March 2007

Stephen Merchant, one half of the comic duo behind “Extras” and “The Office,” wrote an opinion piece for “The Guardian” yesterday wherein he describes the deplorable state of the press. Specifically, on how the press reliance on citizen journalism on sites like Wikipedia is leading to a humber of high-profile recantings.

Quoted: Therefore, I implore my fellow journalists to heed my words: we must not let our standards drop. We are bastions of truth and integrity. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” I think Thomas Jefferson said that, but I can’t be sure. I got it off the internet.

Pynchon’s “Against the Day” just made it past round 2 of “The Morning News” Tournament of Books. He’ll be going to the semi-finals in this completely arbitrary but fun tournament.

Quoted: As for Against the Day, I do intend to finish it, perhaps even by the end of this month. Some of it is kind of boring. Some of it is astonishing. When the narration shifts into heavy scare-quote mode, it can get a tad annoying, and some of the exercises in pastiche (detective novel, adventure tale, scientific journal) work better than others. But Thomas Pynchon is a master and when he is on—by which I mean when his riffs achieve the right balance of the arcane, the modern, the scary, and the hilarious—there is no way the mildly interesting, failed experiment of a younger writer is going to compete. Alentejo Blue is about Monica Ali resisting pigeonholes, sussing out what her voice sounds like now. Against the Day is about many things, including the recurring collision of science, politics, terror, and the imagination in our history. Yes, the book jumps around crazily, the threads seem to disintegrate in thin air. The trick is to consider this its nature, one that affords many other delights, rather than the novel’s flaw. Finally, though there are some flat moments in Against the Day, Pynchon never writes, as Ali does in her much shorter novel: “The sky was so blue it hurt.” At least he hasn’t so far. Check in with me next month.

If you missed John Bolton on The Daily Show the other night, you missed one of the finest interviews I’ve ever seen on that show. It was substantive and illustrated quite brilliantly what this executive branch believes its role is…

Very few authors are iconic enough to be mobbed when they appear in public. It’s sort of comforting to know that people acknowledge Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the artist that he is.

Quoted: Gabriel Garcia Marquez was mobbed Monday when he appeared at a luncheon in Cartagena, Colombia, during a meeting of the Inter American Press Association.

Quoted: Garcia Marquez, whose Hundred Years of Solitude is considered by many as a Spanish-language classic, is a national icon in his native Colombia. People treated him like a museum piece as he dined with journalist friends in a big tent at the event. Dozens jostled with police officers standing guard to have their pictures taken with him and to have books autographed.

Henry Porter at the Guardian pining for a writer or two to step up and serve as opposition to a Labour Party he feels has dulled the community into silence.

Quoted: This may seem harsh, but where are the novelists with their indictments of government and society? Where are exposés of some unregarded part of the termite heap? Where are the dramatists who can barely speak for their anger?

William T. Vollmann’s new book “Poor People” reviewed by David L. Ulin of the LA Times.

Quoted: William T. Vollmann has long been concerned with the fringes of society, where necessity reduces moral questions to their most elemental fiber. He spent much of the 1980s and ’90s in San Francisco, tracing the urban demimonde in works of fiction such as “The Rainbow Stories,” “Whores for Gloria” and “The Royal Family.” He has also reported from Afghanistan and Sarajevo, where in 1994 he was nearly killed. He’s become known for densely layered narratives filled with allusions: His National Book Award-winning 2005 novel, “Europe Central,” which seeks to personalize the history of 20th century Russia and Germany, runs more than 700 pages.

An interesting piece asking whether or not it’s actually worth it to read all the way through books and stating that it’s quite common at the college level “not to.”

I do agree with the one point he makes about it sometimes being easier to draw conclusions from reading less of the book. I read everything I could get my hands on for a holocaust literature course, the required and the optional readins, incclduing some not even on the cirriculum. On the final test, I was a mess of competing theories and ideas scoring worse than in any of my other literature course finals. I still passed but my scores were not an indication of my involvement.

The University of Paris literature professor Pierre Bayard’s best seller “How to Talk About Books That You Haven’t Read” is flying off the shelves in France. Not only does Bayard tell readers how to fake literary orgasm, but he admits to giving lectures on books he hasn’t bothered to read. I’m sure Bayard’s book will be met with outrage from many academics on this side of the Atlantic who lack the French national penchant for public display and intellectual pretension. Obviously, there is something seriously reprehensible about Bayard’s know-nothing chutzpah (or whatever the French word for that is). Our goal as teachers is to teach what we know, not what we don’t. But, outrage aside, perhaps it’s time to admit that not reading has its virtues as well as its vices.

In The Morning News Tournament of Books, Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day,” kicked the hell out of Brian K. Vaughan’s and Niko Henrichon’s graphic novel, “Pride of Baghdad.”

Can I get a “What what?”

Quoted: Look, pretend for a moment you’re an ant. To read The Pride of Baghdad is to take a trip across a leaf. It’s fairly absorbing. There’s lots to see. Your view of the world might be minimally altered once you get across it.

Quoted: To read Against the Day is to spend a boatload of ant-lifetimes exploring a tree with a trunk as big as a beer truck. There are forks and boughs and limbs and twigs and parasitic vines and tens of thousands of shimmering leaves. The tree moves and even seems to grow; you experience it only a centimeter at a time, but as you climb you begin to sense its vast, beyond-baroque architecture, its athletic density, its almost miraculous existence as a self-contained entity, simultaneously highbrow and lowbrow, ironic and heartfelt, campy and genuine.

Quoted: Against the Day is a messy novel, fat as a phone book, foaming over with pop-fiction prose and go-nowhere chatter. It is not built to please, and readers who like their stories tidily put to rights will quickly find their brains pulped. But I am very grateful I had the opportunity to read it.