October 21, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Carolyn Kellogg, Part 2 By Carolyn Kellogg This is the second installment of Kellogg’s culture diary. Click here to read the first. DAY FOUR 7:00 A.M. I wake up to finish Bound by Antonya Nelson, and then spend the rest of the day running errands, sorting through books that have arrived, and trying to wrap my head around what to say in my review. It’s due Monday and runs next Sunday. DAY FIVE 1:00 P.M. It’s back to Book Soup, this time for my friend Cecil Castellucci’s midday reading from her young-adult novel Rose Sees Red. I give Cecil a ride to the airport—she’s off to Wordstock in Portland—and head right back to Book Soup. There are plenty of other places to go for readings and signings in Los Angeles, I swear, but it’s become Book Soup week. This time, Lorin Stein talks to a full house about The Paris Review with David L. Ulin. Nobody gets punched in the nose. DAY SIX 6:00 A.M. Up and trying to finish the Bound review and blog at the same time. Coffee helps. 5:00 P.M. Leave the paper to drive the hour-plus to UCLA for the Look at This F*ing Panel: A Sociological Discussion on the Hipster, a follow-up to one held last year in New York. The audience, mostly students, is not overly hipsterized, except for the proliferation of crocheted hats, which can only be an unfortunate fashion statement on an eighty-degree day. DAY SEVEN 6:00 A.M. Writing up the hipster panel for Jacket Copy, Tao Lin and his fans in the audience look good, and my admiration for Gavin McInnes, shirtless and full of counterintuitive interruptions is too subtle. Alas, McInnes, a cofounder of Vice Magazine, later tweets that my review is “wimpy,” which I tell myself is marginally better than “boring,” his other critique. 11:30 A.M. At my desk at the paper, trying to sort out ongoing login problems and prepping for the Man Booker Prize announcement. There are people in London gathered at a gala event; me, I’m frustrated that the BBC, which is broadcasting it, isn’t making the stream available in the U.S. Luckily, someone tweets a version of the feed I can see. It’s jittery, a hack I think, but it does the trick. Read More
October 20, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Carolyn Kellogg, Book Reporter and Blogger By Carolyn Kellogg DAY ONE 6:15 A.M. After the heat wave of late September, Los Angeles is experiencing a cold and rainy snap. I’m discovering that my new apartment, which is big enough for lots of books, is also drafty and uninsulated in the special way of LA buildings from the 1920s. So when I wake up, staying in bed seems like a very good idea; I read about eighty pages of Antonya Nelson’s Bound before forcing myself up, into the day. I wasn’t sure about the book at first—it’s a little slow to start—but I was very sorry to have to put it down. I leave it on my bedside table. 9:00 A.M. I’m up and blogging about a poetry festival I won’t go to, because it’s tomorrow, and three thousand miles away. 11:00 A.M. I get an invitation to moderate a conversation between Dennis Lehane and Tom Franklin. Hell, yes! I’ve moderated panels and done some onstage interviews—Richard Russo, James Ellroy, John Waters—and what I love is the possibility for serendipity and detour, the moment that could only have evolved from that particular strand of conversation. I saw Lehane at the Brooklyn Book Festival; he’s smart and funny onstage, fast. And I liked the beginning of Tom Franklin’s book, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which I stopped reading because someone else was reviewing it. My first thought is all the reading I’ll get to do to prep for the discussion. My second thought is, What will I wear? Because scooting into a high director’s chair in a dress can be tricky. 6:00 P.M. After several hours at the office, I head to Book Soup to see Ben Greenman read from Celebrity Chekhov. Book Soup is one of LA’s major independent bookstores, right on the Sunset Strip, with bookshelves crammed under high ceilings and a robust selection of literary fiction and art/film books; they don’t waste much room on pap. It also has a strange, L-shaped reading area. The author stands in a corner, with ten chairs in front of him, in five rows of two; off to his right, a similar setup. Ben does fine; no celebrities have shown up to protest the Chekhovian inner lives he’s given them. Afterward I try to prove to him that LA is not weird and drag him to Musso & Frank for a drink. In the spirit of his book, we riff on rock-star corollaries of contemporary writers: William T. Vollmann = Sonic Youth, David Foster Wallace = Kurt Cobain. Ben isn’t satisfied with my Bono counterpart, Dave Eggers. Suggestions are welcome. Read More
October 7, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Chris Weitz, Director, Part 2 By Chris Weitz This is the second installment of Weitz’s culture diary. Click here to read part 2. Photograph by Summit Entertainment. DAY THREE The Times reports a boardroom struggle at Barnes and Noble. I have little sympathy for the big book chains, as they have played such havoc with the independent book market. Los Angeles, contrary to popular prejudice, used to be a great bookstore town; there was Midnight Special on Third Street and the late, much mourned Dutton’s, which used to be my favorite bookstore in the world, not least because it was arrayed in three different buildings around a courtyard, and no one thought twice if you exited one building with a pile of books under your arm without paying, because you were on your way to a different department. That sort of expectation of civility is lacking these days. Nowadays Book Soup seems to be the only holdout in the city, and they have recently been acquired by Vroman’s, the Pasadena independent. Most of all, I lay a curse upon Borders, who sucked up masses of customers by convincing people that bookstores were social venues with DVDs and coffee bars, and then imploded spectacularly, having put dozens of mom-and-pop places out of business. Part of the blame goes to Amazon, of course, which means part of the blame goes to me. Still, I comfort myself with this thought: Books sold in actual space, even books on actual paper, may die off; but the instant accessibility of books, the lower cost, the preposterous speed of acquisition, may lead to a more ready consumer. I buy more books because I have a Kindle, and because they cost less, I am more willing to take a flier on a book that I might otherwise not lumber myself with. In the meanwhile however let me recommend Heywood Hill on Curson Street in London. Among other things, they are fantastic at locating hard-to-find volumes, and when the third volume of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy was unavailable in the States they were more than willing to send it to me. But if you happen to be in the area you can stop by for events, such as when Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire was at the shop to sign copies of her eagerly awaited memoirs Wait for Me! The Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister.” My editor, Pete, tells me that the Mitford sisters would spread jam on their butler’s head to attract wasps away from them. I hope this is apocryphal. On the way home from work, I listened to the Disinformation podcast, a bunch of clever Southern misfits covering the occult, conspiracy, and esoteric beat. This time it was an interview with occult historian Gary Lachman, who also happens to have been one of the founding members of the band Blondie. In bed tonight, Mad Men seemed a little too much of a harsh toke so we took it easy on ourselves with The Mighty Boosh, the absurdist British comedy. I had the pleasure of meeting one of its contributors, Richard Ayoade, familiar to a select few as Dean Learner from Garth Marengi’s Darkplace (can’t explain, just watch it). Richard’s first feature, Submarine, just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and was picked up for distribution by the Weinstein brothers. Still concerned with a cryptic statement of Heraclitus as reported in Anthony Gottleib’s The Dream of Reason. He minted some real Hall of Famers, like “Character is destiny” and “You can’t step in the same river twice,” but he was also responsible for this one: “Death is all things we see awake. All we see asleep is sleep.” Will sleep on it. Read More
October 6, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Chris Weitz, Director By Chris Weitz Photograph by Summit Entertainment. DAY ONE, KIND OF The first thing that occurs to me at the beginning of my cultural week is a question about criteria. What qualifies? If you read—or, as I did, listen to—Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, the whole of culture is going to hell in a handbasket, as mash-ups and the digital entrepôt rid us of professional reportage, musicianship, originality, and notions of humanity itself. He cites Facebook as an example of the degrading of our standards: What is a “friend” from now on? Punters of my generation—and probably most readers of The Paris Review will find this a curious thing to say, but my three-year-old son will likely see it as a word for the tally of standardized connections amassed through the mediation of a Web site. Now then. DAY ONE, REALLY Monday begins, technically, at 12:00 A.M. “Sunday night,” with an Alan Watts lecture on the subject of “Play and Sincerity.” I have long used Watts to put me to sleep, which implies that he is soporific. Not so; it’s that I find his voice comforting. I also indulged in Zombieland, the unfeasibly entertaining comedy directed by Ruben Fleischer. Of the two ruling monster metaphors currently infecting the public mind (the other being vampirism, to which I have to confess I have contributed), I favor the flesh-eating variety, though that may simply be an indication that I have a Y chromosome. While we are at it, I am afraid that I rate Justin Cronin’s vampire epic The Passage a “sell.” The word is that Ridley Scott is to direct the movie version, and this may be one case of a book that benefits from boiling down. I hope that Sir Ridley is in his best science-fiction mode and can bring some of the quotidian genius that he brought to Alien and Blade Runner. My dad, who served in the Office of Strategic Services at the end of World War II, always said that the New York Times was the greatest intelligence resource in the world. When I got old enough to have developed a taste for a newspaper without (as he called it) funny papers, we had two subscriptions for the house, so that there would be no scuffling over favorite sections. (We also received the Post, for shits and giggles.) Read More
September 30, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Peter Terzian, Part 2 By Peter Terzian This is the second installment of Terzian’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 8:00 A.M. Help the convalescent Caleb into a car-service limo to JFK, where he’ll board a flight to Rochester. This afternoon he gives his Melville lecture. We’ll rendezvous in Albany, where I grew up and where my father still lives, tomorrow: Caleb will fly in from Rochester in the afternoon, I’ll drive up from Brooklyn with Toby in the evening. On Saturday morning the three of us will drive to a rented cottage in Deer Isle, Maine, for a belated summer vacation. “Pack sweaters,” we are told by just about everyone. 8:57 A.M. Shave with Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” playing in my head. Sometimes I try to trace a seemingly random song in my head to its origin—a stray thought, a phrase in a book, something overheard—but I fail with this one. I haven’t been lying in any burned out basements lately. 9:27 A.M. On the subway, read Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy—I’m toggling back and forth between this and Poser on my commute. There are a lot of animals in Bedford’s autobiographical novel, which is set in fin de siècle Berlin, and sometimes she holds back the fact that they’re animals. In one section, we’re told that a new character, Robert, is in the kitchen breaking plates, and two pages later he climbs into a young girl’s lap—Robert, we discover, is actually a monkey. In the passage I read today, the narrator describes the irritable donkey she had as a child who is “fond of music full of brass, and it was for her benefit that the gramophone was set a-trigger at tea-time under the lime tree.” 12:58 P.M. Take the subway on my lunch break to Chelsea, to see an exhibit of new work by David Shrigley at Anton Kern Gallery. This is the second time I’ve seen this show. I went to the opening two weeks ago with a couple of friends, but split off to talk to David, whom I interviewed last year for a travel article about the Glasgow arts scene, then had to rush through the gallery to catch up. David is tall and gentlemanly. The Glasgow trip was my last travel story, and I’ve been feeling misty-eyed about it lately. I told David that Glasgow was my favorite city, and he said, “Well, that’s ridiculous.” Today I want to spend more time with the show, when it’s less crowded. The centerpiece is a row of ten pairs of empty black ceramic boots. A row of his funny drawings lines the walls, and hanging outside the building is a desperate-looking placard that says, “IT’S ALL GOING VERY WELL NO PROBLEM AT ALL.” There’s also a wall with small, protuberant digits beneath a model of the word God. My favorite thing here, though, might be a sculpture of a rib cage set on the floor in a circle of light from the skylight above, which I find inexplicably moving. 1:34 P.M. Think about how I don’t think about Pavement when I’m not reading encomiums to Pavement shows. 7:05 P.M. Get my hair cut at Whistle, a salon in the East Village. “Um … so do you know this actor Andrew Garfield?” Will, my haircutter, does! I come out with a modified, less actorly updo. 9:04 P.M. Caleb calls. The lecture was a success, the people at Geneseo lovely. 10:05 P.M. What to read over a week in Maine? First, the books I’m halfway through: A Legacy, Poser. Then some magazines: the new Paris Review, the new London Review of Books with a piece about creative-writing programs by Elif Batuman I’ve been hearing about, last week’s London Review with the Alan Bennett story I never finished. And now comes the joy of selecting un-begun books from the shelf. I settle upon three short ones, as I had intended: two New York Review Books Classics—James Schuyler’s Alfred and Guinevere, one of Caleb’s favorites, and Maria Dermoût’s The Ten Thousand Things, which my friend Jeff Rotter has praised in a Facebook post; and Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing, in a tiny hardcover Bloomsbury Classic edition with a hand-painted cover. I’ll bring The Oxford Book of English Verse, of course, for romantic reading over breakfasts studded with wild Maine blueberries. And then the big question: to bring Ulysses or leave it behind? For vacation, shouldn’t I pack “pleasure” reading? But Ulysses gives me great pleasure—the kind of pleasure found in difficulty. But shouldn’t I bring books that don’t require entire other books of annotation? I end up voting in favor—a quiet Maine cottage seems like the right place for a distraction-free geek-out. Read More
September 29, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Peter Terzian, Writer By Peter Terzian DAY ONE 6:46 A.M. Sit on the couch with Toby, our dog, to read Ulysses. I’ve been doing this in hour-long sessions, a few mornings each week, since spring. Today I begin chapter 9, otherwise known as “Scylla and Charybdis.” This is the one where Stephen Dedalus gives a disquisition on Shakespeare in the reading room of Dublin’s National Library. (Meanwhile, Leopold Bloom, the novel’s main character, is in the National Museum nearby, checking out the bottoms of the classical statues to see if they have anuses.) I am, as a friend calls it, “geeking out” on Ulysses. My method is: read each chapter once through with Ulysses Annotated, Don Gifford’s exhaustive book of explanatory notes, at my elbow; read the corresponding sections in a couple of critical texts that discuss the book chapter by chapter; go back and read the chapter a second time, neat. But that’s not the end of the geekery! Before I begin each new section, I take a look at Ian Gunn and Clive Hart’s incredibly fun James Joyce’s Dublin, which maps the routes Bloom and Dedalus walk over the course of their shared June 16th and reprints archival photos of the Irish capital in the early twentieth century. For “Scylla and Charybdis,” there’s a great picture of the interior of the National Library, with men wearing many-layered, tightly buttoned suits, sitting at long wooden tables similar to the ones in the New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room. No one’s playing Minesweeper on his laptop, though; these Dubliners are reading books—books, imagine!—propped on very civilized-looking reading stands. This chapter is pretty note-heavy. Over the next hour, I get through only sixty lines of text, but according to the annotations, these lines contain allusions to Hamlet, Goethe, Milton, Blake, Yeats, Matthew Arnold, Marie Corelli, A.E., an obscure play by Synge, and Irish political history. I also learn two new Shakespearean words: coranto, “a running dance,” and sinkapace, “a dance with five steps.” I should say that I’m technically rereading Ulysses, but my memory of the book from the first time around, in college, twenty-three years ago, is almost nil. I’m sure I stumbled over every other sentence then. Not this time! 7:51 A.M. Toby and I hear Caleb waking up in the bedroom; Toby slides off the couch, corantoes off. 7:54 A.M. Joyce’s allusion to the phrase “strangers in the house,” an Irish epithet for British invaders, causes the Elvis Costello song “There’s a Stranger in the House” to briefly play in my head. 8:03 A.M. Breakfast. Caleb and I are slowly reading through The Oxford Book of English Verse, aloud, poem by poem. The idea is to start the day with beauty and art, while bad news waits on the doorstep, temporarily contained in a blue plastic bag. But sometimes, against our better judgment, we find the temptation to read the newspaper overwhelming. Today we decide to do both—the paper while we eat cereal, a poem after. I read “Political Cauldron Stirred by Old Video of Candidate,” about Christine O’Donnell’s dabbling in witchcraft, and immediately regret our decision. 8:25 A.M. Caleb reads Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, then I read it. It’s beautiful. The message is, Caleb says, “You love me more because I’m olden.” We figure out that Shakespeare probably wrote it when he was in his late thirties—dismaying that he thought himself in his twilight then. I’ve read a lot of the plays but very few of the sonnets. I know this one, though, because Kate Jacobs, a Hoboken singer-songwriter I like, has adapted it and set it to music. Her version, “That Time of Year,” is enchanting—it’s done klezmer-style, with a horn, fiddle, and banjo. 9:02 A.M. Iron my clothes for work. I figure out that I can memorize Sonnet 73 in a week if I learn just two lines a day. That time of yeeare thou maist in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few doe hang I’ve been obsessed with the idea of memorization since reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, an account of the British travel writer’s walk across Europe in the 1930s. Leigh Fermor passed the time by reciting the anthology’s worth of English poetry he had committed to memory as a schoolboy. Rote learning was not a priority of suburban public schools in the 1980s—we memorized the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities in ninth grade, and that was it—and since reading Leigh Fermor’s book I’ve fantasized about making up for it in middle age, though without much success. 10:10 A.M. At work, read my Facebook news feed. My friend Sean Howe has changed his profile picture to the rooster on the cover of Pavement’s Watery, Domestic EP. Sean texted me Saturday evening to say he had an extra ticket for Pavement at the Williamsburg Waterfront, the first of five New York dates on its reunion tour—did I want to go? I immediately said yes, and then realized I didn’t want to after all, and sheepishly called him back Sunday morning to say I had changed my mind. A reason for my ambivalence occurred to me later: that seeing Pavement, a band I loved in the 1990s, might make me feel temporally displaced—as though, for one night only, I would revisit a musically exciting time in my life, and then the window would close up again, for good. The prospect of such a heady rush of nostalgia made me uneasy. 10:44 A.M. Sean e-mails a link to a review of the Pavement concert with the set list appended to the bottom. Maybe I was wrong—looking at this list, I think I would have been happy to hear these songs again. 12:32 P.M. Take advantage of my new MoMA membership by meeting my friend Kate Bolick for lunch at the trattoria-ish cafeteria on the second floor. Afterward we quickly walk through a small show about modern kitchen design. Some great poster art, including British wartime propaganda with a rat that “will eat your rations,” and TV monitors with kitchen-related vintage films. It’s too much to take in over a few minutes—I’ll have to come back. 6:18 P.M. On subway platform, begin new Alan Bennett story “The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson,” in the London Review of Books. 6:50 P.M. Train pulls into the station near my house. It’s touch-and-go with this story; not sure I’ll end up finishing it. 7:45 P.M. Leaf through new issue of New York magazine while waiting for frittata to set on stovetop; wish that there were more photos of Andrew Garfield in Facebook movie article. I have a haircut scheduled for later in the week—could I pull off his flawlessly styled quiff? 9:31 P.M. Read draft of “Melville’s Secrets,” a lecture Caleb will deliver later in the week at Geneseo State College. He’s been asked to give the annual Harding Lecture, named after the late Walter Harding, a preeminent Thoreau scholar who taught at the school. The lecture is about “secret meaning” in Melville, specifically in Moby-Dick and Clarel, Melville’s little-read epic poem. Why do certain books, Caleb asks, make us feel that the author possesses esoteric knowledge he or she has encoded within the text? What might that hidden knowledge mean in Melville’s case? I haven’t read Moby-Dick in a long time, but I’m fully absorbed by Caleb’s paper; for one, there’s a lot of sperm in it. Read More