David Carr is the real deal New York Times media/culture critic and he’s coming out with a book about his days in Minnesota battling substance abuse and trying to get his life together, who only did so when his twin daughters came into his life. The early buzz is tantamount to a tsunami.

Books about substance abuse are often the most talked about books because they take place in a world that many people begin to travel down at 18-25, but most people make an abrupt U-turn when the realize the stakes involved with continuing down the darkened alley. And let’s be honest, to a certain extent for those who have never been habitual drug users, it’s a fascinating world. One that 80% of people are not privy to.

He’s the rub for The Night of the Gun. David Carr doesn’t trust his memory of those events, so rather than embellish them and become embroiled in some James Frey-type of shit (would you want Oprah bitch-slapping you?) he went out and thoroughly investigated his own life. Pouring over court documents and arrest records and interviewing over sixty people connected to his life at that time. It sounds like heady stuff. Stuff that I can’t wait to dig into.

The New York Times Magazine ran an excerpt this morning of the book titled “Me and My Girls.” It’s breathtaking, simply one of the most outstanding things I’ve read in quite some time. MORE »

“A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary”

Being a self-proclaimed word nerd, this book initially piqued my interest several months ago when I saw it on the shelves of the “Books about Books” section of my local booksellers.

I acquired the necessary funds (usually from the dearth of Bookstore Gift Cards I get for Christmas and Birthdays from relatives who know little about me beyond the fact that I read like a fiend), purchased the book, and finally picked it up.

The Professor and the Madman tells the interwoven tale of James Murray, editor for 21 of the nearly 80 years it took to produce the OED, and W.C. Minor, one of the Dictionary’s most productive and most mysterious contributors. Murray sets off to visit the man who has expended so much time and effort and contributed so greatly to the creation of the OED, and is shocked to discover once he reaches what he believes to be Minor’s vast estate that the estate is actually the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, and W.C. Minor is actually an inmate. Though the author, Simon Winchester, goes on to debunk the myth of Murray and Minor’s first meeting, he seems to find no problem in using it as a draw for the first few chapters and in the blurb.

Well, that’s the premise, but there’s not really much more to the story than that, though Winchester manages to pad it out to 230 pages. It’s an interesting story and very well researched, but Winchester seems to touch on things superficially and defer to speculation over hard facts to keep up the intrigue (perhaps a traumatic experience in the U.S. Army during the Civil War was the trigger for Minor’s delusions, maybe he had an affair with the wife of the man he murdered (after the murder, when she visited him at Broadmoor)).

The real shame is that this story is fascinating, for the right audience, but the facts should be able to speak for themselves. One of Winchester’s main problems seems to be that he doesn’t trust his readers enough to let them draw their own conclusions. His style is heavy handed at points, but didn’t bother me overmuch until the end. He spends a good portion of the last chapter and the entire postscript expounding on how tragic the story is. Well, had he conveyed that in the story, that whole treacle-y mess would be unnecessary.

As it stands, the entire thing comes off as mighty self-indulgent: the superficial exploration of schizophrenia (Minor’s most likely modern diagnosis; what is sanity anyway?); the Postscript in which he explains his somewhat cryptic dedication (to Minor’s murder victim. Why not just use his name instead of initials, then?); the Author’s Note; the Acknowledgements (6 pages); suggestions for Further Reading (which recommends books on tangential topics like the American Civil War, and little more about the OED); meet Simon Winchester; a Few of Simon Winchester’s Favorite Words; an excerpt from his forthcoming book (I find these much easier to stomach when it is the author’s style, and not his story, I want to read more of. Anyone can find a good story. Not anyone can write it well.); “Have You Read?” More books by the Author.

You get the idea. How much of this do we need?

Perhaps some of these unnecessary additions are the fault of the publisher trying to boost sales. But when you read some of the sensationalist titles of Winchester’s other books (The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology; Krakatoa: the Day the World Exploded), I can’t help but think Winchester was at the very least complicit in all of it.

Amazon tells me Winchester has written a sequel of sorts (The Meaning of Everything: the Creation of the Oxford English Dictionary) that focuses more on the actual Dictionary (the part of this book I found more interesting, anyhow). Perhaps this would be a better choice for the hard-core word nerds that were attracted to this book for the OED’s sake, in the first place.

Final judgment: Interesting, but fluffy. A good beach read for a bibliophile, but borrow it or get from the library. Winchester’s ego doesn’t need the boost a sales spike might give him.

Kay Ryan was announced as the 16^th poet laureate of the United States today. Often compared to Emily Dickinson for her semi-reclusive nature and witty skepticism of the outside world, Ryan has been teaching remedial English part-time at the College of Marin in Kentfield, CA for over 30 years. Her introverted nature and accessibility make her an exciting choice for laureate. Ryan, dually skeptical of both writer’s conferences and collaborative work in general, has noted an interest in doing something in celebration of the library (Congress’ or otherwise). “Maybe I’ll issue library cards to everyone,” she quipped.

Part of what makes Ryan’s poetry so accessible is its brevity and meditation on the more common aspects of the human experience. Often utilizing aviary metaphors, the sentiments in Ryan’s poetry are playfully witty and easily relatable. She employs irregular rhyming schemes and a characteristically sparse style.

“An almost empty suitcase, that’s what I want my poems to be, few things,” Ms. Ryan told the NY Times. Here are a choice few of her many poems, which have been published in six collections and boast numerous awards including fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, as well as three Pushcart Prizes.

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I know lots of people are heeeyuge Stephen King fans. One would think that I fall squarely into that camp, however, for some reason I missed the Stephen King boat. It’s not that I don’t like him, actually what I have read by him (his short stories, The Gunslinger series, and his book on writing) I’ve really enjoyed.

It’s just that, well, there is no excuse really. His oeuvre is massive and it’s difficult to jump into the King pool when he seemingly writes a new book every six-months. Still, I’ve watched the movies based on his books and have enjoyed them a lot, even the crappy made for television movies.

So where should I begin? Some suggest The Stand, but it’s nearly 1,000 pages. Others have suggested The Talisman, a book he wrote with Peter Straub. A Canadian filmmaker named Mathieu Ratthe has loved that book so much he’s been dying to make it into a movie.

But the movie rights for The Talisman were bought by Steven Spielberg back in 1984 and he has never really made a move to direct or produce a film version of that story. So what’s a Canadian filmmaker to do? He ponies up some funding and puts together a four-minute scene from the movie in hopes of attracting attention.

“My main objective for creating this piece,” Ratthe says “is to demonstrate my directing ability and my vision to the producers who own the rights to the story: STEVEN SPIELBERG & KATHLEEN KENNEDY.”

And attention he’s got. For a low budget effort, this is pretty good. He called in some favors and was able to get actor Cameron Bright (Birth, X-Men: Last Stand) to play the lead and even got an FX company that worked on 300 to do the effects.

Several efforts have been made to make this a movie, most recently in 2003 by screenwriter Ehren Kruger, but most who have read that script thought it was shoddy. TNT was going to make a six-part miniseries based on a retooled version of Kruger’s script, but that was scrapped due to budgetary concerns.

It’s doubtful if this will get the filmmaker a meeting, but if there is justice or karma or whatever makes the world go round, Ratthe will be rewarded for his efforts here.

Should Spielberg take a chance on an unknown filmmaker? Sometimes passion is all it takes. Well, passion and talent. You have to have talent. Based on his other film, Mathieu Ratthe has some good chops, as they say.

The Talisman tells the story of a twelve years old kid who must go on a fantastic quest in search of the Talisman, in order to save his dying mother. I should also say that Whitney was the first to find this story and since then it’s simply blown up appearing on just about every major movie website. Thanks Whit!

And just in case someone were to challenge that fact, the good people at ArtGarfunkel.com have posted a list of every book he read from 1968-2007. I mean, wow. He even has a highlighted favorites list. Click here to see the whole thing.

The old maxim about not judging a book by its cover somehow seems succinct here.

What everyone has lost sight of in the madness of the New Yorker’s satirical cartoon of Sen. Obama dressed as Osama and Michelle Obama dressed as a member of the Black Panther Party is the actual article about Obama’s swift rise to power.

It’s a long article, almost 18-pages, which is enough to think that no one commenting on the <sarcasm> insane reprehensibleness </sarcasm> of the magazine’s cover won’t actually read the damn thing. Which is a shame, for it’s a thoroughly researched and enlightening portrait of an ambitious/ruthless politician knocking on the door to the nation’s highest political office.

As Nate from FiveThirtyEight put it, “Well, no shit he’s ambitious. For any American to go from a relatively unprivileged childhood (or a privileged one for that matter) to be on the doorstep of the Preisdency by the time he’s age 46 requires a perfect storm of luck, intelligence, and ambition. Obama has ample amounts of each.”

He goes on to say that after finishing the article, it’s more notable for what it doesn’t say about Obama. In that he’s sort of a boring politician - not driven to ascend to the White House by some Oedipal complex (like Dubya) or the desire to get blow jobs (like Clinton).  He’s just. Sort of. Ambitious.  And unafraid of tossing those aside whom he has no use for anymore.

The upside is that he is intelligent, without being an academic; he’s not radical by any means (hence the irony of the cover); and finally, he is in no way corrupt.  Something of a bonus considering how utterly corruptible and morally bankrupt the last president has been.   Though I suppose Dubya’s legacy shouldn’t enter into this article.

As for the cover, yeah it’s provocative and certainly makes for easy water-cooling fodder. But its downside is that the discussion seems to end at the cover and not what’s on the inside of the magazine. Which is a shame because Ryan Lizza has really done his homework. Can’t wait to dive into this one again on my lunch break.

Of all the books I’ve borrowed, there’s one book that holds a seminal place within my personal canon. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash has not only made me friends (there’s something about the idea of a city franchise that’s an instant bonder with new acquaintances) but it actually got me my first job (the magazine was doing a story on Second Life, a virtual reality program inspired by the cyberpunk novel). The book was slow to start and the ending was close to nonsensical, but everything in the middle was nothing short of genius and I would be lying if I denied that Stephenson holds a special place in my heart.

Above is a video of Stephenson giving a lecture on literary genres at Gresham College in London last May. It’s a pretty interesting topic and if you’re a “SF kind of person” you will get a kick out of Stephenson’s referral to anything not of the SF world as the “mundane”.

[Neal Stephenson Lecture on Genres]
(via BoingBoing via Beyond the Beyond)

So just to counteract the last list of bloggers we gave you from Playboy, here is a list of the most influential. It’s a good list, even if we don’t think that the Huffington Post is a blog or Arianna Huffington is a blogger. Neither is true and I wish that the new media would stop with those descriptors. Still, Huffington should be #1 for what she has created with her internet media company. It’s nothing short of amazing.

Deceased literary icon Kurt Vonnegut has a new book coming out entitled, Armageddon in Retrospect, a collection of 12 essays about war and peace.  Included in the book is a letter written to his father in 1945 explaining his stint as a German POW at Dresden, which of course, formed the basis for his most famous work Slaughterhouse Five.

I had the chance to see Vonnegut speak back in 2000 and to this day it remains the singular best literary experience of my life.  His speech was both witting and life affirming, everything you would expect from the man.  All I can say is that he convinced me Hamlet was the greatest work ever produced and afterwards I’ve always appreciated lemonade, hammocks, and the dots on Indians foreheads that much more.

But back to his letter, which was recently republished in the June 14 issue of Newsweek.  Read the entire thing, it’s great and really captures the feeling of being a POW.

Well, the supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep to Limberg, a distance of about sixty miles, I think, where we were loaded and locked up, sixty men to each small, unventilated, unheated box car. There were no sanitary accommodations—the floors were covered with cow dung. There wasn’t room for all of us to lie down. Half slept while the other half stood. We spent several days, including Christmas, on that Limberg siding. On Christmas eve the Royal Air Force bombed and strafed our unmarked train. They killed about one-hundred-and-fifty of us. We got a little water Christmas Day and moved slowly across Germany to a large P.O.W. Camp in Muhlburg, South of Berlin. We were released from the box cars on New Year’s Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn’t.

Under the Geneva Convention, Officers and Non-commissioned Officers are not obliged to work when taken prisoner. I am, as you know, a Private. One-hundred-and-fifty such minor beings were shipped to a Dresden work camp on January 10th. I was their leader by virtue of the little German I spoke. It was our misfortune to have sadistic and fanatical guards. We were refused medical attention and clothing: We were given long hours at extremely hard labor. Our food ration was two-hundred-and-fifty grams of black bread and one pint of unseasoned potato soup each day. After desperately trying to improve our situation for two months and having been met with bland smiles I told the guards just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came. They beat me up a little. I was fired as group leader. Beatings were very small time—one boy starved to death and the SS Troops shot two for stealing food.

Author Chuck Klosterman went to Germany to teach a college class.  He asked 100 college students which Americans interest them the most.

Here’s what happened: I’m teaching a class on twentieth-century popular culture at the University of Leipzig. I don’t know why the school asked me to do this, but it did. And it turns out that any seminar on U. S. consumer culture is extremely attractive to every non-American kid majoring in American studies, because ninety-six students signed up for the class in the span of three days. Due to the size of the classroom, I was forced to immediately reduce this number to twenty. I was unsure how to do that fairly, so I decided to give them a competitive online essay test before the first day of class. The question was this: “Who do you consider the most interesting twentieth-century American — not necessarily the most historically important, but the individual you find most personally compelling?” The responses were well written, habitually understated, and devoid of any pattern whatsoever.

Klosterman then goes on to include his findings, among them: Michael Jackson was the most frequently mentioned person, Dave Grohl got a vote but Kurt Cobain did not, Jared Leto (Jodran Catalano!) got one mention, the only presidents mentioned were Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, George Gershwin received the second-most mentions, and so forth.

He mentions that this test was interesting because it demonstrated how American culture and mass media has proliferated our culture to the point that it is impossible to tell the difference between what information is interesting and what information is available.

In typical Klosterman fashion, though, he does a reverse-double-take and manages to posit that American culture is both interesting and uninteresting.  Truly, he should be a politician, because every essay he writes ends with him taking both positions of an argument.  Or as I like to call it: “It’s a klosterman.”

Can’t end this post without mentioning the funniest bit in the entire thing.  This is probably only interesting to Ryan Adams fans, unless of course it’s interesting to everyone (see a poorly executed klosterman).

Someone selected Ryan Adams. This made me happy for two reasons. The first is that I suspect Adams is something of an underrated semi-genius, and I like the fact that he’s more appreciated in places where nobody cares whether or not Paul Westerberg hates him. The other reason is that I think there’s probably a 98 percent likelihood that Ryan Adams will read this sentence, put down the magazine, walk over to his four-track, and immediately write a psychedelic country song titled “Hey Little Leipzig Girl (I’m Glad You Dug Those Whiskeytown Bootlegs),” which I will be able to listen to on the Internet forty minutes from right now.