Write like Kerouac in just 5 Easy Steps

1) Start with any sentence:

I took a big swig.

2) Now add a whimsical phrase to give it some unexpected flavor.

I took a big swig in the air.

3) Now insert about three (but no fewer than two) adjectives in front of your direct object or the object of your prepositional phrase:

I took a big swig in the wild, blowing, drizzling  air.

4) Now replace at least one of those adjectives with a word not normally associated with the object it describes. Proper place names work well, but really it can be anything.

I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical, drizzling air.

5) If you chose not to use a proper place name in the previous step, tack it on to the end of the sentence in its own prepositional phrase:

I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical, drizzling air of Nebraska.

See? Kerouac! It’s easy. Now let’s try it with a more complex sentence:

1) Start with any sentence of your choosing:

I heard a laugh, and here came this farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

2) Embellish your direct object:

I heard a great  laugh, and here came this farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

3) Do it again, and don’t shy away from hyperbole:

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world,  and here came this farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

4) Now insert your adjectives:

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide old-timer wheat  farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

5) Now swap out one of your adjectives as before:

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide old-timer Nebraska  farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

Piece of cake. Now you try.

The Stunning Beauty of Bookstores

We shared the stunning beauty of books here. Today bookstores  take their turn in the limelight. Check out Flavorwire’s 20 most beautiful bookstores in the world. Here are some of my favorites:

The "cathedral" of bookstores:

The "grand theater" of bookstores:

And "the college professor's office" of bookstores:

Find all 20 here:

First Line Friday

If you review my previous First Line Friday posts, you may notice a pattern: I like short, zippy, poignant first lines.  So, in an effort to diversify my preferences, I'm going with a longer first line today:

"It was the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk - who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classic professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of the faculty - confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college."

That is what I would call an immense first line.  It provides a lot of information . . . a whole novel's worth in one sentence.  But, in spite of my preferences for short first lines, I have a certain appreciation for this first line. It seems to work.  It's somewhat burdensome, to be sure, but all in all, I can appreciate it.

Dost thou disagree?

Review: The Death of a Disco Dancer, by David Clark

When we reviewed Wasatch  back in early February, the publisher of that collection, Zarahemla Books, offered us a review copy of David Clark’s novel, The Death of a Disco Dancer.  I was a little hesitant to accept, due almost entirely to what I think is a pretty lackluster cover. (I am a shallow, shallow man- If only we had a nice, catchy adage to warn people against judging inner content by outward appearances that would apply to the book world.) Ah well, more on that in the postscript below.

Anyway, I was finally able to clear the deck for Disco Dancer  this past week, and couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised.

This book will lull you into thinking you’re reading a reverie of sophomoric highjinks, funny enough to keep your inner 11-year old in stitches. But before you know it, you’re steeped in a poignant coming of age story that deals with themes of love, family, faith, forgiveness, and death. Clark alternates between the main narrative, the summer joys and pitfalls of Todd Whitman’s Arizona youth, and intercalary chapters set in the present-day, as Todd and his siblings gather to say goodbye to, and bury, their mother. The intercalaries provide further meaning and a touching backdrop to the main story of the novel.

That main story centers largely on the excitement and fears of growing up, and that timeless question of what to do when your dementia-stricken grandmother starts showing up in the middle of the night and supplanting the cherished faces of her past with pictures of disco fiend John Travolta. I’m not even joking. A number of different plot lines converge under the dulcet strains of Kenny Rogers’ “Lady” during the Hello Dance on Todd’s second day of Junior High. It is the perfect emotional climax for the story, and one that brought my own past vividly before my eyes.

The main narrative is also peppered with a number of side stories that deliver color and context to the few months of action we see playing out in the book. Early on, the vignettes carry an air of Family Guy cutaway gags, inserted for their own purpose rather than to move the story forward- a ghost story at a Fathers-and-Sons Campout, and a detailed run-down of activities forbidden in the pews during church services are just a couple of examples. But on the whole, these asides help to flesh out the world where the story takes place.

As for that world, the Mormon milieu that might make some readers wary, I’ll just say that there is no tortuous exposition or preachy explanation to be found anywhere. This book will appeal to anyone who’s ever been eleven years old. And since it’s the story of a pre-pubescent boy, there’s nearly as much mention of the Dallas Cowboys and the Phoenix Suns as there is of the family’s religion. Any question you might have about certain terms or topics can be answered by the short glossary Clark provides at the back of the volume. It’s a book that should not be pidgeon-holed as something it is not. What it is, is a compelling peek into the world of a 1981 pre-teen, who’s doing his best to figure life out as adulthood barrels towards him.

The Death of a Disco Dancer  is a poignant and entertaining read, with characters you can't help but care about. And as we pointed out yesterday, Clark’s easy, colorful prose is at once hilarious and heart-rending. Do yourself a favor and read it.

***Postscript: Please, please, please don’t judge this book by its ‘Dean Wesley Smith-esque’ cover. Looking at it, you’d think you were picking up an absurdist horror parody or a cheeky forensic science romance. I’ll be the first to admit, the cover is terrible. The book is anything but. Read it and see.***

From the Pen of David Clark

We've talked about the science of powerful prose here and here, and we regularly share examples of lines that have smacked us over the head during our reading. But today's lines come from an author you might not be familiar with. Take a look at how David Clark swings so effortlessly between the profane and the profound, starting with a description of an album cover, and continuing with  a handful of other excerpts. As usual, all emphasis is mine- the bolded phrases are merely those that crackled with electricity as they entered my brain:

"There was a guy with the cocky expression of a gunfighter frozen in a flamboyant disco pose on a dance floor made of colorful, illuminated blinking squares. He wore a closely fitted white suit with flared slacks and a black spread-collared shirt. His left butt cheek and left arm were cocked to one side, apparently ready to fire off an explosive pelvic thrust. His right arm was extended emphatically skyward like an exclamation point, as if directing the very powers of heaven to take note of the unholy disco  carnage he was about to  unleash. Inset above him on the album cover was a large photograph of three hairy white men in suffocatingly tight white jumpsuits smiling gaily and benevolently down upon the ultraserious dancer."
 

"These were not hands of rest or pleasant parlor conversation; these were hands of planting, picking, plucking, scrubbing, shearing, slicing, sewing, boiling, bathing, mending, canning, chopping, and kneading- of doing. These were hands upon which life itself depended." 

"At first the breezeless warmth of the dumpster felt reassuring, almost cacoonlike, but I soon realized that it acted as a perfect Dutch oven for its putrid contents."
 

"The initial shock and the lingering nausea, like a migraine in your nut pouch, left you powerless to retaliate for at least fifteen minutes." 

"We continued on past the sculpted dead-end hollows and box canyons with their juniper and piñon pine and the varicose veins of cottonwood scrub tracing every gully and wash that had a trickle of water, through the quiet farms of Hatch and Hillsdale and the comparative bustle of Panguitch's Main Street."
 

"I noticed the texture and complexity of the web of wrinkles that shot out from the corners of her eyes and then curved and twirled in their own unique patterns down her cheekbones and across her jaw."

Pretty great, right? If you're intrigued, come back tomorrow and we'll review the book for you...

Imitation is the sincerest form of plagiarism

In case you hadn’t noticed, the publishing world is ga-ga over E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, a book that was born as an erotica fan-fiction derivative of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series.

Take a moment to soak up that sentence, by the way, because it’s likely the last time we’ll touch on either of those series in this space. But it should work wonders on the search engines, and it does give us a timely segue into the juicy topic of plagiarism. Yes, that’s right- not even the high-brow world of classic literature is immune to charges of literary larceny. Consider the following:

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is said to have ripped off two 1920s sci-fi novels (The City of the Sun & The Honeymoon Trip of Mr. Hamilton) by Polish author Mieczyslaw Smolarski. I don’t speak Polish, but in the Slavic language I do  speak, “smola” means bad luck. Based on the relative fame and success of mssrs Huxley and Smolarski, I’d say the Polish author was appropriately named.

Oscar Wilde privately admitted to lifting from J.K. Huysman’s A Rebours, telling fellow author Max Beerbohm “Of course I plagiarize. It’s the privilege of the appreciative man.” That’s a bit like telling someone “Of course I stole your shirt. I liked it very much. You’re a man of fine taste, sir.”

Wallace Stegner found himself embroiled in a plagiarism scandal when his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose  was criticized by descendents of Mary Hallock Foote, a woman whose letters and memoirs inspired the novel and were mixed with Stegner’s original narrative to create it. In this case, I think I stand with Stegner, since he’s operating in a bit of a grey area. For one thing, he was working with one of Foote’s descendents, who gave him permission to do what he did. For another, he offered to let her read the full manuscript, which she refused. Now, were some of the excerpts a little longer than he originally promised? Sure. But they’re also the weakest part of the book, as I’ve observed here.

Here’s one final example, brought to our attention by Readthe100. It’s one I’ll pass on to you without judgment. (In other words, I’d love to hear what you, the readers, think about it):

Did T.S. Eliot bogart “The Wasteland” from, well… “The Wasteland?”

A Reading Check-up

It’s hard to believe, but we’ve already put a third of the year behind us. Time to check in on our reading resolutions, no? Below is my quick progress report; you can add your own in the comments.

Goal #1 Read more women:  So far so good. I’ve been hovering right around 50% women authors all year, and I imagine I’ll end up somewhere north of 50% by the end of 2012.

Goal #2 Read an Agatha Christie novel before I see it adapted on screen: Check. Review can be found here.

Goal #3 Read a foreign language novel in the original: No progress yet, but then again, it’s only April. Get off my back, dude.

Now for the tallies:

Books read so far:  13   (on pace to beat last year’s 32)

Pages read so far: 3,701  (current pace puts me 250 pages below last year’s 11,358)

They break down something like this: eight novels and one novella (73% of total), two short story collections (18% of total), one play, and one play-short story combo (9% of total). All of it classic or contemporary literary fiction.

And here’s the list:

1. The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro 
2. A Bell for Adano, John Hersey 
3. Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta 
4. Wasatch, Douglas Thayer 
5. The Turn of the Screw, Henry James 
6. Curtain, Agatha Christie  
7. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust  
8. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte  
9. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte   
10. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan   
11. The Vegetable, F. Scott Fitzgerald  
12. The Fifth Column & Four Unpublished Stories of the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway  
13. The Death of a Disco Dancer, David Clark

What about you? What have you read this year? Which books have  knocked your socks off?

What they were reading...

“In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare & Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odeon… 

“I started with Turgenev and took two volumes of A Sportsman’s Sketches and an early book of D.H. Lawrence, I think it was Sons and Lovers, and Sylvia told me to take more books if I wanted. I chose the Constance Garnett edition of War and Peace, and The Gambler and Other Stories by Dostoyevsky.” 

-Earnest Hemingway, in his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast.

One of the cardinal rules of good writing is to read. A lot. This is our first post in a series that examines the reading habits of some of the greats.

Live Deliberately: Play Video Games

One of our inaugural posts last November pointed people to the Great Gatsby video game. In the comments of that post I joked that a “first-person hacker” game a la Crime and Punishment  might be equally engaging, if a little more violent. Not to be outdone, some enterprising minds at USC have suckered the NEA into a $40,000 grant to develop an online video game based on Henry David Thoreau’s contemplative classic, Walden:

“The player will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods.”

It should be a rip-roaring good time.

-H/T GalleyCat

First Line Viernes

Alas, it's time to look at a first line from a reputable novel once again.  And this novel is very reputable.  Of course, it's none other than Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," which commences as follows:

"Jewel and I came up from the field, following the path in single file."

Now, I have the same sentiments toward this first line as I do the rest of the novel; indifference.  This first line does nothing for me, although I find it acceptable.  Simply acceptable.  Not stellar, not intriguing, not even interesting.  I struggle with ol Faulkner (perhaps because I am a self-proclaimed Hemingway-phile).  Perhaps I have lost my mind and am just now exposing my literary merit as weak, but Faulkner, to me, is simply bleh.

If you are a Faulkner connoisseur, PLEASE help me!

"The Trench" by Erri De Luca

Welcome back to ShelfActualization's monthly short story club.  This month, we have a dandy.  To start, look at this opening line:

"When I found the sewer pipe I was happy, but I couldn't smile."

Beautiful, short, and altogether intriguing.  But the rest of the story is what really burns me up.  I've been fascinated by this story for years simply because it takes an otherwise ordinary, or even sub-ordinary, situation (that of digging a trench outside of Paris to locate a buried sewer pipe) and converts this ordinary situation into an immense moment of profundity.

All of a sudden down in this ordinary trench with a shovel and pick ax, we are dealing with a myriad of profound human experiences.  For example:

• Identity ("The other man was me, a thirty-two year old Italian laborer . . . At midday, between mouthfuls of highly spiced watery soup, we talked for a while in our rudimentary common French, then each returned to his own thoughts in his mother tongue.")

• Sanity ("At the end of the first week the man who was with me started to crack . . . 'Trouve? Tu l'as trouve?' the hoarse voice of a lost man, the common exhalation of the trenches of the century.")

• Death ("I assured him that if the trench were going to collapse it would do so only at night, when the damp came . . . one shouldn't speak of death with one's foot in the grave.")

• Socioeconomics ("But why should a man have to suffer this way?  Why in the world should a human being have to earn bread for his children with a noose around his neck?") 

• Free Will ("Then I decided that he was no help to me - I would manage better on my own. So, in front of the other workers, I asked [the boss] to let me finish the job alone."

Thus we have an ordinary situation laced with profound themes.  And so, my conclusion is this:  The Trench masterfully portrays the immensity of a mundane moment in a trench with a shovel under the French sky.  And why do we not notice more often the immensity of mundane moments in our own lives?

Why?

Short Story Club: The Trench by Erri De Luca

Welcome (again) to ShelfActualization.com's Short Story Club.  This month's selection comes to us from arguably the most over-trodden god-forsaken country of Europe: Italy.

But, in spite of my low-level contempt for Italy, I find this month's short story selection very relevant.  Erri De Luca published The Trench in the March 2006 edition of The New Yorker.  I am assuming most of us are completely unacquainted with Erri De Luca, so let's have a quick look:  Born in 1950 in Naples, he has become a radical left wing idealist.  He has worked in Italy and France as a truck driver and mason.  Now considered to be a recluse, he lives in an isolated cottage in the hills far outside of Rome.

Now again, he is Italian.  So that sucks.  But let's get over it.  Here is the link to The Trench.  We'll meet back here tomorrow to discuss.  I couldn't look forward to it more than I currently do.

Russian Rumble

We haven’t forgotten about you, Literary Death Match fans. We’ve simply had to postpone our next match a couple of weeks while ringside reporter Kelly Wallace continues to recover from injuries sustained in the last title bout. 

But while you wait for the highly-anticipated Bronte sister beat-down, we thought we’d point you to another head-to-head match up playing out over at the Millions. They asked the experts who’s greater, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. It's definitely worth a read.

How to Read Truly Great Literature

My apologies to anyone who thought this post was going to be profound.

"The Punishment of X4" and "The Man With the Miniature Orchestra"

Well, it only took four episodes for Mad Men to stroke our curiosity of a few weeks ago. Closet fictioneers, all is well; account man Ken Cosgrove is writing again.

Last week we learned that he has begun training his fiction-writing fetish on the science-fiction & fantasy genre, under the pen name of Ben Hargrove. We got the description of one story titled “The Punishment of X4” wherein a robot who maintains a commuter bridge between two planets removes a bolt that brings the whole thing crashing down. Genius.

He’s publishing in magazines, pitching an anthology to Farrar Strauss, and things generally seem to be looking up for him until Roger makes it clear that he is to stop moon-lighting and focus on his day-job. Ken dutifully kills off the Hargrove alias, and with it, his foray into genre fiction.

But he’s far from giving up his one true passion. Ken takes up a new pseudonym, Dave Algonquin, and the episode ends as he scribbles the opening lines of his newest short story, “The Man With the Miniature Orchestra.”

“There were phrases of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony that still made Coe cry. He always thought it had to do with the circumstances of the composition itself. He imagined Beethoven, deaf and soul-sick, his heart broken, scribbling furiously while Death stood in the doorway clipping his nails. Still, Coe thought, it might have been living in the country that was making him cry. It was killing him with its silence and loneliness, making everything ordinary too beautiful to bear.”

Anyone want to take a crack at finishing that one off? I’d get a kick out of reading it.

The Writer's Voice

Sometimes we become so immersed in the distinctive literary voice of an author, that when we hear that same author's actual speaking voice, it can be a little jolting. My little brother forwarded me this interview at the passing of Mike Wallace last week. Take a moment to soak up Ayn Rand’s arrant views, as delivered through her strong Russian accent and cigarette-scorched voicebox.

So …Ayn Rand.

Some people have problems with her Objectivist philosophy. Others take issue with her Godlessness. Still other criticize her characters and her writing. But why on earth do I never hear one word about her love scenes? She’s got a little bit of a rape fantasy she’s trying to work through, and to me at least, it’s a little unsettling. And the exchange on the subject of love  embedded above  (about 8:00 in)  doesn't exactly help. In case you didn’t watch to the end, here is the excerpt I’m talking about:

Rand:    You love only those who deserve it.

Wallace:    And then, if a man is weak, or a woman is weak, then she is beyond, he is beyond, love?

Rand:    He certainly doesn’t deserve it. He certainly is beyond- he can always correct it. Man has free will. If a man wants love, he should correct his weaknesses or his flaws, and he may deserve it. But he cannot expect the unearned, either in love, or in money; either in method or in spirit.

Wallace:    But you have lived in our world and you realize, recognize the fallibility of human beings. There are very few of us, then, in this world, by your standards, who are worthy of love.

Rand:    Uh, unfortunately, yes. Very true.

Yikes!

First Line Friday!

"Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure."

That’s how this famous first line appears in the original French. It’s a line that has been translated a number of different ways throughout the years:

"For a long time I used to go to bed early."  (C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

"For a long time I would go to bed early."  (D J Enright) 

"For a long time, I went to bed early."  (Lydia Davis)

Then again, it’s from a book whose translated title is still the subject of some debate. It’s an interesting first line, in that it serves as the opening salvo for the novel Swann’s Way, as well as the introduction to Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past, if you prefer that title).  

In either case, it’s a deceptively short and straightforward opening into a work whose later sentences can seem like veritable labyrinths to an overwhelmed reader. You’ll feel like a world-class hurdler as you learn to work your way over dependent clause after dependant clause, keeping your eye on the subject and racing in search of its main predicate ten lines down the page. Frankly, it’s a bit of a mess before you get used to it.

Still, I don’t know if I’ve read many books that reached me on quite so deep a level, or many authors who are quite so precise or so thorough in getting their meanings across. And I think the extremely personal nature of the prose starts in that very first line.

Anyone read it? Did you like it? Hate it? Toss it of with ambivalence? I’d be interested to hear.

Review: A Room With A View, by E.M. Forster

There are some among our readership who really have it in for E.M. Forster (what gives?), but we hope you’ll bear with us as we review that author’s A Room With A View.

The book was my first introduction to Forster, and I have to say that I came away generally pleased. It’s not a read that will keep you on the edge of your seat- its major plot points are conversations, betrayals of confidence, and rumors about who will rent the vacant cottage at such and such a place. But if it won’t keep you on the edge of your seat, I think there’s enough to keep you in  your seat- to keep you reading right to the very end.

Now, it is at its core, a romance. This means that the story is wholly dependent on a simple misunderstanding between the two principle characters stretching the entire length of the book. If George an Lucy were able at any moment to actually sit down and have a half-way decent conversation, there would be no story. But true to form, they aren’t; and so there is. Fine.

But here’s where Forster really whimps out: The tension builds and builds (Will Lucy end her engagement to Cecil? Is George’s father really a murderer? Did George not only steal a kiss, but blabber about it to a popular novelist?) We anxiously await the moment when George and Lucy do  finally hash things out, when she realizes that she loves him and always has- but just at the crucial moment- Forster fumbles the ball! He hits the fast forward button and next thing you know, George and Lucy are back in Florence, reminiscing about the winding road that brought them back there. No catharsis, just a few loose ends tied up after the fact. It’s as if he thought that scene would be really difficult to write, so he played it out off-stage. It was a bit of a disappointment.

Still, there is a lot of beautiful writing, some great characters and nice settings. And he presents enough interesting insights into love and happiness and religion to have earned a second read from me. So, for the Forster fans out there: where should I go next? Howard’s End? Or A Passage To India?

From Silver Screen to Printed Page

Often, when the subject of film adaptations comes up, we hear the familiar refrain “Yeah, but the book was better.” But what do we say when the reverse is true- when a book began life as a movie or a screenplay? Here are three such books that are well worth your time.

The Human Comedy, by William Saroyan:

Hired by MGM to write the screenplay for this project, Saroyan was eventually removed after refusing to compromise on the length. While Louis B. Mayer pushed forward on the film version, Saroyan raced to publish his longer version first, as a novel. It’s a short, breezy read… for a book, if not for a screenplay.

Dances With Wolves, by Michael Blake:

Kevin Costner fell in love with this spec-script sometime in the mid-eighties, but Blake had a hard time selling it to anyone. Costner encouraged him to turn it into a novel, with the hopes that it would improve his chances at a sale. Released as a paperback in 1988, Costner finally bought the rights himself. The rest is history. The film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture in 1990.

No Country For Old Men, by Cormack McCarthy:

Originally penned as a screenplay, McCarthy had little luck in selling this story to Hollywood. As an accomplished novelist, he didn’t need Kevin Costner to tell him to turn it into a novel, which he did in 2005. Enter the Coen brothers, who faithfully adapted the book back into a screenplay in 2007. Four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, were the result.

It’s an interesting subject. I know Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy started life as a radio play. (The Infinite Improbablility Drive was Adams’s ingenious way of extending a story he thought was already over.) Certainly in the cases of Dances With Wolves and No Country For Old Men, I think it’s probably safe to say that “the movie was better than the book.” Anyone know of any others?

From the Pen of Jennifer Egan

As a follow-up to yesterday’s review I thought I’d give you a taste of Jennifer Egan’s style. One of the things that struck me about Goon Squad  was her ability to be colorful without being florid. Her descriptions are filled with everyday language that still manages to paint a vivid picture. Here are just a few passages that hit me where it counts (as usual, all emphasis is mine):

They sink onto the sand, still faintly warm, radiating a lunar glow.

The palm trees make a slapping, rainy sound, but the air is dry.
 

Sasha gathered up her ubiquitous black bag, a shapeless wishing well from which she'd managed to wrest whatever file or number or slip of paper he'd needed for the past twelve years.

The sun rose, big and shiny and round, like an angel lifting her head. I’d never seen it so brilliant out there. Silver poured over the water.  

The blinds of his loft were up and a tinge of shower humidity hung in the air, pleasantly cut by the smell of brewing coffee.

Bosco brought Stephanie coffee and then began a juddering emersion into his chair, which suctioned around him in a gelatinous grip.

An unsuccessful hip replacement had left him with the lurching, belly-hoisting walk of a refrigerator on a hand truck.

 Kitty came toward him slowly- poured toward him, really, that was how smoothly she moved in her sage green dress, as if the jerking awkwardness of walking were something she’d never experienced.

That is some good stuff. It seems there’s a certain magic in backloading your sentences- sticking the most memorable phrases and descriptions on the tail end for maximum impact.

A Visit From the Goon Squad: Believe the hype

Alright. I had my doubts, it’s true.

I had a hard time believing that I would enjoy A Visit from the Goon Squad  half as much as book bloggers, reviewers and members of the Pulitzer Prize Board seemed to think I should. In fact, I was ready to cry foul after the first couple pages, where I encountered parentheses in nearly every paragraph, suspiciously effeminate descriptors like “silvery” and “spiky-haired” and gag-inducing phrases like, “not a bangle jangled.” Blast them all, I thought to myself, I’ve been lured straight into a chick-lit booby trap.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Turns out Egan was just playing with characterization- something she does extremely well. The first chapter introduces us to a kleptomaniac record-producer’s assistant, but from there the book branches out and explores the world of her boss and his broken family, her boss’s mentor and his even brokener family, as well as the friendships and falling-outs that shaped the lives of each of the main characters from the beginning.

It’s a collection of interconnected tales that unfold in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with some Italian ghettos and African Bush thrown in for good measure. Each of the stories could easily stand on its own, but together they read like a rangy, meandering novel that explores a number of different viewpoints, characters and timeframes along the way.

Egan does an incredible job of immersing us in the lives of her characters and making their every interaction an exciting new piece of the puzzle. And even when I had my guard up for gimmicks, she seemed to pull them off effortlessly. A chapter written in second person? Recipe for disaster. Yet there we are, drowning in the East River as a doped-up, college-aged, closeted homosexual. Seventy-five straight pages of Powerpoint slides? Again, I was ready for the worst. But Egan crafts a believable narrative out of the dribs and drabs of a teenaged girl’s unorthodox diary.

The last chapter may be the most unconventional of all, but I won’t say any more, for fear of spoiling the read for others. (Still, if anyone knows where I can get a Scotty Haussman Concert T-shirt, I’d certainly like to hear from you.) But do yourself a favor and check out A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Fall asleep with a good book (or a couple thousand)

Well, the days are getting longer and before we know it summer will be upon us. It’s not too early to start planning your next foray into the wilderness.  100BestBooks pointed us to this tent available at Field Candy:

That’s pretty cool. Of course, the slightly more ambitious, slightly less water-proof option is to build your own book igloo. It’s a bit heavier to pack in and a little more labor intensive to set up, but we think you'll agree that it's infinitely cooler, if you can pull it off:

A Big Fish, Wrapped in a Small Book, Inside a Short Video: Part II

As is often the case, one good thing usually leads us to another. Last weekend we shared a short video retelling Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in a series of stop-motion hand drawings.

Now we’ve discovered the amazing animated short below. Created over the course of two years by artist Alexandr Petrov, this paint-on-glass animation netted Petrov the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1999. The original film runs about 20 minutes, but this 8-minute version still captures the major plot points of The Old Man and the Sea. And it’s gorgeous to look at:

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First Line Friday!

This week's first line comes from a novel that finds itself in my list of the ten greatest novels I've ever read. And from what I can tell, it's somewhat unknown. In the very least, I wouldn't consider it prominent. The line is from Ivan Doig's 1987 novel, Dancing At The Rascal Fair (which is a title that I dislike, but the novel is very good). Here is the first line:

"To say the truth, it was not how I expected - stepping off toward America past a drowned horse."

Has anyone out there ever read Ivan Doig, or more specifically, Dancing at the Rascal Fair? I've encountered very few who have. If you haven't, please do so.

From the Pen of E.M. Forster

I was just getting ready to type up a short review of E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, when I stumbled upon these excerpts I had highlighted during my read. I love how Forster gives life to inanimate objects (his face “sprang into tenderness” or “battalions of black pines witnessed the change”) and just as easily turns human characters into inanimate works of art (“She saw him once again at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel…”).

But I think my favorite passage is the third one below. It also happens to be the central plot point of the book. The image of violets running like liquid color is something that has stayed with me since I finished the book last fall. It’s beautiful stuff. All emphasis below is mine- they’re just the lines that knocked me senseless.

She watched the singular creature pace up and down the chapel. For a young man his face was rugged, and--until the shadows fell upon it--hard. Enshadowed, it sprang into tenderness. She saw him once again at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, carrying a burden of acorns. Healthy and muscular, he yet gave her the feeling of greyness, of tragedy that might only find solution in the night. The feeling soon passed; it was unlike her to have entertained anything so subtle. Born of silence and of unknown emotion, it passed when Mr. Emerson returned, and she could re-enter the world of rapid talk, which was alone familiar to her. 

She could not complete it, and looked out absently upon Italy in the wet. The whole life of the South was disorganized and the most graceful nation in Europe had turned into formless lumps of clothes. The street and the river were dirty yellow, the bridge was dirty gray, and the hills were dirty purple.

 Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen onto a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, heading round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion. This terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth. Standing at its brink like a swimmer who prepares, was the “good man.” But he was not the good man she had expected, and he was alone. George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw a radiant joy in her face. He saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her. 

In the Weald, autumn approached, breaking up the green monotony of summer, touching the parks with the gray-blue of mist, the beech trees with russet, the oak trees with gold. Up on the heights battalions of black pines witnessed the change, themselves unchangeable. Either country was spanned by a cloudless sky and in either arose the tinkle of church bells. 

Lucy’s Sabbath was generally of this amphibious nature. She kept it without hypocrisy in the morning, and broke it without reluctance in the afternoon.

Five Months Down!

Today we throw another month in the ol’ archive and celebrate our best traffic stats to date. Thanks to all of you who drop by sporadically, to the diehards who check in every day, and to those who take the time to comment and to link to us across the interwebs. Whatever your interest in this site, we love that you’re here. Come back soon, and come back often.

We’ve covered some great writers in the past 29 days, as you can see in the word cloud above. As usual, here are the ten strangest search terms that led people here, along with the links to whatever they found:

• Commercial Shipping   >>>>  Yep. We’ve covered that here.
• 1920s outdoor spigot   >>>>  We touched on this briefly, as well.
• Explosion of awesome   >>>>  This could really land you on any of our pages, but most likely this one in particular.
• African goose egg   >>>>  A throw-away line from this post.
• Highschool freshman English   >>>>  First Line Friday… diagrammed! (to the best of my lackluster ability)
• Ear stretcher girl   >>>>  We have no idea where this person ended up. Ear might take you here. Stretcher here. Girl? Who knows.
• Animal House Ending   >>>>  Ah, one of our inaugural posts, forever lost in the obscurity of our earliest days.
• Do Mothers Against Drunk Driving Sell Magazine Subscriptions   >>>>  Great question. I have no idea where we’ve answered it, though.
• John Blutarsky wearing shorts   >>>>   This post, again.
• Table graph of bullfights in Spain   >>>>  It has nothing to do with bull-fights (an oversight we regret), but there are graphs galore here.

And, of course, we’ll leave you with our five most popular posts from this past month:

• The Lit-Fic Starter Kit: Your Quickstart Guide to the Classics
• The Stunning Beauty of Books
• Midnight in Paris: How did Woody Do?
• Literary Death Match: Treasure Island vs. King Solomon’s Mines
• So you wanna be a writer? Paris Edition.

We’d like to make this site as great as our mothers think it is. Let us know how we’re doing in the comments. What do you like? What bores you to death? Things like that…

Poet's Corner

-Image courtesy of Fashion Abuse

Whereabouts

by Marcus Jackson, from Neighborhood Register. © Caravan Kerry Press, 2011.

—to Nicole

Finished early at the library,
          I strolled Canal Street to fill
          empty hours
before we'd meet home for dinner.

          Late-winter light sneered,
          reluctant to leave
the streets, bargain tables
          with t-shirts or imposter purses,
          jewelry coves
where gold necklaces refracted
          from squares of scarlet felt.

          All down Mulberry, arched
garlands of festival bulbs
          shined champagne.

          From Italian restaurant stoops,
waiters with handsome accents
          lured tourists by describing
          entrées like landscapes.

At Ferrara's dessert café,
          the wait bent
          halfway up the clogged block.
I whittled inside, browsed
          glass cabinets of cookies,
          yellow-shelled cannolis,
cakes displayed
on paper placemats
          that looked like lace.

I arrived 40 minutes late.
          You balanced, hand
          against bedroom door-jamb,
pulling off your office heels.

          Once you noticed the bakery box
          under my arm, your face calmed—
my earlier whereabouts
          evidenced in sweetness
          we would fork from the same plate.

This is a great little poem. I love how the first four stanzas start out slowly, just snapshots and observations from a lengthy stroll, and then in the final three stanzas we get a series of images that hone in on something very personal. Still, until those final few lines, you get the sense that the whole thing is centered on the narrator.

But the last stanza turns the aimless loafer into a romantic hero. It suddenly becomes a statement about a couple’s intimacy. And those last three lines are worth the price of admission alone:

“my earlier whereabouts

          evidenced in sweetness

          we would fork from the same plate”

Very good, no? Have you had your socks knocked off by a good poem lately? Share them in the comments.