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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cb>Please Note:\u003c/b> This review has been slightly edited. I based some of my original comments on the belief that Vlautin’s novel was a reissue of a book originally published in the UK in 1999. I got this information from the book’s own copyright page, which clearly states, “First UK paperback edition published in 1999 by Faber and Faber Limited.” I’ve since confirmed with Vlautin’s publicist that the 1999 copyright date is a typographical error: the book was only just published in the UK in 2006. Before I found this out, I was mystified as to why the HarperCollins publicity machine wasn’t more upfront about how old a book it was. Well, mystery solved: It’s not even a year old. My opinion of the HarperCollins publicity department has improved significantly. Meanwhile, my opinion of the HarperCollins proofreading department has fallen off a bit, and my opinion of Willy Vlautin’s body of work is entirely unchanged. -SK\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s this short little book, written in the 1990’s by a not-so-young-anymore young guy, narrated by a protagonist who’s done a lot of hard living, who sort of wanders aimlessly but retains his sense of childlike wonder about the world and the things that are in it. It’s an absolutely flawless pieces of poetry, the kind of thing that makes me weep, actually weep, when no one is looking. The book begins with a car crash, the inevitability of which is rendered thusly: “My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside I knew we’d have an accident in the storm.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s this other short little book, set inthe 1990’s, whose protagonist is a hard-living yet wide-eyed innocent kid who does a lot of drinking and gambling but retains a childlike innocence about the world and the things that are in it. It’s so leaden and formulaic, it makes me despair for the state of American writing. The book also begins with a car crash, the inevitability of which is rendered thusly: “Bad luck, it falls on people every day. It’s one of the only certain truths.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first book is \u003cb>Jesus’ Son\u003c/b> by Denis Johnson, a multitalented poet, novelist, and playwright who took the dissipated life of a drug-addled man in his twenties and elevated it to an almost mystical, saintly meditation on redemption and loss. The second book is \u003cb>The Motel Life\u003c/b> by Willy Vlautin, the singer of an obscure alt-country outfit called Richmond Fontaine. It was first published in the UK last year, and is now being released in the US by HarperPerennial, just in time to capitalize on the release of a new Richmond Fontaine album, \u003cb>Thirteen Cities\u003c/b>. From what I gather, Richmond Fontaine has built up quite the British and European following over the past decade. One review in a UK magazine said they are well known to fans of the “Americana genre”: something that doesn’t really exist here in the same form. British and Irish reviews of Vlautin’s novel also use the word “Americana” liberally. I get the sense that it’s popular over there because it depicts a kind of defeated, romantic, western, lonely open road sensibility that has no analogue in Britain, that appears “authentically” American and totally exotic if you grew up in, say, London. But let’s compare books again: \u003cb>Jesus’ Son\u003c/b> treads the same geographic and demographic terrain as Vlautin’s book, it reads like it was written by a man who walked through hellfire and came through it clutching one of Satan’s hot coals, as proof. On the other hand, \u003cb>The Motel Life\u003c/b> reads like it was written by a man who read \u003cb>Jesus’ Son\u003c/b> (along with the complete works of Raymond Carver, perhaps) and thought he’d try that, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vlautin bites off way more than he can chew with this story, a meandering tale of two brothers ekeing out one of the most miserable existences in fiction since “The Little Match Girl.” Frank Flannigan, the narrator, and his older brother Jerry Lee, both in their late teens, are living in Reno on their dead mother’s life savings. Ever since she died of cancer they have been attempting to live on their own, so as to avoid foster care and all its attendant horrors. But they’re not doing too good a job of it, to say the least. They hop from sleazy motel to motel, working odd jobs like scrubbing down vehicles in a used car lot. They hang out in casinos with ne’er-do-wells, they have sex with sad abused girls, and they drink. They drink more than it seems humanly possible to drink. Beer is consumed on nearly every page of the book, at every hour of the day, sometimes alongside Pepto Bismol or a glass of milk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jerry Lee has already lost a leg while train-hopping when the story begins, but the misery carnival has barely begun. Driving drunk, he has hit and killed a kid on a bike. Displaying a virtuoso talent for poor decision-making, Frank and Jerry Lee decide to dump the kid’s body on the side of the road and run. What follows is a series of flashbacks that get us up to speed on how all this came to be, interspersed with made-up stories that Frank tells Jerry Lee when they can’t sleep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The narrative is oddly unmoored in time, there are almost no references that will help you figure out what year it’s supposed to be (Willie Nelson is the favorite singer of the brothers). Also they never seem to consume any drug other than beer, which seems surprising, since I’d think it would actually be easier and cheaper for a couple of teenagers in Reno to get high than buy a six-pack. The only detail grounding the story in time is that the climax takes place during the week of the Tyson-Holyfield heavyweight championship bout. Reno and its myriad motels are unrelentingly bleak: It’s always cold and just about to snow, the asphalt is always lit by neon, and the next big win is always just out of reach. You could invent a fun drinking game where every time a character says he “Hurts Real Bad,” you do a shot. The characters are wooden, the dialogue rings false, Reno as rendered here is like a stage set. Every glimmer of hope or change is snatched away, and by page fifty you can already guess how it’s all going to end. (Hint: not well.).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The American debut of \u003cb>The Motel Life\u003c/b> is getting the full frontlist treatment from HarperPerennial, and not only that, it’s a “P.S.” edition: it has a special section of bordered pages in the back that contain an interview with Willy Vlautin and other supporting materials. Harper has been doing a lot of this, a sort of DVD Special Feature in book form. And just like on a DVD, the special features can be fascinating and revelatory, or they can be totally superfluous. In the interview, Willy Vlautin almost seems like a character Denis Johnson could have written, going on about drinking and road life and betting on horses at the track. When asked what the high point of his life would be, he says to the interviewer, “having a girl like you think you’re actually alright and worth spending time with.” My favorite moment comes when he describes how he sold, for a criminally paltry sum, his complete collection of Charles Bukowski novels: “I had this revelation: Maybe if I got rid of the Bukowski books I wouldn’t be a loser anymore. Maybe if I sold the books I wouldn’t be sweating to death and hung over…Maybe I’d amount to something. It had to be Bukowski’s influence that was ruining me.” Oh, Willy, what are we gonna do with you?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I listened to a couple Richmond Fontaine songs online while writing this review, in an attempt to get in the right frame of mind. They were fine, they pretty much sound like Uncle Tupelo (a seminal ’90s alt-country band) only with a horn section, and a more limited range of song subjects (living in your mother’s basement, betting on horse races). Then, to cleasnse my palate, I listened to an album by the arguable progenitor of alt-country, Gram Parsons, a guy so hardcore he drank himself to death at the age of 27. One of the iconic tunes from his brief career is a soaring, gorgeous duet with Emmylou Harris, a cover of the cheesy rock ballad “Love Hurts”: “Some folks fool themselves I guess, but they’re not fooling me,” goes the bridge. He hits the high note, and you get the sound of a man who’s taken his pain and made it beautiful. For a true hard-drinking, soul-searing hit of pure Americana, rather than a stage-managed rehash, listen to some Gram Parsons while you read Denis Johnson. Only in his wildest dreams is Willy Vlautin fit to shine the boots of either man, let alone step into them.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cb>Please Note:\u003c/b> This review has been slightly edited. I based some of my original comments on the belief that Vlautin’s novel was a reissue of a book originally published in the UK in 1999. I got this information from the book’s own copyright page, which clearly states, “First UK paperback edition published in 1999 by Faber and Faber Limited.” I’ve since confirmed with Vlautin’s publicist that the 1999 copyright date is a typographical error: the book was only just published in the UK in 2006. Before I found this out, I was mystified as to why the HarperCollins publicity machine wasn’t more upfront about how old a book it was. Well, mystery solved: It’s not even a year old. My opinion of the HarperCollins publicity department has improved significantly. Meanwhile, my opinion of the HarperCollins proofreading department has fallen off a bit, and my opinion of Willy Vlautin’s body of work is entirely unchanged. -SK\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s this short little book, written in the 1990’s by a not-so-young-anymore young guy, narrated by a protagonist who’s done a lot of hard living, who sort of wanders aimlessly but retains his sense of childlike wonder about the world and the things that are in it. It’s an absolutely flawless pieces of poetry, the kind of thing that makes me weep, actually weep, when no one is looking. The book begins with a car crash, the inevitability of which is rendered thusly: “My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside I knew we’d have an accident in the storm.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s this other short little book, set inthe 1990’s, whose protagonist is a hard-living yet wide-eyed innocent kid who does a lot of drinking and gambling but retains a childlike innocence about the world and the things that are in it. It’s so leaden and formulaic, it makes me despair for the state of American writing. The book also begins with a car crash, the inevitability of which is rendered thusly: “Bad luck, it falls on people every day. It’s one of the only certain truths.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first book is \u003cb>Jesus’ Son\u003c/b> by Denis Johnson, a multitalented poet, novelist, and playwright who took the dissipated life of a drug-addled man in his twenties and elevated it to an almost mystical, saintly meditation on redemption and loss. The second book is \u003cb>The Motel Life\u003c/b> by Willy Vlautin, the singer of an obscure alt-country outfit called Richmond Fontaine. It was first published in the UK last year, and is now being released in the US by HarperPerennial, just in time to capitalize on the release of a new Richmond Fontaine album, \u003cb>Thirteen Cities\u003c/b>. From what I gather, Richmond Fontaine has built up quite the British and European following over the past decade. One review in a UK magazine said they are well known to fans of the “Americana genre”: something that doesn’t really exist here in the same form. British and Irish reviews of Vlautin’s novel also use the word “Americana” liberally. I get the sense that it’s popular over there because it depicts a kind of defeated, romantic, western, lonely open road sensibility that has no analogue in Britain, that appears “authentically” American and totally exotic if you grew up in, say, London. But let’s compare books again: \u003cb>Jesus’ Son\u003c/b> treads the same geographic and demographic terrain as Vlautin’s book, it reads like it was written by a man who walked through hellfire and came through it clutching one of Satan’s hot coals, as proof. On the other hand, \u003cb>The Motel Life\u003c/b> reads like it was written by a man who read \u003cb>Jesus’ Son\u003c/b> (along with the complete works of Raymond Carver, perhaps) and thought he’d try that, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vlautin bites off way more than he can chew with this story, a meandering tale of two brothers ekeing out one of the most miserable existences in fiction since “The Little Match Girl.” Frank Flannigan, the narrator, and his older brother Jerry Lee, both in their late teens, are living in Reno on their dead mother’s life savings. Ever since she died of cancer they have been attempting to live on their own, so as to avoid foster care and all its attendant horrors. But they’re not doing too good a job of it, to say the least. They hop from sleazy motel to motel, working odd jobs like scrubbing down vehicles in a used car lot. They hang out in casinos with ne’er-do-wells, they have sex with sad abused girls, and they drink. They drink more than it seems humanly possible to drink. Beer is consumed on nearly every page of the book, at every hour of the day, sometimes alongside Pepto Bismol or a glass of milk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jerry Lee has already lost a leg while train-hopping when the story begins, but the misery carnival has barely begun. Driving drunk, he has hit and killed a kid on a bike. Displaying a virtuoso talent for poor decision-making, Frank and Jerry Lee decide to dump the kid’s body on the side of the road and run. What follows is a series of flashbacks that get us up to speed on how all this came to be, interspersed with made-up stories that Frank tells Jerry Lee when they can’t sleep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The narrative is oddly unmoored in time, there are almost no references that will help you figure out what year it’s supposed to be (Willie Nelson is the favorite singer of the brothers). Also they never seem to consume any drug other than beer, which seems surprising, since I’d think it would actually be easier and cheaper for a couple of teenagers in Reno to get high than buy a six-pack. The only detail grounding the story in time is that the climax takes place during the week of the Tyson-Holyfield heavyweight championship bout. Reno and its myriad motels are unrelentingly bleak: It’s always cold and just about to snow, the asphalt is always lit by neon, and the next big win is always just out of reach. You could invent a fun drinking game where every time a character says he “Hurts Real Bad,” you do a shot. The characters are wooden, the dialogue rings false, Reno as rendered here is like a stage set. Every glimmer of hope or change is snatched away, and by page fifty you can already guess how it’s all going to end. (Hint: not well.).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The American debut of \u003cb>The Motel Life\u003c/b> is getting the full frontlist treatment from HarperPerennial, and not only that, it’s a “P.S.” edition: it has a special section of bordered pages in the back that contain an interview with Willy Vlautin and other supporting materials. Harper has been doing a lot of this, a sort of DVD Special Feature in book form. And just like on a DVD, the special features can be fascinating and revelatory, or they can be totally superfluous. In the interview, Willy Vlautin almost seems like a character Denis Johnson could have written, going on about drinking and road life and betting on horses at the track. When asked what the high point of his life would be, he says to the interviewer, “having a girl like you think you’re actually alright and worth spending time with.” My favorite moment comes when he describes how he sold, for a criminally paltry sum, his complete collection of Charles Bukowski novels: “I had this revelation: Maybe if I got rid of the Bukowski books I wouldn’t be a loser anymore. Maybe if I sold the books I wouldn’t be sweating to death and hung over…Maybe I’d amount to something. It had to be Bukowski’s influence that was ruining me.” Oh, Willy, what are we gonna do with you?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I listened to a couple Richmond Fontaine songs online while writing this review, in an attempt to get in the right frame of mind. They were fine, they pretty much sound like Uncle Tupelo (a seminal ’90s alt-country band) only with a horn section, and a more limited range of song subjects (living in your mother’s basement, betting on horse races). Then, to cleasnse my palate, I listened to an album by the arguable progenitor of alt-country, Gram Parsons, a guy so hardcore he drank himself to death at the age of 27. One of the iconic tunes from his brief career is a soaring, gorgeous duet with Emmylou Harris, a cover of the cheesy rock ballad “Love Hurts”: “Some folks fool themselves I guess, but they’re not fooling me,” goes the bridge. He hits the high note, and you get the sound of a man who’s taken his pain and made it beautiful. For a true hard-drinking, soul-searing hit of pure Americana, rather than a stage-managed rehash, listen to some Gram Parsons while you read Denis Johnson. Only in his wildest dreams is Willy Vlautin fit to shine the boots of either man, let alone step into them.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>You read enough books and you get real familiar, real quick, with a few things. One of these is the pervasive habit of underestimating an audience’s intelligence. Many authors seem to think that no plot point will be noticed, no emotional moment will make an impact, unless it is banged into the reader’s head with a sledgehammer and then lit with a giant flashing neon sign. Thankfully, from the first time I ever read an Ann Cummins short story, I knew she was not one of those. That was “Red Ant House,” it ran in a 2001 issue of \u003ci>McSweeney’s\u003c/i>, and I was immediately struck by the scrubbed raw, stark beauty of her prose. “Red Ant House” went on to appear in \u003cb>Best American Short Stories 2002\u003c/b>, and lent its title to her first book, a story collection. 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In front of local politicos, mine representatives, Navajo tribal elders, and lawyers, Rosy makes the case for financial compensation for all the sick millworkers — of which there are many. Even as she does all this, she’s helping her daughter plan a wedding. (That’s where the other yellow cake comes in.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> It’s clear right off the bat that Ryland is a stand-up guy. The same cannot be said of his lifelong friend and former brother-in-law, Sam Behan. Sam was a drunk, a user, who carried on a long affair with a much younger Navajo woman, Alice Atcitty, at the same time he was married to Rosy’s sister Lily. His job required him to climb around all day on a huge pile of radioactive mine tailings: “Someplace there’s a photo of Sam on the catwalk they erected at the top of the pile, standing up there smoking a cigarette, on the clock, his face a study in indifference, Superman, to look at him.” Despite this, despite living in a home downwind from this same pile of tailings, and despite being an emotionally crippled and generally nasty piece of work, he came out healthy while Ryland’s lungs are “shriveled sacks,” working at half capacity. Sam took off to Florida years earlier, but when he comes back to town to watch Ryland and Rosy’s daughter get married, all sorts of long-buried resentments bubble back up to the surface.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve read two books in the last two months where the identity of a character’s father is a closely guarded, lifelong secret, revealed at a climactic moment. This is never how these things really go. In the real world, if someone has fathered a child he shouldn’t, it’s never REALLY a secret. It’s an elephant in the room, something everyone knows and doesn’t mention. So my admiration for Ann Cummins grew even more when she dealt with this situation so deftly. Midway through the book, Sam says something about his “kid.” He’s referring to Delmar Atcitty, Alice’s son, a wild, charismatic Navajo “half breed” fresh from prison, who we’ve previously met. You realize suddenly that, of course, Sam must be his dad: without realizing, you already knew.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are many stories in \u003cb>Yellowcake\u003c/b>, and Cummins jumps in and out of the character’s heads at will. The constant throughout, though, is that the women hold fast while the men fall apart. Delmar’s cousin Becky Atcitty holds down a good job at the bank, ferries around Delmar in her truck because he lost his license, and attends the same meetings that Rosy does — on behalf of her own dying father. It’s the wives, daughters, and mothers who come to all the meetings, helplessly trying to figure out what should be done for the decaying, poisoned mine and the decaying, poisoned people who ran it. Rosy’s sister Lily, so successful at creating a full life for herself after her cheating husband ran off, has to fight to keep it together when Sam comes back to betray her yet again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ann Cummins has an incredible gift for revealing character in tiny moments, glimpses, turns of phrase. “You’re my memory”, Ryland says to Rosy, whenever she reminds him of yet another meeting or medical procedure he’s forgotten. It’s a sentence freighted with resignation, dependence, sadness, love. It tells us far more about their relationship than a simple “I love you” ever could. The book ends with some wedding scenes, which were the only part of \u003cb>Yellowcake\u003c/b> that I really took issue with. Not even Ann Cummins, so skilled at avoiding the syrupy, can write a wedding reception scene without its becoming sugar-encrusted with gossipy aunts and cute flower girls. A few pages feel lifted straight from \u003cb>Steel Magnolias\u003c/b>. Blessedly, it’s only a brief lapse. She more than redeems herself with the depiction of the relationship between the long-absent Sam and his wary son. In one scene near the end, Delmar and Sam are charged with completing a very important and difficult task together. A lesser writer would have had the two men come to an understanding. They would have made peace, recognized one another’s failings, overcome their lifelong disagreements. But these two men, so similar in character, are too damaged and too resentful for something that simple to happen. Cummins knows this, and delivers a resolution that is totally unexpected, yet totally in character.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are almost no animals in this sun-and-radiation-blasted landscape, save a few notable exceptions. A group of “hobbled horses” used to graze on the lawns of the millworkers’ homes, right up to the kitchen windows. Both the houses and the horses are long gone. Ryland has a recurring dream about a fox he used to see running down the “garden path.” This was the mill’s nickname for a strip of concrete that ran between two leaching ponds: one full of caustic acid, the other of clean water. The animals and the protagonists have a lot in common. Without even realizing it, they’re negotiating a life-and-death balancing act, making some sort of life in a place that has become totally hostile to their nature. 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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>You read enough books and you get real familiar, real quick, with a few things. One of these is the pervasive habit of underestimating an audience’s intelligence. Many authors seem to think that no plot point will be noticed, no emotional moment will make an impact, unless it is banged into the reader’s head with a sledgehammer and then lit with a giant flashing neon sign. Thankfully, from the first time I ever read an Ann Cummins short story, I knew she was not one of those. That was “Red Ant House,” it ran in a 2001 issue of \u003ci>McSweeney’s\u003c/i>, and I was immediately struck by the scrubbed raw, stark beauty of her prose. “Red Ant House” went on to appear in \u003cb>Best American Short Stories 2002\u003c/b>, and lent its title to her first book, a story collection. Now Ann Cummins has followed it up with \u003cb>Yellowcake\u003c/b>, a novel just as scrubbed raw and spare band beautiful as her shorter works, with nary a sledgehammer or neon sign in sight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The title refers to both meanings of the term. The book centers around the lives of some aging men, former employees of a now-defunct uranium processing mill on Navajo land, in the border area between New Mexico and Colorado. Ryland Mahoney, the former foreman, is ill with emphysema. He no longer has the energy to do much except sit and think, and thus becomes the stationary hub around which his family and all the interlocking storylines spin out. Ryland’s wife Rosy, an almost terrifyingly capable, bustling, organized woman, runs the house. She keeps track of all her husband’s doctor appointments, baby-sits the grandkids, and collects documents to present at the constant meetings. In front of local politicos, mine representatives, Navajo tribal elders, and lawyers, Rosy makes the case for financial compensation for all the sick millworkers — of which there are many. Even as she does all this, she’s helping her daughter plan a wedding. (That’s where the other yellow cake comes in.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> It’s clear right off the bat that Ryland is a stand-up guy. The same cannot be said of his lifelong friend and former brother-in-law, Sam Behan. Sam was a drunk, a user, who carried on a long affair with a much younger Navajo woman, Alice Atcitty, at the same time he was married to Rosy’s sister Lily. His job required him to climb around all day on a huge pile of radioactive mine tailings: “Someplace there’s a photo of Sam on the catwalk they erected at the top of the pile, standing up there smoking a cigarette, on the clock, his face a study in indifference, Superman, to look at him.” Despite this, despite living in a home downwind from this same pile of tailings, and despite being an emotionally crippled and generally nasty piece of work, he came out healthy while Ryland’s lungs are “shriveled sacks,” working at half capacity. Sam took off to Florida years earlier, but when he comes back to town to watch Ryland and Rosy’s daughter get married, all sorts of long-buried resentments bubble back up to the surface.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve read two books in the last two months where the identity of a character’s father is a closely guarded, lifelong secret, revealed at a climactic moment. This is never how these things really go. In the real world, if someone has fathered a child he shouldn’t, it’s never REALLY a secret. It’s an elephant in the room, something everyone knows and doesn’t mention. So my admiration for Ann Cummins grew even more when she dealt with this situation so deftly. Midway through the book, Sam says something about his “kid.” He’s referring to Delmar Atcitty, Alice’s son, a wild, charismatic Navajo “half breed” fresh from prison, who we’ve previously met. You realize suddenly that, of course, Sam must be his dad: without realizing, you already knew.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are many stories in \u003cb>Yellowcake\u003c/b>, and Cummins jumps in and out of the character’s heads at will. The constant throughout, though, is that the women hold fast while the men fall apart. Delmar’s cousin Becky Atcitty holds down a good job at the bank, ferries around Delmar in her truck because he lost his license, and attends the same meetings that Rosy does — on behalf of her own dying father. It’s the wives, daughters, and mothers who come to all the meetings, helplessly trying to figure out what should be done for the decaying, poisoned mine and the decaying, poisoned people who ran it. Rosy’s sister Lily, so successful at creating a full life for herself after her cheating husband ran off, has to fight to keep it together when Sam comes back to betray her yet again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>If you’re an NPR fan (which I’m betting you are, otherwise why are you reading this blog?), you may have already heard about Turkish author Elif Shafak and the firestorm surrounding her novel \u003cb>The Bastard of Istanbul\u003c/b>. Like Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk and scores of other prominent Turkish authors, Shafak was charged under the now-infamous Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which states that it is a crime to insult “Turkishness.” While recovering from childbirth in a hospital, she was acquitted in absentia. Not long after, her friend and colleague, the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was murdered by an ultranationalist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What I wasn’t really aware of until doing a little research for this review is that these two incidents galvanized the Turkish public against Article 301, and against the government’s continuing denial that a genocide took place against the Armenian minority in 1915. The trial against Shafak was widely regarded as a farce. In the days after Hrant Dink’s death, crowds marched in the streets chanting “We are all Hrant Dink, we are all Armenian.” The Turkish public is largely fed up, and is heavily in favor of changing laws to facilitate the country’s entry to the European Union and heal the wounds of the past.Shafak’s trial and subsequent backlash may be the catalyst that makes it happen. \u003cb>The Bastard of Istanbul\u003c/b> has officially gone from “novel” to “cultural touchstone.” So, why write another review? What is left to say about it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shafak was the first author ever charged under Article 301 for statements made by characters in a novel. It’s a useful reminder to us here in the US that fiction, when handled properly, can be as incendiary as a pipe bomb. That it’s a method of speaking the truth that can have literal, actual world-changing consequences. That a novel can be a matter of life and death. One thing you won’t hear a lot about in the many articles that have been written about Shafak is the content of the actual book (aside from a few brief quotes of the passages that got her in hot water.) It seems like plain old bad manners to ask this: Is \u003cb>The Bastard of Istanbul\u003c/b> — as a novel, a story, a reading experience rather than a political statement — any good?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story is sprawling, populated by a cast of dozens, spanning a hundred years. It’s tough to summarize, but I’ll try. The story opens with Zeliha Kazanci, a rebellious, hot-tempered young woman in a miniskirt, angrily tromping through the rainy streets of Istanbul and cursing the skies. Before long, we find out why she is so disconsolate: she is pregnant, unmarried, and on her way to have an abortion. At the last minute, though, she can’t bring herself to go through with the procedure. And thus she becomes the mother of Asya, the titular bastard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fast forward to the present day. Asya is now the age that her mother was when she was born. Asya is suffocating in an all-female household, stuffed with Aunties and grannies. There’s her mother (who she calls Auntie Zeliha: a still unmarried Bohemian tattoo artist), Auntie Banu (a headscarf-wearing fortune teller) Auntie Feride (a paranoid schizophrenic with ever-changing hair color) and Auntie Cevriye (a shy schoolteacher). There’s Grandma Gulsum, a grim woman who has never fully accepted her granddaughter, and Petite-Ma, the senile great-grandmother who keeps the secrets hidden. All the Kazanci men have either died of illness, been killed by violence, or sent into exile. In the latter category is Uncle Mustafa, who moved to Arizona twenty years earlier and has never been back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cut to Arizona, where Mustafa is married to Rose, the broadest caricature of a white American woman you can imagine. (We first encounter her in a supermarket, buying diet ice cream bars by the case.) Rose seems to have married Mustafa entirely out of spite: her ex-husband, the father of her daughter, is Armenian. That daughter, Armanoush (or “Amy”, as her mother calls her) is the same age as Asya and is equally suffocated: by her doting, meddling Armenian-American relatives in San Francisco, and her bitchy, possessive, meddling blond mother in Arizona. Feeling lost and displaced, the only space Armanoush has to herself is Cafe Constantinopolis, an online community of young, politically outspoken Armenian-Americans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the chatroom, Armanoush is inspired by a discussion about Janissaries — “Christian children captured and converted by the Ottoman state with a CHANCE to climb the social ladder at the expense of despising their own people and forgetting their own past,” in the words of one virtual chatter. “Will you abandon your community to make peace with the Turks and let them whitewash the past so that, as they say, we can all move FORWARD?” The general consensus among this group is: There can be no moving forward, in any fashion, without Turkish acknowledgment of the 1915 genocide. Armanoush concocts a plan. She travels to Istanbul without telling either of her parents. She goes to stay with her stepfather’s family — sharing a room with Asya, her opposite and double. For the remainder of the book, Asya and Armanoush argue about history, bond against their respective crazy relatives, and discover a few deep dark family secrets. We find out the shocking identity of Asya’s father, and we find out that the two families, one Turkish and one Armenian, are more closely tied by blood and by history than they know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elif Shafak translated her book into English herself. This might help to excuse or explain some of the stiltedness in the dialogue that mars the story. Early on, Asya is telling Armanoush about how she started hating sports once she grew breasts. “The body moves forward gaining speed in accordance with the law of acceleration. The amount of change in your speed is proportional to the amount of force impressed upon the body, and in that direction. And then what happens? The boobies accelerate too, even though they move with a completely dissonant rhythm of their own, up and down, eventually slowing your wind. The law of inertia plus the law of universal gravitation!” If you can find two nineteen-year-old girls who actually speak this way to each other, anywhere on earth, I’ll give you a million dollars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Given that the whole theme of the novel is cultural displacement and lack of understanding, I would have expected more attention to be paid to the way the characters speak to one another. Armanoush speaks no Turkish. Most of the Turkish characters speak no English, except for Asya and and a few of her friends. But we’re simply expected to believe that Asya is able to translate and referee complex discussions about history and genocide, translating everyone’s contribution around the table, with no pauses or misunderstandings. Jonathan Safran Foer dealt with this problem much more imaginatively in \u003cb>Everything Is Illuminated\u003c/b>, another novel where a young American goes back to the old country to confront past atrocities. Foer has every other chapter narrated in broken English by Alex, the Ukrainian tour guide. As the book goes on, Alex’s idiosyncratic English improves more and more. Shafak just skips over the language issue entirely, which seems like a missed opportunity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A couple other aspects grated on me. One is the fact that the characters in the novel, over and over, are described as being like characters in a novel. “I am surrounded by Chekhovian characters!” thinks Armanoush, about her family. Later, to her chatroom friends, she writes, “I feel like I am in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel.” Not ten pages later: “They are like Flannery O’Connor characters, Armanoush thought to herself.” After hanging out with Asya’s disaffected friends, Armanoush describes them as being like characters from a Kundera novel. (Not much of a stretch, considering they hang out at a place called Cafe Kundera.) Another tic that broke my concentration over and over is Shafak’s liberal use of punctuation marks. Here is how Rose responds, when she discovers her daughter has secretly left the country: “Oh my god!! But she is not here! Where is my baby?! Where is she?!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, sure, the big dark secret at the center of the story ends up being not much of a secret at all to the attentive reader. And yes, the dialogue is a bit wooden. Maybe more than a bit. But that is because \u003cb>The Bastard of Istanbul\u003c/b> isn’t really a novel. Shafak uses fictional characters as proxies, symbolic of various political and ethnic factions, to have a book-length discussion about Turkey’s past and future. Nationalists saw this book as a threat, because it is a threat. Had Elif Shafak taken all the opinions and statements of the characters and written a nonfiction book of essays on Turkishness, denial, and genocide, her very life could have been at stake, just like her friend Hrant Dink, rather than just her freedom. \u003cb>The Bastard of Istanbul\u003c/b> is a provocation, a point of discussion, a refusal to deny the past any longer. By that measure, Elif Shafak succeeds, tremendously.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>If you’re an NPR fan (which I’m betting you are, otherwise why are you reading this blog?), you may have already heard about Turkish author Elif Shafak and the firestorm surrounding her novel \u003cb>The Bastard of Istanbul\u003c/b>. Like Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk and scores of other prominent Turkish authors, Shafak was charged under the now-infamous Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which states that it is a crime to insult “Turkishness.” While recovering from childbirth in a hospital, she was acquitted in absentia. Not long after, her friend and colleague, the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was murdered by an ultranationalist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What I wasn’t really aware of until doing a little research for this review is that these two incidents galvanized the Turkish public against Article 301, and against the government’s continuing denial that a genocide took place against the Armenian minority in 1915. The trial against Shafak was widely regarded as a farce. In the days after Hrant Dink’s death, crowds marched in the streets chanting “We are all Hrant Dink, we are all Armenian.” The Turkish public is largely fed up, and is heavily in favor of changing laws to facilitate the country’s entry to the European Union and heal the wounds of the past.Shafak’s trial and subsequent backlash may be the catalyst that makes it happen. \u003cb>The Bastard of Istanbul\u003c/b> has officially gone from “novel” to “cultural touchstone.” So, why write another review? What is left to say about it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shafak was the first author ever charged under Article 301 for statements made by characters in a novel. It’s a useful reminder to us here in the US that fiction, when handled properly, can be as incendiary as a pipe bomb. That it’s a method of speaking the truth that can have literal, actual world-changing consequences. That a novel can be a matter of life and death. One thing you won’t hear a lot about in the many articles that have been written about Shafak is the content of the actual book (aside from a few brief quotes of the passages that got her in hot water.) It seems like plain old bad manners to ask this: Is \u003cb>The Bastard of Istanbul\u003c/b> — as a novel, a story, a reading experience rather than a political statement — any good?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story is sprawling, populated by a cast of dozens, spanning a hundred years. It’s tough to summarize, but I’ll try. The story opens with Zeliha Kazanci, a rebellious, hot-tempered young woman in a miniskirt, angrily tromping through the rainy streets of Istanbul and cursing the skies. Before long, we find out why she is so disconsolate: she is pregnant, unmarried, and on her way to have an abortion. At the last minute, though, she can’t bring herself to go through with the procedure. And thus she becomes the mother of Asya, the titular bastard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fast forward to the present day. Asya is now the age that her mother was when she was born. Asya is suffocating in an all-female household, stuffed with Aunties and grannies. There’s her mother (who she calls Auntie Zeliha: a still unmarried Bohemian tattoo artist), Auntie Banu (a headscarf-wearing fortune teller) Auntie Feride (a paranoid schizophrenic with ever-changing hair color) and Auntie Cevriye (a shy schoolteacher). There’s Grandma Gulsum, a grim woman who has never fully accepted her granddaughter, and Petite-Ma, the senile great-grandmother who keeps the secrets hidden. All the Kazanci men have either died of illness, been killed by violence, or sent into exile. In the latter category is Uncle Mustafa, who moved to Arizona twenty years earlier and has never been back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cut to Arizona, where Mustafa is married to Rose, the broadest caricature of a white American woman you can imagine. (We first encounter her in a supermarket, buying diet ice cream bars by the case.) Rose seems to have married Mustafa entirely out of spite: her ex-husband, the father of her daughter, is Armenian. That daughter, Armanoush (or “Amy”, as her mother calls her) is the same age as Asya and is equally suffocated: by her doting, meddling Armenian-American relatives in San Francisco, and her bitchy, possessive, meddling blond mother in Arizona. Feeling lost and displaced, the only space Armanoush has to herself is Cafe Constantinopolis, an online community of young, politically outspoken Armenian-Americans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the chatroom, Armanoush is inspired by a discussion about Janissaries — “Christian children captured and converted by the Ottoman state with a CHANCE to climb the social ladder at the expense of despising their own people and forgetting their own past,” in the words of one virtual chatter. “Will you abandon your community to make peace with the Turks and let them whitewash the past so that, as they say, we can all move FORWARD?” The general consensus among this group is: There can be no moving forward, in any fashion, without Turkish acknowledgment of the 1915 genocide. Armanoush concocts a plan. She travels to Istanbul without telling either of her parents. She goes to stay with her stepfather’s family — sharing a room with Asya, her opposite and double. For the remainder of the book, Asya and Armanoush argue about history, bond against their respective crazy relatives, and discover a few deep dark family secrets. We find out the shocking identity of Asya’s father, and we find out that the two families, one Turkish and one Armenian, are more closely tied by blood and by history than they know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elif Shafak translated her book into English herself. This might help to excuse or explain some of the stiltedness in the dialogue that mars the story. Early on, Asya is telling Armanoush about how she started hating sports once she grew breasts. “The body moves forward gaining speed in accordance with the law of acceleration. The amount of change in your speed is proportional to the amount of force impressed upon the body, and in that direction. And then what happens? The boobies accelerate too, even though they move with a completely dissonant rhythm of their own, up and down, eventually slowing your wind. The law of inertia plus the law of universal gravitation!” If you can find two nineteen-year-old girls who actually speak this way to each other, anywhere on earth, I’ll give you a million dollars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Given that the whole theme of the novel is cultural displacement and lack of understanding, I would have expected more attention to be paid to the way the characters speak to one another. Armanoush speaks no Turkish. Most of the Turkish characters speak no English, except for Asya and and a few of her friends. But we’re simply expected to believe that Asya is able to translate and referee complex discussions about history and genocide, translating everyone’s contribution around the table, with no pauses or misunderstandings. Jonathan Safran Foer dealt with this problem much more imaginatively in \u003cb>Everything Is Illuminated\u003c/b>, another novel where a young American goes back to the old country to confront past atrocities. Foer has every other chapter narrated in broken English by Alex, the Ukrainian tour guide. As the book goes on, Alex’s idiosyncratic English improves more and more. Shafak just skips over the language issue entirely, which seems like a missed opportunity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A couple other aspects grated on me. One is the fact that the characters in the novel, over and over, are described as being like characters in a novel. “I am surrounded by Chekhovian characters!” thinks Armanoush, about her family. Later, to her chatroom friends, she writes, “I feel like I am in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel.” Not ten pages later: “They are like Flannery O’Connor characters, Armanoush thought to herself.” After hanging out with Asya’s disaffected friends, Armanoush describes them as being like characters from a Kundera novel. (Not much of a stretch, considering they hang out at a place called Cafe Kundera.) Another tic that broke my concentration over and over is Shafak’s liberal use of punctuation marks. Here is how Rose responds, when she discovers her daughter has secretly left the country: “Oh my god!! But she is not here! Where is my baby?! Where is she?!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, sure, the big dark secret at the center of the story ends up being not much of a secret at all to the attentive reader. And yes, the dialogue is a bit wooden. Maybe more than a bit. But that is because \u003cb>The Bastard of Istanbul\u003c/b> isn’t really a novel. Shafak uses fictional characters as proxies, symbolic of various political and ethnic factions, to have a book-length discussion about Turkey’s past and future. Nationalists saw this book as a threat, because it is a threat. Had Elif Shafak taken all the opinions and statements of the characters and written a nonfiction book of essays on Turkishness, denial, and genocide, her very life could have been at stake, just like her friend Hrant Dink, rather than just her freedom. \u003cb>The Bastard of Istanbul\u003c/b> is a provocation, a point of discussion, a refusal to deny the past any longer. By that measure, Elif Shafak succeeds, tremendously.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>I’ve said it before, and I’d bet the farm that there’ll be an occasion (read: tomorrow) for me to say this again: I love to waste time on internet pop culture. Really, I’ll throw away entire afternoons on blogs, online magazines, and searching out the coveted \u003ca href=\"http://www.totallyabsurd.com/neck%20fanny%20pack.GIF\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">random gem\u003c/a>. Luckily this blog exists to capitalize on my compulsion, and help funnel my guilt about the hours spent giving my heart to \u003ca href=\"http://www.rejectedjokes.com\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">adorably awkward stand-up comedians\u003c/a> or clicking through the entire archives of a web comic on one sitting. Like a snow-covered Everest climber here to recount the tale of my harrowing adventure, I hope you can learn and grow from my exploration. And by “learn and grow” I mean find a comfortable chair and start reading the excellent web comic \u003ca href=\"http://www.jsayers.com/thingpart/thingpart.html\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Thingpart\u003c/a> by the Bay Area’s own Joe Sayers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve written about his \u003ca href=\"http://%20http://www.kqed.org/arts/lit/index.jsp?id=10660\">books before\u003c/a>, but Sayers’s web comic is worth a separate mention. Reading these small, black and white strips pretty much guarantees a good laugh, and a happy reminder that there are artists who are genuinely, honestly original. \u003cb>Thingpart\u003c/b> subjects and humor fall in that golden territory between inappropriate and ludicrous. There are no recurring characters, and the stories change from week to week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In one of my \u003ca href=\"http://www.jsayers.com/thingpart/thingpart91.html\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">favorite strips\u003c/a> a man and woman astronaut have a dirty little plan. They approach their NASA supervisor with their idea to start a mission to study the effects of zero gravity on sex. As the supervisor applauds the idea, the couple smile at each other, all ready for some hot space action. But there’s one more panel. The supervisor happily reveals that he’s already arranged test subjects for their steamy study — both sets of their parents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I guess I could haul out the old standby of “irreverent” to describe the \u003cb>Thingpart\u003c/b> style. (Usually I try to avoid that word because it always seems to pop up every time crusty old critics try to tackle things that are, you know, cool. Like the time my 63-year-old mother asked me if my day “rocked.”) But here it fits, and in part because there’s no one word that exists to fully capture the hilarity-meets-intelligent-angst of Sayers’s humor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The attitude of Thingpart adds to its appeal and success. Sayers’ little round-headed characters smile and stare with the iconic “dots and a line” happy faces, and the drawing is simple and direct. There’s a definite feel that these strips began as compulsive doodles on a long BART ride or wait at the DMV, and that Sayers really simply can’t help himself. It’s that “te he, look what I’ve done!” unstudied feel to the jokes that makes \u003cb>Thingpart\u003c/b> so fun to read, and gives it the unique comics appeal of being both compelling and unpretentious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It takes a smart person to pull off \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyrM7GxyzGg\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">stupid humor\u003c/a>, and it takes a smart person not be afraid of stupid humor. (Really, click on that link.) In the spirit of another of my favorites, Michael Kupperman, Sayers has firmly staked out territory as one of the funniest cartoonists working today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thingpart\u003c/b> updates every Wednesday, and can be found in a few print publications across the country. Sayers also has original artwork and books available for purchase on \u003ca href=\"http://www.jsayers.com\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">his site, and a new title coming out next month.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "I've said it before, and I'd bet the farm that there'll be an occasion (read: tomorrow) for me to say this again: I love to waste time on internet pop culture. Really, I'll throw away entire afternoons on blogs, online magazines, and searching out the coveted \u003ca href=\"http://www.totallyabsurd.com/neck%20fanny%20pack.GIF\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">random gem\u003c/a>. Luckily this blog exists to capitalize on my compulsion, and help funnel my guilt about the hours spent giving my heart to \u003ca href=\"http://www.rejectedjokes.com\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">adorably awkward stand-up comedians\u003c/a> or clicking through the entire archives of a web comic on one sitting. Like a snow-covered Everest climber here to recount the tale of my harrowing adventure, I hope you can learn and grow from my exploration. And by \"learn and grow\" I mean find a comfortable chair and start reading the excellent web comic \u003ca href=\"http://www.jsayers.com/thingpart/thingpart.html\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Thingpart\u003c/a> by the Bay Area's own Joe Sayers.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>I’ve said it before, and I’d bet the farm that there’ll be an occasion (read: tomorrow) for me to say this again: I love to waste time on internet pop culture. Really, I’ll throw away entire afternoons on blogs, online magazines, and searching out the coveted \u003ca href=\"http://www.totallyabsurd.com/neck%20fanny%20pack.GIF\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">random gem\u003c/a>. Luckily this blog exists to capitalize on my compulsion, and help funnel my guilt about the hours spent giving my heart to \u003ca href=\"http://www.rejectedjokes.com\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">adorably awkward stand-up comedians\u003c/a> or clicking through the entire archives of a web comic on one sitting. Like a snow-covered Everest climber here to recount the tale of my harrowing adventure, I hope you can learn and grow from my exploration. And by “learn and grow” I mean find a comfortable chair and start reading the excellent web comic \u003ca href=\"http://www.jsayers.com/thingpart/thingpart.html\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Thingpart\u003c/a> by the Bay Area’s own Joe Sayers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve written about his \u003ca href=\"http://%20http://www.kqed.org/arts/lit/index.jsp?id=10660\">books before\u003c/a>, but Sayers’s web comic is worth a separate mention. Reading these small, black and white strips pretty much guarantees a good laugh, and a happy reminder that there are artists who are genuinely, honestly original. \u003cb>Thingpart\u003c/b> subjects and humor fall in that golden territory between inappropriate and ludicrous. There are no recurring characters, and the stories change from week to week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In one of my \u003ca href=\"http://www.jsayers.com/thingpart/thingpart91.html\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">favorite strips\u003c/a> a man and woman astronaut have a dirty little plan. They approach their NASA supervisor with their idea to start a mission to study the effects of zero gravity on sex. As the supervisor applauds the idea, the couple smile at each other, all ready for some hot space action. But there’s one more panel. The supervisor happily reveals that he’s already arranged test subjects for their steamy study — both sets of their parents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I guess I could haul out the old standby of “irreverent” to describe the \u003cb>Thingpart\u003c/b> style. (Usually I try to avoid that word because it always seems to pop up every time crusty old critics try to tackle things that are, you know, cool. Like the time my 63-year-old mother asked me if my day “rocked.”) But here it fits, and in part because there’s no one word that exists to fully capture the hilarity-meets-intelligent-angst of Sayers’s humor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The attitude of Thingpart adds to its appeal and success. Sayers’ little round-headed characters smile and stare with the iconic “dots and a line” happy faces, and the drawing is simple and direct. There’s a definite feel that these strips began as compulsive doodles on a long BART ride or wait at the DMV, and that Sayers really simply can’t help himself. It’s that “te he, look what I’ve done!” unstudied feel to the jokes that makes \u003cb>Thingpart\u003c/b> so fun to read, and gives it the unique comics appeal of being both compelling and unpretentious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It takes a smart person to pull off \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyrM7GxyzGg\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">stupid humor\u003c/a>, and it takes a smart person not be afraid of stupid humor. (Really, click on that link.) In the spirit of another of my favorites, Michael Kupperman, Sayers has firmly staked out territory as one of the funniest cartoonists working today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thingpart\u003c/b> updates every Wednesday, and can be found in a few print publications across the country. Sayers also has original artwork and books available for purchase on \u003ca href=\"http://www.jsayers.com\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">his site, and a new title coming out next month.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>New York City, 1896. A new century is about to dawn, and all sorts of newly invented machines are changing the rhythms of everyday life. The telephone, the telegraph, the typewriting machine (operated by a person called, naturally, a “typewriter”), and perhaps above all, the camera. Intrepid explorers were reporting back on wonders from the farthest reaches of the planet, bringing back bizarre animals mounted and stuffed, as well as tales of harrowing escapes. Robert Anthony Siegel chose a fascinating cultural moment in which to set his second novel, \u003cb>All Will Be Revealed\u003c/b>. The book begins with an epigraph from Roland Barthes’ \u003cb>Camera Lucida\u003c/b>. Barthes noted that the early cameras were precision machines, “clocks for seeing.” It’s a perfect way to introduce the themes of this book: all the characters, in one way or another, are attempting to fix a moment in time, and stay in it, like a photograph, long after the moment has passed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While there were great technological strides being made in the late 19th century, revolutions in medicine were slower in coming. That meant you had a whole generation of modern, forward-thinking people who were still on very intimate terms with death, in all its ugly glory. Is it any wonder that so many people sought out telephone- and telegraph-like methods in which to contact the dead? Now, it seems bizarre to us that many thousands of prominent people came to believe in ectoplasm-producing, table-rapping spirit mediums and spirit photography. If you’ve ever seen any of these so-called spirit photographs, they look laughably fakey in the era of Photoshop. Famously, Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, went on record defending two young girls who claimed to have taken pictures of fairies in their backyard. (An aside: if you want to read a truly terrific novel on the subject of Arthur Conan Doyle and the Spiritualist movement, run out and get a copy of Julian Barnes’ \u003cb>Arthur and George\u003c/b>, today.) But consider how magical it must have seemed to see a person’s exact face develop on a photographic plate, or receive a message from the other side of the world only minutes after it was sent. Being able to talk to a dead relative via Ouija board seems no less plausible, in that context. And there were plenty of mediums willing to pull out all the stops — spirits materializing in the flesh, spirit writing, channeling — to wring cash out of the rich, grieving and credulous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The chief protagonist of \u003cb>All Will Be Revealed\u003c/b> is Augustus Auerbach, a reclusive, wheelchair-bound millionaire. Auerbach is magnate of a pornography empire, and made his fortune by mining the endless possibilities of the stereo card — two photos side by side that become a simple three-dimensional image when seen through a viewer. The cards are sold, at astronomically high prices, in plain brown wrappers mailed to thousands of men who all call themselves John Smith. Now this is something I’d never stopped to consider before: that the invention of commercially available dirty photographs must have sparked a revolution in worldwide masturbatory habits on a scale that makes the internet look like no big thing. It’s mind-boggling, really.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Auerbach runs his business obsessively. He stays up all night dictating letters to his full-time “typewriter.” He poses the models and takes the photographs. He keeps one step ahead of Kleinfeldt, his biggest competitor. He gives crucial monthly payoffs to various civic groups, which make it possible for him to run his business without being raided by cops or denounced from the pulpit. In one funny early scene, Auerbach is forced to play host to a bacchanal for a group called the Clean Living League. A newspaper editor is “parading around in petticoats,” and also, he sees “the Reverend Voorhees standing on the table, spraying Judge Montcrief from above with a bottle of champagne…” But something is missing from Auerbach’s life: any hint of real human connection. As you might imagine, things will not stay that way for long.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Auerbach’s favorite model, a young woman named Jane Larue, is nine months pregnant. After a remarkable (and lucrative) series of photos, Jane goes into labor. Auerbach is present at the birth. Witnessing it, and witnessing Jane Larue’s subsequent transformation from porn model to loving mother begins to shake up his highly ordered, unemotional world. Looking at the newborn boy — which Jane named Augie, after him — “Auerbach had stared in horrified fascination, trying to reconcile the smallness of its fingers and the delicacy of its ears with the ferocity of its sucking. That odd combination of rapacity and fragility — he recognized it immediately, intuitively: humanness.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then, as often happened, the baby dies. Jane Larue is shattered. In her desperate grief, she begins visiting Verena Swann, world-famous spirit medium and widow of the late, renowned polar explorer Theodore Swann. Eventually, Jane convinces Auerbach to attend a séance with her. He is skeptical: “He most especially did not want a crudely doctored photo of himself with ghosts in white togas superimposed on the background”. But he goes, and what happens to him there changes everything, forever. Verena Swann, in her trance, makes contact with the spirit of Auerbach’s dead mother, an actress who was killed in a ridiculous stage accident when Augustus was a child. The shock of his mother’s death somehow made his legs stop growing, which left him wheelchair-bound. He is deperate to speak to his mother again. All this deeply human and highly embarrassing information comes pouring out in the séance. Against his better judgment, Auerbach is hooked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unfortunately for Augustus, Verena Swann is a fraud. Or, at least, she thinks she is. Much of her spirit-medium work consists of conjuring up the spirits of dead babies for their crying mothers (“weepers,” as Verena dismissively calls them.), and making ghosts appear bodily, when the price is right (the ghost being her assistant Maisie in a white sheet). Her great success has been entirely orchestrated by her controlling brother-in-law Leopold, who has spent a lifetime trying to get out of the shadow of his dead explorer brother. And yet: there are moments when Verena’s gift might be real. As Augustus and Verena become more and more drawn to each other, Leopold’s cravenness and jealousy turn toxic. Things get a little silly toward the end, when Augustus is compelled to rescue Verena from the clutches of a mad scientist in Brooklyn, who has locked her in a Panopticon (yes, an actual, literal Panopticon) at Leopold’s behest. Several twists, turns, and \u003ci>deus ex machinae\u003c/i> later, (spoiler alert!!) the bad guys get punished and the good guys live happily ever after.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Siegel has synthesized a lot of fun historical tidbits into a serviceable, entertaining, and rather short novel. It’s almost better as an idea, unfortunately, than as this actual, finished book. I kept despairing that a great plotter like T.C. Boyle or Michael Chabon hadn’t taken this same material and whipped it into a five-hundred-page breathless romp, hurtling the reader from the chill of the arctic wastes to the glass-walled, sunny pornography studio to the smoky dark of the séance room, all set against the teeming, dirty streets of Old New York. But Siegel doesn’t really do this. His prose is straightforward, realistic, simple, spare. That’s good for a lot of books — but not for this one. I kept wishing he would go into more detail, that he would expand the various and sundry minor characters into full-fledged humans, or would just employ more big, operatic, lyrical flourishes to match the operatic story. Then I had a great idea: Siegel should get Alan Moore, the legendary British graphic novelist, to create an \u003cb>All Will Be Revealed\u003c/b> comic book. Siegel covers territory that’s sort of similar to some of Moore’s other works, like \u003cb>From Hell\u003c/b> and \u003cb>The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen\u003c/b>. Drawings would fill the gaps in Siegel’s too-quiet prose: we would finally get to experience Augustus Auerbach’s endlessly huge mansion, or the bodies of the young, lithe models being directed into sexual positions before the camera, or the manly and doomed Theodore Swann struggling across the polar ice. Unless that happens, I can’t help feeling that All was only Partially Revealed.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>New York City, 1896. A new century is about to dawn, and all sorts of newly invented machines are changing the rhythms of everyday life. The telephone, the telegraph, the typewriting machine (operated by a person called, naturally, a “typewriter”), and perhaps above all, the camera. Intrepid explorers were reporting back on wonders from the farthest reaches of the planet, bringing back bizarre animals mounted and stuffed, as well as tales of harrowing escapes. Robert Anthony Siegel chose a fascinating cultural moment in which to set his second novel, \u003cb>All Will Be Revealed\u003c/b>. The book begins with an epigraph from Roland Barthes’ \u003cb>Camera Lucida\u003c/b>. Barthes noted that the early cameras were precision machines, “clocks for seeing.” It’s a perfect way to introduce the themes of this book: all the characters, in one way or another, are attempting to fix a moment in time, and stay in it, like a photograph, long after the moment has passed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While there were great technological strides being made in the late 19th century, revolutions in medicine were slower in coming. That meant you had a whole generation of modern, forward-thinking people who were still on very intimate terms with death, in all its ugly glory. Is it any wonder that so many people sought out telephone- and telegraph-like methods in which to contact the dead? Now, it seems bizarre to us that many thousands of prominent people came to believe in ectoplasm-producing, table-rapping spirit mediums and spirit photography. If you’ve ever seen any of these so-called spirit photographs, they look laughably fakey in the era of Photoshop. Famously, Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, went on record defending two young girls who claimed to have taken pictures of fairies in their backyard. (An aside: if you want to read a truly terrific novel on the subject of Arthur Conan Doyle and the Spiritualist movement, run out and get a copy of Julian Barnes’ \u003cb>Arthur and George\u003c/b>, today.) But consider how magical it must have seemed to see a person’s exact face develop on a photographic plate, or receive a message from the other side of the world only minutes after it was sent. Being able to talk to a dead relative via Ouija board seems no less plausible, in that context. And there were plenty of mediums willing to pull out all the stops — spirits materializing in the flesh, spirit writing, channeling — to wring cash out of the rich, grieving and credulous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The chief protagonist of \u003cb>All Will Be Revealed\u003c/b> is Augustus Auerbach, a reclusive, wheelchair-bound millionaire. Auerbach is magnate of a pornography empire, and made his fortune by mining the endless possibilities of the stereo card — two photos side by side that become a simple three-dimensional image when seen through a viewer. The cards are sold, at astronomically high prices, in plain brown wrappers mailed to thousands of men who all call themselves John Smith. Now this is something I’d never stopped to consider before: that the invention of commercially available dirty photographs must have sparked a revolution in worldwide masturbatory habits on a scale that makes the internet look like no big thing. It’s mind-boggling, really.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Auerbach runs his business obsessively. He stays up all night dictating letters to his full-time “typewriter.” He poses the models and takes the photographs. He keeps one step ahead of Kleinfeldt, his biggest competitor. He gives crucial monthly payoffs to various civic groups, which make it possible for him to run his business without being raided by cops or denounced from the pulpit. In one funny early scene, Auerbach is forced to play host to a bacchanal for a group called the Clean Living League. A newspaper editor is “parading around in petticoats,” and also, he sees “the Reverend Voorhees standing on the table, spraying Judge Montcrief from above with a bottle of champagne…” But something is missing from Auerbach’s life: any hint of real human connection. As you might imagine, things will not stay that way for long.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Auerbach’s favorite model, a young woman named Jane Larue, is nine months pregnant. After a remarkable (and lucrative) series of photos, Jane goes into labor. Auerbach is present at the birth. Witnessing it, and witnessing Jane Larue’s subsequent transformation from porn model to loving mother begins to shake up his highly ordered, unemotional world. Looking at the newborn boy — which Jane named Augie, after him — “Auerbach had stared in horrified fascination, trying to reconcile the smallness of its fingers and the delicacy of its ears with the ferocity of its sucking. That odd combination of rapacity and fragility — he recognized it immediately, intuitively: humanness.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then, as often happened, the baby dies. Jane Larue is shattered. In her desperate grief, she begins visiting Verena Swann, world-famous spirit medium and widow of the late, renowned polar explorer Theodore Swann. Eventually, Jane convinces Auerbach to attend a séance with her. He is skeptical: “He most especially did not want a crudely doctored photo of himself with ghosts in white togas superimposed on the background”. But he goes, and what happens to him there changes everything, forever. Verena Swann, in her trance, makes contact with the spirit of Auerbach’s dead mother, an actress who was killed in a ridiculous stage accident when Augustus was a child. The shock of his mother’s death somehow made his legs stop growing, which left him wheelchair-bound. He is deperate to speak to his mother again. All this deeply human and highly embarrassing information comes pouring out in the séance. Against his better judgment, Auerbach is hooked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unfortunately for Augustus, Verena Swann is a fraud. Or, at least, she thinks she is. Much of her spirit-medium work consists of conjuring up the spirits of dead babies for their crying mothers (“weepers,” as Verena dismissively calls them.), and making ghosts appear bodily, when the price is right (the ghost being her assistant Maisie in a white sheet). Her great success has been entirely orchestrated by her controlling brother-in-law Leopold, who has spent a lifetime trying to get out of the shadow of his dead explorer brother. And yet: there are moments when Verena’s gift might be real. As Augustus and Verena become more and more drawn to each other, Leopold’s cravenness and jealousy turn toxic. Things get a little silly toward the end, when Augustus is compelled to rescue Verena from the clutches of a mad scientist in Brooklyn, who has locked her in a Panopticon (yes, an actual, literal Panopticon) at Leopold’s behest. Several twists, turns, and \u003ci>deus ex machinae\u003c/i> later, (spoiler alert!!) the bad guys get punished and the good guys live happily ever after.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Siegel has synthesized a lot of fun historical tidbits into a serviceable, entertaining, and rather short novel. It’s almost better as an idea, unfortunately, than as this actual, finished book. I kept despairing that a great plotter like T.C. Boyle or Michael Chabon hadn’t taken this same material and whipped it into a five-hundred-page breathless romp, hurtling the reader from the chill of the arctic wastes to the glass-walled, sunny pornography studio to the smoky dark of the séance room, all set against the teeming, dirty streets of Old New York. But Siegel doesn’t really do this. His prose is straightforward, realistic, simple, spare. That’s good for a lot of books — but not for this one. I kept wishing he would go into more detail, that he would expand the various and sundry minor characters into full-fledged humans, or would just employ more big, operatic, lyrical flourishes to match the operatic story. Then I had a great idea: Siegel should get Alan Moore, the legendary British graphic novelist, to create an \u003cb>All Will Be Revealed\u003c/b> comic book. Siegel covers territory that’s sort of similar to some of Moore’s other works, like \u003cb>From Hell\u003c/b> and \u003cb>The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen\u003c/b>. Drawings would fill the gaps in Siegel’s too-quiet prose: we would finally get to experience Augustus Auerbach’s endlessly huge mansion, or the bodies of the young, lithe models being directed into sexual positions before the camera, or the manly and doomed Theodore Swann struggling across the polar ice. Unless that happens, I can’t help feeling that All was only Partially Revealed.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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"planet-money": {
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"politicalbreakdown": {
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"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"pri-the-world": {
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"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
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"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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"reveal": {
"id": "reveal",
"title": "Reveal",
"info": "Created by The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, Reveal is public radios first one-hour weekly radio show and podcast dedicated to investigative reporting. Credible, fact based and without a partisan agenda, Reveal combines the power and artistry of driveway moment storytelling with data-rich reporting on critically important issues. The result is stories that inform and inspire, arming our listeners with information to right injustices, hold the powerful accountable and improve lives.Reveal is hosted by Al Letson and showcases the award-winning work of CIR and newsrooms large and small across the nation. In a radio and podcast market crowded with choices, Reveal focuses on important and often surprising stories that illuminate the world for our listeners.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/",
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},
"rightnowish": {
"id": "rightnowish",
"title": "Rightnowish",
"tagline": "Art is where you find it",
"info": "Rightnowish digs into life in the Bay Area right now… ish. Journalist Pendarvis Harshaw takes us to galleries painted on the sides of liquor stores in West Oakland. We'll dance in warehouses in the Bayview, make smoothies with kids in South Berkeley, and listen to classical music in a 1984 Cutlass Supreme in Richmond. Every week, Pen talks to movers and shakers about how the Bay Area shapes what they create, and how they shape the place we call home.",
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"order": 16
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},
"science-friday": {
"id": "science-friday",
"title": "Science Friday",
"info": "Science Friday is a weekly science talk show, broadcast live over public radio stations nationwide. Each week, the show focuses on science topics that are in the news and tries to bring an educated, balanced discussion to bear on the scientific issues at hand. Panels of expert guests join host Ira Flatow, a veteran science journalist, to discuss science and to take questions from listeners during the call-in portion of the program.",
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},
"snap-judgment": {
"id": "snap-judgment",
"title": "Snap Judgment",
"tagline": "Real stories with killer beats",
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