The "sponsored" archive

Advertising for the new film Capote has created an interesting nexus between journalism, archiving and literature. The marketing of the movie includes a "sponsored archive" at the newspapers web site. The url is -- note the "ads" -- http://www.nytimes.com/ads/capote/ .
The web page includes articles from The New York Times about Truman Capote, his star-studded private life, his great "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood, and even his obituary. It has a timeline, too, with lots of photos. All in all, it's a beautifully done archive showcasing a great writer. And of course, there are prominent links to the official movie site.
A note at the top reads "The reprinting of these articles was paid for by Sony Pictures Classics. The Times was not involved in the selection of these articles or the production of this archive." If there was Times article saying "In Cold Blood" is a boring waste of time, I'll assume we won't see it here. I'll also assume that such a hypothetical article does not exist -- the book is a true classic.
Does it bother me that the Times is letting its content be used this way? Nope. The purists may balk, but the newspaper holds the rights to its own work. It is free to accept or reject such advertising solely at its discretion. On the positive side, the archive opens up a lot of free content for anyone to read.
My favorite bit is from Conrad Knickerbocker's review of "In Cold Blood," published Jan. 16, 1966. Knickerbocker begins by referencing an interview with Capote printed in the same day's paper:

As (Capote) says in his interview with George Plimpton, he wrote "In Cold Blood" without mechanical aids -- tape recorder or shorthand book. He memorized the event and its dialogues so thoroughly, and so totally committed a large piece of his life to it, that he was able to write it as a novel. Yet it is difficult to imagine such a work appearing at a time other than the electronic age. The sound of the book creates the illusion of tape. Its taut cross-cutting is cinematic. Tape and film, documentaries, instant news, have sensitized us to the glare of surfaces and close-ups. He gratifies our electronically induced appetite for massive quantities of detail, but at the same time, like an ironic magician, he shows that appearances are nothing.

Merry Michaelmas!

Today is day all Jane Austen fans should mark -- it's Michaelmas!
Michaelmas, the feast day of St. Michael, is a holiday regularly remarked upon in Austen novels. It's pronounced "Mickle-mus" -- kinda rhymes with "nickel bus" -- to sound like "Christmas".
There's a wonderful full-text copy of "Pride and Prejudice" on the web. Find it here.
Here are the references to Michaelmas in the novel.

Mrs. Bennet to Mr. Bennet, referring to the eligible bachelor Mr. Bingley.

``Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.''

and, much later, Mrs. Bennet to Mr. Bingley.

``I began to be afraid you would never come back again. People did say you meant to quit the place entirely at Michaelmas; but, however, I hope it is not true. A great many changes have happened in the neighbourhood, since you went away. Miss Lucas is married and settled. And one of my own daughters. I suppose you have heard of it; indeed, you must have seen it in the papers. It was in the Times and the Courier, I know; though it was not put in as it ought to be. It was only said, "Lately, George Wickham, Esq. to Miss Lydia Bennet," without there being a syllable said of her father, or the place where she lived, or any thing. It was my brother Gardiner's drawing up too, and I wonder how he came to make such an awkward business of it. Did you see it?''

Happy J. Alfred Prufrock Day!

Why pick the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to base a mock holiday around? The short answer is that my friends and I loved this poem in high school, and it's a locus around which we reminesce about our emotionally intense early exposure to literature. But Prufrock has a number of virtues that I think anyone could appreciate.
On first reading, Prufrock sounds good. It's that simple: its words please the ear. Its hip-hop cadences promise comradery ("Let us go then, you and I"), adventure ("through certain half-deserted streets,/ The muttering retreats/ Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels") and yet-to-be-revealed secrets ("Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'"). There's the chanted "decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse", the lament "I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled" and the great question, a balanced scale of alliteration and assonance: "Do I dare to eat a peach?"
The poem's themes allude to unease and isolation, disappointing romance, and the damnable, inescapable interiority of the mind ("That is not it at all. That is not what I meant, at all.") Yes, alientated teenagers like this sort of thing (I did), but as adults we learn the disturbing, gnawing truth behind the cool styling: We die alone.
Most critics will say that Eliot's greatest poem is "The Waste Land," and I agree with that. But I think Prufrock remains a great work in its own right. The Waste Land is vast; Prufrock is personal. The Waste Land is bankrupt society, Prufrock is the depressed iritability of an evening alone.
Over the past few weeks I've been thinking a lot about sadness: the hurricanes, a devastated New Orleans, the lingering horror of 9-11, the poisoned partisanship of our politics, and a far-off war. Then I've thought about Eliot's poetry and felt strangely comforted.
Today is the 117th anniversary of Eliot's birth. This is my salute.

Freedom to Read

Banned Books Week, promoted by the American Library Association, begins this week. It's worth taking time to think about the price of intellectual freedom. I have to confess that I am the sort of person who, when hearing of a book that someone wants banned, will say to myself, "Hmm, I want to read that and see what it's all about."
Here are the top 10 most challenged books of 2004, according to the ALA.

• "The Chocolate War" for sexual content, offensive language, religious viewpoint, being unsuited to age group and violence

• "Fallen Angels" by Walter Dean Myers, for racism, offensive language and violence

• "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" by Michael A. Bellesiles, for inaccuracy and political viewpoint

• Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey, for offensive language and modeling bad behavior

• "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky, for homosexuality, sexual content and offensive language

• "What My Mother Doesn't Know" by Sonya Sones, for sexual content and offensive language

• "In the Night Kitchen" by Maurice Sendak, for nudity and offensive language

• "King & King" by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, for homosexuality

• "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou, for racism, homosexuality, sexual content, offensive language and unsuited to age group

• "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck, for racism, offensive language and violence

Read more about Banned Books Week here.

Eliot reads Prufrock

Listen to a recording of T.S. Eliot reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" via this link.
It is very cool.
I love the way he says the long I in "time."
It works for me only when I click on Download: MP3.
For some reason, when I click on Stream: Real Time, I keep getting an error message.
I particularly invite you to comment on this recording.

Who is T.S. Eliot?

I've searched for short but rigorous biographies of Eliot on the web.
The most extensive one is here, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Sample passage:

In a period less engaged with politics and ideology than the 1980s and early 1990s, the lasting strengths of his poetic technique will likely reassert themselves. Already the strong affinities of Eliot's postsymbolist style with currently more influential poets like Wallace Stevens (Eliot's contemporary at Harvard and a fellow student of Santayana) have been reassessed, as has the tough philosophical skepticism of his prose. A master of poetic syntax, a poet who shuddered to repeat himself, a dramatist of the terrors of the inner life (and of the evasions of conscience), Eliot remains one of the twentieth century's major poets.

For a much shorter bio, check out Who2.com via this link. Who2 calls Eliot's The Waste Land "the most famous English poem of the 20th century."

Help with a Tough Read

Meghan O'Rourke has a charming article about reading William Faulkner with Oprah's Book Club. It sounds like a stimulating and useful experience. I'm kicking myself for not joining in on this one. (I read John Steinbeck's East of Eden with Oprah's Book Club and was quite pleased.)
O'Rourke writes:

It looked like one of the oddest pairings around, and yet Oprah-meets-Faulkner turned out, in a curious way, to be an inspired match. It's easy to forget just how radical a writer Faulkner still is, because he's been so thoroughly absorbed into the canon: a process by which, as one critic once put it, "the idiosyncratic is distorted into the normative." Faulkner is anything but normative. Figuring out what is going on in a book like The Sound and the Fury is so hard—and demands such a leap of faith—that every reader struggles in similar ways.

Read the whole story here.

Anticipating Prufrock

Every year, a few friends and I quietly celebrate J. Alfred Prufrock Day. It is Sept. 26, which is the birthday of T.S. Eliot. Eliot wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; it was published in 1917.
I'll be blogging about Eliot and the Love Song this week in anticipation of the great day. I will also explain why I celebrate J. Alfred Prufrock, and what it is about the poem that so appeals.
To kick things off, why not read the poem via the Bartelby web site? (Bartelby.com is a great source for full-text copies of great literature.)
The poem is here: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
It begins:

LET us go then, you and I, ...

High Fidelity

I recently read Nick Hornby's new novel "A Long Way Down." It's sarcastic, generous and insightful, much like his famous debut High Fidelity. If you haven't read "High Fidelity," I would start with that first.
In "High Fidelity," Rob, a record shop owner, is breaking up with his girlfriend. The book is essentially his thoughts on pop music, girls, sex, love and growing older. It's one of those books that didn't seem all that remarkable to me when I first read it, but it has aged so well that about once a year I read it again. (See other books I have re-read here.)
A favorite passage:

A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners, a two- or three-page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made. It amused us at the time, although Barry, being Barry, went one stage further: he compiled the questionnaire and presented it to some poor woman he was interested in, and she hit him with it. But there was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it'’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn'’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.

Interestingly, I disagree with the gist of that passage, and in the book Rob learns not to be such a culture snob. I still think it's an amusing sentiment with a little bit of truth in it.

Dry, a recovery memoir

I feel like I've been wading around in the muck with my reading the past few weeks. I've read all the news reports I can about Katrina -- very depressing. I've also been slogging through parts of Disneywar (previous posts here and here) and the novel "Couples" by John Updike. (I'll post more about Updike soon.)
Then last night, most fortuitously, I received in the mail from my friend Lanore W. a copy of Dry, a memoir, by Augusten Burroughs. I've read about half of it -- it's about his attempt to recover from alcoholism. This book, like his first memoir, Running with Scissors, is so compulsively readable I have a hard time putting it down. It's dark, but funny. His subject matter, in both books, is his own troubled life. He writes about child abuse, alcoholism, and depressingly anonymous sexual encounters. Yet I'm of the opinion that his writing is suffused with an underlying moral clarity that affirms the value and uniqueness of every living person.
Having given this ringing endorsement of Burroughs, I have to add that he is not for everyone. Many will find his writing grotesque and disturbing -- but not me! I expect to finish Dry in the next day or two.

Reading about the storm

To be honest, I've spent most of the past week reading every scrap of coverage I can find about Hurricane Katrina. I was born and raised in rural Louisiana. Like many people who live in the state but outside the city, I love New Orleans and visited it often. Its sophistication, its debauchery, its fun, its grittiness -- New Orleans is a fascinating, cosmopolitan beacon rising out of the swamps. (I can't bring myself to write "was." It is and will be again.)
At any rate, the media coverage has been amazing. It sadly seems reporters realized the magnitude of the problem much faster than the federal government.
I could link to lots of coverage of the storm and its aftermath, but I will content myself to link to only one item: An editorial written as an open letter to the President in New Orleans' great newspaper, the Times-Picayune.
It reads, in part in part:

We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame. ...
Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially. ...
We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We're no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

Read the whole editorial here at Nola.com or here via the Editor & Publisher web site.

There is no B-list

A friend of mine recently read I, Fatty, a novel about silent film star Fatty Arbuckle. Should I read it?, I asked. I don't know, he said, it was OK. Maybe you could put it on your B list.
Ahhh, I said, but there is no B list. The A list is full up. If it's not great, I can't spare the time for it, I said.
And that's so true. There are too many good books and too little time. In fact, I might stop reading a book I'm in the middle of: Disneywar, a nonfiction account of Michael Eisner's rise and fall as head of Walt Disney. It's not holding my interest, and I had such high hopes for it. It's too much a story of neurotic Hollywood powerbrokers maneuvering for position. That's too bad, because I usually love James B. Stewart's work. His book Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story Of A Doctor Who Got Away With Murder is excellent.

New Orleans and the storm

Say a prayer for New Orleans and her people ... the muse of great authors such as John Kennedy Toole, Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner.

The power of reading

National Public Radio has been running a series of commentaries called "This I Believe." Today's installment was by author Rick Moody on the power of reading. It made me cheer at my breakfast table. Here's how it starts:

I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket. I believe in reading books because others dislike them or find them dangerous. I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind. ...

Read the whole commentary here.

Out

I don't read many crime thrillers, but Out, by Natsuo Kirino, is a cool, creepy walk on the dark side. The novel, translated from Japanese, centers on four women struggling to make ends meet while working at a boxed lunch factory. In Kirino's novel, Japanese society is depressingly sexist -- women are denigrated as a matter of course by both by their families and their employers. Nevertheless, the female characters are smart, cynical, manipulative and eager to carve out their own destinies. When one of the women kills her philandering husband for gambling away their life's savings, her co-workers come together to help her get rid of the evidence. That cover-up leads their entanglement with Japan's brutal underground criminal world.
The book has several scenes of startling, disturbing violence, much like a Quentin Tarantino movie. The dismemberment of a dead body is particularly graphic.

Lunar Park

I have no intention of reading the newest Bret Easton Ellis novel, "Lunar Park." When I was young and alienated, I read his novels "Less than Zero," and "The Rules of Attraction," books about extremely wealthy college kids doing lots of drugs and having lots of anonymous sex. I enjoyed them at the time -- it's ironic that when you're feeling alienated, it's comforting to read books about other's people's alienation. (This is part of the enduring appeal of The Catcher in the Rye.)
Fortunately for me, The New York Times Book Review has an excellent review of "Lunar Park" by A. O. Scott, and it's well worth reading the whole thing.
The clincher:

The problem with this novel is not that it is a fast, lurching ride to nowhere. Of course it is; it's a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The problem is that it does not have the honesty to admit that it wants to be more, the faith that readers will accept more or the courage to try to be more. It is the portrait of a narcissist who is, in the end, terminally bored with himself; that it may also be a self-portrait doesn't make it any more true.

Books about journalism

Mediabistro.com asked professional media watchers to name the most useful book they've read about the media. The answers would fill a shelf with excellent books.
Here are the commentators who picked the books I want to read next:

Keith Kelly
Media Reporter, The New York Post
I don't think it sold like a rocket, but I thought Hard News, Seth Mnookin's book on all the problems at the New York Times involving Jayson Blair scandal and the eventual ouster of executive Howell Raines, was terrific. He took a story that had been covered to death, gave it a new perspective and unearthed lots of new material.

And in what I consider a unique twist, in the paperback version, he also printed a long line of corrections. Now what author has the integrity to do that?
...
Jack Shafer
Media Critic, Slate
I never travel far without a copy of W. Russell Neuman's The Future of the Mass Audience in hand. Published in 1991, well before the web arrived, it accurately predicted that evolving media technology would fragment the mass audience before economics and entrepreneurs conspired to reaggregate it. It was Neuman who first alerted me to the fact that the digitization of media meant that for the first time all media would speak a common language and that the cartels and monopolies dominating radio, TV, newspapers, motion pictures, recordings, etc. would finally be forced to compete with one another.

Read the whole article here.
Some of the commentators picked more than one book, and I will, too. My first most useful book is We the Media by Dan Gillmor. The former tech columnist for the San Jose Mercury News rights about how interactivity and the Web will open up journalism, making it a virtual conversation between the reporters, the sources and the readers. (I've blogged about this book before here.)
My other pick is "Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment," by Anthony Lewis. (Read a review from Columbia Journalism Review here). The book is about The New York Times vs. Sullivan, a landmark Supreme Court case that established important standards regarding freedom of the press and libel. Lewis was covering the court at the time of the case, so the book has a wonderful you-are-there quality.

Lafayette's Confederacy of Dunces

One of the great Louisiana novels is "A Confederacy of Dunces," by John Kennedy Toole. Some would argue that it is a New Orleans novel, and it is. But it also contains a whole lot of things that mark the general south Louisiana area - particularly a rollicking sense of fun and a fear of the bland hinterlands. The plot: Ignatius J. Reilly, medieval scholar and all-around eccentric, navigates his way through New Orleans condemning violations of taste and geometry, while his mother hectors him to get a job. I think it's hilarious, but it's also a novel that draws love-it-or-hate-it reactions.
The Independent, a smart weekly in Lafayette, La., recently published a story about the year that Toole lived there teaching English at the local university (now named the University of Louisiana at Lafayette). It's been local legend for years that Toole based Ignatius J. Reilly on a UL professor; The Independent's story connects the dots.
I love the quotes from Pat Rickels, one of the UL professors who knew Toole when he taught at the school in 1960. She called him Ken, and she said his inspiration for Ignatius was a medievalist by the name of Bobby Byrne.

Byrne retired in 1985 and passed away in 2000. Rickels says she is probably the last person alive on the faculty who knew Toole and Byrne well. "Any day I can spend talking about Ken and Bobby is a happy day for me," she says. "When we first saw that chapter in New Orleans magazine," Rickels says, "We thought, 'How awful.' We thought it would destroy Bobby.

"Finally I had the courage to ask Bobby if he liked Confederacy of Dunces," she remembers. "Apparently he never saw it. He knew he was the inspiration for Ignatius, but he didn't care. He didn't read modern books and said he never read best sellers. He was reading Boethius."

Bill Wilson biography

Is there such a thing as a warts-and-all hagiography?
If so, Susan Cheever has achieved it with her book "My Name is Bill: Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous."
She writes about many of Bill's character defects, most notably his nicotine addition, his infidelity to his wife Lois, and how he begged for a drink on his death bed. But she always comes back to his remarkable genius in founding AA, and how that organization has saved thousands, perhaps millions, of lives. Cheever makes a strong implied case that, due to his background and character, Bill Wilson was uniquely qualified to begin AA. So his flaws are not that significant. I came away from the book admiring Wilson but not really liking him, but also thinking that it's irrelevant whether I like him or not -- he was a great man.
From a literary point of view, I enjoyed reading about Bill's friendship with Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World. Bill experimented with LSD after he got sober but before LSD was made illegal. Huxley was interested in psychedelic drugs as well; he wrote about his experiences in his book The Doors of Perception. Both men believed that the drugs might be used to treat addiction. But beyond LSD, both Bill and Huxley were interested in how change is possible, both on the level of the individual person and society in general. Huxley called Bill "the greatest social architect of the 20th century," according to Cheever.
Cheever's writing is elegant and efficient. Here, for instance, is a beautiful passage she writes about Huxley and death:

Later, when Maria Huxley was diagnosed with breast cancer, both Huxley's acted on their belief in the friability of the line between the living and the dead. Huxley talked his wife "through" death, urging her toward the light as she gradually expired. It was a calm letting-go. In 1956, when Huxley was dying, he instructed his wife, Laura, to inject him intradermally with 100cc of LSD as he died and to talk him through it in the same way. She did, urging him on lovingly toward the light, hour after hour until his last breath.

Authoritative Self-Help

After reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, I was captivated with the ideas of Dr. John Gottman. Gladwell visits Gottman's marriage clinic, where Gottman and his researchers videotape couples talking about an area of conflict in their marriage. It can be any conflict, it doesn't matter what. Gottman and his clinicians then code the coversation based on emotional values he's developed over the years. Gladwell writes:

On the basis of those calculations, Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married 15 years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.

I thought this idea was so fascinating, and I wanted to read more about Gottman's theories. So I got a copy of The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family and Friendships, by John Gottman and Joan DeClaire.
Just one of Gottman's intriguing ideas is that we make emotional connections with bids. "How was your day?" is a bid for emotional connection. A one-word answer like, "Fine" is actually turning away from the bid. To turn toward the bid, you'd say something like, "Really good, I got to do research on the space shuttle. Did you know .... " That way, you're opening up the discussion instead of closing it down.
Gottman uses lots of examples to illustrate this point. For instance, a contradictory, turning-away response:

Friend A: Would you like a tangerine?
Friend B: That's not a tangerine. It's a Satsuma orange.

There's lots more to this book -- including facial expressions, emotional instincts and finding shared meaning. If you're interested in self-help, I highly recommend it.
My previous post on "Blink" is here; my secret confession to liking self-help books is here.