The Count of Monty Cristo

vindication of the rights of.. something

Yep, it's true. And let me just point out that I went to high school with the keyboardist in that photograph. No, I'm not going to tell you how much older I am than him. Yes, the difference is significant. No, not that significant, you big jerk.

So, nyah.

in which I am once again shamed for being behind the times

Let's talk about how great gin and popcorn are for dinner. Actually, let's not. Let's talk about the fact that Stephen Colbert of the Daily Show, if I'm reading the headlines about tonight's show correctly, has paid a visit to my dear, dear hometown of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to follow up on what is easily the funniest bit of journalistic goldpanning to hit the town since that time back in high school that Jonny and I took that bowling ball and.. wait, wait, hold on just a second, I'm getting distracted.

Disclaimer: I am writing this a full six hours before the show is set to air in the States, and a full who-knows-how-many hours before I'll get to see that particular segment, if ever. So work with me here: I'm working with what I know, the old 'just the facts ma'am', and not an ounce more.

Right. I'm assuming your familiarity with the (tremendously popular) piece from Chapelle's Show about Rick James, in which Eddie Murphy's brother Charlie recounts what it was like to know Rick James back in the day. (And have his couch torn up by him, and have James punch him in the face a few times, &c., &c.) So. There's a local politician in Hattiesburg, an altogether sweet and very mild-mannered guy who's running for city council, who is, unfortunately, also named Rick James. (In case you are wondering, they are probably not related.)

***Stop press, stop post. In the middle of trawling for suitable images of these two, I've found about six thousand (by which I mean five hundred and fifty-three) news stories (the N&O bought it off the wire!?) and blog posts about this very story. So, dammit. How 'bout that gin and popcorn, then? Jeez. See y'all tomorrow.

*****For the record, this is #43,001. Which is, I think now, a form of love.

accept[ing] the hour badly spent

So I've squandered the last few hours on the first few episodes of Firefly, which I will promptly file under the folder marked 'Things I wish I'd known about when they first came out so I could have been watching them over and over ever since.' Honestly, that folder gets fatter by the day.

The daily driftwood floating in:

I want you all to go read these poems right now. Right now.

'The Fuck Patois conversation is brilliant; the Spanish translation of "dry humping" (potentially) useful.' (so says the Rake.)

This is a very cool blog (file in the abovementioned folder, see especially the posts on Alcalay and book arson in Manipur, India). Found via the seesawing currently taking place over at the Valve.

Terry Eagleton jumps over The Literary Wittgenstein, a book that has been out for some time in the US but has apparently just made it over to this side of the pond. (Too slammed with writing at the moment to editorialize  much further on Eagleton's piece, but rest assured it's worth a read. As is the book, of course. Okay, one bit of editorializing: I'm glad to see books like this getting higher-profile coverage such as the TLS, because lit and Witt make for a very interesting and rewarding couple to watch. Like, say, Simon and Kaylee on Firefly. Damn, I really need to put the brakes on that show.)

And this will either make your day or rob you of a verbal stone to throw, depending on how you look at it. Me, I ain't tellin'.

ways America makes me a little sad, number forty-three

...thousand.

Bookstore owners complain that grocery stores, like warehouse clubs, are killing bookstores and possibly the book business, too. By focusing almost exclusively on best sellers, grocers do not support the thousands of lesser authors whose books are carried at independent and chain bookstores, the critics say. Nor do supermarkets carry large selections of older books, or the backlist, which for most publishers is the most profitable portion of their business and which often supports their publishing of newer, less-known authors.

The supermarkets do not apologize for that. They want to carry what sells, plain and simple.

"So much of what Wegmans talks to its customers about is freshness," said Heather Pawlowski, a vice president for general merchandise at the company. "That includes freshness within the reading category."

sunday poem the sixth

...And you thought I forgot this week's Sunday poem. Well, you're right. But I was at dinner here (thanks again -- you know who you are) among other excitements; such divine distraction can perhaps be forgiven. If you just can't wait for the poem, it's at the end of the post -- but first, to clear the mental desk: thanks to the Saloon and to Bookish for the JTB hat-tips. Not much further coverage over the weekend, unfortunately, though Eoin McNamee did give David Peace a nod in the Guardian. (No mention of the prize, which suggests he may have written the piece before the story broke). First paragraph:

There is something new in David Peace's novel of the coal strike, GB84. It's not the breakneck prose, the hand-held feel to the narrative, although that is part of it. It's the sense of a novelist moving into the real political field, taking real people and real events and interrogating them in a way that is exhilarating, demanding and, ultimately, frightening.

In time I may forgive McNamee his use of that word 'interrogating' -- see this post, specifically the link at the end, also this newer post at The Valve -- but don't hold your breath. It's a rather strange piece, otherwise, not one I'm entirely sure about. Where in one paragraph he likens aspects of the book to DeLillo, for instance, in the next he drops the opportunity to prove it. "GB84 doesn't, in fact, name Thatcher, Scargill, McGregor," he writes. "Thatcher is referred to as Her, Scargill as the Chairman. But there is a point to this. It is a way of demonstrating how these figures stop being real people, and start to become eerie abstractions of themselves." Fair enough -- but if you're going to bring DeLillo to the party, why not point out that one of the main characters of Ratner's Star is the Supreme Abstract Commander, and then take it from there? As it stands, I think a diagnosis of reviewer's namecheckitis is in order, which, for lack of any desire to offer it any further initiative, merits only a decidedly cranky humph. Anyway. Here's some other neat swag that came across the wire in the past few days:

Randy Cohen at the NYT wants to make a map of Manhattan, tho' not quite how you might think. Sounds like fun -- spread the word!

Out of the Woods Now has come up with an equally fantastic project, which absolutely merits your attention absolutely.

James Salter has a new book of stories coming out, and will be reading from it this Thursday. (Thanks to Maud/Lauren)

Ted Kooser, as poet laureate, does Diet Pinsky. (via Tingle Alley)

Scott Esposito riffs on Dan Green riffs on Sarah Glazer.

Not a Zombie suggests it is better to be a scholar than a critic. (Reminding me that a few weeks ago David Brooks suggested that the mantra of the Chicago Cubs is that it is better to be loved than feared. Sorry, no link. You'd have to pay anyway.)

There's more, obviously, but I can't keep Larissa Szporluk waiting any longer. Here she is, originally from The Journal but here from Best American Poetry 2001 (which also featured, I have to mention, a previously unpublished Elizabeth Bishop poem!):

Meteor

I chose this. To be this
stone, grow nothing. I wanted this
absolute position in the heavens
more than anything, than you,
my two, too beautiful, my children.
A man I knew once
muttered in his terrors of the night,
no, no, no, instead of yelling.
It was this, this dismal low,
that made me leave him. I will leave them.
All the butterflies the lord above
can muster, all their roses.
I will leave whatever colors
struggle to be noticed. To leave,
to leave. That's the verb I am,
have always been, always will be,
heading, like a dewdrop, into steamy
confrontation, my train of neutral green
lasting half a second
before casting off its freight -- his arms
outside the sheet, how warm they were,
like Rome the year it burned,
Nero at the window, loving no one,
fusion crust. I fly because
my space is crossed
with fear and hair and tail and hate,
the bowels of a lioness,
iron in her roar.

muddying the waters

Just a bit more fallout from the JTB prize, from Reuters and the Herald. (Nothing much new, but take a look if you feel so moved.) I thought it might be worth saying a little something about the selection process, for anyone out there interested in the internal workings of these sorts of things. (And let's be honest -- who isn't?)

The way it works, as the official sites will tell you, is that graduate students at the University of Edinburgh read and write reports on each of the titles in the longlist, choosing, as I understand it, either fiction or biography but not both. From these, the five or six highest-ranked titles become the shortlist presented to the fiction and biography judges, who make the final decision. Not altogether unusual. But there's a little-known fact about the makeup of this grad student posse here at Edinburgh (called 'postgraduates', in the UK parlance): there isn't a single creative writing postgrad among them. Only the critical students (MA and PhD) read the submitted titles for the prize. At first glance this may seem unremarkable, until one presses the question of what kinds of peer review should be in place for a prize committee (which, in effect, consists here of the final judges plus all the postgrads). It's reasonable enough to say that critically trained scholars should be making decisions on scholarly monographs (the biographies) -- indeed, a substantial portion of a career in scholarship of any kind is devoted to just this act -- and likewise reasonable enough to assume they'll be capable of evaluating and commenting on creative works as well.

But is there any such going wisdom about the other camp, the MA students in creative writing? Is there any reason why they, as working writers, should or should not be allowed to evaluate the work of their peers (the novelists)? Before developing the question, let me put forth a conclusion that I've drawn from several conversations with various senior members of the JTB committee: by all accounts, it seems to be a historical accident that the creative writers aren't involved in the selection process. Again: an accident. An oversight. Not a policy decision. The creative writing degree at Edinburgh is scarcely three years old, and being so young its creation never made it onto the radar of the JTB committee. Who knows why -- it slipped almost unnoticed into the maelstrom of university bureaucracy, the right people weren't in the right place at the right time having the right conversation, or who knows what. That aspect of the historical account is less important, I think, than posing the question to next year's committee: should there be some kind of official stance on whether working writers should judge the work of other working writers?

Most of the individuals I've talked to seem to think there's nothing wrong with the proposition, which makes me wonder whether I should try to go through the official channels to set it up for next year -- you know, equality for the masses, or somesuch -- but for some reason I keep thinking this question is much more delightfully complicated than it appears and as such deserves more complicated conversations before anyone arrives at any decisions. So I put it to the larger community: taking into account the potential (by which I mean customary) messiness of literary politics, as well as the attentional overkill the literary marketplace gives in our era to literary prizes.... what do you think?

In other news, an iceberg the size of Jamaica has smashed into Antarctica.
If you're turned off by this whole JTB prize thing, then put that in your pipe and smoke it. And in other other news, a friend of mine has come to visit this weekend, so, er, talk amongst yourselves. I'll try to keep up with the conversation, and will be back full-time on Monday. Nice weekend, y'all.

ps. If there's anyone out there who thinks that creative writers shouldn't be judging either fiction or biography, then I want to know: what about a PhD student who studies Modernism by day but, as many PhD students nowadays do, writes novels  (or poetry, or whatever) by night? Then what should we do? Bar them from serving as a judge? Ah, the counterexample -- philosopher's oldest gambit. Apart from sitting down in the aisle of the intellectual supermarket, of course. That one's a classic.

"Justifying Existence Absolutely": JTB 2005

Okay, so I didn't end up scooping the dailies after all. But give me a break: it's the BBC. To quote my brother, also a journalist: it's their job to know.

When in doubt, begin at the beginning -- but as in this case the beginning, the initial selection process, actually poses some rather curious questions, I'll save those for a post tomorrow morning. Fast-forward to the part where for their books John Clare: A Biography and GB84, respectively, Jonathan Bate and David Peace win the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize: a selection that, as Colin Nicholson of the University of Edinburgh, the final judge for the fiction prize, put it, "was never in doubt."

Strong words, perhaps, but I suppose one can't fault hyperbole on an evening such as this one. (Though it does surprise me that Nick would so grandly dismiss the rest of a shortlist containing, oh, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.) It really was a remarkable gathering, start to finish -- lovely venue, good wine, all of the Edinburgh literati and glitterati out to see and be seen. As I'm sure there will be a fair amount of coverage and discussion over the next wee while -- not least of which here in the 'sphere -- for time and sanity's sake I'll just put up a few of the observations that might not make it into wire copy.

Let's see. For one thing, Peace remarked how surreal the contrast was between the beautiful surroundings of the award ceremony in contrast to the horrific conditions depicted in the book receiving the award (his book is set during the miner's strikes of 1984-1985 in the west of England -- consequently a contemporary historical novel that The Little Professor would doubtless be interested in).  The book was originally intended to conclude a quartet of novels set in Yorkshire in the 70's and 80's, but he says that over a period of about ten years he came to realize that this book had gotten too big for its britches, that it needed to stand apart from these other works. Peace said he researched GB84 by reading, while he was living in Tokyo, the Times of London for every single day of the year 1984 -- only after he had done that did he begin to write his novel.

Bate, on the other hand, rather than remarking on method or conviction, merely noted the pleasure of a quintessentially Scottish prize being given to an English biographer writing about an English poet who was said to be England's own Robert Burns (and who was in fact a quarter Scottish -- Clare's grandfather was from around Inverness, if memory serves). Insofar as England has always lagged behind Scotland in recognizing its folk poetry and ballad traditions, Bate said, the ironic folds present were altogether to his (and Clare's, he reckoned) satisfaction.

The Q&A after it was all over, far from the "Mr Writer, do you use pen or pencils? Oh, pencils? Mechanical or wooden?" norm, may have been the most interesting part of the evening. And not least because Ian Rankin (!), who was in the crowd, stood up and asked Bate at what point John Clare had begun to get on his nerves. "Never," Bate replied, "I admired him too much." Bate then went on to say that some biographers do ultimately suffer from Stockholm syndrome (a psychological condition in which the prisoner begins, over a long period of time, to identify with his or her captor), but that his own research into Clare's life, within the context of resuscitating a long-forgotten social history, showed just how difficult and complicated of a man Clare was, a fact that had never been known, much less stressed, by his prior biographers. In the end, Bate said, the process of desentimentalizing Clare from his legacy proved so demanding as never to allow any time for mental love affairs (however abusive) with the subject of his book.

Inevitably someone asked Peace how much of his book was taken directly from life (the old "fiction or fact?" fracas), to which he responded that he came from the school of you should "write what you know or what you have an emotional stake in" -- the emotional stake being, in his case, the guilt he felt that he hadn't paid more attention to the profound implications of the strikes when he was growing up in Yorkshire in the 80's. Doing the math revealed that the strike, initially of 160,000 workers, affected literally millions of people by its end; Peace said that for a time, this had been what life was. Yes, there was the strike, but there was only the strike. Nor, he said, do we now publicly remember the suffering and sacrifices people endured -- quitting their well-paying jobs and jeopardizing their families' well-being to support the cause of people they had never met. Thus one of the reasons he felt moved to write the book was to try to bring something back into the public awareness that had dropped so definitively off.

In this sense, Nicholson noted, there was consonance between the two books, in that they both gave accounts of individuals just as much as they were accounts of ways of life that had been lost. After it was all over I asked Roger Savage, the final judge of the biographies, to what extent he thought this prize endorsing particular types of books over others (such as Jonathan Coe's experimental biography of B.S. Johnson, in which the biographer becomes a character in the unfolding narrative -- biography from the school of Hunter S. Thompson, in other words) was a political decision; he responded by saying that in this particular case a straightforward narrative biography suited Clare more than any other, given that -- if you look at his previous biographies -- Clare had never had one before. I don't think that Savage meant to imply that righting perceived historical wrongs should be a selection criterion for a book award, but I have to say: that was the sense of his statement that came across to me. It might also have been his earlier statement that what he was looking for in the shortlisted titles was "a readable book that justified its existence absolutely." (Would that all books justified their existence absolutely.) Don't know. Jury's still out on that one.

And now for something completely different. We'll call it the "Closing quips that aren't woven into the above account" section, in the folder marked "Because it's late and I'm tired":

Savage, as he opens the envelope: "There's not nearly enough tension in this room. Is everything okay?"

Bate, in his acceptance speech: "Well, I have to thank the readers. I guess that's the first hurdle to get over, isn't it?"

Peace, in his: "Because I'd never won anything before, I was always a bit sceptical of prizes. Now that's all changed."

puttin' on the monkey suit

Okay folks, I'm off to the James Tait Black Prize ceremony. I've learned, sad to say, that the drinks tonight come before the proceedings -- so unless everybody tromps off to the pub immediately afterward to drown sorrows, toast fortune, bask in reflected glory, &c., &c., I'll head home to drop off the news as soon as I can. (Call it 2-3 hours or so from now.)

So: unless you were sittin' beside me, you heard it here first. Ta---

FYI

Silvio Berlusconi has stepped down (l'articolo in Italiano) as Prime Minister of Italy, though like most ex-politicians ('ex-politicans', he says) will only be politicking from an arm's length away. But the real question is: did he do this so he could devote more time to his illustrious recording career?

This is, incidentally, a rather circumspect way of asking: does anybody out there have a copy of the above-linked CD? Because if you do, I will happily send you something lovely in exchange for a copy. I've scoured those websites which, er, I know to scour.. but as of this moment (1219 GMT  21.04.05) have found precisely jack shit. For a PM who owns damn near all the media outlets in the country, I must confess I'm disappointed in dear old Silvio. So again I ask: c'è qualcuno che può aiutarmi? 'allo? ..ciao?

Italy, how do I miss thee? Let me count the ways.

Habemus papam (from the NYT):

Elsewhere in Rome, people started heading toward Vatican City from all directions, many of them running to try to catch a glimpse of the new pope as he made a balcony appearance.

Some priests and seminarians in clerical garb ran. Nuns pulled up their long skirts and jogged toward the Vatican. Drivers honked their horns and some people began closing stores early and joined the crowds.

Police immediately tried to direct traffic, but to little effect.

Awesome.