August 7, 2013 On the Shelf Cities in Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein Texas writer John Graves, author of Goodbye to a River, has died at ninety-two. The secret—but public—New York City Hall Library. “9 Popular Yet Terrible Kids Books,” a doubtless controversial list. An infographic charts the incidence of different cities in literature.
August 6, 2013 At Work Imaginary Extensions: A Conversation with Caleb Crain By Anna Altman Photography Credit Liza Johnson This week sees the publication of Caleb Crain’s first novel. Necessary Errors takes place in Prague shortly after the Velvet Revolution and offers a view of the changes that roiled the city in the early nineties. We see it through the eyes of Jacob, a young American teaching English to support a dilatory life abroad. Prague itself figures prominently in the story: more than a setting, the city’s linguistic currents, architecture, and Communist-tinged daily interactions are portrayed so deftly as to render the city a character itself. Crain is likewise evocative on the granular moments of frustration and incremental clarity that accompany acquiring a language. Often, a book about a young person going abroad or otherwise finding himself is presented as a string of solitary experiences. Necessary Errors, on the other hand, portrays the alternating feelings of camaraderie and loneliness endemic to group expatriate life, about learning who one is from a diffuse group of people. Ardent, self-conscious, and introverted, Jacob, having only recently discovered that he’s gay, ventures into social life with new purpose. Through his apprehensions and misapprehensions—his necessary errors—the reader gleans not only a vivid group portrait but a sense of the quotidian consequences of the seismic shift from Communism to capitalism. Last week, I spoke with Crain, an accomplished critic and essayist, over chamomile tea (him) and wine (me) in New York. Crain, too, lived in Prague in 1990 and 1991 and shares qualities with his protagonist (Harvard graduate, gay male, literary aspirations), but he maintains that the work should be understood as fiction. As he explained, expressing his disinterest in the question of how much of fiction comes from lived experience, “The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote that the child’s toy was the precursor to the adult’s field of culture, and he said the one question you’re not suppose to ask the child about the toy is, Does it come from inside or outside? In other words, was the bear born in the hundred-acre wood and did it grow up with the wizard, or did Mommy buy it at Walmart?” Necessary Errors may or may not have benefited from notes scribbled twenty years ago, but the novel is better served by leaving its fictional shell intact, so one might appreciate the writer’s gifts in transporting us to a dynamic social world twenty years removed. At the beginning of Necessary Errors, Jacob’s friends seem incidental—they are people he’s happened to meet at the school where he teaches, other expats like him—there’s no particular affinity that draws them together. But if there is a primary love story in the novel, it’s with this group of people. When people are young adults, they have these packs, or tribes, that they form. Those connections are very real, and yet another, more powerful social narrative is that you’re supposed to pair off and have children—and never see your friends again. In the case of the gay world, there’s an additional element, in which you’re supposed to spin away from your straight friends and be part of a gay world. Both ideas of adulthood are sad to me, and I was attracted to a group of friends as a lost paradise, and one that there’s no way to keep. As a technical matter, with Necessary Errors I wanted to write as much in dialogue as I could. Mikhail Bakhtin was right when he wrote that novels are dialogic texts, where lots of voices come together. Focusing on a group of friends was a way of having lot of different voices. I spoke with somebody who works in TV not long ago, and I discovered that, in television, that kind of arrangement—in which explication happens through dialogue among a certain group—is called a “precinct.” I guess it comes originally from a cop show, but the idea is that there is some social institution that requires a group of people to come back into contact with each other on a regular basis. In between, they have adventures and misfortunes and romances, but at the end of the show they report back to the precinct. It serves to anchor the world of the show. Maybe the group of friends, meeting in their various watering holes, is the precinct of my novel. Read More
August 6, 2013 Bulletin What We’re Doing: Not Staying in Room 1212 By Sadie Stein Why should you never stay in room 1212? When should you tip the concierge? How can you raid your minibar—for free? Learn the answers to these and other shameful but reasonable questions tomorrow at noon when Paris Review editor Lorin Stein interviews Jacob Tomsky, author of Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality. To purchase tickets, click here.
August 6, 2013 On Film Don’t You Forget About Me By Jason Diamond Some people revere Jean-Luc Godard, others obsess over finding subliminal messages in the films of Stanley Kubrick. Much as I love the work of these masters, the filmmaker whose work I tend to think the most about is John Hughes. From the iconic films he both wrote and directed (The Breakfast Club, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles) to those he wrote and produced (Home Alone) the movies Hughes helped create between 1984 and 1991 are all classics in my eyes. (Even I will admit that after that his work gets really iffy: 101 Dalmatians, anybody?) I grew up laughing at his films, and when I eventually found myself homesick for the Chicagoland area I knew growing up, I’d revisit the copies of his films that I still watch on a monthly basis. Eventually I’d come to the realization that while David Kamp rightfully called Hughes the “Sweet Bard of Youth” in his 2010 Vanity Fair piece on the late director, I came to realize—thanks in large part to the distance between me and the place where I grew up—that Hughes was something even more; that he was to Chicago and its northern suburbs what Woody Allen was to Manhattan in the seventies and eighties. He made being from those bland suburbs seem more interesting than I recalled. Read More
August 6, 2013 Bulletin Gatsby-Jazz, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Over the years, I’d purchased books on Indian philosophy, Nepali architecture, alpine flowers, Hatha yoga, spirit possession, as well as old copies of The Paris Review, and I frequented the store long enough to see my own collection of short stories appear in the section for Nepali authors.” Kathmandu’s Pilgrims Book House rebounds, slowly, from a devastating fire. The Generative Gatsby lays out the text of Fitzgerald’s novel like music scores, designed along the lines of twenties-era jazz. Scholastic Book Club is dead; long live Scholastic Reading Club! “The phrase is alluring, stirring, and indistinctly evocative. It is also, strictly speaking, incomprehensible, and for all the time the phrase has been relished, readers and scholars have debated what the term actually means.” What, exactly, did Homer mean by “wine-dark sea” … if that’s even what he said?