A few months ago, Mulhholland Books ran a good two-part interview with Pete Hamill and Pete Dexter (part one and part two).

It’s worth checking out:

Hamill: When I first became a newspaperman—June 1st, 1960—it was the beginning of my real life—it really was. When I first got a presscard with my name on it I wore it to bed like dogtags for a month. It said, “Hey, okay, do it. Leave your game on the floor,” you know? And I think there were a whole bunch of us like that, including you, Pete. So we’re going to lose things now. Just the transition from newspapers into websites means that journalism will stay alive, but not the feeling that came with going into a city room, and having guys bounce ideas, and wisecracks, and rotten jokes, and everything else off you before you ever got to write the first sentence of your piece. I mean, that sense of serendipity that comes from being among people who know things you don’t know, and who help educate you every night or every day that you show up, I think that’s going to get lost if you just park in front of a computer somewhere.

But with all that, I don’t have any regrets about it. I feel sad, and melancholy from time to time, but I never think, Gee, I wish I’d gone to work for Goldman Sachs instead.

Dexter: There’s something there that you said that’s really true. A lot of the best things you write come out of, somebody will say something, and it’ll make you think of something else, and bang, people are calling you smart, and…

Hamill: When it’s all about chance.

Dexter: [laughs] You have the chance. And I’m sad about it, and I regret that there’s nobody—you’re not passing along to people now. There’s nobody who’s going to wake up tomorrow and put a press card around his neck, I mean—that just doesn’t happen anymore. And to me, I don’t know any other kind of job I could’ve done.

Hamill: The same with me—that I could have done and be happy at the same time. I mean I could’ve done other jobs I guess—you know, lifting orange crates into trucks or something—but to be happy, to feel like I couldn’t wait to wake up the next day and do it again, that feeling—I don’t think a lot of people have that anymore, including young people going into the business to become journalists.

Hamill’s latest novel, Tabloid City, is about the newspaper business.

Dig this bitchin’ gallery of book cover art by Robert McGinnis.

Matt B hipped me to this blog post by Lawrence Block about the difficulty of adapting books for the big screen:

Once in a while, of course, someone really gets it right. Once in a while there’s a movie that takes a book, slaps it on the big screen, and works like a charm even as it reflects the writer’s vision. The most vivid recent example would be the Coens’ remake of True Grit. I’d read the Charles Portis novel first, then saw and enjoyed the Henry Hathaway film with John Wayne and Kim Darby. It wasn’t the book, but I thought it was a pretty good movie.

But the Coen brothers went back to Portis’s book, and took the revolutionary step of putting that story on the screen, using his scenes and dialogue pretty much as written. And blew the earlier picture out of the water.

Oddly, something very similar happened seventy years ago. John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon succeeded so utterly that not many of us realize it was the third adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel. (The 1931 version starred Ricardo Cortez; the 1936 remake, called Satan Met a Lady, had Alison Skipworth playing the Sydney Greenstreet role.)

It’s also not widely known that Hammett deliberately wrote the book in the form of a prose screenplay, with nothing on the page that couldn’t be shown or spoken on the screen. It was his notion that movies were the future, that writers were best advised to write books that could be filmed, and that the ideal tactic would be to do the screenwriters’ work for them while writing the book. After this was conveniently overlooked by two sets of filmmakers, Huston did what should have been done in the first place, and put Hammett’s lines, essentially verbatim, in the mouths of the perfect cast. There’s a reason the film gets better every time you see it.

Amen, to that. It’s a near perfect movie.

Here’s Margaret Atwood on what she reads:

I like to read at night before bed, too, though it can give you some pretty horrific nightmares–and a stiff neck, because of the position of your head.

Really, though, I will read anything at any time. If there’s nothing else available I will read airplane shopping magazines. You find out some pretty interesting things in there, actually. You think: “Somebody invented this. They actually sat in a room and invented it. And then they went out and raised the money and they manufactured it and now it’s in the airplane shopping magazine.” Boggles the mind.

I used to read the backs of cereal boxes but I’ve kind of exhausted their possibilities. Advertisement used to provide a lot more reading material than it does now‹ads have become too pictorial. They used to have a lot more print. They used to be more narrative. Story ads were still going strong in the forties, and to a certain extent in the fifties. I think it probably started to change in the sixties. They used to have little poems. They used to have quizzes.

I’m a reading junkie, I guess. It’s the fault of my upbringing. I was brought up in the north where there weren’t any other forms of media–other than print. I certainly learned my first French off the backs of cereal boxes. This is Canada: “Eh! Les enfants! Special offer. Collect the box tops.”

I think it’s curiosity that drives me to read. I don’t think “entertainment” quite covers it. It’s not that I’m indiscriminate in my appreciation–I like to feel that I can tell an apple from a pear, and I don’t expect from the pear what I might expect from the apple. In other words, if I’m reading Conan the Conqueror I’m not demanding that it be Middlemarch. They have different things to offer. But in some cases you get led to fine experiences through very devious pathways.

I have not seen “Justified,” the TV series based on characters created by the Elmore Leonard but from all accounts it is excellent. Over at the Star-Ledger, Alan Sepinwall talks to the Master:

We talk about director Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1995 version of “Get Shorty,” the first truly successful (in both creative and commercial terms) Leonard adaptation after a long fallow period. The conversation quickly turns to how the creative team on the sequel, “Be Cool,” got wrong so much of what Sonnenfeld and writer Scott Frank got right.

“I told Barry Sonnenfeld, ‘When somebody delivers a funny line, don’t cut to someone else laughing or nudging or grinning, because they’re all serious,’” he recalls. “And he knew that. But then when they shot the sequel, they forgot all about that, and everybody’s laughing all the way through. There’s a guy named Cedric the Entertainer (in the cast). Well, I can’t have a guy named Cedric the Entertainer in one of my stories!”

I just happen to be reading “Swag” these days, and am thoroughly enjoying it.

Dig this wonderful piece by Jhumpa Lahiri from last week’s issue of The New Yorker:

Books, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to possess as a child. Even then, the possession was not literal; my father is a librarian, and perhaps because he believed in collective property, or perhaps because my parents considered buying books for me an extravagance, or perhaps because people generally acquired less then than they do now, I had almost no books to call my own. I remember coveting and eventually being permitted to own a book for the first time. I was five or six. The book was diminutive, about four inches square, and was called “You’ll Never Have to Look for Friends.” It lived among the penny candy and the Wacky Packs at the old-fashioned general store across the street from our first house in Rhode Island. The plot was trite, more an extended greeting card than a story. But I remember the excitement of watching my mother purchase it for me and of bringing it home. Inside the front cover, beneath the declaration “This book is especially for,” was a line on which to write my name. My mother did so, and also wrote the word “mother” to indicate that the book had been given to me by her, though I did not call her Mother but Ma. “Mother” was an alternate guardian. But she had given me a book that, nearly forty years later, still dwells on a bookcase in my childhood room.

Our house was not devoid of things to read, but the offerings felt scant, and were of little interest to me. There were books about China and Russia that my father read for his graduate studies in political science, and issues of Time that he read to relax. My mother owned novels and short stories and stacks of a literary magazine called Desh, but they were in Bengali, even the titles illegible to me. She kept her reading material on metal shelves in the basement, or off limits by her bedside. I remember a yellow volume of lyrics by the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, which seemed to be a holy text to her, and a thick, fraying English dictionary with a maroon cover that was pulled out for Scrabble games. At one point, we bought the first few volumes of a set of encyclopedias that the supermarket where we shopped was promoting, but we never got them all. There was an arbitrary, haphazard quality to the books in our house, as there was to certain other aspects of our material lives. I craved the opposite: a house where books were a solid presence, piled on every surface and cheerfully lining the walls. At times, my family’s effort to fill our house with books seemed thwarted; this was the case when my father mounted rods and brackets to hold a set of olive-green shelves. Within a few days the shelves collapsed, the Sheetrocked walls of our seventies-era Colonial unable to support them.

What I really sought was a better-marked trail of my parents’ intellectual lives: bound and printed evidence of what they’d read, what had inspired and shaped their minds. A connection, via books, between them and me. But my parents did not read to me or tell me stories; my father did not read any fiction, and the stories my mother may have loved as a young girl in Calcutta were not passed down. My first experience of hearing stories aloud occurred the only time I met my maternal grandfather, when I was two, during my first visit to India. He would lie back on a bed and prop me up on his chest and invent things to tell me. I am told that the two of us stayed up long after everyone else had gone to sleep, and that my grandfather kept extending these stories, because I insisted that they not end.

George Kimball has a fine profile of Pete Hamill and Hamill’s new novel, “Tabloid City” in the Irish Times. This part spoke to me:

Introducing Hamill at a symposium celebrating the publication of Tabloid City a few weeks ago, fellow writer Adam Gopnik alluded to Tabloid City’s “recurrent theme of loneliness”, but he was quickly corrected by Hamill. While most of the novel’s characters do fly solo, some do so by choice.

“I would draw the distinction between loneliness and solitude,” says Hamill. “Many of us, particularly writers and artists, cherish our solitude.” He and Fukiko maintain separate working quarters in their Tribeca loft.

“Many people adjust to being alone by embracing solitude, rather than surrendering to loneliness, and there’s something almost ennobling about that. With a good book in the house, you’re never alone. But since being alone – at least in my opinion – can be most difficult at night, some people fill their nights with work.”

I used to be uncomfortable being alone. Maybe it is because I’m a twin, I don’t know. But I associated being alone with being lonely. Now, I see that solitude is not necessarily depressing or isolating at all. And that is a great relief.

[Photo Credit:  David Senechal Polydactyle]

The much ballyhooed ESPN Book, “Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside the World of ESPN” has been out for two weeks, and to no surprise, landed atop the New York Times Bestseller list for nonfiction. The writers, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, spent the better part of two years interviewing dozens of current and former ESPN employees. The access they received and the candor they elicited from their interview subjects was unprecedented. In doing so, Miller and Shales trace the company’s history from its roots as an idea by Bill Rasmussen and his son Scott, mentioned on a drive from Connecticut to the Jersey Shore in the summer of 1978, to the monolith it has become.

Miller and Shales, who also wrote the oral account of Saturday Night Live, have structured this tome in a similar fashion to the SNL retrospective. The interviews and the quotes drive the narrative. Any reporting and interjections outside the context of quoted material appears in italics and helps to establish the next batch of interviews. The reported inserts serve a similar purpose Steinbeck’s interclary chapters in “The Grapes of Wrath.” The only difference — beyond the obvious that “The Grapes of Wrath” is fiction and the ESPN Book is nonfiction — is that unlike the interclary chapters, which are third-person omniscient accounts of similar situations that foreshadow what will happen to the Joads, Miller and Shales’ reporting does not pull the reader away from their interview subjects and personalities framing the storyline. This style made for a quick read. I wore out the touch screen on my iPad (via the Kindle app), ripping through the book in four days.

The blogosphere naturally pounced on the salacious accounts in the book, specifically descriptions of co-workers having sex in stairwells and utility closets, the raucousness of the holiday parties, the history of sexual harassment, and incidents of lewd conduct involving Gary Miller (arrested for allegedly urinating on a police officer in Cleveland) and Dana Jacobson (drinking vodka straight from the bottle at the “Mike and Mike” roast and making fun of Notre Dame’s Touchdown Jesus). But the book, as an oral history, is about much more than that.

If you think you will read this book and get a repeat of “The Big Show,” or get behind the scenes of SportsCenter, you’ll be disappointed. Yes, there is plenty of time spent on Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick, what they did to elevate SportsCenter, and what the show has become since their respective departures. But this book is all about ESPN as a business venture, and how the people involved created a business model, a brand, cultivated a workplace culture, and framed how we as fans consume live sporting events and get our sports news. It’s about the leadership of Chet Simmons, then Roger Werner, then Steve Bornstein, George Bodenheimer, and the joint efforts of John Walsh, Mark Shapiro, and John Skipper.

The highlights are the details of the beginnings of the relationship when Getty Oil owned the company; how George Bodenheimer, the current CEO, rose to his position from being a driver when the company started. It was his idea of a dual revenue stream (cable companies paying them a share for subscriptions, plus advertising), that laid the foundation for the cash machine ESPN is today; the influence of Don Ohlmeyer, who has made more money from the company than any individual; and the inner workings of the last round of NFL negotiations, which brought Monday Night Football off of ABC and over to ESPN, and took the Sunday Night package to NBC. Charley Steiner, Bob Ley, Robin Roberts, George Grande, Gayle Gardner, Linda Cohn, John Saunders, and Jeremy Schaap all present themselves as the professionals they are. Chris Berman is, well, Chris Berman.

Among the lowlights are the rampant misspellings. Now, having contributed to, and co-edited books, I know this happens. I have a glaring typo in the first paragraph of my essay in the Baseball Prospectus 2007 annual that to this day kills me. Jim Miller even said on his appearance on Bill Simmons’ podcast last week that he was upset at the number of times he misspelled Jim Nantz’s name. (It appears about five or six times as “Nance”.) Beyond that, Stan Verrett, who anchors the late SportsCenter from LA, had his name misspelled. So did a few athletes, including former Denver Broncos defensive lineman Trevor Pryce. (It was spelled “Price”.) Also, not enough time was spent on ESPN.com’s effect on the Internet and how other sports websites do their daily bidding. Dozens of pages are devoted to ESPN Magazine—its creation, editorial philosophy, etc. ESPN.com’s little nook reveal that Steve Bornstein, who at the time was running the company, had one of the first-ever aol addresses, the purchases of Infoseek and Starwave helped build the infrastructure for the website, Bill Simmons hates being edited and Rick Reilly was not, in fact, traded for Dan Patrick. Too much time is spent on the Erin Andrews peephole incident, and nothing of the reaction she received when she went on Dancing with the Stars, wearing outfits that lead dudes to creep and peep in the first place. Too much time is also spent on Rush Limbaugh, and the three-man booth of Monday Night Football that involved Tony Kornheiser, Mike Tirico and first, Joe Theismann, then Ron Jaworski, and now Kornheiser’s replacement, Jon Gruden. Bottom line, with MNF the games sucked. At least they mentioned that trying to make chicken salad out of you-know-what was impossible given their schedule. Way too much time is spent on the ESPYs.

There are elements to the book for me that are personal. I interned on “Up Close” in 1999 when Gary Miller hosted the show, and my first job after graduating college was at ABC Sports as an assistant editor for their college football web operation. With those experiences etched in my brain, I had more than a passing interest in the book. It was odd to read direct quotes from people I know and worked with for a time in both instances. To learn that ESPN had planned to dissolve ABC Sports going back to the days when CapCities owned them both — as early as 1993 — was alarming. To learn that it was an inevitability following the Disney purchase, and as early as Super Bowl XXXIII, saddened me. I knew the plan and saw it happen beginning in the Summer of 2001. I saw industry veterans agonize over taking a buyout or fighting for their jobs. I saw my own boss decide which members of our eight-person team were going to stay and which were going to go in order to meet his headcount requirement. Had I known all this was in the offing when I interviewed for my job there, my entire career path may have been altered.

Similarly, the accounts from ABC folks, or ESPN people who were assigned to ABC, detailing how they were viewed as second-class citizens by the powers that be in Bristol stung a similar way. I remember in November 2001 interviewing for a beat position at ESPN.com. I had a feeling going into the interview that based on my experience at the time, I was a longshot, but I wanted the chance to interview with the editor-in-chief of ESPN.com — at the time, this was Neal Scarbrough, who ran ESPN the Magazine and has since had stops at AOL Sports, Wasserman Media and Comcast — and believed I had forged strong relationships with my Bristol-based colleagues to where I at least merited a look. As good as my interview was, and as much as I do believe they liked me, it wasn’t to be. Despite my being single at the time and willing to move to Bristol, I had the three letters attached to my resume that basically ruled me out. There were no other openings in Bristol, despite several months of inquiry. In February of ’02, I started at YES, where a host of other ABC refugees, including my former boss, landed.

Reading this book, I determined there is a wide subset of people who it is written for: ESPN employees and alumni, industry types, bloggers, media members, people interested in public relations and sports business, and sports video production. The diehard sports fan or casual viewer of ESPN likely will not care about 70 percent of the book’s content.

Keep that in mind if you’re thinking of spending $15 on it.

Ian O’Connor’s new book, “The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter” was given a fair but tough review by Richard Sandomir over the weekend in the Times Book Review:

O’Connor’s sweet Life of Derek raises a core question: Can a Jeter biography be anything less than an ode to a wonderful guy who has been the face of the Yankees for a decade and a half, since he was 22? Maybe O’Connor’s man-crush is the inevitable result of extended exposure to Jeter and his story. Without a tell-all, what’s left? The tale of a terrific fella who, as O’Connor reports, quizzes dates about their morals and has a “spectacular talent for doing the right thing at the right time.”

But O’Connor is a serious journalist, a former newspaperman and now a columnist for ESPN.com who has covered Jeter’s entire career. Surely he searched for the “other” Jeter, to balance the one who “dated supermodels at night and helped their grandmothers cross the street by day.” (Disappointingly, O’Connor’s notes do not cite any interviews with these grandmas.) Surely he wanted to find a troubled side to Jeter, so he could offer a complex picture like the ones that have emerged in definitive biographies of Joe DiMaggio (by Richard Ben Cramer) and Mickey Mantle (by Jane Leavy).

Sandomir notes that the darkness never arrives perhaps because it doesn’t exist. The book is dutifully researched, he writes, but “O’Connor rarely elevates his material beyond a narrative about Jeter’s greatness as a man and player. A straightforward storyteller, he gods up his subject without irony, detachment or recognition of the hyperbole that comes with so much positive testimony.”

If there is any darkness in the book it is reserved for Alex Rodriguez:

Rodriguez is absurdly easy to criticize. He is blunder-prone and shows none of Jeter’s sense of himself. But O’Connor’s open loathing of Rodriguez is as difficult to accept as his adoration of Jeter. “A-Rod was ruining the Yankee experience for Jeter,” he writes. Rodriguez is a “man of dishonor” after he admits to using steroids. And when he follows his agent’s advice to opt out of his Yankees contract in 2007 (he ultimately re-signed for another 10 years), O’Connor says, “On muscle memory, Alex Rodriguez played the fool.” Once the enemies find detente, with Jeter deciding that a humbled and “emasculated” Rodriguez is worth a second shot, O’Connor extends the saint-sinner imagery to an explicitly biblical level. Here he is, describing the jubilant scene after the Yankees clinched their division in 2009: “The photos captured a beaming Jeter lifting A-Rod’s cap off his head with his left hand and pouring a bottle of bubbly over A-Rod’s bowed scalp with his right. At last, the captain had baptized Rodriguez.”

As the announcer Dick Enberg says in moments of rapture, “Oh my.”

In other words, save your money.

[Drawing by Paul Mcrae]

Over at SI.com, here’s Richard Deitsch on the new ESPN book:

Over the past 36 months, as he immersed himself in the nation-state otherwise known as ESPN, James Andrew Miller became admittedly obsessed with his subject. Charged with writing a book on one of the great media success stories of all time, Miller found himself struggling to condense a tale of empire building, fierce rivalries, sex and drugs, and self-reverence. He had enough information for multiple books after interviews with more than 550 subjects. The hardest part, he knew, was letting some of it go.

Ultimately, his tome, Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, clocked in at a robust 763 pages, an oral history of how the network morphed from a muddy landfill in Bristol, Conn., to a broadcasting behemoth that airs roughly 70,000 hours of programming annually, can be seen in 200 countries and employs more than 6,000 staffers.

“They are very good at controlling the message,” Miller said of ESPN. “But at the same time, nobody has covered them the way they cover the Cowboys.”

Be sure to check out Deitsch’s podcast with Miller, embedded in the article.

Also, for more on the book, here’s a review in the L.A. Times.

Some of what I’ve been reading…

Christopher Hitchens on “To End All Wars,” Adam Hochschild’s new book about WWI:

We read these stirring yet wrenching accounts, of soldiers setting off to battle accompanied by cheers, and shudder because we know what they do not. We know what is coming, in other words. And coming not only to them. What is really coming, stepping jackbooted over the poisoned ruins of civilized Europe, is the pornographic figure of the Nazi. Again, Hochschild is an acute register. He has read the relevant passages of “Mein Kampf,” in which a gassed and wounded Austrian corporal began to incubate the idea of a ghastly revenge. He notes the increasing anti-Semitism of decaying wartime imperial Germany, with its vile rumors of Jewish cowardice and machination. And he approaches a truly arresting realization: Nazism can perhaps be avoided, but only on condition that German militarism is not too heavily defeated on the battlefield.

This highly unsettling reflection is important above all for American readers. If General Pershing’s fresh and plucky troops had not reached the scene in the closing stages of the bloodbath, universal exhaustion would almost certainly have compelled an earlier armistice, on less savage terms. Without President Wilson’s intervention, the incensed and traumatized French would never have been able to impose terms of humiliation on Germany; the very terms that Hitler was to reverse, by such relentless means, a matter of two decades later. In this light, the great American socialist Eugene V. Debs, who publicly opposed the war and was kept in prison by a vindictive Wilson until long after its ending, looks like a prescient hero. Indeed, so do many of the antiwar militants to whose often-buried record Hochschild has done honor. (Unsentimental to the last, though, he shows that many of them went on to lose or waste their lives on Bolshevism, the other great mutant system to emerge from the abattoir.) This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard.

Click here for an excerpt...

I am a great admirer of Hochschild’s book “King Leopold’s Ghost” as well as his wonderful memoir, “Half the Way Home.”

His new one looks riveting.

Albert Brooks has written a book. I hope it is good.

If it is nearly as funny as this Proust Questionnaire, the world will be an unhappier (but funnier) place.

Bronx Banter Book Excerpt

Here’s a smile for you. From Leigh Montville’s terrific new book, “Evel: The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel:American Showman, Daredevil and Legend.” I reviewed the book in SI last week and can’t recommend it enough.

“Most of us think of what we do as writing,” said William Nack. “But Leigh Montville sits down and says, ‘Why don’t I tell you all a story?’ ”

“My philosophy has always been that sports should be fun—a thing of joy,” Montville once told SI. “I don’t get up a whole lot of outrage; I’d rather laugh. What I really like to do is take something and stand it on its head, look at it that way, from a different perspective.”

Montville is one of our best pure storyteller’s and he’s perfectly suited to tell the tale tale of Evel Knievel. Here’s the first of two-part excerpt detailing Knievel’s most infamous stunt–Snake River Canyon.

Enjoy.

Whoosh

The man of the moment made the moment a family affair. If this was going to be his last day on earth, then he would go out looking like a church deacon. Linda and the three kids would be there. His mother would be there from Reno. His father had been there all week. (“Bob always had to have a challenge,” his dad said at a press conference, sounding a bit like Ward Cleaver. “I tried to discourage him for years for fear of injury.”) His eighty-one-year-old grandmother, Emma, would be there. His half-sisters would be there from both sides of the family tree. His cousin, Father Jerry Sullivan, a Catholic priest from Carroll College in Helena, Montana, would give the benediction before liftoff.

His lawyers, accountants, bartenders, friends, and fellow reprobates from long ago had appeared already at the site. Bus trips had gone down from Butte. There had been a mass migration from the city, people driving the 364 miles in five, six, seven hours, depending on speed. The Butte High band had gone down to play the National Anthem. Everyone had assembled, former promoters, fans, everyone . . . Ray Gunn, his first assistant from Moses Lake in the early days, had returned for the show, friends again, signed up now to watch the jump from a helicopter and carry a bottle of Wild Turkey to the other side for an instant celebration.

The day would be part wake, part wedding reception, an all-time Humpty Dumpty experience. The broken pieces of Robert Craig Knievel’s life would be put together for this one time as they never had been put together, not once, in all of his years.

He would fly from Butte in the Lear in the morning with his family. Watcha would be at the controls and would buzz the crowd at the canyon, a dramatic touch. Watcha and everybody else would switch to a helicopter at the Twin Falls City-County Airport, arrive at the site to great applause, and the man of the moment would put on the flight suit in his trailer, and the show would begin.

Unless, of course, he canceled the show. “I have two demands that if you don’t meet I’ll cancel the show,”

Knievel said in an early morning phone call to Bob Arum from Butte. Arum prepared for the worst.

“First,” Knievel said, “I want to have all the press meet my helicopter when it lands. I want to make a statement.”

Arum said that would be impossible. Moving the entire press corps through the crowd could start a riot. (Another riot.) What he could do was bring Knievel to the press tent. That was possible. Knievel could make his statement that way. Same result.

Knievel agreed. “Second,” he said. “I want you to bring your two sons to my trailer before the jump. I want to say some words to them before the jump because people are going to blame you for my death and I want them to know it was my idea. And I want them to sit with my family at the jump.”

“Done,” Arum said, figuring that the two boys, ages eleven and nine, would do what he told them. “I’ll get them there.”

Knievel seemed sentimental in everything he did that morning. He seemed to be turning off the lights, locking all the doors. Just in case. He had a picture of the canyon, just the canyon, no Skycycle or ramp, that he secretly signed, “Linda, I love you,” across the blue sky. He told Kelly, his oldest son, last thing before everybody left Butte for the jump, to pretend to go back into the house for his shaving kit and hang the picture on the bedroom wall. He wanted that waiting for his wife if somehow the results turned out badly.

Even when he arrived at the site—plane flight, helicopter, there—he was sentimental. Even when he talked to the press.

“When I weighed last night all the good things and the bad things that were said, it came out a million to three for the good,” he told the press after he landed in Watcha’s helicopter. “So I hope all your landings in life are happy ones—and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

(more…)

I love to talk but when it comes to writing I have learned that you can talk too much. You can talk a story out before you’ve finished–or started–writing. Some talking is good because it helps formulate your thinking but I’ve discovered that it can go too far.

Talking comes naturally. When I was younger I talked because I was anxious, talked because silence was terrifying. But talking also runs in the family. My twin sister loves to talk. My old man was a champion talker. He loved the sound of his own voice. He talked instead of working. (Maybe that is why I am attracted to but mostly repulsed by Fran Lebovitz.) On the other hand, my mother walked the walk; she was pragmatic, a worker, not a dreamer.

I got to thinking about talking when I read this piece on James Agee by John Updike, a review of “Letters of James Agee to Father Flye”:

Alcohol—which appears in the first Harvard letters (“On the whole, an occasional alcoholic bender satisfies me fairly well”) and figures in almost every letter thereafter—was Agee’s faithful ally in his “enormously strong drive, on a universally broad front, toward self-destruction.” But I think his real vice, as a writer, was talk. “I seem, and regret it and hate myself for it, to be able to say many more things I want to in talking than in writing.” He describes his life at Harvard as “an average of 3.5 hours sleep per night; 2 or 3 meals per day. Rest of the time: work, or time spent with friends. About 3 nights a week I’ve talked all night. . . .” And near the end of his life, in Hollywood: “I’ve spent probably 30 or 50 evenings talking alone most of the night with Chaplin, and he has talked very openly and intimately.” And what are these letters but a flow of talk that nothing but total fatigue could staunch? “The trouble is, of course, that I’d like to write you a pretty indefinitely long letter, and talk about everything under the sun we would talk about, if we could see each other. And we’d probably talk five or six hundred pages…”

He simply preferred conversation to composition. The private game of translating life into language, or fitting words to things, did not sufficiently fascinate him. His eloquence naturally dispersed itself in spurts of interest and jets of opinion. In these letters, the extended, “serious” projects he wishes he could get to—narrative poems in an “amphibious style,” “impressionistic” histories of the United States, an intricately parodic life of Jesus, a symphony of interchangeable slang, a novel on the atom bomb—have about them the grandiose, gassy quality of talk. They are the kind of books, rife with Great Ideas, that a Time reviewer would judge “important.” The poignant fact about Agee is that he was not badly suited to working for Henry Luce.

Steve Lopez, one of the last big time, big city newspaper columnists left, has a new collection out. Here’s a review by David Kipen in the Los Angeles Times:

The other thing every columnist needs, and that a Los Angeles columnist circa 2011 needs maybe most of all, is the ability to mix clarity with outrage. If things don’t break just right in Sacramento, California may just careen over its own lovely cliffs this year and L.A. right along with it. The invaluable, angry service Lopez continues to perform is spelling out the fateful connections between the lofty characters he mocks and the exploited, defenseless ones he sticks up for.

…The career of a columnist like Lopez can have three distinct phases: first, when he still nervously re-reads his work every morning to make sure it turned out right; later, when he hits his stride and makes do with reading it onscreen the night before; and, last, when he doesn’t even read it himself before filing on deadline.

It’s tricky to gauge where Lopez falls on this continuum, since the new collection is arranged thematically instead of temporally. Lopez’s kickers can get a little lazy, but the specter of burnout — when even the best tend to pull a few too many columns out of the mailbag — still looks to be safely down the road. One hopes Lopez may yet scrape together the time to write some book-length L.A. fiction, to join his three well-received crime novels set in Philly and Jersey.

[Picture by Edi Weitz]

In the New Yorker, here’s David Remnick on a new Malcolm X biography:

For nearly twenty years, Manning Marable, a historian at Columbia, labored on what he hoped would be a definitive scholarly work on Malcolm X. During this period, Marable struggled with sarcoidosis, a pulmonary disease, and even underwent a double lung transplant. Recently, he completed his rigorous and evenhanded biography, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” (Viking; $30), but, in an echo of his subject’s fate, he died on the eve of publication. One of his goals was to grapple with Malcolm’s autobiography, and although he finds much to admire about Malcolm, he makes it clear that the book’s drama sometimes comes at the expense of fact. Haley wanted to write a “potboiler that would sell,” Marable observes, and Malcolm was accustomed to exaggerating his exploits—“the number of his burglaries, the amount of marijuana he sold to musicians, and the like.” Malcolm, like St. Augustine, embellished his sins in order to heighten the drama of his reform.

The literary urge outran the knowable facts even in the most crucial episode in Malcolm’s childhood. One evening, in 1931, in Lansing, Michigan, when Malcolm was six, his father, Earl Little, a part-time Garveyite teacher, went to collect “chicken money” from families who bought poultry from him. That night, he was found bleeding to death on the streetcar tracks. The authorities ruled his death an accident, but Malcolm’s mother, Louise, was sure he had been beaten by the Black Legion and laid on the tracks to be run over and killed. Perhaps he had been, but, as Marable notes, nobody knew for sure. The autobiography (and Lee’s film) presents the ostensible murder as established fact, and yet Malcolm himself, in a 1963 speech at Michigan State University, referred to the death as accidental.

[Photograph by Ricard Avedon]

The New York Times Book Review has a good piece on Alexandra Styron’s family memoir:

Rose Styron [William’s wife] emerges from this memoir as a good and heroic presence, erring only on the side of excessive tolerance. There is something touching in the picture of her following her husband to Martha’s Vineyard, having been “forbidden to show up before June,” with “a mountain of summer Martha’s Vineyard dresses poised on their hangers for another season’s whirl of festivities.” Before long, deprived not only of his temper but of all self-esteem, Styron would be pleading like a child to be spared the ordeal of appearing before guests at the dinner table.

“Avoiding my father’s wrath was a complicated business,” Alexandra writes. Her memoir is part of that process. William Styron’s illness may have prevented his making an appropriate response to her novel, “All the Finest Girls” (2001). Before then, however, she wrote some stories that he did read. “Dear Al,” he told her in a fax, “you really are a very good writer. More! More!” He got more — this is it — and he was right.

[Photograph by Saul Leiter]

Here’s a lovely piece by Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award in 2009 for his novel, “Let the Great World Spin”:

A London nursing home. The shape of a figure beneath the sheets. My grandfather could just about whisper. He wanted a cigarette and a glass of whiskey. “Come up on the bed here, young fella,” he said, gruffly. It was 1975 and I was 10 years old and it would be the first — and probably last — time I’d ever see him. Gangrene was taking him away. He reached for the bottle and managed to light a cigarette. Spittle collected at the edge of his mouth. He began talking, but most of the details of his life had already begun slipping away.

Long wars, short memories.

Later that afternoon my father and I bid goodbye to my grandfather, boarded a train, then took a night boat back home to Dublin. Nothing but ferry-whistle and stars and waves. Three years later, my grandfather died. He had been, for all intents and purposes, an old drunk who had abandoned his family and lived in exile. I did not go to the funeral. I still, to this day, don’t even know what country my grandfather is buried in, England or Ireland.

Sometimes one story can be enough for anyone: it suffices for a family, or a generation, or even a whole culture — but on occasion there are enormous holes in our histories, and we don’t know how to fill them.

[Photo Credit: Grant Howard]

Check out this excerpt from Robert Weintraub’s new book, “The House that Ruth Built” over at Deadspin. And dig this piece by Weintraub on Alex Rodriguez and the Babe over at Slate.