Michael Popek, better known around these parts as “unmoderated,” runs a used and rare bookstore in upstate New York. Several years ago he started a fascinating blog called Forgotten Bookmarks. Now, he is the author a book devoted to the forgotten bookmarks he finds along the way.

Michael has written pieces on this subject for the Times Union, the Huff Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Recently, he took a few minutes out to chat about his blog and the new book. Dig:

Bronx Banter: Are all of the images that are in the book ones that also appeared on the blog?

Michael Popek: I don’t remember the exact ratio, but I believe that 60 percent of the items in the book are exclusive and haven’t appeared online. I wanted to reward the loyal readers with lots of fresh material and at the same time give new fans a look at some of the best stuff from the site.

BB: How did you choose which ones were fit for the book?

MP: It wasn’t easy deciding what to choose; when I was working on the manuscript, there were more than 600 entries on the blog and I had a collection of more than 1,000 unpublished items. I tried to pick the strangest, the funniest, the most poignant; items that might make a reader think about the time and place, the history of the bookmark. I also wanted to offer a good variety, so I tried to keep an even number of photos, letters, postcards, notes, etc. In the end, a few items had to be dropped because of copyright issues, but I don’t think any of those items take away from the entire collection.

BB: Do you save the books, along with their bookmarks? Or do you still sell the books and save the bookmarks?

MP: I save all of the bookmarks, and many of the books. As a bookseller, however, the nicer titles need to be on the shelves so I can’t afford to keep them around forever.

BB: When my dad died I went through most of his books and found random things–a voter registration card from 1977, a dry cleaning bill from the 1960s. You can let your mind wander and try to piece together a story from these fragments even though the randomness means that it can’t really tell you about someone. Have you built stories in your mind from your found bookmarks?

MP: Absolutely, I think all of us do – it’s part of the fascination with found items. It’s easiest with the old letters I find, my mind immediately creates a voice, like I would if I was reading a novel. I can instantly picture the letter writer’s face, the way they position their hand as they write, the items on their desk, the weather outside their window – I can’t help it.

BB: There is an element of voyeurism in found items. Have you ever felt uncomfortable with something you’ve found in a book?

MP: One of the most interesting things I found was just too personal to post online. It was a suicide note from the 1930s, and although there were no names or places mentioned, the emotion was too much. Being this kind of voyeur is often a lot of fun, but that’s something I wish I hadn’t seen.

BB: Wow, that’s heavy, man. On the other hand, have  you sound something so intimate that you found it to be beautiful?

MP: I can think of one in particular. It was a break-up letter, found in “While Waiting,” a pregnancy book. It started out:

Dear Aeneas,

I cannot believe what a slime you are. What I ever saw in you in beyond me. Sarah’s mind must be warped – I love her but how she managed to spend 2 years with a manipulative sadist like you is incredible (yes she told me.)

BB: How did you arrive at the format for the book, a small, handsome hardcover, as opposed to a glossy picture book?

MP: That was up to the publishers, for the most part. I had stated in my book proposal that I wanted to produce something that was vivid and in full color.

BB: I think the design of the book is ideal. I think a big, glossy book would spoil the flavor of these hidden treasures.

MP: I think producing a big coffee-table book might have been a bit risky for a first-time author like, those volumes cost a lot of money to print. In the end, I’m very happy with the way it turned out, the pages really come to life.

BB: As a bookseller I’m sure you spend most of your time looking through collections of books. How deep has the bookmark project seeped itself into that process? Do you feel disappointed when you come across books that are “clean,” and does your heart skip a beat when you initially see a bookmark?

MP: It has completely changed the way I sort through books. I cannot let one go without checking every page for lost treasures. It has certainly reduced my sorting efficiency, but I think it’s worth it. The feeling I get when I find something good and juicy is as exciting as it was when I first started this treasure hunt.

BB: It reminds me of the feeling you got as a kid opening up a pack of baseball cards. Guess it’s more like a box of Cracker Jack, waiting for the surprise, right?

MP: Nah, I like the baseball cards metaphor better. You may get a Mattingly, you may get a Dale Berra – but in the end, at least you got some gum, or in my case, a book. All the Cracker Jack prizes were awful.

BB: I like the idea of a treasure hunt. I was talking to my cousin the other night. He grew up in L.A. and now lives in New York and when we first started hanging out in the ’80s, he’d come to town and I’d take him to used bookstores. He never goes to them anymore, not that there are many left. Nowadays, I don’t go to them as much as I used to, heck, I buy my books from you. But one of the charms of your book is that it brings back the accidental pleasures of hunting. Can you talk about that and how vital your business is these days?

MP: As long as there are books still around, there’s going to be someone like me selling them. Sure, the digital revolution in publishing is underway and showing no signs of slowing down, but that’s OK. E-readers can’t replace a signed copy. There are no first edition e-books. And most importantly, you can’t buy a used digital copy – yet. I’ve done my best to adapt to the new marketplace, and the shop has done pretty well. I always like to think about the success of the good record shops still around, and they give me hope for used book shops everywhere. They are both about the hunt, the browse, the discovery. Digging through the shelves is a lot like digging through the stacks, you may have wandered in looking for some Dionne Warwick, but you walk out with some Elvis Costello.

BB: I love Baseball-Reference.com, it’s an amazing tool, but you lose something from opening up the encyclopedia and finding names by mistake. I find the same thing with reading newspapers on-line. You don’t run across a stray article in the same way. I have a friend who runs a record shop and they don’t do very much business on line–consciously–and the store is a meeting place for a community of record heads. Do you have anything like that at your store? I assume you do a majority of your business on-line now.

MP: The local paper ran a story about it, since then there have been a lot of people in asking to see some of the stuff. Before that story, I don’t think there were a lot of local readers. I’ve had a few of fans of the blog make their way into the shop, one from as far away as California, but to be fair, in was in the area for a family wedding. Most of our sales do come from online venues, but I like to think that our success there allows keeping an open brick and mortar store. I really enjoy interacting with customers, and there is the collection of usual suspects that come in every few days. I have seen a few friendships blossom from encounters here; two older guys coming in looking for Vietnam books end up discussing their service days.

Forgotten Books can be ordered here.

And when you find yourself looking for any out-of-print books, check out Michael’s store. And tell him I sent ya.

Found a couple of intriguing posts about a new book, “On Rereading,” by Patricia Meyer Spacks.

First, from Nathaniel Stein at the New Yorker’s Book Bench:

“One cannot read a book: one can only reread it,” Nabokov said. I thought of that line while reading “On Rereading,” Patricia Meyer Spacks’s charming and strange blend of memoir, literary criticism, and scientific treatise. Spacks, a literature professor and a former president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, systematically revisits “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “The Golden Notebook,” the novels of Jane Austen, and other milestones of her reading life. She hopes to justify the usefulness—or at least to solve a bit of the mystery—of an activity that she loves but also, at times, doubts.

Few would question looking at a great painting twice, or watching a favorite movie again and again. But, perhaps because rereading requires more of a commitment than giving something a second look, it is undertaken, as Spacks puts it, “in the face of guilt-inducing awareness of all the other books that you should have read at least once but haven’t.” It engages, she fears in her darker moments, a “sinful self-indulgence.” Never mind Nabokov, or Flaubert, who marvelled at “what a scholar one might be if one knew well only five or six books.”

And here is Lisa Levy, over at The Millions:

In his often anthologized essay “On Reading Old Books,” William Hazlitt wrote, “I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire to ever read at all.” This is a rather extreme position on rereading, but he is not alone. Larry McMurtry made a similar point: “If I once read for adventure, I now read for security. How nice to be able to return to what won’t change. When I sit down at dinner with a given book, I want to know what I’m going to find.” In her recent study On Rereading Patricia Meyers Spacks uses McMurtry as an example of someone who rereads to stubbornly avoid novelty, and unapologetically so. His refusal, like Hazlitt’s, to read anything new makes rereading a conservative if comfortable experience, vehemently opposed to the possible shock of the new.

Spacks herself feels slightly differently. She writes, “No reader can fail to agree that the number of books she needs to read far exceeds her capacities, but when the passion for rereading kicks in, the faint guilt that therefore attends the indulgence only serves to intensify its sweetness.” In Spacks’s scenario rereading is a forbidden pleasure, tantalizing and, contra Hazlitt and McMurtry, with an element of time wasted — an extravagance. The choice Hazlitt and McMurtry easily make weighs more heavily on Spacks, who knows she forgoes a new book every time she picks up an old one.

Yet there are far more positive spins put on rereading in Spacks’s book and elsewhere. Pleasure, after all, needn’t be a negative. Elsewhere in his essay, Hazlitt brings up a point which is raised often by rereaders: “In reading a book which is an old favorite with me (say the first novel I ever read) I not only have the pleasure of imagination and of a critical relish of the work, but the pleasures of memory added to it. It recalls the same feelings and associations which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have again in any other way. Standard productions of this kind are links on the chains of personal identity. They are landmarks and guides in our journey through life.”

I am not a voracious reader of fiction and have only read one novel, “The Sound and the Fury,” more than once. But I re-read non-fiction all the time, especially essays and articles. I like the idea of revisiting a novel, to see how my feelings may have changed but also as a way to remember where I was when I first read it.

Another project. I’m down.

[Photo Credit: Ashinine]

“The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael,” edited by Sanford Schwartz is a new release from the Library of America and it’s been getting a lot of press along with Brian Kellow’s Kael biography. I’m going to blog about P. Kael, who is one of my favorite writers, all week and will include all the links fit to click.

For starters, here’s a recent conversation I had with Sanford Schwartz.

Check it out:

Bronx Banter: What was your approach in selecting the material for this book? My first impression was that it seemed thin, but then I checked and it is almost 800 pages, anything but thin. Then again, I grew up reading Kael and have all of her books. Is the ideal reader for this book someone who is unfamiliar with her work?

Sanford Schwartz: My first aim in selecting Pauline Kael pieces was to give the range of her thinking and sensibility. As a kid of shadow story, I wanted the selections to give a rough sense of movie history during the years she wrote. I wanted there to be representative pieces on the actors and directors who meant most to her. So there are a number of reviews on Altman, Godard, Scorsese, and so forth. I hoped that the anthology would engage people who already knew her—but unlike you didn’t collect all her books over the years—and also people who, in their twenties and thirties, don’t know who she is. It is always a surprise to run into people who have never heard of her, and I have found that most young people haven’t.

BB. Kael was close to fifty when she started reviewing movies for the New Yorker though she’d been writing for some time. How do you think this influenced her voice as a writer, as opposed to other critics who get their start much earlier?

SS: I’m not sure that it meant a lot. Her having waited so long and absorbed so many movies along the way obviously couldn’t have hurt when it came to writing with authority and conviction. But that certainty was evident in her letters from the late 1930s and early 1940s, when she was in her early twenties—except that her subject was still unclear to her. And it was fortuitous, her coming into the field when she did—an art form was being revitalized.

BB: What did Kael bring to movie criticism in the 1960s and ’70s that set her apart from her contemporaries?

SS: Kael made reading movie reviews a more intimate and personal experience than it had ever been before. Little criticism of any kind conveyed a comparable sense of there being such a powerful, funny, opinionated, scarily shrewd, and common sensical voice there, talking to you. You wanted to know what she thought about everything. You don’t feel this with most journalists, whether they are reviewing an art of doing a political column.

BB: One of the quirks that Kael was famous for was only watching a movie once. She’s been criticized for that over the years, that it suggests a lack of reflection or the possibility that a work of art can change for you. What is it about watching a movie only one time that informed the way she wrote about it?

SS: First off, it should be noted that there were times when she saw a movie more than once. I saw a number of movies with her when it was her second time. But then it was usually because she was checking something. I think she joked about falling asleep during Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” both times she saw it. How many times she saw a movie was conditioned, actually, by her generally tight writing schedule; she usually didn’t have the time to see a movie twice. But the deeper point with this issue concerns the importance of instinct for her. She believed our truest response to a movie (or any art) was our first one, and she wanted to catch that. It was also a matter of temperament. She had on-the-spot judgments about many things. That was how she operated. Movies for her, even the great, complex ones, were about the senses in a way that books were not, and in seeing a movie once and trying to recapture its immediate impact she was, in her thinking, being true to the experience it offered.

BB. Did you re-watch any of the movies whose reviews you included in the collection?

SS: I saw some again, and initially I thought it would be good to re-see many of them. But my sense if that going back to films I loved years ago is hazardous. You re-see Truffaut, Satyajit Ray, or “The Leopard” and part of you must confront ways that the movie, and you, have changed—and altogether the event is more about time than the movie. How movies age is an interesting topic. Kael talked about it in “Movies and Television.”

BB: You’ve included her most famous reviews, ones she was chided about for over-praising like “The Last Tango in Paris,” “Nashville,” and to a lesser extent, “Casualties of War.” How do you think her takes on those movies stand up?

SS: I can’t say how her reviews of those movies hold up because I haven’t seen them recently. My hunch is that she did go overboard on them. I probably felt that then. But of course the reviews had to be in any anthology of her work. They were major pieces for her. They are statements of her belief.

BB: Kael has been ridiculed for her enthusiasm for those movies, but her take on other “classics” of that time period, particularly two “Godfather” movies or “Mean Streets” or “Shampoo” seem spot on. Are there any particular movies that she loved where you feel that her writing is especially sharp?

SS: I wasn’t that interested in whether she was, as you say about some of her reviews, “spot on.” In reviewing an art, reasoning and descriptions count for much more than opinion. As to what I think she was especially sharp on, I hope “The Age of Movies” provides an answer. Are there many more pieces that might have gone in? For sure.

BB: I like that you’ve included her major essays like “Trash, Art and the Movies,” “Why Are Movies So Bad? or The Numbers,” and the long one on Cary Grant, “The Man From Dream City.” And especially an early on, “Movies, the Desperate Art.” But you did not include her celebrated essay on “Citizen Kane.” Is that because it was just too long or because you feel it doesn’t hold up as representative of her talent?

SS: No, the Kane article, as I say in the Introduction, is too long to be included.

BB: One of Kael’s first memorable articles was “Circles and Squares,” a harsh take on fellow critic Andrew Sarris’ ideas about the auteur theory. Why did you not include that one?

SS: I didn’t include the Sarris essay because it is too long for the points it makes. It would have hogged space from livelier writing—writing that meant more to Kael. There are good words in it on what criticism meant for her. If I had excerpts in the anthology I probably would have excerpted those passages. I felt also that readers for whom “auteur” issues mater would already know Kael’s piece, whereas for the wider audience that she wrote for at The New Yorker, and for whom “The Age of Movies” is intended, her deflating this theory—it is really a set of opinions—is not a very engaging issue. And while I think she nails Sarris and the whole approach, she doesn’t do it in a way that opens up the topic to the general reader. Unless you are already familiar with the auteur line, her essay is rather confusing, especially at the beginning. It isn’t an essay that had much long-term meaning for her; she never could take that stuff seriously.

BB: Kael’s review of the documentary, “Shoah,” was famous because she panned it but it’s not here.

SS: I didn’t have a powerful reason to skip the “Shoah” review. Probably, it was a matter of space and also the sense that the reasoning and attitude on display there was already clear from other articles. It is certainly a strong one, though.

BB: During the ’70s, Kael shared her position writing “The Current Cinema” at the New Yorker with Penelope Gilliatt. As a result, there are some classics from that time that she never reviewed properly like “Annie Hall,” “Dog Day Afternoon” (though she does mention this one in a notes column), and maybe especially, “Apocalypse Now.” Were there any movies that you missed her reviewing?

SS: Even with her half-year schedule in the beginning, I believe she managed to encompass the major films of her era (but a movie historian might have another view of this). If a movie was taken seriously or touched hot issues for people—and it came out when she was off—she generally managed to find a way to her her verdict in somewhere. The long articles she periodically wrote during the time she was off let her do just that. She used a piece ostensibly about actors to acknowledge “Jaws” and she let people know where she stood on “2001” in “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”

BB: Kael had her favorites—Peckinpah and DePalma, to name just two—and those who she was famous for blasting, like Kubrick and Woody Allen. But she actually took each movie as it came, and I like that you’ve included “Lolita,” which she adored and as well as “A Clockwork Orange,” which she hated. Same goes for the early Scorsese hits, “Mean Streets,” and “Taxi Driver,” again, which she loved, and “Raging Bull,” which was the first in a long line of his movies that turned her off. Even though she was famous for her prejudices do you feel that she always gave a new movie an equal chance?

SS: Oh, yes. That is one reason I included her review of Bergman’s “Shame.” The piece shows her wrestling with the fact that a director with whom she was often at odds made a movie she had to call a masterpiece. She could always say when someone she admired—Altman, Godard, Bertolucci, Huston, even Renoir—came out flat. Her subject was the film at hand, not someone’s reputation or the credit they might have built up. She didn’t much like Robert Duvall, but after she saw “The Apostle,” which he directed and wrote as well as starred in, she said something like, “You’ve got to hand it to the bastard.”

BB: Kael once said that she never wrote a memoir because, “I think I have” in her reviews. She brought her life’s experience to her reviews, from what she knew about music and books and the theater, but also from what she knew about being a mother, having her heart broken in relationships, everything. Do you think you the story of her life can be found in her work?

SS: Yes, if the story of her life is constituted by her awareness and judgments. I don’t think she was the kind of artist whose life experience mirror or can be seen as a counterpoint to their work. For Agee and Farber, yes; their movie reviews tell us things about each man’s total contribution that we might not know otherwise. Kael, though, put most of what counted in her life in her reviews.

BB: She also once said “In movies, judgment is often not so important in a critic as responsiveness to what a movie feels like, and where it’s heading and what its vision is.” She was very tuned in to the reaction movies had on audiences, especially during her heyday in the early ’70s. Was there any other critic during that time, or any other time, that was as invested in how movies were received by popular culture and what it all meant?

SS: I believe you need a movie historian to answer this one. My feeling is that she got more of the ramifications of movies—their relation to the wider culture and society in general—than most film writers.

BB: This collection is spare toward the last 10 years of her career. Is that because the cultural moment of the movies had passed by the mid ’80s or because you were running out of room? Even though the pieces in her final two collections, “Hooked,” and particularly, “Movie Love,” are terse compared with her earlier writing, I think they had a lovely, compact quality. Were there any reviews that were hard for you not to include?

SS: Kael herself said that her strongest collections were those that covered the films of the 1970s. The movies were richer then. They brought out more of her. And she was first luxuriating in all the space The New Yorker gave her. It is possible that if she had first started reviewing in 1980 her pieces might have been longer and more nuances—even considering the quality of the movies. As it was, by the mid-1980s she had already put forth in some detail her aesthetic and social positions. I agree with you, though, about the “lovely, compact quality” of her reviews of the eighties.

BB: I recall Kael once writing with admiration for the discipline it took Altman to achieve a style that appeared casual and loose. I often think about that when I consider her writing—it is conversational but don’t you think it must have taken a lot of discipline to achieve that effect?

SS: Kael was almost always writing with a deadline, so the words had to come fast, and by nature she was suited to spilling her feelings. But she had to do a lot of work to get the reviews in shape. She could be making substantive changes right to the last minute.

“The Age of Movies” is out now and you can order it here.

As a follow-up to my conversation with Schwartz, I dipped into my library for more Kael and found this in “Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael,” by Francis Davis:

Well, the auteur theory originally meant something quite different from what people understand it be mean now. What it originally said was that a director conferred value upon a film—that if a director was an auteur, all of his films were great. I think the public never understood that, and neither did most of the press. It was an untenable theory, and it fell from sight. It’s now taken to mean that we should pay attention to who directed a movie, because a director is vital to a film, and of course this is true. But it’s something that everybody has always known. I mean, everybody knew that Howard Hawks was terrific. We went to see “To Have and Have Not” and “The Big Sleep” the day they opened, and there was an excitement in the theater, because we all knew that these movies were special. They were smart, and we loved the work of smart directors, because lots of movies were so dumb…But the auteurists considered all of his movies to be wonderful by definition, because he was an auteur. It reached a point where they were acclaiming the later movies of directors who had ceased doing good work years earlier. Hitchcock’s later movies were acclaimed, and they were stinkers—terrible movies. And many routine action movies were praised because they were the work of certain directors.

It’s sometimes discouraging to see of a director’s movies, because there’s so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director’s artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But for all of a director’s movies to be alike in some essential way can also be a sign that he’s a hack.

And this on Andrew Sarris:

We both loved movies. We had that in common, and I enjoy reading him as I enjoy reading very few critics. He has genuine reactions to movies, and many critics don’t. He picks things up and points things out…The big difference between us is that our taste in movies is so radically different. He really likes romantic, classically structured movies. He had very conservative tastes in movies; he didn’t love the farout stuff that I loved. He’s a man who likes movies like “Waterloo Bridge,” movies that drive me crazy with impatience. It’s funny that he should have been at the Voice, and the voice of an underground paper. I think I would have been much more suitable to the Voice, yet for years I got dumped on brutally by the paper. That always amazed me, because I thought, I’m praising movies you should love, so what’s going on here? He and I were at the wrong places—it’s one of those flukes of movie history.

Also this on eroticism in movies and not being able to review “Deep Throat” for the New Yorker:

It wasn’t a good movie. But I very badly wanted to write about it, because for all that was being written about it, nobody was really dealing with what was on the screen. I think half of the reason that people become interested in movies in the first place is sex and dating and everything connected with eroticism on the screen. And I felt that not to deal with all of that in its most naked form was to shirk part of what’s involved in being a movie critic.

I’d love to have written about more eroticism in the movies. I think it’s a great subject, and I dealt with it a little bit in my reviews of “Last Tango in Paris,” “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” and a few other movies. Bertrand Blier I loved writing about, because he dealt so much in sexual areas. But it was tough to write about it all with [New Yorker editor, William] Shawn. I had a real tough time with him when I wrote about “Tales of Ordinary Madness,” The Marco Ferreri version of Charles Bukowski, about a girl who’s virtually a mermaid, with Ben Gazzara as the Bukowski, more or less. It’s an amazing movie, with some scenes that are quite erotic. I had to put up a terrible fight to get it in. Shawn wanted to know if the critics for other magazines were covering it. I said that shouldn’t be our standard for what we covered at The New Yorker. But it was hard to convince Shawn that I wasn’t pulling some sort of swindle by sneaking material into the magazine that he felt didn’t belong there. He felt he was holding the line against barbarians, and to some degree I was a barbarian.

He made it very hard to write about certain aspects of movies. Nobody, really, has done a very good job of writing on a sustained level about the way movies affect people erotically, and about the fact that they became popular because they’re a dating game. People love movies that reason, because they excite them sexually. They go to them on dates, and they go to learn more about how to behave. I never got a real crack at writing about that.

Another terrific volume for Kael nerds is “Conversations with Pauline Kael”.

From an interview with Sam Staggs in Mandate (May 1983):

Mandate: Why do you hit so many nerves among the common readers? Why do you stir up such antagonism as well as such passionate devotion?

Kael: In my writing, I was trying to get at what I actually responded to at the movies, and I couldn’t do in formal, scholarly language. I worked to loosen my style—to get away from the term-paper pomposity that we learn at college. I wanted the sentences to breathe, to have the sound of a human voice. I began, for example, to interject remarks—interrupting a train of thought, just as we do when we talk, and then picking it up again. And when I began to feel the freedom to write as easily as I spoke, the writing itself became pleasurable.

Maybe part of the resentment I stir up among critics who suffer when they write is that they can tell I’m having a good time. My guess is that just as my slangy colloquial style appeals to some readers because it is sometimes enables me to get right at what I think the emotional substance of a movie is, it turns off other readers, who prefer more literary, distanced criticism. For example, I’m frequently disparaged as ‘opinionated’—I think what this comes down to is that often I don’t share in the consensus that builds up on certain movies. Sometimes, it builds up even before the critics have seen a picture, as it did on “Sophie’s Choice”—I suspect that a lot of readers are snowed by big themes and advance articles in the New York Times. And then, if they read me making fun of the picture, they’re outraged and think I’m irresponsible, and especially so because I don’t couch my review in the language that has come to be equated with ‘objectivity.’

photo by Chris Carroll

And from a Q&A by Marc Smirnoff in the Oxford American (Spring 1992) after Kael had retired from the New Yorker:

Q: Is a person lucky to be a movie critic?

Kael: It is really a wonderfully exciting field to write about when the movies are good. When they’re not good, it’s to despair. The really bad movies you can write about with some passion and anger. It’s the mediocre ones that wear you down. They’re disgusting to write about because you can feel yourself slipping into the same mediocrity and stupidity. And you feel you’re boring the readers and yourself. When you starting falling asleep while you’re writing a review, you know how dull the movie is. The danger for criticism is that people will want to become critics in order to become television celebrities, rather than enjoying the pleasure of writing and the excitement of trying to define and describe what you’ve seen.

Q: Do you miss writing reviews?

Kael: Yes, but I know I’ve got to adjust to it. That’s part of adapting to getting older. You’ve got to recognize that the time for certain things has passed and, I’m not an idiot, I know I would not write at my best if I went on. You know, you start repeating yourself—you write the same phrase, you write the same descriptions. I’ve already had the problem of working on a paragraph that I thought was pretty good and looking up what I said about that director’s work the last time I wrote about him and finding out it was almost exactly the same paragraph. Well, you know, it’s time to quit.

There is a wonderful profile of our man Pete Dexter by Ellis E. Conklin in today’s Villiage Voice:

Of his writing regimen, Dexter says: “It’s work. You’re pulling stuff out, like I did with Spooner, that doesn’t want to come out. The only time I really enjoyed the process was writing Spooner. I didn’t want it to end.”

For Dexter, the most essential quality a novelist must possess is the ability to entertain his or her readers. “There’s nothing more important than that.”

It’s a good mystery that most entertains Dexter. In Philly, Dexter became a regular at the Whodunit bookstore, where he first met Tex Cobb. He likes Mike Connelly’s stuff (“He knows what’s he’s doing”), and Scott Turow (“He always aims high. You can see him really trying”), and just about anything by Elmore Leonard.

Among more traditional novelists, Dexter admires Padgett Powell, Thomas McGuane, Tom Wolfe, and Jim Harrison. But it is friend and author Richard Russo (Nobody’s Fool, Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Straight Man, Empire Falls) who is Dexter’s absolute favorite.

“I got a call from The New York Times some time back, asking me what the best novel of the last, I forget, 25 or 50 years was,” Dexter recalls. “And I told him it was Straight Man,” Russo’s poignant 1997 novel about a wisecracking professor trying to navigate his way through a highly dysfunctional English department at a central Pennsylvania university.

Dexter’s respect for Russo is mutual. In an e-mail, Russo writes: “Pete Dexter has always been a writer after my own heart: sly, yet deeply honest, full of twisted wit and spirit. He wears both his prodigious talent and knowledge of the human heart ever so lightly, as if they’re hardly worth mentioning, a mere parlor trick, and not the stuff of which great art is made.”

Dexter has this wonderful ability to get to the heart of something without hitting directly on the head. He creeps up on the outside, or up from beneath, in a way that is surprising. He’s a huge talent but he doesn’t let his talent that get the better of him. His prose is restrained without being forced. And he doesn’t coast. Writing is not easy for him, every sentence, every word, is worked over until it’s right. Steve Lopez, the accomplished columnist, said that Dexter is “the guy who makes you want to give it up, sell shoes, take up heavy drinking, or just shoot yourself.” And that’s true. But he also makes me want to try harder.

“He’s some kind of genius,” Richard Ben Cramer told me recently. “He’s just ferocious.”

 Here’s an excerpt from James Wolcott’s new memoir about New York back in the ’70s:

How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything was about to go to hell. I had no idea how fortunate I was at the time, eaten up as I was by my own present-tense concerns and taking for granted the lively decay, the intense dissonance, that seemed like normality. Only F. Scott Fitzgerald characters (those charmed particles) feel the warm gold of nostalgia even while something’s unfolding before their enraptured doll eyes. For the rest of us, it’s only later, when the haze burns off, that you can look back and see what you were handed, the opportunities hidden like Easter eggs that are no longer there for anybody, completely trampled. To start out as a writer then was to set out under a higher, wider, filthier, more window-lit sky. A writer could still dream of climbing to the top, or at least getting close enough to the top to see who was up there enjoying themselves.

[Photograph’s via Only NY Lives]

Dig this coolness (fresh direct from Marilyn Johnson).

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach begins in the middle of a streak. Scrawny shortstop Henry Skrimshander has never made an error. Not in Little League, not in high school. And when he matriculates at a small, venerable, liberal arts school called Westish College, he remains perfect.

The streak exists not only during games but in between as well. He’s never made a bad throw in practice; a ball has never hit a pebble and skipped past his glove during drills; never lost a ball in the sun while having a catch. He’s been flawless for fifteen straight years.

Henry works hard at the game, perhaps harder than anybody, since nothing else matters to him besides playing baseball. He’s memorized Hall of Famer and personal hero Aparicio Rodriguez’s book, The Art of Fielding and internalized the practical advice on positioning, balance, and physical preparation. The meaning of the more philosophical passages has eluded him as he starts college, but he’s memorized those too.

The book starts percolating when scouts and agents descend on Henry as he scoots up the draft board towards the first round. In the game he’s set to match his idol’s college errorless streak his errant throw sails into the dugout and shatters his roommate’s eye socket.

The first bad throw of Henry’s life spawns others and he unravels. By the time a ballplayer counts 15 years experience, he’s learned the humbling nature of the sport. The paltry rates of success that stand for excellence and the failure to constantly replicate even the most routine gestures bend a player’s expectations. But since Henry’s never made an error, he’s never had to confront this essential truth about the game and his identity collapses when he fianlly does.

The meat of the book is about how Henry and his estranged mentor, catcher Mike Schwartz, the guy responsible for bringing him to Westish in the first place, attempt to overcome the errors. But Mike, distracted by his new girlfriend Pella and brimming with resentment from Henry’s lurking draft day success, offers only warmed-over platitudes for Henry’s soul and countless sets of stadium stairs for his legs.

The inadequacy of their response is obvious to any baseball fan. How can they recover magic that they made no attempt to understand in the first place?

Unfortunately, not one character in the book is in the least bit curious about the source of Henry’s supernatural fielding ability. And anyone that has played one season of baseball at any level would instantly recognize 15 years of perfection as supernatural.

In The Art of Fielding however, even die-hard ballplayers accept the perfection without comment. And when Henry’s first error touches off a crisis of confidence and eventually a total systemic failure, the other players treat him like a player in a bad slump, expecting hard work or the right attitude adjustment will eliminate the errors and restore his factory settings.

But he’s already the hardest worker and already has the best possible attitude. So how’s that supposed to fix the problem? Perfection at this absurd length cannot be earned through practice. And if his ability is indeed supernatural, with all the hard work running parallel at best, then the sudden loss of his ability requires a different treatment than this book imagines.

A ballplayer could react to a terrible slump in a number of ways. But all of them should be vastly different to a person reacting to the loss of a supernatural gift. A slump usually begins with the wrong mix of flawed mechanics and dumb luck and spirals into Adam Dunn-level tragedy when the player gets trapped inside his own head. Henry’s situation is closer to Prometheus and his gift of fire than it is to Adam Dunn and his buck-fifty batting average.

Because all of the characters ignore this essential difference, the baseball in the book loses integrity – a distraction that I could not tolerate.

I’m sure Harbach has loftier intentions than examining Henry’s fielding ability, but he wrote a book around a baseball team – and from what I can tell, nobody’s been shy promoting it as a baseball book. At the very least, the context of the baseball season should serve as the binder of the story, but since the author doesn’t get the baseball right, the binder dissolves. What’s left is still good enough to carry your interest for a while, but since the baseball is palpably unreal, it taints the other stuff too.

And what was gained by Henry’s lifetime of perfection if the source of that gift is not an element of the story? So that his error can be an original sin? An expulsion from his Diamond of Eden? The extreme nature of Henry’s predicament lends itself more easily to that metaphor, but for me, a similar construct was still achievable without involving the miraculous.

Harbach would have been better served if he had taken Henry to the natural limits of baseball. An outstanding fielder in the midst of a record-tying streak. And when that guy flubs a throw and falls into a bottomless slump, Henry’s story could play out as it does without the necessity of an eye roll.

It’s not just the unspoken presence and sudden disappearance of magic that serves to dislodge the baseball fan from making an intimate connection with this book. Henry’s teammate (and roommate) Owen Dunne gets away with reading books on the bench until such time as their red-ass Coach Cox tells him to pinch-hit.

Owen’s homosexuality is accepted by the team without the slightest hesitation. That’s probably not plausible at a college in a state that elected Scott Walker Governor; even the most enlightened eighteen year olds are prone to confusion and snickering when they find themselves spending a lot of time in cramped locker rooms.

But let it slide in the interest of progress. Still, there’s not a competitive baseball team in the country that’s allowing a bench warmer to clip a reading lamp to the brim of his cap so he can curl up in the corner of the dugout with a steaming cup of herbal tea and the latest Barbara Kingsolver novel.

That’s not Division III college baseball. That’s not even the Amherst English Department’s softball team. Perhaps Tanner Boyle lacked the SAT scores to play at Westish, but he’d have that reading lamp sticking out of Owen’s ear before the end of the first inning. Or he’d end up in the garbage can trying.

These things could have transpired in a different kind of book. In a funnier book. In a book that was candid about its alternate, enhanced reality. In science fiction, perhaps. But this story takes place in a crafted, hyper-reality, a reality that breaks with ours for effect only before darting back under a mutual cover. The physics of this world are the same as ours, and under those rules, we know that baseball players can’t be perfect for long.

If W.P. Kinsella conceived of a shortstop that didn’t make an error for 15 straight years, someone else in the story would have noticed.

Coolness.

“Perhaps because he decamped to Hollywood in the 1980s, while he was still in his prime, John Schulian has never quite been recognized as one of the last in the great line of newspaper sports columnists that started with Ring Lardner, ran through W.C. Heinz and Red Smith, and probably ended when Joe Posnanski left the Kansas City Star in 2009. This is a shame. On his better days, he rated with anyone you might care to name.”

Tim Marchman on John Schulian’s latest collection, “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand: Portraits of Champions Who Walked Among Us.” (Wall Street Journal)

John Schulian has been entertaining us this year with the story of his career in “From Ali to Xena.” He has a new collection of sports writing out and we recently caught up to talk about it. Here’s our conversation.

Enjoy.

BB: Your work has been collected twice before: “Writers’ Fighters,” a boxing compilation, and “Twilight of the Long-ball Gods,” a collection of baseball writing. What was the genesis of your new anthology, which is both broader and more specific than those two?

JS: “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand” was born of a mixture of ego and an urge to remind readers of the kind of sports writing they’re no longer getting in newspapers. What writer doesn’t want to have his work, at least that portion of it which isn’t embarrassingly bad, preserved in book form? I got my greatest lessons in writing by reading collections of my favorite sports writers—Red Smith, W.C. Heinz, Jimmy Cannon, John Lardner—so having a collection with my name on it became a goal early on in my career. Because “Sometimes” is my third, I may have exceeded my limit, but I hope people will forgive me when they see that it’s wider in scope than “Writers’ Fighters” and “Twilight of the Long-ball Gods.” I’m not just talking about the number of different sports it touches on, either. I’m talking about the personalities involved, and how open they were about themselves and their talents.

I realize, of course, how rare such accessibility is in today’s world, with athletes wary of any kind of media, protected by their agents, and generally paranoid about revealing anything about themselves except whether they hit a fastball or a slider. I think it was you who told me the change came about in the early ‘90s, which did a lot to shape this book. Suddenly, I knew how to make it more than a vanity project. The key was to make it stand as a tribute to the kind of sports writing that enriched newspapers when guys like Dave Kindred, Mike Lupica, David Israel, Leigh Montville, Bill Nack, Tony Kornheiser, Tom Boswell and I were turned loose with our portable typewriters. It was my great good fortune to work in an era so rich in talent, so full of talented people who were both my competition and my friends. Likewise, the athletes were there to talk to when you needed them. I know I didn’t always get the answers I wanted, but I got enough of them to give my columns and my magazine work the heartbeat they needed. It was a wonderful time to be a sports writer, and I hope “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand” bears that out.

BB: I was struck by your piece on John Riggins in Super Bowl XVII. Your starting and closing image is the most famous one from that game. You didn’t get any special access that your peers didn’t have and yet within those limitations the piece is just so writerly. The kind you don’t see today. How were you able to condense a guy’s career into a single column?

JS: It was pure reflex. I forget how much time I had for post-game interviews, but it wasn’t much before I had to get back to my computer. I’m guessing I had an hour or so to write the column. There were some guys who routinely finished in less time than that, but for me, that was a sprint. I still wanted the column to be as stylish as possible. Sometimes that was my undoing, because I spent too much time massaging the language and not enough just saying what I wanted to say. With the Riggins column, though, things fell into place. I’d spent a lot of time around the Redskins during the regular season and into the playoffs, so I was pretty well steeped in his story. As for working with the same post-game material everybody else had, there was something liberating about that. No scoops, no exclusive interviews, just a good old-fashioned writing contest. When you get in a situation like that, if you can get your mind right, everything just flows. And that was certainly the case when I wrote about Riggins. I knew instantly where all the pieces of the puzzle were supposed to go—imagery, post-game quotes, back-story. Then my instincts took over, and I even made my deadline. What could be better than that?

BB: The majority of the stories in the collection were written for newspapers. Can you describe the atmosphere of that business in the post-Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein days when columnists were stars?

JS: The newspaper business became truly glamorous after Watergate. Robert Redford played Woodward, Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein, and Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post’s executive editor, practically became Jason Robards, who portrayed him on the screen. It just didn’t get any cooler than that, and the people at the Post were certainly aware of it, maybe too much so. I noticed the self-importance and inflated egos when I showed up there in 1975, in the wake of Watergate. The Post was a wonderful paper—beautifully written, smartly and courageously edited—but it was still a newspaper. There were still typos and factual errors and the kind of bad prose that daily deadlines inspire. The ink still came off on your hands, too. And there were still desk men with enlarged prostates and reporters who stank of cigar smoke, and one night some son of a bitch stole my jacket. Maybe worst of all, if you looked beyond the Post, you could see the storm clouds gathering. More and more afternoon papers were dying, and there was a segment of the population that hated the Post for unhorsing Dick Nixon and the New York Times for printing the Pentagon Papers. But newspaper people, who can be so sharp about spotting trouble on the horizon for others, tend to be blind when it comes to their own house. No wonder it felt safe and good and even magical to work on newspapers after Watergate. I loved it as much as anybody. And I probably would have liked the dance band on the Titanic, too.

BB: Before we get to the players, let’s talk about the section you have on the writers—Red Smith, A.J. Liebling, W.C. Heinz, Mark Kram and F.X. Toole—because it reminds us that the era you cover wasn’t just about the athletes, it was about the writers too. Can you talk about what a remarkable stylist Mark Kram was in his prime?

JS: I don’t think any sports writer ever wrote prose as dense and muscular and literary as Mark Kram’s. He opened my eyes to the possibilities of what you could do in terms of pure writing even though the subject was fun and games. If you want to read classic Kram, you need only turn to the opening paragraphs of his Sports Illustrated story about the Thrilla in Manila. It has to be one of the most anthologized pieces in any genre of writing. I know that it was a mortal lock to be in “At the Fighters” as soon as George Kimball and I sat down to edit the book. Kram had been on my radar since I was in college. He absolutely killed me with his bittersweet love letter to Baltimore, his hometown, on the eve of the 1966 World Series. He was under the influence of Nelson Algren when he wrote it, but I wouldn’t figure that out until years later. All I knew was that he had taken a mundane idea and turned it into a tone poem about blue collar life. Baseball was only a small part of it, and even though I was under the Orioles’ spell—Frank Robinson! Brooks Robinson! Jim Palmer!—I loved Kram’s audacity. He wasn’t afraid of the dark no matter how bright the lights on what he was writing about.

No wonder he was so great when the subject was boxing. When I was in grad school, he did a piece about the fighting Quarry brothers and how their old man had ridden the rails from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to the supposedly golden promise of Southern California. He had LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles, and Kram left me with a picture of him standing in a boxcar door as the train carried him toward a future filled with more sorrow than joy. I read the story standing at the newsstand where I bought SI every week, and when I got back to my apartment, I read it again. I would discover A.J. Liebling, W.C. Heinz, Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, John Lardner, and all the other giants of fight writing later, but Mark Kram was the one who lit the way for me. And it began with that story about the Quarry brothers and the image of their old man in the boxcar door.

(more…)

Here’s a good piece on a new book about Heminway:

From his father, who loved the natural world, Hemingway learned in childhood to fish and shoot, and a love of these things shaped his life along with a third thing, writing. Almost from the first there is his distinct voice. In his journal of a camping trip he took with a friend when he was sixteen years old, he wrote of trout fishing, “Great fun fighting them in the dark in the deep swift river.” His style was later said to have been influenced by Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, journalism, and the forced economy of transatlantic cables, but he had his own poetic gift and also the intense desire to give to the reader the full and true feeling of what happened, to make the reader feel it had happened to him. He pared things down. He left out all that could be readily understood or taken for granted and the rest he delivered with savage exactness. There is a nervy tension in his writing. The words seem to stand almost in defiance of one another. The powerful early stories that were made of simple declaratives seemed somehow to break through into a new language, a genuine American language that had so far been undiscovered, and with it was a distinct view of the world.

Pete Dexter’s first book report in 55 years appeared in the New York Times Book Review yesterday. It is about Jim Harrison’s latest novel, “The Great Leader”:

To enlighten and to entertain: what else is there? And while good books — even so-so books — serve both functions, if you ever have to choose one over the other, keep in mind that a book that entertains without enlightening can still be a guilty pleasure, but a book that enlightens without entertaining is algebra.

… I would mention that for me, Harrison set the hook deep and early, in a novella called “Revenge.”

There is a scene in that story of almost incomprehensible savagery — Harrison by the way is as good at writing violence as anybody, and particularly gets the weirdness of the incubation period — and he accomplished this particular violence by interrupting himself and manually moving readers to the fireplace mantel, where they could watch without getting hurt.

It was one of Harrison’s moments of instinctive genius, I think, perhaps the only way to bring off the scene without changing the mesmeric sound coming off the pages to something more ordinary, and I mean it as no disrespect to speculate that these moments are in some way out of Harrison’s hands, and very close to magic.

Over at the Paris Review, dig this interview with the late Budd Schulberg. Here he is talking about his debut novel, “What Makes Sammy Run?”:

INTERVIEWER: I didn’t grow up in Hollywood. I grew up in Indianapolis. But when you wrote this book, I said, “This guy’s got to be crazy. Putting himself in such terrible danger.” Didn’t you realize it was a dangerous thing to do?

SCHULBERG: Well, yes I did. Of course, with the warnings that my father gave me, I realized it was dangerous, but I couldn’t help it. I wrote it, and I wanted to write it. I was doing what Sidney had told me to do—to write what you feel, what you want, what you know. I had to do it. I should also add that before I saw Goldwyn, just after I got back, I went into Chasen’s Restaurant, which was the place, the in place, where all the big shots hung out. I knew so many of them, so many familiar faces, and they literally turned away from me. They turned away so they wouldn’t have to look at me and say hello.

I heard that at a meeting of the producers’ association presided over by Louis B. Mayer and the head of MGM, Mayer had looked down the long table at my father and said, “B.P., I blame you for this. Why didn’t you stop him? You should have stopped him!” My father said, “Well, as a matter of fact, Louie, I did write to him—” Mayer said, “Well, you know what I think we should do with him? I think we should deport him.” He really meant it. In Mayer’s mind he was the king of a country. Hollywood was like Liechtenstein or Luxembourg. The district attorney was on the studio payroll; you could and did commit murder, and it wouldn’t be in the paper. That was the kind of power that he wielded. My father—who was much more intelligent than Louie, but not nearly as street smart or studio smart, whatever—said, “Louie, he’s one of ours, for God’s sake. He may be the only novelist who came from Hollywood instead of to Hollywood!” Then he said, “Well, where do you think his St. Helena should be? Maybe Catalina Island?” My father reported that rather proudly because he was sort of proud of the joke. He was proud of the jokes that often got him in a lot of trouble.

That’s the kind of thing that he got on their shit list for. Because Mayer wasn’t kidding. Anyway, it was at that point I quit. I didn’t want to stay there any longer and, of course, if I had wanted to, I couldn’t, and that was it.

Schulberg led a fascinating life. Hollywood, boxing, novels. This is a solid interview, I only wish it were longer. This bit is good, though:

Scott Fitzgerald often wished that after Gatsby he had never done anything but just stuck to his last. Sometimes at night I feel that way. I have a little bit of that feeling, that I probably would be more respected as a novelist if I had just stayed on that track. Instead, I have this sort of fatal problem of versatility. Because I was raised in such a writing atmosphere, it got so I could write anything. I could write a movie; I could write a novel; I could write a play, I could even write lyrics, which I did for A Face in the Crowd. Always there were these different strings, so many different ones. I was sort of cursed with versatility. My problem is that I’m just not going to live long enough to do all the different things I want to do.

“The Art of Fielding” is the debut novel by Chad Harbach. It’s received a good deal of hype and will be one of the “it” books of the fall.

Here’s an excerpt over at Vanity Fair:

If you’ve never read “The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, I suggest picking up a copy. Here is the title essay:

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of fight pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines .of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed ten ounces. They were signed “Love, Martha,” but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.

The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wrist watches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds, depending upon a man’s habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-size bars of soap he’d stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. By necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed five pounds including the liner aid camouflage cover. They carried the standard fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle boots-2.1 pounds – and Dave Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl’s foot powder as a precaution against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was 2 necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RT0, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, Carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man, his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated. Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.

[Photo Credit: Addiction Inbox]

Here’s Tracy Daugherty, in an adaptation from his biography on Joseph Heller, on the War for Catch-22:

The novel, you know,” people whispered whenever Joseph Heller and his wife, Shirley, left a party early. From the first, Joe had made no secret of his ambitions beyond the world of advertising. In later years, he floated various stories about the origins of his first novel. “There was a terrible sameness about books being published and I almost stopped reading as well as writing,” he said on one occasion. But then something happened. He told one British journalist that “conversations with two friends … influenced me. Each of them had been wounded in the war, one of them very seriously The first one told some very funny stories about his war experiences, but the second one was unable to understand how any humour could be associated with the horror of war. They didn’t know each other and I tried to explain the first one’s point of view to the second. He recognized that traditionally there had been lots of graveyard humour, but he could not reconcile it with what he had seen of war. It was after that discussion that the opening of Catch-22 and many incidents in it came to me.”

The Czech writer Arnošt Lustig claimed that Heller had told him at a New York party for Milos Forman in the late 1960s that he couldn’t have written Catch-22 without first reading Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished World War I satire, The Good Soldier Schweik. In Hašek’s novel, a mad state bureaucracy traps a hapless man. Among other things, he stays in a hospital for malingerers and serves as an orderly for an army chaplain.

But the most common account Heller gave of the hatching of Catch-22 varied little from what he said to The Paris Review in 1974: “I was lying in bed in my four-room apartment on the West Side when suddenly this line came to me: ‘It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.’ I didn’t have the name Yossarian. The chaplain wasn’t necessarily an army chaplain—he could have been a prison chaplain. But as soon as the opening sentence was available, the book began to evolve clearly in my mind—even most of the particulars … the tone, the form, many of the characters, including some I eventually couldn’t use. All of this took place within an hour and a half. It got me so excited that I did what the cliché says you’re supposed to do: I jumped out of bed and paced the floor.”

In all likelihood, each of these scenarios is true; they don’t contradict one another, and they probably occurred at some stage in the process of imagining the novel. But we also know from a letter to Heller in California from the editor Whit Burnett that, as early as 1946, he’d been considering a novel about “a flier facing the end of his missions.”

[Photo Credit: Vanity Fair]

Thanks to Matt B for pointing out this killer gallery of Swedish book covers over at 50 Watts.

Here is an excerpt from Roger Ebert’s forthcoming memoir:

My blog became my voice, my outlet, my “social media” in a way I couldn’t have dreamed of. Into it I poured my regrets, desires, and memories. Some days I became possessed. The comments were a form of feedback I’d never had before, and I gained a better and deeper understanding of my readers. I made “online friends,” a concept I’d scoffed at. Most people choose to write a blog. I needed to. I didn’t intend for it to drift into autobiography, but in blogging there is a tidal drift that pushes you that way. Getting such quick feedback may be one reason; the Internet encourages first- person writing, and I’ve always written that way. How can a movie review be written in the third person, as if it were an account of facts? If it isn’t subjective, there’s something false about it.

The blog let loose the flood of memories. Told sometimes that I should write my memoirs, I failed to see how I possibly could. I had memories, I had lived a good life in an interesting time, but I was at a loss to see how I could organize the accumulation of a lifetime. It was the blog that taught me how. It pushed me into first- person confession, it insisted on the personal, it seemed to organize itself in manageable fragments. Some of these words, since rewritten and expanded, first appeared in blog forms. Most are here for the first time. They came pouring forth in a flood of relief.

The book is due out next month.

[Photo Credit: Babelsdawn]

Here’s another gem from Pete Dexter.

The Old Man and the River

By Pete Dexter

Early morning, Seeley Lake, Montana. The sun has touched the lake, but the air is dead still and cooler than the water, and the fog comes off the surface in curtains, hiding some of the Swan Range three miles to the east. And in doing that, it frames the rest. It is the design here, I think, that nothing is taken without compensation, except by men and fires. They leave all the holes.

On the lake a cutthroat trout breaks the surface; pieces of it follow him into the air. He breaks it again, falling back. The water mends itself in circles; the circles disappear. You could never say exactly where, but that’s how things mend; it’s how you get old, too. Not that they are necessarily different things. The place is quiet again. The sun has touched the lake, but the lake still belongs to the night. To the night and to the old man.

He is in the main room of the cabin putting wood on the fire. I hear him humming—a long, flat note, more electric than musical. I think it is a sound he makes without hearing it. He moves from the fireplace to the kitchen wearing a fishing hat, runs lake water out of the spigot into a dented two-quart pan, puts that on the stove to heat. He starts a pot of coffee, leaves it on a counter, and pushes out the door to urinate in the yard. He and his father built the cabin in 1922 as a retreat from whatever civilization there was in Missoula, and they didn’t do it to come down off the mountains and have to look at an indoor toilet.

He comes back in, humming, and surveys the kitchen. He scratches his cheek, remembering where he is. He locates the coffeepot, checks to see what is inside. Part of him is somewhere else. Probably not so much of him that he’d piss in the fireplace and throw the wood out the door, but it isn’t impossible.

The guess is that the part of the old man that’s not in the kitchen is someplace tangent to August of 1949, Mann Gulch, Montana, where thirteen of sixteen smoke jumpers were killed in the first hours of a wildfire that got into the crowns of the trees there. He is in the last chapter of that story now—the jumpers have become his jumpers, he looks at tall trees and imagines fire in their tops, sucking the oxygen out of the air, and feels how helpless a man is in its presence—and while it’s still three hours until he sits down and puts himself back in Mann Gulch to confront it, he is headed there already, feeling his way over what has already been done, measuring what is left.

As far as I know, that’s the only pleasure there is in writing—until something’s finished, anyway. And the old man works carefully and is entitled to his time alone with what he’s done. I stay in bed looking out the window, waiting for him to call me for breakfast.

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“Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.”

Raymond Chandler

[Photo Credit: The Portland Mercury]

There’s No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books from Etsy on Vimeo.

A secret Treasure via the Etsy Blog.