It's ON!

Well, we were all thinking it - even my teenage cousins who've read all the Twilightbooks - but Steven King came right out and said it.

Wowsers.

Now I'm just waiting for Meyer to make a snide remark about hackneyed "folksy" dialogue and then maybe Wordloaf or whatever it's called can sponsor a cage match or knife fight or something. Me? My money'd be on King, even after the van accident. He's got the background knowledge, clearly is not troubled by gore, and, I dunno, seems like he'd be handy with a pig-sticker.

Although, if we're being honest, King really isn't in a position to criticize anyone's writing of what he calls in the interview "the physical side" of writing. I mean, I've read IT - you ain't foolin' me on that one, Uncle Stevie.

Counting My Blessings

As petulant, hateful, and baffling as some of the folks I dealt with today were, at least I didn't have a library encounter like this one.

Quarantine!

Okay, so, here's the deal: Mary's been out of town since Friday, and I'm pretty much trying out for "Superflu Victim #8,432" in the Broadway version of Stephen King's The Stand here.

You know, Jaws never ruined swimming for me, but King's plague epic has pretty much ensured that every time I catch a cold or my sinuses try to kill me, there's at least a few minutes where I'm convinced that there is a superflu, it has gotten loose from some hush-hush military installation, and I've somehow managed to become Patient Zero.

Then I get ahold of myself and bust out the Neti Pot, but it's always a fun minute or so of fever-driven existential terror.

So, just for fun, here's the trailer for the 1994 TV miniseries adaptation which had a heck of a cast (Ossie Davis! Gary Sinese! Shawnee Smith!* Dr. Kelso! Kareem Abdul Jabbar!) but not so much of an ending or a script.

visit videodetective.com for more info

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* Becker aside, I've had a soft spot for Ms. Smith ever since the remake of The Blob, which I was so not supposed to have seen at the time when it came out.

Eatin' Crow, Staying Positive

Going to veer from the stated Purpose-of-Blog for a sec:

The new Hold Steady album is so good it makes me feel bad about snotty things I may have said about the previous ones.

It is like a Midwestern Decoration Day.

Like Cameron's dad's car, it is so choice.

In short, it is eight thirty in the morning and I've already listened to it all the way through.

A Music Writer Just Ruined My Life

My good buddy - aesthetic ninja, culture warrior, and all around raconteur Stephen M. Deusner - just introduced me to the Magical 1990s MTV Simulator.

Clearly, it's a good thing that I've just finished reading my second Zombie Summer Reading pick.

Because I will never get anything done or read ever again.

But it got me thinking...decades have albums that go along with them pretty indelibly in the minds of music junkies. And it's the same way with books, I'd wager - whether the author is being held up as the voice of a generation (cough...breteastonellis...cough) or not.

So here's a fun game for your next erudite cocktail party or bar conversation: match 1990s books with 1990s albums. You can do it on the basis of how they fit into their respective aesthetic landscapes, or on any other axis - similarities in themes, styles, or maybe you just read one while listening to the other.

I'll start: Howard Stern's Private Parts and Joey Lawrence's Joey Lawrence. Both were evidence that you should probably dance with the one that brung ya, artistically speaking, and both of 'em sold a hell of a lot of units to people who liked saying things like "Bababooey" or "Whoa!".

Also, both make me weep silently into my hands.

Surely someone else can do better?

In Case You Didn't Know

Author David Hajdu (The Ten Cent Plague) popped up on the Colbert Report the other night.

Also, according to the episode, giraffe is now considered kosher.

Who knew?

Don't Diss My Dodger Dogs

This weekend, the NYT's Peter Meehan wrote an ambitious and cholesterol-packed feature on the highlights and atrocities of ballpark cuisine, complete with a super cool, drool-inducing interactive map laying out best and worst bets at 30 major league baseball stadiums.

DO NOT look at this right before lunch, as even the plastic cheese nachos and soggy BBQ sandwiches will start to look good to you.

While I was not particularly astonished that Dodger Stadium didn't come out on top, I was horrified by Meehan's description of the park's legendary Dodger Dog as "contemptibly bad (salty, greasy and tepid)."

I beg to differ, as Dodger Dog cravings carry considerable weight each time Potts and I debate whether to shell out the dough to attend a Dodgers game. I've never found a Dodger Dog to be either greasy or tepid, and aren't hot dogs supposed to be salty?

Meehan's winning stadiums include San Francisco, Seattle, and Milwaukee, and while I can vouch for the bratwurst at Brewer Park, I suspect our palettes may differ somewhat. The Seattle Sea-Dog (a cod hot dog), which he loved, sounds like poison to me, and I would never, ever in a million years eat sushi at a ballpark unless I was in Japan.

Alongside Los Angeles, Chicago, and Baltimore fared poorly with a crab cake sandwich at Oriole Park written up as "the worst dish I had the displeasure of sampling at a ballpark."

After checking out the map, though, I'm suddenly inspired to travel to St. Louis for the sole purpose of going to Busch Stadium for a "bratzel," a bratwurst wrapped in a pretzel and served with spicy mustard. I looked at a picture of it over 12 hours ago, and haven't stopped thinking about the yummy-looking thing since.

In Defense of the Seven Deadly Words

Last week, I expressed some chagrin over my use of what Bob Harris of the NYT's Paper Cuts called the seven deadly words of book reviewing.

The 200+ snarksome, pissy comments generated by the post set forth a ton more. Apparently "sweeping epic," "tour de force," "page-turner," "readable," "wickedly funny/darkly comic," "nuanced," and "rollicking" are making people want to "claw their eyes out" in droves.

Yes, there are a few bits of book-reviewese that I dislike immensely: luminous, dazzling, and wise, to name a few. And while I feel that literary criticism is probably ill-served by the overuse of this language, I also believe that book reviewing needs it. And I'll stand on Michiko Kakutani's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say this.

What I do, what many other lit bloggers do, and even what most "legitimate" book reviewers do isn't literary criticism, it's readers' advisory. We're telling our readers why they might or might not want to pick up a book, and those readers are possessed of an understandably short attention span. After all, why would anyone waste their time reading about a book that they don't want to read?

So, we have to work fast.

However, overused the word "taut" may be, it tells the reader something about an author's writing style in the same way that "rollicking" tells us something about the pacing and tone, and "page-turner" about the general reading experience. These words are shorthand, a kind of secret readers' code that lets us know as quickly as possible whether we want to pursue a book.

And I happen to like books that are "poignant."

I used to write 1000-word reviews for venues more legitimate than my own sorry little blog, but eventually the process began to feel like an empty exercise in saying something that hadn't already been said, using far more words than needed to be used in the first place.

Because in nearly every case, I'd decided that I wanted to review the book by reading a 150-word review in PW or Library Journal or Booklist.

A book review needs to serve the interests of the reader, not the ego of the reviewer. And while there's a place for the dense and linguistically classy review, I'll usually opt for the populist approach in my review-reading and review-writing. Hell, it's what all the kids are doing anyways, even the NYT.

It's more "readable."*
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* The only "Seven Deadly Words" comment that actively annoyed me was the one that read, “'Readable.' I don’t know what that means. Is the work grammatical? Is it a comment about the book’s typeface?"

I happen to love this word, which describes a piece of writing with qualities that appeal to a wide range of readers. The librarians at the Madison Public Library have done an excellent job of tapping into this appeal with their "Too Good to Miss" and "Beyond Bestsellers: Best of the New" book lists.

Um, don't miss them.

Bits and Pieces

I have a cab to the airport in an hour, and decided it would be more productive to stay up than try to sleep. So, here's what's been entertaining me:

- The American Book Review has compiled a list of the 100 best first lines from novels and the 100 best last lines from novels. The Catcher in the Rye made both lists, and although I liked the book a hell of a lot more when I was 16 than I do now, I have to admit, Salinger totally nails both the take-off and the landing on that book.

- The seven deadly words of book reviewing: I'm guilty of four of them, two in the past week.
UPDATE: Ha! But a great finger in the eye to Bob Harris's Paper Cuts post at CLEWS.

- A Sweet Valley High relaunch? Although I'm disturbed that the Wakefield twins' "perfect size 6" has been done over as a "perfect size 4" (since 6 is apparently no longer "perfect"), I have to say this for the SVH series: it saved my social life. By third grade, I was taller than my teachers. And then SVH taught me about fashion, and I learned that hunched over and awkward was no way to go through life. So, I grant them that.

- The always-up-for-a-challenge Carl has a great one this spring: Once Upon a Time 2, where participants agree to read at least one book from the fantastical subgenres of fantasy, mythology, folklore, or fairy tale... or all of the above, topped off with a June reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I may just do either way.

- I watched one season of American Idol before I realized that I vastly preferred letting others watch it for me. I used to swear by Ang's recaps, but she doesn't seem to be doing them this season. So instead, I enthusiastically recommend Keith's.

Have a lovely weekend -- more when I return from Birmingham.

The Dickensian Aspect

As the last episode of The Wire looms ever larger - seriously, if I had a time machine that could only go forward in time, I'd make it Sunday already and consider the intervening days acceptable losses - I thought I'd throw the following out into the ether:

It became very popular for a while to describe The Wire as "Dickensian" - so much so that the creators wrote some snarky little digs into the current season as regards the use of the word as shorthand by lazy journalists. David Simon, in recent interviews, has pointed out that his show looks much more like a Greek tragedy, in which hapless protagonists are pushed around by forces that are out of their control and utterly indifferent to their fate, only with, say, bureaucratic inertia or unfettered capitalism instead of randy old deities with lightening bolts and spouses who have had enough of their betrothed's swanning about.

So perhaps it's time to put the Dickens comparisons out to pasture. That said, I'd like to humbly submit that if we are going to keep that little trope alive, Hard Times is far closer in spirit to what Simon and Co. seem to be up to, and almost as close in execution as the oft-cited Bleak House.

Thoughts?

Bits and Pieces

While I'm officially back in Workout Barbie mode after a terribly extended holiday hiatus and a bout with the flu, I didn't do a whole lot of reading over the weekend. The only exception was getting through about half of the audiobook for Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle.

Call me a prude, but I have decided that I do not like to hear sex scenes read on audiobooks. It is awkward and weird, and does not go well with household chores like, say, cleaning the litter box.

So, until I catch up on my reading, I am going to rely on the creativity of others to make up for the slump in my own:

-A lovely interview with Sara Zarr and a review of her new book, Sweethearts. Her insightful first book, Story of a Girl, made me bawl my eyes out on the bus, and I can't wait to read this one.

- This has been up for awhile, but it amuses me to no end that Western PA has been chosen as the filming location for the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Because nothing says post-apocalyptic like the land of my birth. Fifty days of sunshine a year, folks -- it's amazing that I didn't die of ennui by the 8th grade.

- What treasures will the Beinecke dig up next?

- And some 1958 bestsellers at The Daily Mirror: Nevil Shute, Art Linkletter, and the odious Ayn Rand, who I learned this weekend, was a huge fan of the child murderer William Hickman. As if we needed one more reason to despise her.

1947project Nominated for a Capote Award

My other home on the internets, the 1947project has been nominated for a Capote Award for Best True Crime Blog of 2007, and we're in some very impressive company, including Jill Leovy's Homicide Report and Laura James's CLEWS.

If you're in the neighborhood and feeling a bit daffy, you can vote for us (and many other fine folks) at In Cold Blog.

Braggin'

Out of idle curiosity, I decided to find out how many books I've reviewed this year.

Turns out, there were 95 of them in 2007. This does not count books Brady reviewed that I did not read, cookbooks, various comics rants, books I plan to review before the end of the year, or books I reviewed for other places. Throw those in, and it's at about 130.

I'll admit, I did experience a brief moment of "Holy crap, I have no life." But then I thought about all the things I did this year that did not involve books, and realized there were a whole lot of them, many involving the company of other people. And then I felt better.

In fact, I felt sort of awesome.

Before & After

In the spirit of our favorite Jeopardy! category, I offer you the following children of Mary's weird brain and my love of Photoshop.

Clue: Plucky young sex columnist moves to Chicago, shacks up with older man. She sleeps around and gets famous; he dies.



Question: What is Sister Carrie Bradshaw?

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Clue: Conniving but fabulous Inuit trophy wife sneaks off on a yacht with her previous husband, only to be shipwrecked on the Tundra - and then led home by a taciturn kid from Juneau who was raised by Arctic wolves.



Question: Who is Julie Cooper of the Wolves?

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Clue: Open war breaks out in the streets of Baltimore between two factions of the largest East Side drug ring. The cool, calm, and business oriented former second-in-command emerges the victor.



Question: What is For Whom the (Stringer) Bell Tolls

And of course, please post your own in the comments.

This Is Petty, But....

I finished my marathon 45 minutes faster than Katie Holmes.

That said, Holmes donned high heels and went to Tom's movie premiere afterwards, while I only managed to drink half a beer before passing out with the lights on. So, good on you, Katie.

A Baseball Story

In The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America, O'Neil posits that the reason there are so many fathers and sons playing in the Major Leagues is because baseball is a game that fathers teach to their sons, that the very specific way a person swings a bat or fields a ball is passed down. On the road, Buck frequently asks people if they remember the first baseball game their fathers ever took them to -- everybody does.

Reading all those stories made me remember mine, which is a story about how baseball is about mothers and daughters, too.

It was the summer of 1988, and early on, the Pirates were locked in a pretty tight race for the NL Eastern Division pennant with the much-hated New York Mets. Or at least they were much-hated in western Pennsylvania.

I went to Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh with my parents, my sister, and our friends, Jason and Ben, although I have no idea who the Pirates were playing that day. That wasn't the important thing.

I followed the standings every day in the paper, and I watched games on television with my dad, and talked with Jason about the Pirates and how they were doing and whether they'd beat the Mets (duh, yes... although as it turned out, duh, no).

Our heroes were Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, Andy Van Slyke, and Sid Bream, and the important thing about going to the game was meeting them. We got our baseballs, we planned how we would get their autographs, and speculated about whose would be best to get (toss-up between Bonds and Van Slyke).

We got to the stadium, and settled into our seats by the first base line. And then, an awful man with the world's foulest cigars sat down directly behind me. And proceeded to smoke the world's foulest cigars throughout the entire game.

By the seventh inning, I was woozy. By the ninth, I was nauseous. And when the game was over, I was sitting on a curb outside the stadium with my head between my legs as my sister and our friends went off to get autographs while Dad chaperoned.

Then, my mother came up to me and asked for my baseball. I handed it to her, and she said, "I'll see what I can do."

Now, it is fair to say that Mom had not been following the 1988 Pirates season as avidly as I had, didn't know Bobby Bonilla from Andy Van Slyke, and had never sought out a celebrity autograph in her life. But she was determined to get one for her kid.

She walked up to the throng of fans, and was immediately bewildered. She didn't want to push up on or bother anyone, and some of the players certainly looked bothered. Then, she saw a guy in a Pirates jacket standing off to the side by himself. He didn't look bothered or busy, so she walked up to him, stuck out my baseball, and said:

"Are you somebody?"

This is probably a terrible thing to say to a person you're asking for an autograph, but I know my mother, and can practically hear the tone in her voice as she asked. I'm sure she managed to say this in a kind voice that admitted her cluelessness, yet was somehow unwilling to take no for an answer.

The man was not offended. In fact, he laughed at her.

"I'm nobody," he said. "You don't want me."

And Mom said, "I don't care. Would you sign my daughter's baseball?"

And that is how I came to have a baseball autographed by Lanny Frattare, announcer for the Pittsburgh Pirates since 1976. Bonds and Van Slyke moved on, but Lanny is still there, and there's nobody whose autograph I'd rather have.

To this day, I still love the Pirates, I still can't hate Barry Bonds, and I still sit on the first base line any time I go to a baseball game.

So, thanks Mom.

Mordor or Los Angeles?

"Far away now rising towards the South the sun, piercing the smokes and haze, burned ominous, a dull bleared disc of red. . ."

Okay, clearly, it's Mordor, but due to the haze and smoke caused by the massive wildfires, I've been half expecting Smaug or a Nazgul or something to go flying by the window. It's looked like about 30 minutes before sunset all day, and now that it gets closer to evening it's starting to look like Caprica City, if you know what I mean.

And if you do: Greetings, fellow dork! Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go flush out my sinuses. Ack.

The 'Signature' Story

I'm currently reading Joe Posnanski's The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America, where the author recounts a year he spent traveling around the country with baseball legend Buck O'Neil.

Now, anyone who saw O'Neil in Ken Burns's Baseball, or read interviews with him knows that the man had a gift for storytelling as prodigious as his gift for baseball. And an entire book devoted to a combination of the two is beyond wonderful.

Many of the stories that appear in the book were new to me, but I'd heard a lot of them before: the story of getting out of Sarasota, the Easter Sunday he hit for the cycle, then met his wife, and his signature story -- why Satchel Paige always called him 'Nancy', which is told or referred to in one way or another at least five times.

But I'm loving these well-worn, well-loved stories, the kind that hold up to repeated tellings. And I love how the telling changes, depending on what kind of mood O'Neil's in and how he feels about the person he's telling it to.

Everybody has a story like that, the one that all your friends know, and the one that you look forward to unrolling whenever you meet someone who isn't a friend yet, but probably will be.

You can tell Brady likes you if he tells you the story about the time his old band, The Dillingers, went to Chicago, or about the time he met Paul Westerberg. And if you know me long enough, I will inevitably tell the story about my parents and the donkey basketball team.

So, I'm curious. Does anyone else out there have a "signature" story to tell? Gwen, I know you've got a million of them, but if you had to pick just one...

thirtysomething

Tonight, Susan Faludi is speaking at the Los Angeles Public Library. And tomorrow, I will officially be in my 30s. These things seem unrelated, but they are not.



Because, you see, when I was about 15, I was the world's biggest fan of the show thirtysomething, and watched all the reruns on Lifetime. I'm not sure why I liked it, as I was certainly not the target audience. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the actress who played Nancy went to high school with my dad. Or maybe it was that everybody on the show seemed so old to me, but it still seemed like they were playing at being grown-up.

Then I turned 17, and picked up a copy of Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, in which thirtysomething does not come off well.

At first, my hackles were up because this was, after all, my very favorite television program. But by the end, I realized, "She's right! They made Melissa all man-crazy and pathetic and Ellyn had to go to a shrink, and everybody hated Susannah because she didn't want to stay home with the baby, and meanwhile, good, perfect Hope was good and perfect because all she did was clean up baby puke and do things for Michael. This show sucks!"

So, thank you, Susan Faludi, for hopefully helping me to be a much better thirtysomething than I might have been otherwise, even if I am skeptical of the premise of your new book.

And another thing about thirtysomething, it does not hold up well. Watch the advertising agency brainstorming scene above, compare it to any episode of Mad Men, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Things That Are Lame

Now this is really getting far afield of the ostensible aims of this blog, but here's the deal: in a fit of early 90s nostalgia inspired by an evening spent watching The Adventures of Pete and Pete on YouTube, Mary and I found ourselves involved in a game of rock and roll onedownsmanship. Having found all the good videos we could think of, we started looking for the worst that we could find. And lo, YouTube did not disappoint.

While viewing the slouching horror that is "The World I Know", we had the following exchange:

Me: "How can you not love Collective Soul? They're like Candlebox and the Goo-Goo Dolls, only suckier. That's hard to do."
Mary: "You know, we complain a lot about how MTV doesn't show videos anymore. I think, instead, we should say: Thank you, MTV, for not showing the narrative videos. Do we really need Collective Soul to tell us stories? Do we really need Axl Rose to tell us stories?"

(See how I did that? Brought it back to storytelling. My blog-fu is, indeed, mighty.)