AnimaMundi

Vonnegut Style

First there was Strunk's "Elements of Style", then came Kurt Vonnegut.

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

Lesbian Nuns

In order to avoid talking to people on planes, John Waters wraps whatever he is reading with the cover of the book "Lesbian Nuns".

After his show "Filthy World" he said:

"Porn is art now. Rich kids are jerking off to the Christies catalog!" And of Los Angeles, he noted, "Everyone has face-lifts. Everyone looks surprised and Cubist."

Via Maud Newton

What Tipped "The Tipping Point"? & Bloggers as Reviewers

Robert McCrum, outgoing literary editor of The Observer, on Malcolm Gladwell's first book:

"The Tipping Point was almost a flop. It was published to mixed reviews in the US, did no serious business in the UK and was saved by -- yes -- word of mouth. After a dismal launch, and as a desperate last resort, Gladwell persuaded his American publisher to sponsor a US-wide lecture tour. Only then did the book 'tip'. Eventually, it would become a literary success of its time, turn its author into a pop cultural guru and spend seven years on the New York Times bestseller list. This was one of those pivotal moments that illustrates the story of this decade."

Then on Blogs vs Reviewing he states the "omens are not encouraging". He then mentions Maud Newton.com as one of the blogs. I think that in this case he is dead wrong. Maud Newton is a published author and very good writer. So she knows of what she writes. She writes with care, humor and insight. I have a ton of books on my wish lists that she has reviewed. So he might want to read her a little more closely. I wish she would finish that novel that she is anguishing over, so she can tour and sign, move back to her beloved Florida and regain the title of the whitest woman in the Sunshine State. 

H/T Kottke

Would You Like a Side of Avocado Pits With That Dawg?

It's a well known fact that when summer kicks in, all men go into heat, i.e. cooter hoo-ha. So when I came across this bit of salacious news about a new German book I was forced to read it.

H/T Gastriques

Top photo: Zardoz

Not In Ravello Any Longer

Like Oscar Wilde, he is celebrated for his epigrams, most famously: "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." Asked whether his first romantic encounter was homosexual or heterosexual, Vidal replied that he had been "too polite to ask".

The Royal Library of Alexandria

My "watch the dance" dream brought to mind another. Many moons ago or about 40 plus years ago, long before I had ever learned of the Library of Alexandria, I had an intriguing dream about the library. I don't have many dreams like this that I can re-member. How many have I had that I don't recall? The dream was mysteriously haunting and its images have faded over the years, much like the scrolls and lecture halls under the waters of the Mediterranean. I do remember a woman guide who showed me the brilliantly colorful display of the wisdom of the ancients emanating in waves from different levels/rooms of the library. The dream of this grand repository of muse inspired knowledge is branded on my memory. Years later, I learned about the existence of the library through reading Carl Jung and from E.M. Forster's book Alexandria: A History and Guide. In the introduction, Lawrence Durell calls this book a small work of art containing some Forster's best prose. For four centuries Alexandria was the center of learning in the Western world. On October 16, 2002, the New Library of Alexandria was opened. Later in the 13th century, Palermo became another great focus of intercultural exchange. The city and Frederick II, Stupor Mundi , were not so distant in time and space from the nexus of Alexandria. However, Frederick's legacy is unjustly tempered by his lack of allegiance to the Pope and interest in Islam. Anti-Papism and pro-Islam was never good for publicity.

That Moment of The Day and Reflections on the Wine Industry

Toni Morrison's essay about cooking out:

"The day moved then into its splendid parts: a ham, fried-potatoes, scrambled-egg, breakfast in the morning air; fried fish and pan-cooked biscuits on the hind side of noon, and by the time Mama - who had never heard of Gerber’s – was grinding a piece of supper ham with her own teeth to slip into the baby’s mouth, and the Blue Gums had unveiled their incredible peach cobbler, the first stars were glittering through the blue light of Turkeyfoot Lake.

We were all there, All of us, bound by something we could not name. Cooking, honey, cooking under the stars."

The Good Grape offers 25 things that he learned while in the wine business. As for #13, when in San Francisco last May we always replied to "where are you from?" with "New York". It was assumed that we were from the City and we never offered further geographical latitudinal clarification. There wasn't enough time. We were there only 5 days. #18 is not a good thing for people like me, i.e. people who would like good QPR wine that they can't obtain anywhere else delivered to their door. To # 21, I would add that most of the restaurants in the major cities of this country would be up the same narrow creek. Napa, Napa, Napa, but #23 says the mojo is elsewhere.

The Climactic

I enjoy reading quotes that mine the motherlode. Papercuts in the NYTimes has a post that to date has generated over 600 comments from people quoting everyone from Groucho to Robert Penn Warren. I have saved it as text file twice already.

Harshly Made Money

Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", contains an essay about the mansions of Newport, RI. I remember touring most them in the mid- 80's. After one sees all the marble and crystal, something says that the obscene display of wealth had "nothing to do with pleasure and nothing to do with graceful tradition, a sense of how prettily money can be spent but how harshly money is made, an immediate presence of the pits and the rails and the foundries, of turbines and pork belly futures. So insistent is the presence of money in Newport that the mind springs ineluctably to the raw beginnings of it." The kitchen at the Breakers Vanderbilt summer cottage is separate from the main part of the house because of the potential of a damaging fire. The dimensions of the kitchen alone is that of a two story three bedroom family home. One of the guides mentioned to us that a Vanderbilt descendent comes each year and stands in line just like us ordinary folk. Didion's essays are still powerful today. She doesn't come across as dated, even though some of the places and contexts she write of no longer exist. The vanished, like a film dissolve, is part of her style.

"Who could fail to read the sermon in the stones of Newport? Who could think that the building of a railroad could guarantee salvation, when there on the lawns of the men who built the railroad nothing is left but the shadows of migrainous women, and the pony carts waiting for the long- dead children?" 

Golem, The Mighty Molecule and The Escapist

I am always a little behind on the latest books and music, so reading "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" in 2008 was no different. However, just last year 2007 the NY Review of Books named the book Michael Chabon's magnum opus. So, I'm not that out of it culturally speaking. The book is a very good read. It hits on so many cylinders with mercurial humor and pathos. Eloquent, amazing in scope, intertwined magical twists, slight of hand, friendship, romance, love, superheros, what the hand can portray, comic book escapism, everyone searching for a father. Read it and be amazed. Not much more that I can say. 

Here's an important source site on the book.

Name That Tax Lawyer

This a picture of a famous writer, blogger, Russian translator, tax lawyer, Mark Twain freak, humorist, electro accompanist, critic and so many other things that I can't possibly begin to list them. The first person who can name this woman gets either a free trip to the Mark Twain House or a trip to Gainsville, Florida. Offer not valid in New York or Gainesville, FL.

The Prophet and Profit

Khalil Gibran's book, "The Prophet", sold well prior to the 60's. However, during the 60's sales sometimes reached five thousand copies a week. Blame it on the hippies. I was one of the suckers who walked into a pharmacy-restaurant-bookstore called Vars Brothers in Westerly, RI one summer day looking for it. It was up near the window, not hidden but not in plain sight either. I opened the slim hardbound 150 page book with margins wide enough to drive a truck through. The color of the thick paper was meant to look like an ancient text recently unearthed in Egypt. "It-must-be-a-cult" Knopf made a lot of money on the book. Nine million copies in English alone. Back then, it was not inexpensive. Afterall, I was paying for "The Prophet", a book I thought would bring me some wisdom. One of the things that puzzled me about the text was that The Prophet kindly informed me that many things were their opposite. Freedom was slavery; waking is dreaming; joy is pain. "So, whatever you’re doing, you needn’t worry, because you’re also doing the opposite." Not much is known about Gibran's life because he wanted it that way.

The Second Sex

What with the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir's birth coming up, you would think that the seminal feminist book, "The Second Sex" would have been accurately translated by 2008. Not so, but you can read about her sex life here, if you are interested or want to for the 10th time.

Via Maud Newton

"Season of Gene"

Thanks to the fantastictabulous Lux Lotus, who gave me an autographed copy, I just finished reading "Season of Gene" by Dallas Hudgens. The book is a mercurial romp through baseball, video games, crime, pills, love, mobbed up memorabilia, more pills and extortion. Hudgens' swift stylings are infectious as is his humor. Tenderness alternating with violent bizness make for a pattern that keeps you turning da' pages. I highly recommend this book and look forward to reading his "Drive Like Hell". Pick it up or give it to someone for the holidays.

Outlier Kulture

Alan Bloom's book, "The Closing of the American Mind" is twenty years old today. The New Criterion offers this article about Bloom's observations about our instant karma culture.

"But Bloom is writing about rock music the way someone from the pre-rock generation experiences it. You’ve no interest in the stuff, you don’t buy the albums, you don’t tune to the radio stations, you would never knowingly seek out a rock and roll experience—and yet it’s all around you. You go to buy some socks, and it’s playing in the store. You get on the red eye to Heathrow, and they pump it into the cabin before you take off. I was filling up at a gas station the other day and I noticed that outside, at the pump, they now pipe pop music at you. This is one of the most constant forms of cultural dislocation anybody of the pre-Bloom generation faces: Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don’t have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music. I was at the airport last week, sitting at the gate, and over the transom some woman was singing about having two lovers and being very happy about it. And we all sat there as if it’s perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, it’s very weird—though, as he notes, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” Whether or not rock music is the soundtrack for the age that its more ambitious proponents tout it as, it’s a literal soundtrack: it’s like being in a movie with a really bad score. So Bloom’s not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go, and there is no more dated sentence in Bloom’s book than the one where he gets specific and wonders whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George will take the place of Mick Jagger. But he’s not doing album reviews, he’s pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic...

Well, they’re the suits in the back room. What of the revolutionaries themselves? The last time I saw Paul McCartney on stage he was urging us all to give our money to Africa. Yet I found myself thinking of Sir Paul’s late wife. Linda McCartney had been a resident of the United Kingdom for three decades, but her Manhattan tax lawyers, Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts, devoted considerable energy in her final months to establishing her right to have her estate probated in New York state. That way she could avoid the 40 percent death duties levied by Her Majesty’s Government."

Some good points, some so so points. But when I'm feeling down and need something to raise me up or when I'm up and want to stay there or go higher, I don't look to Mahler or Puccini or Tupac. I get out some Ella or Sarah, Ellington-Strayhorn, Professor Longhair, Scott Hamilton, Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges, Paulo Flores, Carlos Lamartine, Tito Paris, Teofilo Chantre, Kassav', Malavoi, Sam Cooke, Jimmy Rushing and on and on.

Some Props

Doris Lessing is 88 and the Nobel committee finally got it right and gave her the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Harol Blume of the Boston Globe recently interviewed her. From the piece:

IDEAS: Why do you think you haven't won a Nobel Prize?

LESSING: There is something hidden here. At a big evening party in Sweden, back when my Swedish publisher was alive, a little gray chap from the Nobel Committee sat down beside me and said: "You'll never win the Nobel Prize. We don't like you."

It was so graceless. What was I to say? I didn't say anything. I've never found out why they don't like me.

I found the link to this interview at Maud Newton's site who was also recently interviewed by Yahoo Picks.

In an earlier interview Maud was asked where did she summer:

"I can tell you’re not paying off student loans. “Summering” to me means a cold beer, sunglasses, a grill, and a hot breeze blowing over the factory and into my Brooklyn backyard."

"The City of New Orleans"

Clay Eals has just written a biography of Steve Goodman called "Facing The Music". Goodman wrote "The City of New Orleans" which Arlo Guthrie recorded in 1972. The song hit and enabled Goodman to pursue music. He wrote many more songs and performed while battling leukemia for 15 years.

Book cover photo: Gina Jett 

RIP Kurt Vonnegut

As many of you know, Kurt Vonnegut died the other day at age 84. Here's an excerpt from an interview with David Brancaccio on PBS from 2005:

"You know, Christianity is very big now in particular-- and our president, of course, is a Christian. These are words I never hear:

Blessed are the poor in spirit. For theirs is kingdom of heaven. This isn't original.

Blessed are they that mourn. For they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers. For they shall be called the children of God.

Not exactly a Republican platform."

Amen, Kurt.

"Antediluvian Tales"

You can preorder Poppy Z. Brite's collection of "Antediluvian Tales" from Subterranean Press. These stories date from before the flood of August, 2005. "The Last Good Day of My Life", the last piece in the collection, is a nonfiction account of the changes in her life in the last two years.

Cowboy Logic

A good friend from college lives well outside of San Antonio in a very comfortable home that he and his wife had built several years ago. Our Cape Cod could probably fit into their double her/his bath. They have invited us to visit them and we plan to when it's not 450F degrees. They really want me to come so I can slave over their 1 million BTU gas grill and cook Texas beef. Today, from my friend in the hills outside San Antonio, I received a copy of Kinky Friedman's latest book, "Cowboy Logic". For those who don't know about the "only Jew in Texas that doesn't own real estate", he's running for Texas governor as an independent. The last person to do that was Sam Houston in 1859. Molly Ivans says of Kinky: "Spreads more joy than Ross Perot's Ears." It's definitely required reading for the summer; light, humorous, lewd, insightful, poetic and soulful. In short, a hoot. I'll try to offer a quote every now and then.

Acid Redux

In the early 70's, Timothy Leary, a gold-plated egomaniac, escaped from jail in California and was smuggled out of the the country by the radical underground. He flies to Algiers:

"...here Leary is the house guest of Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers’ minister of defense. Cleaver would seem to be Leary’s type, since his book “Soul on Ice” contains such sentences as “The quest for the Apocalyptic Fusion will find optimal conditions only in a Classless Society, the absence of classes being the sine qua non for the existence of a Unitary Society in which the Unitary Sexual Image can be achieved” and (to explain why white women want black men) “What wets the Ultrafeminine’s juice is that she is allured and tortured by the secret, intuitive knowledge that he, her psychic bridegroom, can blaze through the wall of her ice, plumb her psychic depths, test of the oil of her soul, melt the iceberg of her brain, touch her inner sanctum, detonate the bomb of her orgasm, and bring her sweet release.” But, alas, the visionaries do not get along."

Factoids from the book: Cary Grant and Groucho Marx dropped acid, but not together.

From The New Yorker Louis Menand's "The Life and High Times of Timothy Leary"

Maud's No Loser, But She has a Cramp

Maud Newton on how difficult it is to write about teenage losers.

Another author, Poppy Z. Brite, on why New Orleans is still worth it and how living there is like being a writer.

I'll Never Tell

The fabulous and eccentric Lauren Cerand interviews Reb Livingston, author of "The Bedside Guide To...No Tell Motel".

Macabre Maud, for a Change

Maud Newton's visit to Edgar A. Poe's cottage in the Bronx.

Moldy Miserables

Amidst the mold and rot after the levees failed, one person found these rare first editions.

Sybille Bedford

Sybille Bedford RIP (1911-2006)

The Blood of the Lamb

I discovered Peter De Vries' writing from reading Maud Newton.

From "The Blood of the Lamb" (reissued in 2005):

"I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religions, which his own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race. Philosophy can really give us nothing permanent to believe in either; it is too rich in answers, each canceling out the rest. The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life 'means' nothing. But that is not to say that is not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque 'mean,' or a rainbow or a rose? A man delights in all of these, knowing himself to be no more --a wisp of music and a haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third."

Gabo

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" is a fascinating though short read.

"The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin."...

"From then on I began to measure my life not by years but by decades. The decade of my fifties had been decisive because I became aware that almost everybody was younger than me. The decade of my sixties was the most intense because of the suspicion that I no longer had the time to make mistakes. My seventies were frightening because of a certain possibility that the decade might be the last. Still, when I woke alive on the first morning of my nineties in the happy bed of Delgadina, I was transfixed by the agreeable idea that life was not something that passes by like Heraclitus' ever-changing river but a unique opportunity to turn over on the grill and keep broiling on the other side for another ninety years." The maestro's humor and descriptive powers are still vital.

Where is HE?

Over at Maud Newton, you can read that Muslim is now a nationality according to Gawker. In the link to cryptobigotry, Dana explains the rationale behind this complicated geographical phenomenon. I love the comment from sakebomb.

Maud also has a link to an article about Rumi's popularity, except in his native Turkey. They're too busy westernizing to read him. From the article: "Rumi's first biographer, Aflaki, tells of a man who came to Rumi asking how he could reach the other world, as only there would he be at peace. "What do you know about where He is?" asked Rumi. "Everything in this or that world is within you". "

Sadly, This Isn't Fiction Either

This is one the gems from this site.

This is another.

High Society

From Rob Walker's "Letters from New Orleans":

"The important thing to remember is that these people are supposed to be the elite of New Orleans. That status--and this what made me think of that book ("The American Idea of Success" Richard Huber 1971) about the success idea--is emphatically not the status of the self-raised man. The basic transaction seems to be that these aristocrats give us all the gift of Carnival, and in return they get to play dress-up, and belong to exclusive clubs. Their goal is not to recognize and welcome new members into their society; their goal is to protect what they have. In the guise of upholding the past, they live in the past. This is the classic logic of aristocracy.

Sometimes I think that this is funny, and sometimes I think it's sad, because New Orleans is, emphatically, not a city that can afford an aristocracy. And it almost goes without saying that the romantic past they honor is highly selective--its better points exaggerated, its worse aspects ignored, until it becomes a comfortable fiction. And so it is that the more such people succeed in convincing themselves that they matter, the less they really do."

From Jordan Flaherty this article on New Orleans.

Letters From New Orleans

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm reading Rob Walker's "Letter's From New Orleans". The relaxed tone and conversational style make it a very good read. He offers some insights into the soul of N'awlinz life and what goes on in the city beyond tourism and conventions.

Above photo Jorn C. Olsen.