Oprah Comes Correct

Since I blogged on this previously, I must now mention that dear Oprah reversed herself and took James Frey out to the woodshed for sins against the genre of memoir. You can go here to see portions of the Oprah show on it. (Her personal statement -- a formal apology -- is extraordinary.) The New York Times also put the story on page 1 the day after Oprah's show, read that story here.
And, for a delightful piece of rhetoric from one of the columnists who urged Oprah to defend the principle of truth, read this piece by Richard Cohen of The Washington Post.
It begins:

Because she has led countless billions and billions of people to the promised land of books, because she preaches self-help and self-sufficiency and not least because she has shown that even a middle-aged person can keep weight off, I must tiptoe up to the amazing Oprah and merely whisper to her that in the case of James Frey, the liar whose memoir turns out to have a good deal of fiction alongside fact, she is not only wrong but deluded. What she needs is a session with Dr. Phil.

Read the entire column here.

Top 5 Books I Want to Read but Don't Have

If there's a movie I know want to see, I try not to read reviews or look at the back of the DVD box. It's somewhat the same with books. Every so often a book comes along that I know I want to read, so I try not to read too much about it. I don't want pre-conceived notions of what the books is about. So forgive me for not providing descriptions of these books. These are the Top 5 books I want to read but don't already own.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (2005). British author of much praised debut White Teeth. She's also funny and a fan of David Foster Wallace. "On Beauty" is supposed to examine political correctness and conservatism at American universities.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (2005). Economists look at questions like, What do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? and Why do drug dealers live with their moms?
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2005). Reviewers call it mysterious, powerful, beautiful. The author's web site is very extensive and worth checking out. See it here. (It has sound, too.) (Also, this is a cheat -- I bought this book last week, so I do actually have it. I have not read it.)
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (2005). Diamond looks at disappeared cultures such as the Vikings in Greenland or the Anasazi in the American Southwest, focusing on how and why scarce resources become completely depleted. Is this us?
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981). This Robinson's first novel. I read her second novel, Gilead, this year and was blown away. I want more! "Gilead," by the way, just came out in paperback.

A good Lear reference

I love a good Shakespearean reference, so I was pleased to see a somewhat tongue-in-cheek mention of King Lear in a recent column by The New York Times' David Brooks. He writes about Sen. Joe Biden's tendency to bloviate at hearings for Supreme Court nominees:

I rise to defend Joe Biden, who is being attacked for his verbosity during the Alito confirmation hearings. Some have concluded that Biden is a blowhard, though I assert he is thoughtful, just at Wagnerian length.
After years of study, I have come to recognize that it is wrong to regard Biden's committee room interventions as questions. They are senatorial arias of immense emotional range. At times he will ascend to heights of rage and contempt; at other times he will wander like Lear through the desolation of undesirable policies.

Read the column here. (Sorry, you will need to be a TimesSelect subscriber to see it.)
My favorite Lear quotes: "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!" and "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is/To have a thankless child." (The latter I will use to hilarious effect whenever my mom and I have some trivial disagreement. At least I think it's to hilarious effect.)

Scandal! Scandal! Scandal!

Oprah's last book club pick was harrowing memoir of addiction recovery called A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. On Sunday, The Smoking Gun posted a highly convincing expose (read it here) that debunks a lot of the criminal exploits Frey describes in his novel. It may take awhile for this to shake out -- Frey issued an initial terse statement of denial -- but things don't look very good for his credibility. The Smoking Gun knows their public records, and they're well-known for posting original mug shots, police reports, etc. (If you don't feel like reading the lengthy expose, read a news story about it here.)
Meanwhile, the New York Times this week went after about another druggie memoirist, this one a young man named JT Leroy. The story implies that a 40-year-old woman wrote Leroy's books about homeless child prostitutes and then got her sister-in-law to crossdress as Leroy in public. Read the story here. I'd never even heard of JT Leroy until I read this story, apparently his(?) best-known book is called The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.
Finally, writer Neil Pollack has a hilarious, R-rated send-up of all this in his blog, in which he reveals he's not everything you may have thought.

My loyal readers. I've decided to tell all after these many years of pretending to be something that I'm not. My role as father, husband, and semi-employed reformed literary hipster is a lie, a cover for the terrible reality of my actual self. Writers, after all, must always tell the truth about themselves. The truth.
I may be a father, but I am also a murderer of children. Several thousand of them have died on my watch, some in secret government-sponsored air raids in foreign countries that no longer exist. But it's more depraved than that. I killed all those children while addicted to crack, and weed, and heroin. That was very hard to do because I couldn't see very well due to the massive quantities of blood that were streaming from the always-open wound in my forehead ... .

Read the whole thing here.

New stuff on David Foster Wallace

I started working on this post about David Foster Wallace (a longtime favorite author of mine), and as I was looking for interesting links, I discovered even more interesting news and miscellaneous about Mr. Wallace. This is a just another example of how I get so much out of writing this blog -- much more, I'm sure than the 12 people who read it.
So here we go:
The good folks at literary magazine n + 1 have posted an essay from their first issue on Wallace's fiction, particularly his last collection of short stories, Oblivion. I have "Oblivion" but have not yet read it -- But now I think I will use the n + 1 essay, which is by Chad Harbach, as a mini-reading guide for "Oblivion." I think I will like very much.
The essay explores what Wallace has accomplished with his fiction and where he might go next. Harbach writes:

(Wallace) is fascinated by the way corporations use psychological cunning and sophisticated observation to discover their constituents'’ most basic needs and fears, to find the salient detail that will grant them access to a soul. It is, ultimately, a novelist's work, turned to sinister purpose. Wallace knows this
well, and he knows how to pass his fascination along to readers. The narrator of "Mr. Squishy," for instance, spends dozens of pages dissecting the intellectual underpinnings of an ad campaign for an upscale Ding-Dong. Even though the consequences for plot and character are scant, it'’s riveting stuff.

This insight gets at part of what I find so compelling about Wallace. He writes about the way consumerism leaches the meaning out of our lives, commodifying and commercializing every kind or cruel impulse we have. I am not against markets, but it seems we are living in a period of hypercapitalism, when the civilizing force of the market has reached the proverbial tipping point and become a brutalizing, inhuman force. This is arguably the most important issue of our day, and Wallace is very much in touch with that.
Wallace is at his best in his novel Infinite Jest when he is writing about his characters' search for meaning in a consumerist world. A lot of people who write about IJ concentrate on the tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza, but I think the more compelling character is ex-thief Don Gately and his quest for sobriety at a Boston halfway house. Gately looks into the dark yawning maw of insatiable desire -- in this case, desire for a substance -- and turns away, and he finds a community to help him do that. Gately's observations are so compelling.
You may have heard that Wallace has a new book out, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays. This is a collection of his funny, usually penetrating journalistic work. Most, maybe all of it, has been published in other magazines. I read the title essay about the morality of boiling lobsters in Gourmet magazine last year.
This is a really fun bit of multimedia that his publisher Little, Brown has put up on the web for the book release. It's called "VidLit," and features Wallace reading from "Consider the Lobster" to an animated short. I love Wallace's voice, and the music is really cool, too. Check it out here. (Warning if you're reading at work: It has sound.)
Finally, I found this on the web: Wallace commencement speech at Kenyon College in May. It's posted on a blog, apparently transcribed by a fan, and I did a bit of checking just to make sure that Wallace did indeed give a commencement address at Kenyon this year. (You can't be too careful about these things on the web.) But he did indeed give the address, and I'm going to go ahead and believe this is the actual speech. It sounds just like him, and the little joke it starts with is straight out of "Infinite Jest."
If you don't read any other link associated with this post, please read this speech. It is so worthwhile and important, and I fervently hope David Foster Wallace finds a way to get it published as an essay. It's about the importance of what we choose to think about. It's great, great stuff.
Sample passage:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliche about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many cliches, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

Read the whole speech here.

Willa Cather and the MLA

Here's an interesting argument: Are English professors totally out of touch or not? A Washington Times columnist beats up on the frivolity on display at the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) conference. Then a libertarian blogger beats up on said columnist.
Here's a choice excerpt from the blogger's take-down:

So Fields [the columnist] bitches and moans about the "queering" of, among others, good old-fashioned American authors such as Willa Cather. Here's a news flash: During her college days at Univ. of Nebraska, Cather dressed as a man for a while and even took to calling herself "William"; she also had several long-time intimate relationships with women. That sort of long-suppressed biography makes Cather a particularly strong candidate for reappraisal from a queer studies perspective. As important, Cather's treatment by queer studies critics represents the best hope that she will continue to be read.

Read the columnist here; the blogger here. Thanks to Ryan F. for the links!
By the way, I I dearly loved Cather's My Antonia, and I aspire to read Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Top 5 Plus 1 Unread Books on my Shelf

Here are the Top 5 books (plus 1) that I currently own and really, really, really want to read this year. (I have not read them yet.) A holiday book sale in December beefed up this list nicely.

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005). The author of "The Remains of the Day" takes us into a creepy boarding school where the students live to serve a privileged upper-class.
• Harbor by Lorraine Adams (2004). Fiction by a former Washington Post reporter; this debut novel tells the story of Arab immigrants in the U.S. and their response to Islamic extremism.
• The Ha-Ha by Dave King (2005). A mute veteran becomes the guardian of a young boy. King has been praised for his beautiful writing written from the perspective of a narrator who does not speak.
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (2000). Comic books, Harry Houdini and the Holocaust combine in a quasi-epic novel by the author of Wonder Boys and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2000). A literary novel of gender issues, personified by our first person narrator, a transsexual. I don't know much more and don't want to know because I've heard so many good things about this book.
  

Plus One:
(I've labeled this book "plus one" to keep my Top 5 motif going, and because the above books are novels and this is nonfiction.)
The Anarchist in the Library by Siva Vaidhyanathan. Isn't that the best title? In the author's own words:

The anarchist is a specter. It's a symbol of an imagined threat. There are powerful forces trying to close up our information worlds so they can control its flows and charge admission. To accomplish their goals, they raise fears about "anarchists in libraries," uncontrollable, dangerous forces threatening us from within. The library is a metaphor for our information ecosystems. I argue we should be as careful with our information ecosystems as we should be with our real ecosystems. Small changes can have huge effects.

Good reading, eh? This list also might be a sign that I should stop buying more books. Yes, I have a mild addiction to buying books -- worse than some but not as bad as others (hello Gerry!). Well, this list should take me through at least June, I'm thinking. And I've already started "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay."