This is why Autumn is my favorite season: “I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.” 

You best damn well better believe I’ve got a cornucopia of mutant fucking squash on my table.  I’d throw up some corn stalks and scarecrows if I lived in a house, but something tells me my condo association would throw me on the curb if I turned my hallway into an apple orchard. 

But honestly?  Colin Nissan’s piece is the funniest thing I’ve read in two weeks.

David Grann’s “Trial By Fire” in the current New Yorker is long, 17-pages long to be exact, and on the despressing side. But it’s everything great journalism/feature writing should be. The story of an innocent man who was put to death in Texas is a must read.  Print it out, take it to the bathroom, put it on the nightstand. 

By now, both investigators had a clear vision of what had happened. Someone had poured liquid accelerant throughout the children’s room, even under their beds, then poured some more along the adjoining hallway and out the front door, creating a “fire barrier” that prevented anyone from escaping; similarly, a prosecutor later suggested, the refrigerator in the kitchen had been moved to block the back-door exit. The house, in short, had been deliberately transformed into a death trap.

The investigators collected samples of burned materials from the house and sent them to a laboratory that could detect the presence of a liquid accelerant. The lab’s chemist reported that one of the samples contained evidence of “mineral spirits,” a substance that is often found in charcoal-lighter fluid. The sample had been taken by the threshold of the front door.

The fire was now considered a triple homicide, and Todd Willingham—the only person, besides the victims, known to have been in the house at the time of the blaze—became the prime suspect.

It was 70 years ago that Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein, better known to you and I as Nathanael West, published The Day of the Locust. 

A new edition of the book is being paired up with the other seminal West tome, Miss Lonelyhearts (New Directions, $11.95 with a foreword from Jonathan Lethem) and if you’ve never read either, then do so. 

Both are highly required reading and still relevent to today’s world.

The Day of Locusts is a pretty perfect slice of the perverse Hollywood underbellyand still burns like a sharp roman candle 70 years after its first publication. 

The LA Times has high praise for the book and its author. 

Los Angeles has been the subject of, and setting for, many fine novels, yet “The Day of the Locust” still feels like the single best-achieved, and most oracular, piece of fiction the city has inspired. West wanted to show the dump behind the dream, and he did it in spades; but he proved too that L.A. could be the seedbed of high art. Tod Hackett’s epic dream painting becomes a metaphor for what West actually did achieve.

“He was going to show the city burning at high noon, so that the flames would have to compete with the desert sun and therefore appear less fearful, more like bright flags flying from roofs and windows than a terrible holocaust. He wanted the city to have a gala air as it burned, to appear almost gay. And the people who set it on fire would be a holiday crowd.”
 

Sam Anderson reviews the latest opus from William T. Vollman. 

As someone who is largely unfamiliar with the author and his body of work, it was this hyperbolic description of Imperial that grabbed my attention knickers and forced me to hike them up. 

“Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.”

I mean, who wouldn’t want to read a book like that?  Yes please.

The Second Pass examines 10 books that should be fired from the literature canon. The mistake they make, however, is twofold. The first is the inclusion of books that arguably haven’t even been canonized yet.

No one would argue that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections don’t deserve the acclaim they’ve received, but it’s difficult to accept that they are safely in “the canon” to begin with. Their newness is a detriment. Maybe one day they’ll get there, but the canon exists as a statement for literature that has stood the test of time.

We could argue about whether or not the gatekeeping of the mythical canon is even relevant (and risk being attacked by Harold Bloom in the process) today; yet, it seems as if the canon, a lightpost illuminating significant works of literature, is a mercurial thing — changing with time, circumstance, reevaluation. 

It’s very function is to create a communal vocabulary, a sense of shared culture.  It’s hardly ever up-to-date with the times.  Still, the literature that reflects our culture now, probably won’t be ascertained until we’re long gone.

And in that sense, The Second Pass should be commended for dipping their toes into this muddy pool.  Especially given that culture changes every three months and is so fragmented that having one guidepost seems, well, outdated.

But, the second problem with their list is that many of the novels aren’t exactly sacred cows. With the exception of On the Road, White Noise, and One Hundred Years of Solitude the other five books seem like safe selections. Feathers won’t be ruffled by their inclusion here. 

Oh really, A Tale of Two Cities, The Rainbow, Absalom Absalom, Jacob’s Room, and The U.S.A. Trilogy should be taken down a peg or two.  Okay, fine, whatever.  They were never on the peg to begin with in my lifetime. 

Two novels I would’ve like to have seem them take down would be James Joyce’s Ulysses and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. It would have been nice for them to really go for it because it seems as if the canon should be altered.  I don’t think I’d rely on Harold Bloom to help me pick out a decent sci-fi novel, comic book or anything genre related.

Post-modern Essentials

The list of 61 essential postmodern reads gives points for: • author is a character • self-contradicting plot • disrupts/plays with form • comments on its own bookishness • plays with language • includes fictional artifacts such as letters • blurs reality and fiction • includes historical falsehoods • overtly references other fictional works • more than 1000/less than 200 pages • postmodern progenitor.

I’m not usually a fan of post-modern literature; I often find the stories too clever, too enamored with their tricks and conventions and flourishes, instead of just telling a damn good story.  Too often, it feels like reading the work of an academic instead of a raconteur.

Essential Beach Reading

NPR is in the process of winnowing their list of 200 great beach reads to compile their diffinitive list of the 100 best beach books.  Sometimes you just need something you can polish off in a day or two without really reflecting on it all that much.  Coincidentally, many of these books have been “canonized.”  So there you go.

Reading is a personal endeavor.  It’s not a competition; when I engage with a story, I want it to somehow illuminate the dark corners of my world.  I want it to shine a light or reveal a path, give me something that pertains to my struggles and everyday ennui.  I want it to educate me, to make me feel as though I understand the world slightly more than I did before.

Plenty of sites attempt this with their best-of currations.  And while I get the need for those types of list, many of those books always seem dated, past their relevance; the usual “greatest books of all-time” lists (whatever that means anyways) always includes the likes of The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, Lolita, et. al. but they always seems daunting and impersonal.  A little too samey.

 ”The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is,” Newsweek says in their just published Fifty Books for Our Times. “What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books — new or old, fiction or nonfiction — open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways.”

Among the selected books are Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, William Faulkner’s The Bear, Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live, Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,  Don DeLillo’s Underworld. 

The list is an intriguing mix of fiction and non-fiction and don’t hew to any particular time frame.  The common themes running throughout seem to be that of terrorism and war in the Middle East, financial uncertainty, environmentalism and food, social change, and science vs. religion. 

It’s an extremely thoughtful and well-thought out list.  Many of these books, I haven’t read but I feel as though I must to have a clearer understanding of the world around me.

I’m engrossed by the part memoir, part court-reporting from Natasha Vargas-Cooper regarding the Jesse James Hollywood murder trial that is going on right now. 

You might remember the 206 Nick Cassavetes’s movie Alpha Dog, with the very easy to look at Justin Timberlake, Ben Foster, Anton Yelchin and Emile Hirsch, playing pretend thuggery.  At the time the movie was publicized as the gritty-star-making performances for all the young stars involved!  And maybe they were.  The movie was quite good in that glossy Hollywood kind of way.  But you couldn’t help but feel sorry about the whole sordid affair.  And how the movie turned empty, hollow mid-level suburban drug pushers into something sexy. 

Anyway, with the amount of content that hits The Awl everyday, it would be easy to look past this, for now, two-part series.  But the prose is crisp and vivid. 

Besides the personal, concrete details that sketch a portrait of the murdered 15-year-old, Nick Markowitz, this is from the just-published second installment and it put a lump in my throat:

The TEC-DC9 featured in the photographs submitted to the jury was the weapon used to kill Nick. The gun was in the shallow grave with Nick’s body. It belonged to Hollywood but was fired by Hoyt. A TEC-DC9 is monstrous and formidable. It has a closed bolt design, meaning one pull of the trigger fires one bullet, and the weapon ejects the bullet cartridge and loads another. This particular weapon had been modified into a fully-automatic hand gun. The bolt had been “grinded down” so that it could fire multiple bullets at one time. This gun was capable of firing off 800 to 1,000 bullets a minute.

During the 1980s, the gun became extremely popular for non-hunting reasons because it was so easily to modify into a fully-automatic. The gun was banned in 1994 in the U.S., but similar variants were produced until 2001.

Are you getting a picture of the kind of person that Jesse James Hollywood is?  The real one is not as glamorous as Emile Hirsch, nor as pretty.  He is thuggish, muscular, brutish.  The kind of person that would kill a boy over a $1,200 debt. 

More than anything else, the description of the gun and its cruel mechanics gave the most direct sense of horror in the trial. The obvious and intentional brutality of the weapon undermines so much testimony. The gun, the fact that you can hold the damn thing in your hand, is more substantial and therefore more affecting than the subjective, agonized testimony of Nick’s father and brother. If you want any indication of what sort of person Jesse James Hollywood is, he’s the type of person who owns a TEC-9.

History’s lens is often reduced to competing dialectics; the ease and comfort of simple black versus white explanations. It is the worst form of rewriting history. A prime example of this is the Civil Rights movement. For those people whose only experience of this time period is through a fifth-grade history book, one would suspect that all African-Americans aligned themselves with either the philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X.

This is a disservice to nuance, however. Life is much more complex than that, evidenced by Claude Brown’s wondrous account of his life during the Civil Rights movement in Manchild in the Promised Land.

Published in 1965, Manchild in the Promised Land is an inner city coming-of-age tale first and foremost. Claude Brown’s fictionalized retelling of his own life is a complex story of survival and hope; one that history often buries for convenience sake. Raised on the streets of poverty-stricken Harlem, Brown’s childhood was one of crime, drugs, hustlers and violence all recounted in angry slice of life details.

Brown’s protagonist Sonny spends time in and out of various reform schools from the age of nine. When not at school he spends his days selling drugs and hanging out with his Italian friend Minetti. He grows up, gets his GED and moves down south to live with his grandparents for a brief time escaping from his city prison. But the book doesn’t reach majestic heights until he returns to Harlem as a young man. It is there that we see why Sonny had to escape his home, why he had to get out of Harlem.   MORE »

GQ, off all places, has a fascinating piece by Robert Draper on Donald Rumsfeld’s disastrous stint as George W. Bush’s secretary of defense. [via  Frank Rich]

I first got a whiff of the new Malcolm Gladwell essay when he engaged in a three part (part one, part two, part three) email exchange with Bill Simmons from ESPN.  Gladwell looks at underdogs and innovation in sports and why the two don’t necessary follow each other, even though they probably should.

Both exchanges are worth reading, if for nothing else than they’re sports food for thought.  The most memorable aspect is Gladwell’s thoughts on sports drafts and his suggestion that there shouldn’t be a draft, but rather college players should go on job interviews with their respective teams.

That suggestion alone, is worth wading through 20,000 words or so.

Kazuo Ishiguro is best known for his novels The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled and Never Let Me Go. 

His latest book, Nocturnes, is a collection of five short stories and will be released on September 22, 2009.  It is, apparantly, quite good. 

Not that there should be any doubt about that.  Never Let Me Go is a transcendent book for the ages, it was afterall featured on Time’s list of the 100 greatest books since 1925. 

Nocturnes is Ishiguro’s first collection of short stories, after six novels. He has said in interviews that he conceived the book holistically, almost as a piece of music in five movements. Like a cycle, the collection begins and ends in the same place – Italy – and it contains modulations of tone that would be awkward within a single narrative. The opening story, “Crooner”, establishes a mood of quiet melancholy. Tony Gardner, an ageing American singer, comes to Venice with his wife, Lindy. He hires Jan, a guitarist from a band in the Piazza San Marco, to accompany him while he serenades his wife from a gondola beneath their hotel window. [...]

All the narrators in Nocturnes sound roughly similar and the collection is saved from monotony by Ishiguro’s subtle shifts of register. The second story, “Come Rain or Come Shine”, is largely farcical, involving a man impersonating a dog in an effort to cover up a mistake. The third story is more refl ective before the fourth , “Nocturne”, reintroduces an element of absurdity. A talented saxophonist whose wife has left him is persuaded to have facial surgery to make him more marketable. He meets Lindy Gardner from the opening story (recently divorced from Tony) in the exclusive wing of the hotel where they have both been sent to recuperate. The story contains the collection’s funniest moment, as the saxophonist finds himself embarrassed on a stage with one arm up a turkey.

Choire Sicha and Alex Balk (no word on whether or not he’ll be joined by his cock) have launched The Awl.  From the about page: “What if there were a website that zippily surveyed a wealth of resonant, weird, important, frightening, amusing bits of news and ideas? And what if it weren’t totally clogged with reality show linkbait?”

It has a decidely Gawker feel to it, back when that site wasn’t an illiterate parody of itself.  There’s already contributions from Emily Gould and several of the commenters are recognizable. 

After Alex, Choire and Emily left Nick Denton’s universe, I can honestly say I pretty much stopped visiting the neighborhood.  It’ll be nice to have them all back in one place.

From the AP:

NEW YORK (AP) — A long, unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace is scheduled for a posthumous release next year.

The Pale King, excerpted in The New Yorker magazine edition coming out Monday, is set in an Internal Revenue Service office in Illinois in the 1980s.

Wallace’s longtime publisher, Little, Brown and Company, will release the novel. Little, Brown said in a statement Sunday that the novel runs “several hundred thousand words and will include notes, outlines, and other material.”

Wallace, best known for the 1,000-page novel Infinite Jest, was a longtime sufferer from depression who committed suicide last fall. He was 46 and had been working on The Pale King for several years. 

Read The New Yorker’s excerpt.