November 23, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Dan Nadel, Publisher, Part 2 By Dan Nadel This is the second installment of Nadel’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY THREE I realize this journal is meant to be cultural, but I swear, a ton of my daily doings are more like the “business” of culture. Or like being the janitor of the business. Or something. That’s what I did for most of the day until I went to Penn Station to pick up Brian and Christopher. A couple sandwiches later, we were en route to a bookstore in Williamsburg, where the guys did a stock signing. This is when authors sign a stack of books so customers will, hopefully, buy them faster. Then it was dinner with Gary Panter, his wife, Helene Silverman (designer of many of my books), and their daughter, Olive. The two dudes love Gary as a spiritual north star of sorts, and Gary has, after thirty-five years, finally found artistic progeny he can be proud of. It’s a lovefest. We always look at stuff together. Piles of stuff. Today’s piles consisted of books and ephemera by Jack Kirby, Mike Kelley, Willy Fleckhaus, Heinz Edelmann, Irwin Hasen, Troy Brauntuch, and Moebius. Stray thought: The problem (or, flipped, the pleasure) of being involved with a funky little subculture like comic books is that you have to deal with a level of absurdity so high that it’s like the gods are constantly fucking with you just for kicks. In other words, ninety percent of the “serious” books on the topic have introductions by TV stars or are filled with absurd claims of greatness. Rarely are comics left alone to be a medium unto itself. DAY FOUR I really admire good publicists. This week, oddly, I’m just a pale imitation of one, but it’s hard to both hustle these books and the authors and also, y’know, think about them, too. Or, uh, think about anything else at all. Morning finds the guys asleep on my living-room floor. They’re both kinda tall, so they take up an absurd amount of space in the room. Over coffee and tea we have a friendly nerdfest in the morning discussing something Dan Clowes recently said to the effect of reconciling himself to the reality of comics history. Which is to say, understanding that there are few thoroughly “great” works or artists to be found, as in film or literature. There aren’t many Jim Thompsons or Philip Dicks to “rediscover” and tout as transcending their genres. Instead, we pick through the bins for a great storytelling device or wonky approach to drawing, or some freakishly good art-text combo by a hack, picking our pleasures and fascinations within a single comic book or even just an eight-page story. Read More
November 23, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Dan Nadel, Publisher By Dan Nadel DAY ONE Woke up in Providence, Rhode Island, but as I write this I’m zooming back to NYC on the Amtrak listening to an exquisite bootleg of Neil Young and Crazy Horse at Budokan, in Tokyo, on March 11, 1976. I arrived in Providence less than twenty-four hours ago for the local launch of Brian Chippendale and C.F.’s (a.k.a. Christopher Forgues) new books If ‘n Oof and Powr Mastrs 3 (both published by my own PictureBox) at Ada Books. The Ada event was packed and quite merry. I bought used copies of Jimmy McDonough’s Russ Meyer biography and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. McDonough’s biography of Neil Young, Shakey, is one of my favorite books, and so while I have little interest in Meyer, I figure I better read whatever is on McDonough’s mind. Shakey, for the uninitiated, is about as good a book about an artist as can be imagined. There’s Nick Tosches’s Hellfire, about Jerry Lee Lewis; Lawrence Weschler’s Robert Irwin–obsessed Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees; and Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage on D. H. Lawrence. And there are more. But Shakey is the most important to me because it is as much about the field of humans and emotions around an artist as it is about Young, and this includes the author himself, who is conflicted and outraged as he tries to deal with Young on an aesthetic, intellectual, and moral (this last bit being the trickiest) level. McDonough wanted too much from his idol/subject, but in a way that is perfectly understandable. The problem, as Christopher would say, is that sometimes you have to turn your back on your life in order to make art. That doesn’t always make for nice human moments. In any case, Shakey beats the hell out of the recent Keith Richards autobio, which is fucking brutal. I’m amazed he published it. Usually with these kinds of books, there’s some kind of arc to it, some realization or redemption after all the action. Not here. It’s mostly unremitting destruction: of himself, of the people around him, of his talent. It is, as Keith might say, a fucking bummer, man. At least Richards doesn’t really pretend there is romance there. But the level of unself-consciousness reaches staggering levels. What Richards leaves out (apologies, regrets, sadness) is as telling as what he leaves in (blow jobs, heroin, death). Then again, the descriptions of music-making are top notch and moving, in the sense that if you believe him, you believe this beast sometimes finds grace in open-tuned guitars and groovy chord sequences. But he’s a beast nonetheless. Read More
November 11, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Tim Wu, Professor, Part 2 By Tim Wu This is the second installment of Tim Wu’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:00 A.M., Amtrak, Washington, D.C. → New York City Taking a break, I read P. G. Wodehouse, whose work I would call a guilty pleasure if I actually felt any guilt about it. Today, I read what must be one of his most brilliant stories, “The Story of Webster.” It is about a young Bohemian named Lancelot whose uncle, a disapproving Vicar, makes him take care of his cat while he is on missionary duty in Bongo Bongo. The cat, it turns out is something of a proxy for the Vicar’s disapproval. “His eyes were clear and steady, and seemed to pierce to the very roots of the young man’s soul, filling him with a sense of guilt.” Lancelot cannot seem to ignore the pressure. Soon he has begun to shave daily, clean his apartment, and under the cat’s influence even ditches his fun-loving poetess girlfriend for a Miss Carberry-Pirbright, “a young woman of prim and glacial aspect.” All seems lost, until at the end the hero solves the problem in a way I won’t spoil. 2:50 P.M., Room 104, Jerome Green Hall, Columbia University My copyright class today is about cultural appropriation, or more precisely, what a secondary author can and cannot do without the first author’s permission. We talk about the case of the Harry Potter Lexicon—a detailed encyclopedia of all things Potter, which J. K. Rowling declared an infringement of her authorial rights. This year’s copyright class is a good crowd. I banned laptops, and class speaking is done standing so it has a performative aspect that adds intensity. It also doesn’t hurt that the underlying topic—authorship—is just interesting. How authors react to works based on their work is unpredictable. Some authors take the existence of any secondary works as a sign of success. Others are hurt, even if the work is flattering. I tell the class about the day I watched Ms. Rowling on the witness stand, crying and saying that her life had lost meaning thanks to that nasty Lexicon. Read More
November 10, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Tim Wu, Professor By Tim Wu DAY ONE 11:00 A.M., Oakland University, Michigan “We don’t actually have wires sticking out of our heads,” I say, “but if you have an iPhone in your pocket and a laptop on your bag you’re pretty close. You’ve already delegated your memory to Google and Wikipedia; Facebook is there to remind you who your friends are.” I have a bad habit. Whatever I happen to be reading influences me to a degree that is often, in retrospect, embarrassing or ridiculous. You might say I’m a slave to what I’m reading. And that may explain why I’m here with a group of undergraduates discussing whether or not we are, in fact, already cyborgs. While these are my ideas (sort of), they are more honestly a take on Kevin Kelly’s new book What Technology Wants. I’m obsessed. He has got me talking about weird tech-philosophy stuff, such as whether we are cyborgs (see above) or whether it’s a good idea to quit technology altogether and go live in the wild. I’m talking to undergraduates because my first book, coauthored with Jack Goldsmith, was selected to be read, campus-wide, by Oakland University in Michigan. For their part, the undergraduates seem to accept the idea that we are already more machine than man without much resistance, proving again that it is hard to shock the young. Perhaps to them, Darth Vadar had roughly the right idea. 7:00 P.M., Ann Arbor, Michigan I hit up Twitter, where I find that I have said something insane about someone named Dorothy: superwuster DOROTHY you don’t know shit about SHIT so fuck you. Someone must have hacked my Twitter account. It is a bit of a surprise to see things written in my name that don’t fully reflect what I think. On the other hand, that was also the experience of rereading my first book. A little later I notice that in addition to a hacker, I have a Twitter hater, apparently one of the students forced to read my book for school. He writes: julianmgsantos Fuck you tim wu #crazyrhyming julianmgsantos #whatreallycheesesme tim wu and dumb bitches To his credit: At least Mr. Julianmgsantos appears to be enjoying Twitter. Most everyone else views it as a duty, like washing the digital dishes. Nonetheless, my appearance at a student Q & A yesterday prompted a reappraisal: julianmgsantos Not gonna lie i hated tim wu. Until he showed up to this Q&A fried as hell. Im actually gonna read his book now Kelly gets credit for that change in heart. Read More
November 4, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Sarah Burnes, Literary Agent, Part 2 By Sarah Burnes This is the second installment of Burnes’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 7:40 A.M. A little tired and wobbly this morning. Get up late … 8:20 A.M. … but this is OK. Littlest is in a great mood as we head out. We get the good bus that takes us just two blocks from school. 8:50 A.M. Perusing the paper when I finally get a seat on the subway. Lydia Peelle won a Whiting! She is so good. This is my favorite story. 10:40 A.M. Listen to a CD of a public-radio program, as its producer wants to do a big multimedia project, which sounds compelling. I think I may refer him to Kickstarter. 12:13 P.M. Off to lunch to meet my agents group, as Brian said—anyone who missed it this time needed a doctor’s note. Betsy isn’t there, though; I commend her blog to anyone interested in the writing life. Read More
November 3, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Sarah Burnes, Literary Agent By Sarah Burnes Author’s Note: So as to not turn this into a kind of Caucasian Chalk Circle—that is, play favorites, pit one client against another—I am not going to mention any of my own this week unless they win an award or Lorin tells me to. DAY ONE 6:56 A.M. Alarm goes off, blaring NPR. Sebastian gets up to wake the kids. I turn off the radio and go back to sleep. 7:34 A.M. The Middlest comes up to make sure I am awake. I turn on the radio and listen to the Morning Edition story about the NFL enforcing their own rules. 8:35 A.M. For reasons both Byzantine and boring, I am driving to work today, dropping off the Littlest at kindergarten on the way. We pass by a Wonder Bread truck as we walk to the car. “Candy!” he shouts. “No,” I reply. “That’s a bread truck.” “A candy bread truck?” 9:45 A.M. At the office, I close my door to finish my weekend reading. I’m reading on a Kindle, which is convenient, but I haven’t yet figured out how to transfer my notes and highlights onto a document, so it’s not nearly as useful as it might be. Or as a paper manuscript is. But of course this makes me like this guy. 11:07 A.M. An offer comes in via e-mail! It’s going to be a good week. 1:00 P.M. Lunch with my friend Diane, Executive Director of the New Press. I tell her I think she should publish a book on the legal roots of the foreclosure crisis, and she looks at me quizzically. I realize I’m not explaining myself well and tell her I’ll give it more thought. We gossip about the kids in the sunshine at La Esquina. 2:35 P.M. Early for an appointment, I duck into B&N (there was no nearby independent!) and browse. I buy Gail Collins’s When Everything Changed, having just gobbled up Rebecca Traister’s Big Girls Don’t Cry. I also buy the current issue of Vogue, which really I should just subscribe to. 4:48 P.M. I dive back into a proposal I am editing—on paper. 5:57 P.M. Pack up bag. Since it’s Monday, I have all my favorite magazines, including the NYRB. 6:20 P.M. Driving home, I listen to the end of All Things Considered and to Marketplace and shout at this guy who says that there should not be a moratorium on foreclosures. What if it were your paperwork that got lost, pal? 7:14 P.M. My beloved mother-in-law and the Eldest’s BFF are over for dinner. I make chicken and broccoli from dinneralovestory.com, and even the picky eater eats it. 8:24 P.M. The Littlest and I are reading Charlotte’s Web. They’re at the fair, and Charlotte has just created her magnum opus, her egg sac. My friend Sarah says that when she got married, CW was one of three books she required her husband-to-be to have read. 8:54 P.M. The Middlest reads me a chapter of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights while I flip through New York. After the kids have been convinced to go to bed, I realize the Eldest has stolen my New Yorker, so I read The New York Review of Books (Cathy Schine agrees with me on Jennifer Egan). 10:15 P.M. I read a couple of chapters of Sigrid Nunez’s Salvation City. I loved The Last of Her Kind, but this is a different—if equally accomplished—kind of book. The last one was saturated in envy, but this one seems to be about … love. Read More