith. His assistant (whomever that was) sent me a racoon penis bone soon after.

I certainly didn’t have the kind of contact or relationship with “JT” that Ms. Bright did, or Ayelet Wadman (as she writes here) nor do I possess the kind of justifiable outrage San Francisco writer Violet Blue does, calling out LeRoy for exploiting a troubled past for fame and profit. I was just someone else, someone much less famous and connected, in his orbit.

Know what? In a perverted way, it felt good. It felt good. I feel pathetic even saying it but I was new in San Francisco, just starting to get my writerly legs and here was someone who hung out with Winona Ryder and Dave Eggers who wrote back, who said “hey thanks” who wanted to know what I was up to.

LeRoy never asked me for anything but I had nothing to give. In the rigid hierarches the hoax was built on, I was somewhere between penthouse and basement, not famous but not really a fan. I’d never read his books, never raved about how much I related to his story because I didn’t. I was taken in by someone who swore by the power of writing so much and wanted share a little with me.

When I look at the coverage (particularly in the Chronicle) of this whole ugly, sad mess, I can’t help but think of the Kaycee Nicole story, a blog of a fictional teen girl dying of lukemia, which was actually written by an adult woman playing her mother. The web’s brightest stars (including the huge-hearted John Halcyon Styn) were taken in by the story and devestated by its implosion. But the aftermath revealed a kind of junior high stratification of grief, where high profile bloggers had their grief magnified by their influence and how badly you felt reflected how close you were to the white, hot center of the then young blogosphere. I was new to blogging and knew nothing about it.

The list of folks wronged by the unveiling of JT LeRoy is long and distinguished, many of whom have very public forums to lay out their grief and outrage. Maybe I was lucky that LeRoy and company never wanted anything from me and thus, don’t feel gamed. A sad little part of me wishes (s)he had because maybe it would bespeak a level of notoriety or acheivement I didn’t know I had. But when I’m real, like in the case of Kaycee Nicole, I mostly feel bad that I couldn’t feel worse.

“Fuck off, I’m Reading” knit bookmark. Classic! (via Not Martha).

Title: Don’t Get Too Comfortable: Essays

Author: David Rakoff

Backstory: Heard on Writer’s Voice Radio. Purchased during the bilio-orgy that was A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books’s 30th anniversary sale.

Notes: Enjoyed Rakoff’s first collection and would like to have his way with words someday.

Verdict: Enjoyable, sometimes slight, thoroughly crafted. I’m putting it by my desk in hopes of osmosis.

Title: Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities

Author: Alexandra Robbins

Backstory: Saw a copy at Clean Well Lighted a few months ago and was mildly curious. Still trying to read investigative books but liked the idea of one that didn’t involve a war or international tade policy. Got it from the library.

Notes: Robbins followed four newly-minted sorority members at a university she couldn’t reveal (the only way the members would agree to talk to her) for the length of a school year. In between chapters are essays on the more controversial aspects of sorority life–alcohol, comformity, sexuality, and that MTV show.

Verdict:

Robbins is thorough, dogged, and admits her story’s limitations, a refreshing shift from the macho exhautive air that hangs over too much investigative journalism. Her structural choices, dashing from her subjects to larger analysis of issues, aren’t ones I would have made and too often feel like she wrote two books and stitched then together. I prefer the more interwoven style of a Malcolm Gladwell or a Ted Conover. And while her prose can seem workmanlike, its a smart decision given she’s chosen an subject prone to hysteria, melodrama and titilation.

What I learned: Sororities are just plain scary. I had a brief flirtation with fraternity rush in college and at least there, you know what awaits you. You’ll get the crap thrown at you for several weeks but once you’re in, all is forgiven and everyone acts stupid together and with equanimity. At least that’s what I heard.

Sororities, not so much. There’s power struggles with the other members (right out of Queen Bees and Wannabees), maintaining the right “image” for the sorority by associating with the right fraternities, not acting too slutty or being too ugly in the face of the national organization. It reaffirms the worst stereotypes we have about women and female bonding rituals. And though it seems to be a great networking tool in the deep south or if you’re African-American (Black greeks are a whole different animal which thankfully Robbins does not ignore), for most young women, within 5 years of graduation their sorority means almost nothing to them.

It sounds like a hoot to you, I can see why you’d join. Otherwise, sororities sound like the military or a cult. They grab you when you at the most vulnerable age and station in life, promising you belonging, loyalty and community. It’s only after you’re in that you’re clobbered other baggage comes with it.

Followup:

Admirers and Greeks react at Amazon.

Title: The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

Author: Susan Orlean

Backstory: After reading The New New Journalism and meeting its author at the Texas Book Festival, I made a list of books by the journalists featured (Little did I know it had been done already) and decided to devote my library checkouts to “New Journalism” books as I saw my career branching out this way. Bullfighter was my first pick.

Notes: Collection of pieces Orlean did for her first 15 years as a staff writer at The New Yorker. Mostly glimpses of the unconventionally famous (The best female bullfighter in Spain, The “Lemon Ice King” of New York), the seemingly workaday (her hairdresser, a star high school basketball player) and the once-were (The Shaggs, considered the greatest 60s pop group no one’s heard of).

Verdict:

Orlean is quite possibilty the Joseph Mitchell of the 21st century. She’s a master at marathon listening tucked neatly into a Chinese box of one sharply observed character nugget after another. But where Mitchell’s profiles hung on exhaustive detail and vertical depth (Read a few pieces from Up in the Old Hotel, his collected works, to see what I mean), Orlean’s have a smoother surface. She doesn’t brag beneath her sentences about how much work she’s done for her quotes and her character sketches are a bright flash of insight quickly extinguished as the story barrels forward. When you’re done then with an Orlean piece, you’ve learned a lot about but she rarely claims to be the last word on the subject. She leaves a few questions on the table for you to either digest, puzzle and forget about or follow up on yourself.

The may be a product of magazine economics (she probably can’t rattle on for 15,000 words the way Mitchell could 50 years ago) or simply her personality, but what I love about Orlean is not just her subject choice but her honesty about how she came to those choices. When she includes the word “I” in an article, it’s to show how she found the subject not it reveals about her in choosing it. She leaves that to her selectivity. By not including everything in her notebook, she’s saying “Look, this is what I found interesting. If you’ve got questions, the answers are out there. Go find them.” Since she isn’t writing about political corruption, perhaps she has that luxury. It’s still refreshing to read a journalist who knows they’re not the only ones capable of telling a good story, even if they get to it first.

Highly recommended.

Followup:

Susan Orlean’s Official Site

Orlean guest blogs at Powells.com

To the Best of Our Knowledge interview with Orlean about the movie Adaptation and watching Meryle Streep play her.

Seattle had been named the most literate city in America. Must be that new library. Or Nancy Pearl. Or all that rain that keeps everyone indoors and reading by the light of the moon.

San Francisco is a measly 5th but that’s up 5 notches from last year. I take some comfort in that (via ArtsJournal).

Wake me when American Literature stops its self-hating whining and fatalistic nonsense. At the ceremony for the National Book Awards (rundown of winners here), Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who I expect better from and should be ashamed of himself) all warned us (set your faces to cringe) that “The serious novel may be in serious decline.” Never mind that Norman Mailer hasn’t had a contemporary thought since the Johnson administration, or that Morrison has decided to conveniently overlook the explosion of interest in poetry and the written word happening in African-American communities across the country or that Ferlinghetti, a half-century resident of San Francisco, has ignored his adopted home’s thriving literary culture. All of which leads me to place the blame at the feet of…

1) The Internet. The biggest evil the arts have known since the Nazis burned books on the Opernplatz.

2) “Desperate Housewives”, who has drugged America into watching the idiot box on Sunday nights instead of doing what they were before: Quizzing each other on Proust.

3) Junk Food, which has made everyone so fat and lazy they can no longer lift a book like The Naked and the Dead and thus forced them to deny the First Commandment of Contemporary Literature: Length equals merit.

4) Podcasting, which, er, because I don’t know what it is must be one of those new fangled distractions that keeps the kids from buying my books.

5) Arrogance and self-hatred. It serves exactly no one to moan the death of literature and propose no solution to the contrary. It is the height of arrogance to assume the decline happened safely after you had published greatness, collected your awards and been crowned a legend.

Miles Davis was perhaps the greatest musician of the 20th century. Not once did he complain that jazz was in peril, nor did he ever blame contemporary culture from shifting their interest away from him. At the end of his life, he was making music with Big Daddy Kane, Public Enemy and many other hip hop artists his contemporaries were cursing for killing the spirit of jazz.

Morrison, Mailer and Ferlinghetti should learn from his example. Theirs is an unwiliness to accept change, to see how the world could be different than the one you grew up in and to engage in labored denial of history. The novel has been declared dead since the day it was born. And when, in that 300 years, has it happened?

Their scolding is not wanted here, on the battlefields of contemporary literature, where many of still have the audacity of hope. Shame on all three of them for spitting on it.