Ever since discovering radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in Kevin Starr’s invaluable California history books years ago, I’ve long been fascinated by her. McPherson is often a forgotten historical figure: a woman who built up a mass audience by preaching her gospel through the radio, but who didn’t entirely hold herself to the same standards, which involved a decidedly less pure “kidnapping” that had troubling evidential contradictions. She created the Angelus Temple, a $1.5 million edifice financed entirely by donations and still existing today. She proved so charismatic that she even charmed H.L. Mencken.

In fact, I have a file with notes and an outline for a play centered around her staged disappearance from Venice Beach. One of these days, I will find the time to write it.

The kidnapping got serious press and even inspired Upton Sinclair to compose a poem. McPherson emerged later in Mexico, claiming that she had hiked many miles back to civilization. Alas, there were no scuff marks on her shoes. There was McPherson’s troubling involvement with a married man — an engineer by the name of Kenneth G. Ormiston. Ormiston, however, was a gentleman and kept his tongue firmly unflapped. Despite the shaky evidence available to a grand jury and public scrutiny over this “publicity stunt,” McPherson’s ministry carried on.

For those who wish to learn more about this fascinating pioneer, there’s now a new biography available about McPherson from Matthew Sutton, which John Updike has reviewed in the latest issue of the New Yorker.

• Amy Finnerty: “Martin Amis excels at descriptions of creepy men–sweaty misogynists, soused lowlifes, and thugs.” Ms. Finnerty says this like it’s a bad thing!
• A reminder: fireworks on Sunday, if you’re in Los Angeles.
• Colleen illustrates the history of the science fiction label, as kick-started by this Jason Silverman piece.
• William Gibson on Borges (Thanks, Keith!)
• Churches are now slamming the doors on sex offenders. (via The Other)
• Over at the LBC, I’ve put up a guide to cultural references in Sacco & Vanzetti Are Dead. A podcast with Mr. Binelli, in which the Mr. Binelli and I talked as the sun set behind the edifice of the Phoenix Hotel, will follow tomorrow. Somehow, while we were talking about knife-throwing and films, the 1986 Anthony Michael Hall film Out of Bounds even came up in our conversation. But do sift around the LBC site and you’ll find a lot more.
• At the Huffington Post, Art Winslow sums up various newspaper closings. Norman Spinrad even shows up in the comments. (via Book/daddy)

Scott Esposito, who before moving to Mexico was once referred to in certain quarters as the Sexiest Man in Oakland and who remains, at least according to certain reports, a polite decliner of French kisses, has made his debut in the Philly Inquirer. He reviews Robert Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.

John Freeman on blogs: “It’s one thing to accept advertising money: that’s what has kept papers afloat for years. It’s quite another to make a commission off the very object you are purporting to criticize.” (Emphasis in original)

John Freeman while criticizing newspapers: “#4) Join the NBCC. If you’re a working critic and have published three reviews (online or in print) over the past five years, join us — the more voices we have behind us, the greater our chances will be at preserving the cultural dialogue in this country.”

And here’s more nonsense from Freeman: “But in the struggle for bragging rights something gets lost: the awareness that for every lit-blogger who has been serving up opinions daily since 1998, there are five books editors who were around when Toni Morrison’s first book landed on their desk in 1970, and are no longer.”

Who’s the one really boasting here? I certainly harbor no illusion that I was the first person writing about books. If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty, there were critics reviewing books decades before the NBCC. What should matter here is where the media environment is right now and what all of us can do to maintain and preserve book coverage. As I suggested on Monday, it’s “a united front, whereby literary and “sub-literary” enthusiasts of all stripes, print and online, litblogger and journalist, campaign on behalf of literary coverage in as many conduits as possible.” It seems to me that Freeman doesn’t seem to be aware of how similar his posturing is to online hubris.

UPDATE: In his latest column, the always dependable Scott McLemee addresses the book reviewing problem on many fronts, pointing out persuasively why online media, academic librarians and university-press folks should support book review sections and sign the petition, while also revealing Freeman insisting that Critical Mass is the “blog of record” for literary and publishing news.

Howard Hendrix: “I’m also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.”

This comes from Howard Hendrix, the current Vice President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, who has clarified his comments by later observing that “webscabs” was “too incendiary a term” and stating:

I think the jury is still very much out, however, on whether such free online fulltext [sic] offerings will prove to be salutary or deleterious to the writing profession as a whole. We’re still in the early stages of this transition, and data remains insufficient.

Roger Ebert: “We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I’m not going to miss my festival.”

(via Sarah)

Jesus. Journalist-popular historian David Halberstam has died in a car crash. Halberstam was the author of The Best and the Brightest, one of the first books I ever read about Vietnam, as well as a great overview of the Eisenhower era, The Fifties, and a very compelling history of journalism called The Powers That Be. Halberstam had a remarkable gift of explaining intricate bureaucratic behavior and its effect upon cultural events in a clear and concise way. Sometimes, this meant substituting “us” and “our” for the United States (as he did in War in a Time of Peace) to get his point across to a popular American reading audience.

I never got the chance to see him speak or to interview him. And I’ll certainly miss him. This is a staggering loss. He was one of the authors I read in my early twenties who taught me that politics and history were as rich in American tradition as our cultural lifeblood. He was that very rare author who, like the historian Will Durant, had faith in the common reader to get excited about history. All of us, I suppose, start out as common readers. And for me, Halberstam was one of those central figures I encountered so happily in libraries. Like Vonnegut’s recent passing, I feel as if a dear friend who helped to show me bigger things has departed and there is nothing I can do to express my gratitude. In this age of microhistories and popular histories that prefer gossip items to substantive interconnections, I can’t think of anyone who could take Halberstam’s place.

While I still harbor considerable doubts about Sam Tanenhaus’s abilities to cover literary fiction with any degree of range or (here’s the key quality) humor, it is nevertheless good to see the services of one Mark Sarvas employed, deflecting attention from other decidedly less robust contributors.

My profile of Lionel Shriver can be found in today’s Chicago Sun-Times.

A year after Marisha Pessl became the Hot Young and Overeducated Literary Chick with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Galleycat reports that there’s a new Hot Young and Overeducated Literary Chick in the making named Rivka Galchen, who has a book called Atmospheric Disturbances and Other Sad Meteorological Phenomena.

Call me crazy, but there’s a title trend here, which I suppose would make this blog post a “trend piece” or perhaps a “trend blog post.” Since I am a philanthropist and I greatly desire to see more women in literary fiction, I hope to help all future Hot Young and Overeducated Literary Chicks get their book deals. With this spirit in mind, I have assembled a helpful list of future titles that might be used to acquire additional book deals:

Naughty Novelties in Quantum Mechanics
Geophysical Undercurrents in Close Proximity
Seismic Shifts and Other Assorted Miracles on the San Andreas Fault
Astronomical Gastronomy and the Burden of Astral-Intestinal Alignments
Zoological Bliss in the Existential Biosphere
Newton’s Ventricles and Ancillary Universal Gravitations
Metaphysical Heartbeats and the Critique of Pure Reason

Rumors of this site’s death have been greatly exaggerated. This site is back up after being down and things should now load a lot faster. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Variety: “The first came when Dave Chappelle appeared onstage at 10:36 p.m. for an unannounced set. The second shocker: Chappelle kept telling jokes until 4:43 the next morning— making his entire set a whopping six hours and seven minutes. That’s the longest performance by any comedian in the the 28-year history of the Laugh Factory, according to founder Jamie Masada….Chappelle didn’t take any bathroom breaks. And Laugh Factory staff stopped serving alcohol around midnight, Masada said.”

Stop Anne Tyler before it’s too late. Otherwise, not bad.

Ellen Heltzel of The Book Babes raises an interesting point about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

Crace is among my favorite contemporary novelists (“Being Dead” is amazing and rightly won the National Book Critics Circle prize). “The Pesthouse,” while by no means surpassing “The Road,” is worthy in its own right. For one thing, it actually has a FEMALE character. For another, the ending seems to evolve more naturally from the story. In “The Road,” it feels as if McCarthy couldn’t sustain his hopeless vision and flinched.

While I don’t agree that McCarthy’s novel is about sustaining a “hopeless vision” (if anything, its purpose seems to me just the opposite), I am also troubled by the double standard in apocalyptic novels, where the protagonists are often men.

But it’s not just the “man’s man” quality of McCarthy that sets him apart from his peers, but the literary vs. genre divide. Much as Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America wasn’t the first novel to explore an alternate universe (although I do recall hoary-haired highbrows scratching their pates in wonder over Roth’s “innovations”), the apocalyptic novel was laid down before by writers as diverse as Robert A. Heinlein (Farnham’s Freehold), H.G. Wells (The Shape of Things to Come), Octavia Butler (the Parable books), David Brin (The Postman), Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle) — too many quite frankly to list.

For those critics and enthusiasts now in the practice of declaring genre lesser or worthless, one must ask why top contemporary writers like Roth and McCarthy are using genre to sustain their literary worth.

Taxes plagued me this weekend, and I didn’t have the time to send in my thoughts, but Simon Owens has collected a number of tributes to Kurt Vonnegut.

The Litblog Co-Op has announced its Spring 2007 Read This! Selection: Alan DeNiro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead.

My emotions are high.

What nobody has observed (at least as far as I can tell) is that this is the first American mass murder along these lines (at least that I know of) in which there was absolutely no ego involved. This madman did not want to be recognized. He didn’t carry an ID. Didn’t carry a cell phone. He willfully disfigured his face. He was not Charles Whitman shooting from a tower, knowing full well that his handiwork was going to be discovered. He was not Eric and Dylan getting vocal revenge on classmates. There was no ego.

And beyond the family and friends of the victims and the wholesale incompetence of the Virginia Tech Campus Police, who had jurisdiction here, to call in city, county and state police to contain this situation, that’s what creeps me out the most about this. There is absolutely no human component to this. This guy went in and, as far as we know, just started shooting the shit out of people. There is nothing that we can empathize with here. Not a common grievance that saner humans can identify.

I’m still sifting through the information, stunned that this happened and trying to find some trigger effect. But there’s nothing. I’m wondering if there was some kind of personal connection between the shooter and his victims. But the more articles I read, the more it looks like this was a carefully calculated plan of evil upon the human race.

And that’s what scares the hell out of me. That a person walking this earth would be incapable of even the tiniest sliver of good. That a person would butcher so many without even a warning. That the blood of this killer may very well be colder than a year in Eureka, Nanavut.

Christ. This is worse than Charles Whitman.

[UPDATE: ABC is reporting 29 dead.]

There is currently a tiny thatch of hair on the left side of my receding hairline. I thought it would go as swiftly as the others. But it appears to be clinging to the rock, like some leech that the finest blade devised by humankind couldn’t t even remove. It apparently didn’t get the memo that the other follicles got. Perhaps this thatch wishes to distinguish itself, but it seems to think that I’m still 28. It’s an area of hair on my head that wants to attend nightclubs again and maybe MDMA. Of course, I know those days are pretty much over, and my drug habits, for the most part, have been limited to the legal stuff. Drug-wise, I’m that garden-variety taxpayer you want to kick repeatedly in the ass. I’m sorry for being so unhip.

Mind you, I’m happily balding. I intend to be a badass bald motherfucker. I intend to tell people to get off my lawn, even if I don’t have one. There have been plenty of fantastic bald men, and I hope to be one of them. I just wish that the process had some kind of logic or consistency. There is no reason for this stubborn patch of hair to remain. Yet it does, with stunning resilience.

I only write about this because recent emails my way have suggested some confusion on the subject, when my hair should be a dead giveaway. While I am happy to be thought young, the truth is that, depending upon how you view the age spectrum (my own observational window conflates it with a value associated with Andrew Carnegie), I’m in the beginnings of early middle age. So I can’t exactly be called young or precocious. But I assure you that I’m still a silly person.

Now that we’re cleared up on that subject, let the balding commence!

Howard Junker is asking for your help. It seems that, as is the practice with any nationally established support group, Mr. Junker has finally accepted “the higher power of Web 2.0.” Please send a few prayers his way, as Mr. Junker lives up to his promise and otherwise mangles four-letter words and grammatical mood in the process.

The revamped Los Angeles Times Book Review has gone live, with editor David Ulin announcing, “[W]e will also offer links to book-related stories from around the paper, as well as an array of Web-only material in the weeks to come,” and revealing new monthly columns from the following: Sarah Weinman on mystery (her first column can be found here, although the cheesy name “Dark Passages” has got to go), Ed Park on science fiction (a natural choice and one that should thoroughly combat Dave Itzkoff’s uninformed nonsense on the other coast), Richard Rayner on paperbacks, and Sonja Bolle on children’s books. Also in this week’s section: an essay from Jonathan Safran Foer.

I don’t know if Newsweek‘s Malcolm Jones felt guilty about failing to finish Against the Day, but getting John Banville and Donald Westlake together for a conversation is enough to momentarily recuse him from acute scrutinty.

You’re off the hook, Mr. Jones.

For now.

(via Sarah)

In a sad and desperate attempt to take attention away from Vonnegut’s death, CBS has pulled the plug on Don Imus’s radio show.