Isak

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Catharsis (1983)

Detroiters: Reading Tonight

Head over to the Detroit Artists Market to celebrate three new publications from White Print Inc, which is "a new avant-garde Detroit press dedicated to unknown and emerging writers as well as the Cass Corridor history."

Among the readers with new publications by White Print Inc are poet Kim D. Hunter (The Edge of the Time Zone), poet Jhon Clark (Being.Still), and contributors to the new issue of Listen, "an experimental zine dedicated to emerging unknown and more established poets."

Here are the details:

Friday, January 30th,
Detroit Artists Market
4719 Woodward @ Forest
7pm
Free Admission

There will be refreshments available for donation, a post-reading venture to the Motor City Brewing Company ... and, of course, books for sale.

In the meanwhile, listen to Kim D. Hunter interviewed on Detroit Today about White Inc, his poetry, and the Detroit artist's community.

See you there!

Image Credit: Model D Media

Acts of a New World

President Obama's first legislative act puts me over the moon.

Frost/Nixon

This just seen:

Frost/Nixon: it's outstanding. I'm motivated to watch the original Nixon interviews now. And read All the President's Men--a natural fit for my 2009 intention of reading pivotal nonfiction (and the classic monster/adventure books).

REVIEW: The Feminine Mystique(In Progress)

Let me be clear: Betty Friedan's seminal 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, is brilliant, startling, well-written, clear-sighted, and even better than I anticipated when I first picked it up. Bringing together insight and wide-ranging research to a gendered culture that was on the brink, it's apparent why the book cued a revolution when it was published to enormous acclaim.

There are, however, meaningful oversights in the book. Class, certainly, is a factor that shapes men's and women's lives (particularly work lives); Friedan is more than a little dismissive of it, and makes statements that make my skin crawl about the kinds of work that take "intelligence" and "ability." It would've been a better book if she'd admitted a focus on a certain class of American people at the very beginning, justified it by noting that this is the class promoted and aspired to in most cultural sectors, and avoided class comparisons at all.

Homosexuality is the other. Friedan is quite frank about sexuality in this book, particularly how Freud and popular culture shapes the sexual expectations of suburban couples, how much emphasis is put on it to make people feel "alive" in a stultifying society, and how it inevitably dissatisfies. It's quite fascinating--God knows I learned an enormous amount, particularly about the kind of cultural moment 1963 was, and how stagnating Freudian thought was for so many disciplines. But while Friedan's thinking about sexuality is often wonderful, I cringe when she talks about same-sex acts and actors. She ascribes gayness to stunted "childish" behavior, a product of a culture that intentionally stunts the mental and emotional growth of its women, their mothers. She talks only of gay men, as well, never acknowledging gay women.

Friedan's views on homosexuality weren't much of a surprise; I was aware of the later women's movement that challenged her on just this point, particularly after she referred to gay women as the 'lavender menace' in feminism (spawning, of course, the active organization of gay women called the Lavender Menace).

Still, in a book that is overall so wonderful and smart and empathetic, it pains me that these blind spots puncture it. This is a book I want to share and recommend to others (like you, good Isak reader!)--but I'm loathe to imply an endorsement of Friedan's homosexuality analysis and class blindness.

And while I won't put this on par with my other problems with Friedan's book, there's another thing that makes me cringe: she spells 'fantasy' as 'phantasy.' GAH! It's like a punch in the face, every time.

Nonetheless, The Feminine Mystique is a book that changed the world. In that, it has few counterparts, and even fewer of these counterparts are so well-written as this.

Moreover, while this book is inevitably knitted to its peculiar moment in American history, its insights and ideas bear uncomfortably close to our moment right now.

Consider Katha Pollitt's words, from her eulogy to Friedan after the author's death in 2006:

If you ever doubt how thoroughly dead the 1950s are, try teaching The Feminine Mystique to young women, as I did six years ago. You might as well be teaching Jane Austen. The way you'd have to explain about curates and Bath and entailed estates, you have to tell them how women dressed up to go to the market, how women's magazines obsessed about the fragile male ego and how dropping out of college to get married was indulgently viewed because you weren't going to use your education anyway. ... My students felt a bit exasperated by Friedan's suburban wives ... If they were so unhappy, why didn't they, you know, do something about it? None of my students planned to spend their days waxing the kitchen floor; even their mothers hadn't done that. But if they did, it would be--the magic word--their choice.

Well, maybe. Or maybe what looked like choice would be a new incarnation of the mystique in a hot new downtown outfit, wheeling a designer stroller. Or maybe the mystique is gone but the structural obstacles it obscured are still there: job discrimination, the old boys' network, workaholic job cultures, lack of childcare. After all, naming a problem is not the same as solving it. The Women's Strike for Equality, which Friedan helped organize in 1970, called for twenty-four-hour childcare centers, abortion on demand and equal opportunity in education and employment. Not one of those thirty-six-year-old demands has been fulfilled.

Friedan's book is direct, empathetic, and carries, as Pollitt puts it, the "moral seriousness" of a life fully lived. It is a book that sings of human potential, and the utter Greek tragedy of when that potential is suffocated. It is a book with great vision:

Women, like men, have a duty to their minds and talents and selves that cannot be fulfilled by living vicariously through husbands and children. An equal cannot live a happy subordinate life; an adult cannot thrive in a culture that infantilizes her. If Rousseau had not been a mad misogynist, he would have applauded Friedan.

What's more, Friedan is clear about how destructive such an infantalizing culture is to every person existing in it, no matter their gender ... and she's pointed about how this destructiveness is often not noticed until the sons of it are harmed.

So. The Feminine Mystique. Read it, and be prepared for a thunderous experience--cringe-worthy chapters and all.

Book World Apocalypse

It's official: after busy rumors and passionate opposition, The Washington Post is killing Book World, its stand-alone literary section. Reviews at the Post will be reduced, and moved online and to other book sections.

What I found distressing in the news was this piece of information:

As it happens, Book World never garnered much advertising from publishers, who generally spend very little on newspaper ads. Publishers now focus their marketing dollars on cooperative agreements with chain bookstores, which guarantee that certain books will receive prominent display at the front of stores.

Not an earth-shaking revelation by any means, but it points to a troubling reality. While ads in book sections supported a space for literary dialogue, contextualization (so to speak), and creative thinking, the chain store placement method of promotion doesn't, in my experience, support any of these things. If anything, it opposes them. Books promoted by literary reviews are those that are championed by a particular reviewer, who gives reasons we may or may not agree with. Books promoted by chain stores are those that paid for it; no personality or reasons or even a human being is behind it that a reader can engage with. Chain bookstores are convenient warehouses of many books, but aren't often much else.

Independent bookstores may be one of our last spaces for honest and dynamic literary conversation. There, and on the literary blogs and websites, of course. And god knows I'm an avid supporter, with a staked interest, in the digital future of literary conversation and exploration. I wouldn't be here otherwise. But I take to heart the following comment, in response to Book World's closure:

Several former contributors referred to the stand-alone section’s symbolic quality in prioritizing books. “There is a lot of great online coverage, but you go and look for it,” said Meg Wolitzer, a novelist and regular reviewer for Book World. “For people who get it on their front step, books are honored there and the loss of that seems like a big mistake.”

Roberto Bolaño's Life Fictions

So. Roberto Bolaño. He died in 2003 at age 50, and ever since, his international reputation has grown in prestige, intrigue, and, perhaps, myth.

From "A Chilean Writer's Fictions Might Include His Own Colorful Past" in today's Times:

... his widow, from whom he was separated at the time of his death, and Andrew Wylie, the American agent she recently hired after distancing herself from Mr. Bolaño’s friends, editors and publisher, are now challenging part of that image. They dispute the idea, originally suggested by Mr. Bolaño himself, endorsed by his American translator and mentioned in several of the rapturous recent reviews of “2666” in the United States, that he ever “had a heroin habit,” that his death was “traceable to heroin use” or even that he had “an acquaintance with heroin.”

At the same time, some of Mr. Bolaño’s friends in Mexico, where he lived for nearly a decade before finally settling down near Barcelona, Spain, are questioning another aspect of the life story he constructed for himself.

They say that Mr. Bolaño, who is rapidly emerging as the pre-eminent Latin American writer of his generation, was not in Chile during the military coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power, despite his claim to that badge of honor.

Regarding Mr. Bolaño and drugs, numerous Latin American and European critics and bloggers have taken the side of his widow, accusing American critics and publishers of deliberately distorting the writer’s past to fit him into the familiar mold of the tortured artist. Mr. Bolaño’s life and work have been made into “a trivial spectacle,” Julio Ortega, a Peruvian critic and scholar, wrote in El País, the leading daily in Spain.

There's truth in that contention of how Americans like their literary geniuses to be suffering ones. Preferably with a bit of edge and "street" in them. The public's appetite for such tortured geniuses seems insatiable and depressingly gullible: witness the recent hoaxes of James Frey, JT Leroy, and Margaret B. Jones, all people who lived relatively comfortable 'normal' lives and found themselves embraced by the literary world when they pretended to have drug-ridden existences, dysfunctional families, and identities (in the cases of Leroy and Jones) that suffered via gender, sexuality and race.

This love for tortured geniuses connects easily with the uncomfortable way we mythologize the alcoholism, abuse, and so on, of those we canonize as the literary "giants" of our era. I've written about this before, on the occasion of Norman Mailer's death.

I'm troubled at how we see truly terrible acts and real pain as a sort of "quirk" that comes with the territory of writing great fiction, that builds the writer's credibility for genius. ("I've seen things.") Well, it's an adorable quirk if you're Norman Mailer or Ernest Hemingway. If you are female and a suffering writer, a la Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, your myth becomes one of bleeding heart sympathy. Their suicides become understood as tragic inevitability, the best of their writing being the curious and edgy products of crazed minds.

So, is Roberto Bolaño's reputation as a "hard living literary outlaw" based on false pretenses? Was Bolaño complicit in the making of his own myth--aware, of course, what suckers we all are for myths? I don't know, but evidence points that way.

I'm interested in the life of writers I admire, like anyone else. But, as the El País writer contended in the above excerpt, I don't want to be so distracted by spectacle that I ignore the fiction at hand--or worse, to filter the fiction through the spectacle.

We have got to get over this taste for tortured geniuses. Why aren't real human lives enough for us? Why isn't tremendously good fiction and poetry not enough?

Image Credit: The New York Times

Gaiman Wins the Newbery

If you've picked yourself off the floor after today's sad news about the passing of John Updike, and are looking for a shot of something happy (or a shot of anything ...), note this: Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book has won this year's Newbery Medal. The Graveyard Book is "a story about a boy who is raised in a cemetery by ghosts after his family is killed in the opening pages of the novel."

Great writer, great honor, despite the recent bristling about who wins the Newbery and who doesn't. This probably won't please the critics who berate the Newbery Medal for choosing books that are too "dark" and complex for children (as if fairy tales offered any kind of sunshiney alternative), but I'm glad for this news.

John Updike Dies at 76

It's a giant hit in the literary world: John Updike, the Pennsylvania native who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his four-book Rabbit series, has died today of lung cancer.

Ridiculously prolific, Updike also wrote stories, essays, book reviews, and poems.

While I'm ambivalent about the relatively small amount of Updike's writing I've read, I can't deny his enormous intellect, his wit, and his passion for the craft. It's a sad day.

The Boston Globe has a full and interesting reflection on Updike's life and work

Image Credit: Bloomberg News

Did You Catch It?

The 2008 finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards (sort of the Screen Actor Guild awards of the literary world) were announced last night--and there are old favorites mixed with some surprises. In every instance, I'm expecting the old favorites (Roberto Bolaño, et. al.) to triumph. Though it's great to see a healthy number of small presses represented among the honorees.

Nominees are below, as copied from NBCC's blog, Critical Mass. The awards ceremony is on March 12.

Fiction Finalists

Roberto Bolaño, 2666. Farrar, Straus
Marilynne Robinson, Home, Farrar, Straus
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project, Riverhead
M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, West Virginia University Press
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge, Random

Poetry Finalists

August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, Farrar, Strauss
Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press)
Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point Press)
Pierre Martory (trans. John Ashbery), The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow Press)
Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism Finalists

Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard. Metropolitan Books
Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life. Boston Review/MIT
Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds. Doubleday
Reginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, University of Michigan Press
Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History: Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter, University of Chicago Press

Biography Finalists

Paula J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching. Amistad.
Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family In An American Century. Penguin Press.
Patrick. French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul. Knopf.
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Norton
Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Knopf

Autobiography Finalists

Rick Bass, Why I Came West. Houghton Mifflin.
Helene Cooper, The House On Sugar Beach, Simon and Schuster
Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter. WW Norton
Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves Of Heaven. Harmony Books.
Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq. Algonquin

Nonfiction Finalists

Dexter Filkins, The Forever War, Knopf
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War, Knopf
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side, Doubleday
Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation, Atlantic
George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776. Oxford University Press

Balakian Finalists

Michael Antman
Kathryn Harrison
Laila Lalami
Todd Shy

Author 2.0

Do elaborate websites help sell books and the authors behind them? Maybe.