Wrestling an Alligator actor Damian Lanahan-Kalish sends word that un/dying/love, a collection of theatrical shorts, will be playing at the Climate Theatre (285 9th Street) through Oct. 30. Check it out.

And the Elegant Variation turns one today. Congratulations, Mark!

It may not be hep to say it. After all, Our Great Nation is still adapting to a post-9/11 age of terror in which irony is as forbidden as Mary Jane and Certain Assumptions must remain True and Unquestioned by the 48% of the population who still insists that George “You forgot Poland!” Bush is the best man for the job.

But the 9/11 Commission‘s recent nomination for the National Book Award is a travesty to quality nonfiction. The “work” isn’t even a book proper. It was a report generated by an independent government authority. As such, there will no doubt be a mad and unfortunate dash among the 9/11 Commission’s many members over who has rightfully earned the award. But beyond this, what can one say about a document with a structure clearly pilfered from U.S. Department of Justice Interdepartment Memo 2004-85721-97 (an undisputed classic also referred to as “Potential Applications of Telemetric Devices in Post-Operative Middle American Scenarios”)?

Unless you’re a reader who thinks turgid bureaucratese beats out investigative journalism any day of the week, the report has only its astonishing facts to draw upon. And while these facts are substantial, it cannot detract from one glaring problem: how it was written.

Take the following passages:

“The Justice Department is much more than the FBI.” (Chapter 3) Much more? Discarding the glaring redundancy here, where’s the qualitative adjective that guides the topic sentence?

“KSM first came to the attention of U.S. law enforcement as a result of his cameo role in the first World Trade Center bombing.” (Chapter 5) Cameo role? We reserve cameos for movies, thank you very much. Does someone at the 9/11 Commission fancy himself the next Alex Garland?

Chapter 6’s Title: “From Threat to Threat.” Even a half-hearted scrivener understands that you don’t use the same noun twice, particularly when you’re trying to evoke the halycon phrase “From Here to Eternity.”

“Although boasts among prison inmates often tend to be unreliable, this evidence is obviously important.” (Chapter 7) By any reasonable estimate, this is an anticlimactic sentence. It suggests that the 9/11 Commission intends to explain why the prison testimony weighed even a modicum into their decision and then fails to follow through on the promise.

“He was flown by helicopter back to the White House, passing over the still-smoldering Pentagon. At 8:30 that evening, President Bush addressed the nation from the White House.” (Chapter 10) Well, where else would the President address the nation from? It’s already been established that he’s been flown back to the White House. This is lazy exposition.

I’d quibble further, but already I crave a bottle of aspirin. And the last thing I wish to do is cause the reader additional anguish. These cursory examples are but a handful of the full travesty unveiled upon an unsuspecting public. Bad enough that the predictable Garrison Keillor and his damn Woebegone stories are on tap to propel the ceremony. But should the National Book Foundation dare to crown The 9/11 Commission Report its winner, it will send a clear and resounding message that pulpish, slavishly written and hastily executed work matters most. I urge all concerned parties to contact the NBF at (212) 685-0261. This seminal lapse in judgment demands proper accountability.

I just saw the leader of the free world reduced to a quiet stammering marshmallow. Who knew?

Congratulations, Mr. Balk (formerly known as TMFTML). Rest assured, now that Mr. Balk has very publicly sold out to the man, boiling a few live babies just before walking to the Times office, and lighting up Havanas underneath Bloomberg’s very own nose, it is clear that Mr. Balk has become too untrustworthy and hopelessly corrupted to be useful for the blogosphere’s purposes. We will be certain to write blasphemies about his work, with the same pragmatism with which we use Tanenhaus’s NYTBR issues for our furnace. Mr. Balk cannot be trusted ever, ever again. (via Maud)

The National Book Award finalists have been announced. For Fiction:

Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Florida by Christine Schutt
Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber
The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck
Our Kind: A Novel in Stories by Kate Walbert

This may be the first time in National Book Award history that all the nominees were women.

Vendela Vida: “I need help finding smell in contemporary fiction — please help me.”

From Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World: “I rode the bus to a corner populated by a cluster of small shabby stores-grocery, shoemaker’s, dry cleaner’s, and under a tattered awning a dim coffee shop vomiting out odors of some foul stuff frying.”

From Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s My Nine Lives: “…she leaned forward to kiss me, enfolding me in the warmth of her breath, her perfume, the smell and taste of the good strong coffee she drank all day long, even at tea-time.”

The first two lines of Walter Mosley’s Little Scarlet: “The morning air still smelled of smoke. Wood ash mainly but there was also the acrid stench of burnt plastic and paint.”

David Lodge, Author, Author: “pressed up against her sweet-smelling, gently yielding form in the dark”

Maggie O’Farrell, My Lover’s Lover: “…Lily finds a small office smelling faintly of wet coffee granules.”

And that’s all from first chapters.

Personally, my favorite smell passage that I’ve read recently comes from (of all people) Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: “High school teachers faced with a large group of students in study hall or a school assembly will tell you that teenagers, even when freshly showered and groomed, reek of the hormones which their bodies are so busy manufacturing. Any group of people under stress emits a similar stink, and Jake, with his senses tuned to the most exquisite pitch, smelled it here.”

If there’s been a particularly bitter tone that’s crept onto these pages of late, my apologies. My heart has remained broken for at least sixty-six different reasons (and, yes, it’s at least sixty-six; they’ve all been logged down privately, along with prospective ways out) over the past couple of weeks, and I’ve tried to rebound from this by submerging myself into work, which to my mind includes this place. Certainly the insomnia helps. But it hasn’t completely extinguished a tone of nastiness that really doesn’t serve anybody. It doesn’t help my writing, much less the research I’m trying to do right now for the next play. (After all, not that I’m trying to draw any comparisons here, we all know what happened to John Fowles.)

So I’ve decided to withdraw from these pages for a while. It’s more important for me to find solid ground and a certain faith in humankind again than to kvetch about picayune shit like Stanley Crouch’s latest piece of irrational detritus. In the meantime, the David Mitchell interview I posted a few days ago should keep you folks busy. But do visit the smart and sturdy souls on the left.

I was sent the following email. If you care at all about the greatest movie theatre in San Francisco, I urge you to read this and write in (that includes you, Cinetrix!):

Friends and Colleagues:

Whether I have mentioned to you or not, the Castro Theatre is in serious trouble. The owner of the business, in his desire for sure profit, has made drastic staffing cuts and is on the verge of changing things for the worse by monkeying with programming. Anita Monga, who has programmed the theatre since 1986, long before this present owner/adminstration, has guided the Theatre through heavy times, the good and the bad years, to be able to make the Castro a unique movie theatre experience, not just locally but internationally.

If the Castro Theatre goes, an important cultural institution will forever perish. We all know the state of movie exhibiton, so this is no
exageration. The less venues there are to show unique, interesting,
non-mainstream films, the less opportunity filmmakers will have to make
those kinds of films.

This might be hard to imagine today, but the current owner’s father ran the Castro Theatre into the ground in the late 60s, early 70s, showing
third-run in an unfortunate state of disrepair. He had hoped to turn that piece
of land into a seemingly more profitable apartment building. It was the
passion of programmer Mel Novikoff who took over operations, and created
the beautiful Castro we know today, cultivating an audience for classics
and independents. Anita Monga took up Novikoff’s vision when he passed
away.

I include below a request to you made by the staff of the Castro Theatre. Whether you have, in recent times, come to see theatrical premieres of extraordinary docs like The Corporation or The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, the antics of Marc Huestis’ Ladies and Gentlemen Prefer Jane Russell with the singular Ms Jane Russell in person, gorgeous revivals of The Leopard, La Dolce Vita or Tokyo Story, or have come to the Asian American, SF International, Frameline Lesbian and Gay, the Arab or the many other film festivals we host, you know how important this theatre is.

Thank You, and please pass this on.

Dear Friend:

Can you do a favor?

Can you write a simple letter of appreciation for the Castro
Theatre? Some critical points to make (if you’re comfortable doing so)
are: 1) The programming is interesting and intelligent and is one of the
things that sets the theatre apart. 2) The staff is intelligent,
knowledgeable and responsive to the audience’s needs, and is one of the
things that sets the theatre apart. 3) The theatre is a vital part of the
cultural life of the Bay Area.

Please be positve. Any negativity, including fears about the
theatre’s future or pleas to save the theatre will be extemely
counterproductive. Rather, take the tone of a recommendation letter or a
simple thank you note. You can address it to the Castro Theatre.

This doesn’t have to be long (unless you feel inspired)—a few sentences will do. If you can write it on letterhead and mail it to Castro Theatre, 429 Castro Street, San Francisco CA 94114, or attach it to e-mail and send it to castrotheatre@aol.com, that’d be great.

If you think of anyone else who might appreciate what we’re doing, let me know to contact.

If you feel that you can do this, please don’t delay. The next few weeks are critical.

Moby lives again.

Jessa takes King and Rowling to task for thinking “they’re above having editors.” Well, if that were the case, then I suspect the latest installments of the Dark Tower and Harry Potter series would be a good deal longer and more incoherent.

With the exception of the first book, Stephen King has in fact had an editor through the Dark Tower series. And, in fact, he went back and revised the first volume with the Donald M. Grant team specifically because these early stories lacked an editor. And, as usual, King also enlisted longtime agent Arthur Greene as his editor. One can also turn to the final pages of On Writing to see King’s editing in action.

As for Rowling, Barry Cunningham and Arthur Cunningham have, respectively, edited the UK and US editions of Potter.

So to hell with Indian Massacre Day or whatever today’s supposed to evoke. Return of the Reluctant proclaims today International Editor Day, saluting the fine folks who kept these writers under wraps.

“These tombstones looked really neat.” (via Kottke)

Best. Anchor Bay DVD Release. Ever.

And Tom “My time in Vietnam had a big influence on me” Savini is the most insane man in the film makeup business. If you check out the extras, watch his eyes light up when he contemplates pig intestines and exploding heads. That’s what movie magic is all about.

Oscar Villalon asks whether the Nobel’s really worth it: “Even the most erudite among us will have a hard time naming a single book by a great chunk of past laureates. How about that Sigrid Undset (1928)? Who could ever forget her, right? Or how about Par Lagerkvist (1951)? Or Jaroslav Seifert (1984)? Got those names tattooed on the brain, don’t you? And if you do, it’s because you’ve boned up on all the past winners for trivia night at the pub.”

Salon talks with Toni Bentley: “‘You could eat off my asshole,’ you write, describing your ritual ablutions. Can it be true that you did not see, touch or smell shit during the 298 anal penetrations you describe? Is that a realistic expectation for most people?”

Ah, nothing like the unfettered freedom of the Internet to encourage the seminal questions of our time. How long before Philip Roth is finally cornered by Rebecca Traister’s unequivocally eloquent mind on Portnoy? (via Ron)

It’s difficult to find a first novel that conveys a mature and understated voice while daring to tackle as seminal a topic as imagination’s connection to the human soul, but Ben Rice’s Pobby and Dingan (opening excerpt here) is that novel. Pobby tells the tale of two imaginary friends of Kellyanne, a young girl in an Australian Outback mining town. The two friends are “lost” one day by Kellyanne’s alcoholic father and this sets into motion a remarkable series of events that demonstrate how important fantasy is when juxtaposed against the daily upheavals of life. Rice adeptly captures the nuances of rowdy Down Under vernacular (Mello Yello and all) and pommy prejudices while showing how Ashmol, Kellyanne’s brother who narrates the tale, gradually comes to understand his sister’s mentality. But more importantly, Rice has achieved a pitch-perfect balance between Balzacian reality and the plausible hyperreality that the novel is almost intended to get away with. While my colleagues at the Complete Review may quibble over the abstract nature of Kellyanne’s condition, I think they’ve failed to fully appreciate how Rice has created a self-sufficient fable for our times.

I will confess that recent personal events probably had my heart more ready to be scattered into a thousand shards. But with pomo dismissed in some circles as intellectual flummery and a literary climate encouraging mammoth “event” novels that are essentially trumped up popular fiction (now worse than ever, given that the most egregious cases are now taken seriously by the NYTBR), Rice has done the unthinkable. He’s written a thin novel that contrasts the human heart with its own sustaining requirements. Which is more than a dozen highly regarded authors could do with a single humorless sentence, much less a concept purlonied and distilled from Donald Barthelme.

A film adaptation of Pobby is in the works, but, even with Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo behind it, Rice’s story demands to be experienced on the page.

Jacques Derrida has passed on.

This weekend, if you’re in the San Francisco area, the third Litquake is going down. About a hundred authors reading their goods at the Koret Auditorium. Joe Bob says check it out.

Elfriede Jelinek “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.”

Life has us busy, but we do promise something pretty huge on this site in the next couple of days. That is all.

• Ron takes on Paul Maher again and talks with Stephanie Lehmann.
• Jennifer Weiner fends off medically imbalanced Big Media.
• The Book Babes squeal in Tanenhaus’s presence. I’ve responded.
• Amy Fisher is back and she has a self-published book where, it appears, she dispenses parenting advice.
• The Nobel buzz is purring, but could it go to a woman? Only nine women have been awarded the Nobel Literature Prize since 1901.
• Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha has given Pride and Prejudice the Bollywood treatment.
• David Mitchell gets the royal treatment over at the Independent (first seen at the Literary Saloon)
• The Washington Post takes a look at Altman’s Tanner ’88 followup.
• S.E. Hinton talks at length with the Ottawa Citizen about returning to writing after a long hiatus, movies, motherhood, and her new novel.
• Nebraskan Ted Kooser will be the next poet laureate of the United States.
• Maya Angelou has written a cookbook.
• The short story defended yet again (via Bookninja)
• Stuart Macintyre argues that historians are no longer detached observers.
• Joan Didion examines Kerry.
• The Dagger Awards have been announced. (via Sarah)
• Books on anger examined at the TLS.
• An early review of the new Atwood essay collection.

• The 56th Frankfurt Book Fair begins on Wednesday and Hannah Wettig wants to know if Arab literature has a chance. Meanwhile, publisher Mohammed Rashad shares his thoughts. [UPDATE: And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Laila has weighed in as well.]
• Attorneys for the estate of John Steinbeck’s widow want Steinbeck’s heirs to back off. Who knew that Oprah’s East of Eden pick could transmute into such a nuisance?
• Just when he got out, Mark Winegardner is pulling him back in. “At the same time I’m trying to write a novel that would be appealing to the popcorn crowd, and God bless ’em. I think literary writers can lose sight of the sheer page-turning pleasure that a novel can give,” says Winegardner of The Godfather Returns. Don’t you mean the sizable paycheck, Mark?
• The Scotsman notes that Edinburgh’s literary reputation as a murder apex is unfounded. There were only six murders in the past twelve months, and all of them were solved.
• Eduardo Gonzalez Viana has been awarded Peru’s highest literary honor.
• Four original Norman Rockwells are being unloaded to save a library with ties to Funk & Wagnalls.
• The James Joyce Bloomsbury expo hits Boston and The Globe is impressed.

Another fun bold-it-if-ya-done-it list from Bondgirl. This time, instead of books or movies, it amounts to personal experience.
Continue reading →

Stephenson and Jonathan Strange not enough? Why not try Paul Anderson’s Hunger’s Brides? It’s 1,376 pages long (via Booksquare)

LANDLORD: “Why didn’t I get the rent check?”
BUSH: “It’s hard work.”

LAURA BUSH: “You missed our dinner date.”
BUSH:: “It’s hard work. You’re sending mixed messages.”

WAITER: “Here’s the check, sir.”
BUSH: “The thing I don’t get is how my bill remains so inconsistent.”

UNEMPLOYED AMERICAN: “I’ve been unable to get a job for eighteen months.”
BUSH: “It’s hard work. I make difficult decisions every day. But you’re in my heart. But you attacked first.”

[UPDATE: B has the goods on last night’s smackdown.]

[UPDATE 2: Number of times Bush said “hard work” during the debate: 11.]

Carrie has the scoop on Norman Mailer and her mom: “Her courtroom work in Boston had put her in contact with a lot snakes and liars — there was one well-connected politician who repeatedly showed-up at her doorstep in the middle of the night, expecting to be taken in because of his last name (creepy she said, because he shouldn’t have even known where she lived) — and so Mailer, even in all his bluster and alcoholism, was a far more appealing species of male.”

Michael Berry compares the last volume of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle with the last volume of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series: “Stephenson, on the other hand, is best appreciated once you have a solid liberal arts education under your belt, perhaps with a couple of graduate courses thrown in for good measure.”