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"content": "\u003cp>As a child, I learned to conceal my love of fantasy. Reading it was apparently a geeky pastime, and other kids didn’t seem to share my enthusiasm for talking animals and magical forests. These days, it’s a very different story, with pop culture tropes like cute robots and unicorns, artists like Bjork, and a slew of mainstream movie adaptations following in the vastly successful footsteps of \u003cb>Lord of the Rings\u003c/b>. Having cast off my mantle of fantasy shame, I can proudly acknowledge that my literary diet of fairy tales, young adult mysteries like \u003cb>The Westing Game\u003c/b>, and fantasies like \u003cb>The Dark Is Rising\u003c/b> prepared me well to appreciate the half-lit pleasures of \u003cb>Samedi the Deafness\u003c/b>, the lyrical first full-length novel by author Jesse Ball.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A dreamlike literary thriller, \u003cb>Samedi the Deafness\u003c/b> plunges readers into a dubious reality that seems to have been distilled from the burdens and escapist tendencies of our modern society. Elements of the fantastic and of the absurd pepper the narrative, which concerns one week in the life of James Sim, who stumbles across a mysterious conspiracy that may or may not threaten a doubting nation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Samedi the Deafness\u003c/b> gets going as James Sim is taking his Sunday walk and encounters a dying man in a park, who tells him the desperate details of a conspiracy unfolding on the lawn of the nearby White House. Sim has been trained as a mnemonist, able to remember in detail everything he sees, which comes in handy as he investigates the dying man’s story. The novel follows a common plot outline from thrillers of decades past: A bewildered protagonist meets a mysterious and fetching young woman. The young woman turns out to be the daughter of the man who is the powerful, shadowy figure at the center of a mysterious conspiracy carried out by an intimate circle of male colleagues. The protagonist must deal with a steady stream of secret notes, numerous lies and half-truths, and the occasional death as he fumbles his way towards an ambiguous truth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sim’s character is developed at a leisurely pace, introduced as a pondering sort of soul. Left a largely blank canvass, he emerges as a somewhat naïve figure who makes a few errors in judgment, forcing the reader to cringe slightly, but also to identify with him. A series of vignettes illuminates some hazy and emotional episodes from Sim’s childhood. Upon re-reading the book, I realized just how much rumination on childhood is inserted into a generally fast-moving plot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A series of suicides taking place on the lawn of the White House is the only reference that places \u003cb>Samedi the Deafness\u003c/b> in the United States or in any other modern nation. Very soon, Sim arrives at a wealthy estate that is removed from the routines of normal, daily life, where the inhabitants abide by a set of elaborate rules governing conversation, dress, and even naming conventions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the series of dreamlike scenes that intersperse the main narrative remove us from modern society as Sim’s childhood is presented in an otherworldly light. These scenes, in which Sim talks with his best friend, an invisible talking owl, are hardly a whimsical throwaway, as the author develops a melancholic theme on childhood and its relationship to truth and clarity to complement and interact with the main narrative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Author Jesse Ball’s lyric yet spare style brings a finely balanced melancholic emotion to the journey of James Sim, reminiscent of Murukami’s finest works (at least in the English translations). A tension quietly builds as Sim enters the eerie country house and encounters a gently bizarre landscape of characters who share names but not their meals, quarters but not a social life. Even though very little explanation is given, even less might be desirable, leaving the reader to independently interpret the themes of lies and responsibility, childhood and honesty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While many have remarked on Ball’s genre subversion of the thriller, I was equally struck by how organically he integrates elements of children’s fantasy into \u003cb>Samedi the Deafness\u003c/b>. The nonsensical wordplay of Lewis Carroll and the dimly-lit foreboding of Susan Cooper are as strongly evoked as the bewildering complexity of Thomas Pynchon. \u003cb>Samedi the Deafness\u003c/b> is almost pitch perfect in technique, and approaches greatness in substance. I expect Ball will only continue to develop his talents, fine-tuning his unique amalgamation of plot and style in the forthcoming \u003cb>World’s Fair 7 June 1978\u003c/b>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cp>There’s no way to sugarcoat it. \u003cb>Sharp Teeth\u003c/b> is a 300-page novel in verse about werewolves in Los Angeles. If that had you at “werewolves” or “novel in verse,” then this book is definitely for you. But even if neither of those phrases rings your bell, Toby Barlow’s debut shaggy-dog tale is worth sinking your teeth into.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite its pseudo-fantasy premise, the blood that pumps through \u003cb>Sharp Teeth\u003c/b> is pure noir. A turf war between rival packs of lycanthropes embroils a rogue’s gallery of familiar but fleshed-out types: there’s the detective who should know better, a shadowy crime lord, a mysterious and extra-fatale femme, and a regular joe who falls for her. The city of LA looms large as well, but it’s as a jet-black backdrop for this pulp yarn, with updated details like taco stands, burn-out beach bums and crystal meth labs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Why verse?” I can hear half the skeptics asking. Well, rather than making \u003cb>Sharp Teeth\u003c/b> unbearably pretentious, the unrhymed lines of varying length actually make the book quite hard to put down. The unusual form gives the page a ragged edge, sending your eye racing, and moving the already rabid pace along at quite a clip. Occasionally, it just feels like julienned prose but, on the whole, verse allows Barlow to play up the hardboiled cadences of his writing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What about this werewolf business?” The other half of the peanut gallery complains. Well, Barlow never really calls them werewolves, and he doesn’t seem interested in belaboring the mythology of his conceit. Instead, he has his “dogs” playing bridge, planning public relations coups and fighting over pack hierarchy. When they transform, they turn into surlier-than-average house dogs rather than top-predators. They even lie low in unsuspecting suburban homes when the heat is on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This image of a ravenous beast quietly watching late-night TV with you gets to the heart of what Barlow is trying to do here. As well as being a rip-roaring read, \u003cb>Sharp Teeth\u003c/b> is a sly social satire in wolf’s clothing. The packs draw their ranks from the outcast and the marginalized recent army vets, the homeless, and bars at closing time. Out of these cast-offs they fashion warped but close-knit clans with big dreams and bigger problems. Threaded through even the most gonzo pulp scenes, there’s an undertone of unease and even anguish with the way modern society lets people slip through the cracks. While \u003cb>Sharp Teeth\u003c/b> serves up plenty of sensational blood-and-guts entertainment, it also manages to reflect on love and revenge, community and competition, and what binds people to one another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cp>I have been ruined by reading. And if you are bothering to read this, you probably have, too. Are you miserable when stuck somewhere, like on a train or an airplane, without a book? Does the idea that our nation is full of non-readers fill you with nameless dread? Do you have obsessive habits that dictate how you select and care for your reading material? Although the culture loves to crow that reading is good for you –“fun-damental,” in fact — let’s face it, a serious reading habit can also be more than a little creepy. This is the thesis of Mikita Brottman’s hilarious, tongue-in-cheek “indictment,” \u003cb>The Solitary Vice: Against Reading\u003c/b>. In making her argument that being an obsessive reader makes one socially awkward, she holds herself up as an enthusiastic, unapologetic Exhibit A.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book’s title comes from a Victorian euphemism for masturbation. Reading, Brottman argues, has more in common with masturbation than with any other leisure activity that humans routinely engage in. Think about it. People often tell half-truths or outright lies about how often, and what, they like to read. The act of reading absorbs your full attention, and cannot really include another person (two people could read side by side, and often do, but you’re not really sharing the experience.) Usually, it’s an occasional diversion, a pleasant relaxing activity. But for some people reading can become a lifelong, compulsive — albeit highly enjoyable — addiction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Obviously, Mikita Brottman isn’t actually AGAINST reading. She wouldn’t be a writer and Oxford-educated English professor if she was. But she does encourage us to take a few steps back and be more realistic in what we expect an avid reading habit to do for us. There’s no solid evidence, she says, that reading a lot of books will make you a smarter, better, or more interesting person. “Yes, books can take you to wonderful places, but they can also leave you stranded there, alienated and unemployable, lonely and classless, isolated from other human beings, even from your own memory, your own experience of yourself.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sounds pretty harsh. But not so harsh in the context of Brottman’s own life. She recounts a lot of cringe-worthy anecdotes from her 1970’s Yorkshire adolescence, a time when she spent so much time in the attic reading Victorian romances that she has stronger memories of story plotlines than of the events in her own life. Brottman contends that there’s something about the act of reading, specifically, that caused her dreamy isolation — although she sounds pretty similar to kids obsessed with \u003cb>World Of Warcraft\u003c/b>, or the \u003cb>Rocky Horror Picture Show\u003c/b>, or any activity in which the lonely and the shy get to pretend to be someone else for a while. At least those kinds of activities involve a shared experience with other people. When you read a book, you can only read it alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was almost ready to dismiss Mikita Brottman as a weirdo. But then she hooked me in with Chapter 2: “In the Stacks,” which can only be described as Library Porn. The Bodleian Library at Oxford is part of the UK’s “library of legal deposit,” meaning it houses a large percentage of all the books ever published in Britain. The stacks are “eleven stories deep, connected by underground passageways. The process of retrieving a book, like some occult ritual…began with the librarian putting a copy of your order slip in a sealed tube and sending it down a pressurized vacuum chute to the basement.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brottman recounts tales of sex and death inside libraries, and stories of impoverished intellectuals evading detection and living among the shelves. “I knew a graduate student at Oxford, a philosopher who…lived in his library carrel for over a month, peeing into an empty milk carton…” (Whoa.) My favorite part of the book comes later in that chapter, when she shares the responses from a survey she sent to friends, asking them the details of their reading habits. When she asked if people ever dog-eared or wrote notes in books, she got responses like “I’d seriously punch someone who dog-eared my books;” and “Dog-earing…is analogous to twisting the arm of a child.” How people organize and catalog their libraries and how they decide what to read next really does have a whiff of religious practice, or maybe mental illness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second half of the book is where Brottman lost me. She veers away from the central premise and dives into long analyses of her favorite genres of book, all of them allegedly trashy and bad for you. She dedicates a chapter each to serial killer true crime books, Hollywood tell-alls, gossipy author biographies, and psychiatric case studies. Although you might learn more than you ever wanted to know about the Yorkshire Ripper, or Philip Roth’s divorces, the main point about human reading habits kind of falls by the wayside.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And though I’m aware that Counterpoint (the book’s publisher) is a small indie publishing house without a lot of money to throw around, they’d be well served by setting aside a little cash to hire a professional graphic designer. My enjoyment was marred by odd margins and badly reproduced photographs (some of them so dark or so low-res and pixillated that you can’t tell what the picture is supposed to be.) That, plus the inclusion of a bunch of amateurish drawings in a dozen jarring styles made the book look confusing — until I read the acknowledgments, wherein Brottman thanks an illustration class at the Maryland Institute College Of Art, where she teaches, for all their help with the book — a generous gesture, but a really bad idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brottman wavers a bit, but her point is made. When you really start to look at it, the behavior of the avid reader appears more and more insane. Why, for example, do people pretend to have read certain books when they haven’t? (It’s such a widespread phenomenon that a book called \u003cb>How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read\u003c/b> is currently a bestseller.) “You wouldn’t pretend to know your way around Chicago if you haven’t been there,” Brottman points out. Her recommendation for those of us ruined by reading is pure sacrilege — “Don’t give in to your prejudices; don’t read books just because you feel you “ought to,” because they’ll be “good for you;” do it because you can’t help yourself.” In other words, stop pretending that reading is a noble pursuit, and just read what you want, when you want. As a hopeless book addict and pusher, I couldn’t agree more.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"headTitle": "Laura Flynn: Swallow the Ocean | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>There is a sub-genre of memoir that I never really get tired of. And judging by the publishing trends of the last decade or so, I must not be alone. It’s not the addiction autobiography — those get repetitive and boring. It’s the “my childhood with crazy parents” narrative that gets me every time. NPR reporter Jacki Lyden’s \u003cb>Daughter Of The Queen Of Sheba\u003c/b> was probably the first that I read. Clane Hayward’s \u003cb>The Hypocrisy of Disco\u003c/b>, previously reviewed, is still one of my favorite books from the past year. \u003cb>Criminal Of Poverty\u003c/b> by Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia focuses less on her mother’s mental illness and more on the prison-industrial complex that kept them in a never-ending downward spiral with no one to turn to for help. I haven’t yet read Virginia Holman’s \u003cb>Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad\u003c/b> or Jeannette Walls’s \u003cb>The Glass Castle\u003c/b>, but I’m sure I’d devour those in one sitting, too. Each family is, like Tolstoy’s dictum, unhappy in its own way. Even if your family was normal, you can find something to pull you in. Just like the way a kid from the 20th century suburbs could read a fairy tale like \u003cb>Rapunzel\u003c/b> and kind of wish she was an orphan imprisoned in a tower by a witch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laura Flynn, author of \u003cb>Swallow The Ocean\u003c/b>, was obsessed with the Rapunzel legend for a different reason. For several years, Laura and her sisters were virtual hostages to their mother’s schizophrenia. They would braid together their dolls’ hair and concoct escape fantasies, hoping for their own rescue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Flynn is a native San Franciscan. Born the summer before the Summer Of Love, she’s a near-exact contemporary of \u003cb>Hypocrisy of Disco\u003c/b> author Clane Hayward. But aside from a San Francisco birth, and complicated parental relationships, the similarities end there. Flynn’s childhood in the fog-encapsulated Richmond district was a universe away from the goings-on over in the Haight. Flynn paints a vivid portrait of her block’s most feared kids, the nine Mulligan brothers, “an endless horde of Patricks, Eddies, and Bobs in toughskin jeans and beefy tees.” Laura and her sisters get “drafted” by the Mulligans into a war against the Kittredge family. The Kittredge kids, dirty, lost, and motherless, are “hippies” worthy of scorn. You get a sense that “hippie” was the worst slur an Irish-American Richmond District kid of 1972 could think of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the years went on, Laura, Sara, and Amy Flynn came to have more in common with the shunned and lonely Kittredges than they could have ever guessed. Their mother, Sally, developed a particularly 1970’s brand of madness. Her delusions and paranoias involved Edgar Cayce, the Del Monte corporation, Richard Nixon, Jesus, Buddha, and her “special partner” in the fight against evil, John F. Kennedy. In one heartbreaking passage, Sally explains that she watches the Lawrence Welk show with her eyes fixed on one little girl in the chorus who resembles Laura. The more people from the “good side” have their eyes on the ersatz Laura, the better chance that the real Laura will escape the devils who control the world and the weather. Somewhere under the madness is an expression of real love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rescuing Patty Hearst\u003c/b> author Virginia Holman spent three years kidnapped by her mother, sequestered in a vacation cabin with blackened windows, fighting a “secret war.” For her own survival, Holman decided to believe that the secret war was real. Sally Flynn, in contrast, didn’t actively pull her children into her delusional world in that way — instead, she pushed them out. Laura Flynn often describes her mother as absent, or behind a closed door. When necessary, she could usually summon up the sanity to keep social workers and nosy neighbors at bay. The kids kept attending school and visiting their father on weekends. Amazingly, Sally Flynn even continued to more or less successfully manage the apartment building they owned and lived in. Meanwhile, old newspapers piled up inside, in stacks along the walls, two and three feet high.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Flynn writes with an adult’s lifetime of distance and hindsight, like a journalist. When different family members have conflicting memories of the same incident, she notes the discrepancies. (Did Sally really cover herself in tinfoil armor before she went to sleep? Laura says yes, but her sisters have no memory of this.) Flynn, and the audience, are kept at a bit of a distance from what went on. As a narrative strategy it’s less immediate, and less risky, than Clane Hayward’s present-tense child’s eye view in \u003cb>Hypocrisy of Disco\u003c/b>. Laura Flynn has her reasons for this, I imagine. Late in the book she describes years in which she was terrified of following her mother down the rabbit hole. Hyper-vigilant for signs of a crack-up, she once mistook glow-in-the-dark wall paint as the hallucination she always feared would come. As a writer, Flynn’s instinct for self-preservation prevents her from being able to fully render, in three dimensions, the inner workings of her mother’s psychosis. She peers over the edge but never jumps in — as a daughter and a survivor, you can’t blame her for that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laura’s father, Russell, emerges as the true hero of \u003cb>Swallow the Ocean\u003c/b>. Laura makes it clear that Russell loved Sally very much, and if the disease hadn’t stolen her away, he probably never would have left. In the end, rescuing three little girls from Sally Flynn’s mental illness required a phalanx of lawyers, judges, social workers, and psychiatrists, took half a decade, and left a dozen or more destroyed lives in its wake. If you’ve ever had to confront a loved one’s schizophrenia, the calm voice of Laura Flynn will be a welcome friend. Even now, schizophrenic people and their families are failed utterly by the courts and by social services. As Flynn makes clear, this is the real tragedy.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>There is a sub-genre of memoir that I never really get tired of. And judging by the publishing trends of the last decade or so, I must not be alone. It’s not the addiction autobiography — those get repetitive and boring. It’s the “my childhood with crazy parents” narrative that gets me every time. NPR reporter Jacki Lyden’s \u003cb>Daughter Of The Queen Of Sheba\u003c/b> was probably the first that I read. Clane Hayward’s \u003cb>The Hypocrisy of Disco\u003c/b>, previously reviewed, is still one of my favorite books from the past year. \u003cb>Criminal Of Poverty\u003c/b> by Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia focuses less on her mother’s mental illness and more on the prison-industrial complex that kept them in a never-ending downward spiral with no one to turn to for help. I haven’t yet read Virginia Holman’s \u003cb>Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad\u003c/b> or Jeannette Walls’s \u003cb>The Glass Castle\u003c/b>, but I’m sure I’d devour those in one sitting, too. Each family is, like Tolstoy’s dictum, unhappy in its own way. Even if your family was normal, you can find something to pull you in. Just like the way a kid from the 20th century suburbs could read a fairy tale like \u003cb>Rapunzel\u003c/b> and kind of wish she was an orphan imprisoned in a tower by a witch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laura Flynn, author of \u003cb>Swallow The Ocean\u003c/b>, was obsessed with the Rapunzel legend for a different reason. For several years, Laura and her sisters were virtual hostages to their mother’s schizophrenia. They would braid together their dolls’ hair and concoct escape fantasies, hoping for their own rescue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Flynn is a native San Franciscan. Born the summer before the Summer Of Love, she’s a near-exact contemporary of \u003cb>Hypocrisy of Disco\u003c/b> author Clane Hayward. But aside from a San Francisco birth, and complicated parental relationships, the similarities end there. Flynn’s childhood in the fog-encapsulated Richmond district was a universe away from the goings-on over in the Haight. Flynn paints a vivid portrait of her block’s most feared kids, the nine Mulligan brothers, “an endless horde of Patricks, Eddies, and Bobs in toughskin jeans and beefy tees.” Laura and her sisters get “drafted” by the Mulligans into a war against the Kittredge family. The Kittredge kids, dirty, lost, and motherless, are “hippies” worthy of scorn. You get a sense that “hippie” was the worst slur an Irish-American Richmond District kid of 1972 could think of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the years went on, Laura, Sara, and Amy Flynn came to have more in common with the shunned and lonely Kittredges than they could have ever guessed. Their mother, Sally, developed a particularly 1970’s brand of madness. Her delusions and paranoias involved Edgar Cayce, the Del Monte corporation, Richard Nixon, Jesus, Buddha, and her “special partner” in the fight against evil, John F. Kennedy. In one heartbreaking passage, Sally explains that she watches the Lawrence Welk show with her eyes fixed on one little girl in the chorus who resembles Laura. The more people from the “good side” have their eyes on the ersatz Laura, the better chance that the real Laura will escape the devils who control the world and the weather. Somewhere under the madness is an expression of real love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rescuing Patty Hearst\u003c/b> author Virginia Holman spent three years kidnapped by her mother, sequestered in a vacation cabin with blackened windows, fighting a “secret war.” For her own survival, Holman decided to believe that the secret war was real. Sally Flynn, in contrast, didn’t actively pull her children into her delusional world in that way — instead, she pushed them out. Laura Flynn often describes her mother as absent, or behind a closed door. When necessary, she could usually summon up the sanity to keep social workers and nosy neighbors at bay. The kids kept attending school and visiting their father on weekends. Amazingly, Sally Flynn even continued to more or less successfully manage the apartment building they owned and lived in. Meanwhile, old newspapers piled up inside, in stacks along the walls, two and three feet high.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Flynn writes with an adult’s lifetime of distance and hindsight, like a journalist. When different family members have conflicting memories of the same incident, she notes the discrepancies. (Did Sally really cover herself in tinfoil armor before she went to sleep? Laura says yes, but her sisters have no memory of this.) Flynn, and the audience, are kept at a bit of a distance from what went on. As a narrative strategy it’s less immediate, and less risky, than Clane Hayward’s present-tense child’s eye view in \u003cb>Hypocrisy of Disco\u003c/b>. Laura Flynn has her reasons for this, I imagine. Late in the book she describes years in which she was terrified of following her mother down the rabbit hole. Hyper-vigilant for signs of a crack-up, she once mistook glow-in-the-dark wall paint as the hallucination she always feared would come. As a writer, Flynn’s instinct for self-preservation prevents her from being able to fully render, in three dimensions, the inner workings of her mother’s psychosis. She peers over the edge but never jumps in — as a daughter and a survivor, you can’t blame her for that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laura’s father, Russell, emerges as the true hero of \u003cb>Swallow the Ocean\u003c/b>. Laura makes it clear that Russell loved Sally very much, and if the disease hadn’t stolen her away, he probably never would have left. In the end, rescuing three little girls from Sally Flynn’s mental illness required a phalanx of lawyers, judges, social workers, and psychiatrists, took half a decade, and left a dozen or more destroyed lives in its wake. If you’ve ever had to confront a loved one’s schizophrenia, the calm voice of Laura Flynn will be a welcome friend. Even now, schizophrenic people and their families are failed utterly by the courts and by social services. As Flynn makes clear, this is the real tragedy.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Charles Baxter: The Soul Thief",
"headTitle": "Charles Baxter: The Soul Thief | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>In the current issue of the \u003ci>Believer\u003c/i> magazine, there’s an essay called “The Chaos Machine,” co-written by author Charles Baxter and his son Daniel. The elder Baxter narrates a story about picking his son up from college and the car trip that followed. Daniel provides footnotes to his dad’s reportage, adding refutations, clarifications, corrections. In the center of this sweet and normal-sounding story is a very strange little anecdote. At birth, Daniel Baxter was named Nathaniel. During a turbulent toddlerhood, as soon as the boy was capable of articulating a preference, he began insisting that he was not Nathaniel. He wanted to be called Daniel instead. Refreshingly, his parents took his request seriously. At age four, his name was legally changed. Nathaniel became Daniel and has remained so ever since. In his footnote, Daniel Baxter grumbles a little bit. “I’m not in a rush to let people know about the name switch, but I suppose this essay would be incomplete if this were omitted.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles Baxter’s new novel, \u003cb>The Soul Thief\u003c/b>, is about identity and loss of it, about taking on new lives and jettisoning old ones (or trying to.) It’s not a coincidence, then, when you hear the name that the book’s narrator chooses for himself. “I must turn myself into a ‘he’ and give myself a bland Anglo-Saxon Protestant name,” says the novel’s opening chapter. “Here it is: ‘Nathaniel.’ So that is who I am: Nathaniel Mason. He once said that the name Nathaniel was cursed, and that my imagination had been poisoned at its source by what people had called me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The “he” (we presume) is Jerome Coolberg, Nathaniel’s college classmate, a charming, bullshitting, insufferable know-it-all who Nathaniel comes to blame for the collapse of his own life. This is Buffalo, New York, the 1970s, mid-winter. It’s difficult to conceive of a bleaker time and place. The first time Nathaniel runs across Coolberg, he is holding court at a party, enthralling the guests with his speechifying. A friend warns Nathaniel to keep his distance. “He’s in some kind of Artaudian condition where all the ideas are unoriginated and unsourced; that’s how he can claim anybody else’s ideas as his own. Really all he wants to do is acquire everyone’s inner life. I’d use the word ‘soul’ but I don’t believe in souls.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the first couple conversations, I wondered whether the diction wasn’t a little high-flown for a bunch of Buffalonians in their twenties. But it works. It works because the characters are deadly serious grad students, playing intellectual. They talk that way self-consciously, purposely trying to impress each other and convince themselves that they contain something other than hot air. Nathaniel just sees Coolberg as an annoyance at first, not a danger, despite the warning. He meets a girl named Theresa, flirts heavily, does his best to seduce her and eventually does, with her enthusiastic help. Nathaniel also cooks for the poor at a soup kitchen alongside Jamie, a tough, blond, purported lesbian who he finds deeply erotic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Coolberg keeps reappearing. Unsettling events continue to take place. Nathaniel catches a burglar rummaging through his meager belongings. He only steals some clothing, which Coolberg is later seen wearing. Coolberg appropriates parts of Nathaniel’s life story as well, taking his past and passing it off as his own. How did Coolberg learn all of this, anyway? Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Coolberg steals Nathaniel’s girl, too. Nathaniel falls further and further down the rabbit hole, unable to get a grip on reality. Then, in the second half, the book fast-forwards several decades in time. Nathaniel, now a married father, gets a call from his old college buddy, Jerome begins to spill out. At this point, the reader starts to realize that everything that’s been said so far might not be the truth. In fact, we may not even know who’s actually telling the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I got to the end of \u003cb>The Soul Thief\u003c/b>, I wanted to immediately go back to page one and read it a second time, to see if I could figure out what the hell just happened to me. The only other book that’s had that kind of effect (in a GOOD way) is Paul Auster’s \u003cb>New York Trilogy\u003c/b>. Charles Baxter (as I’ve \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/lit/index.jsp?id=19260\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">noted before\u003c/a>) is one of those writers who is not a household name, but who has a towering reputation in the world of writers, because he can do things that don’t seem possible. \u003cb>The Soul Thief\u003c/b> could be called metafiction, or postmodern, because of the way it messes with the reader’s head. It raises questions of authorship. It uses \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/lit/index.jsp?id=16605\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">unsourced, appropriated dialogue\u003c/a> from other books and movies. It ends in the same place it starts, like a snake eating its own tail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Soul Thief\u003c/b> pulls you out of the “world” of the story and draws attention to the way the story is being told. If it wasn’t Charles Baxter doing this, it could be showy, or annoying. I think that some writers, especially young ones, rely on po-mo trickery to distract from the lack of a plot or strong characters. Thankfully, Baxter knows it’s not enough to just play with the conventions of narrative if you can’t write a heart-stoppingly good STORY in the first place. And he can. \u003cb>The Soul Thief\u003c/b> is heart-stoppingly good, by any measure.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In the current issue of the \u003ci>Believer\u003c/i> magazine, there’s an essay called “The Chaos Machine,” co-written by author Charles Baxter and his son Daniel. The elder Baxter narrates a story about picking his son up from college and the car trip that followed. Daniel provides footnotes to his dad’s reportage, adding refutations, clarifications, corrections. In the center of this sweet and normal-sounding story is a very strange little anecdote. At birth, Daniel Baxter was named Nathaniel. During a turbulent toddlerhood, as soon as the boy was capable of articulating a preference, he began insisting that he was not Nathaniel. He wanted to be called Daniel instead. Refreshingly, his parents took his request seriously. At age four, his name was legally changed. Nathaniel became Daniel and has remained so ever since. In his footnote, Daniel Baxter grumbles a little bit. “I’m not in a rush to let people know about the name switch, but I suppose this essay would be incomplete if this were omitted.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles Baxter’s new novel, \u003cb>The Soul Thief\u003c/b>, is about identity and loss of it, about taking on new lives and jettisoning old ones (or trying to.) It’s not a coincidence, then, when you hear the name that the book’s narrator chooses for himself. “I must turn myself into a ‘he’ and give myself a bland Anglo-Saxon Protestant name,” says the novel’s opening chapter. “Here it is: ‘Nathaniel.’ So that is who I am: Nathaniel Mason. He once said that the name Nathaniel was cursed, and that my imagination had been poisoned at its source by what people had called me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The “he” (we presume) is Jerome Coolberg, Nathaniel’s college classmate, a charming, bullshitting, insufferable know-it-all who Nathaniel comes to blame for the collapse of his own life. This is Buffalo, New York, the 1970s, mid-winter. It’s difficult to conceive of a bleaker time and place. The first time Nathaniel runs across Coolberg, he is holding court at a party, enthralling the guests with his speechifying. A friend warns Nathaniel to keep his distance. “He’s in some kind of Artaudian condition where all the ideas are unoriginated and unsourced; that’s how he can claim anybody else’s ideas as his own. Really all he wants to do is acquire everyone’s inner life. I’d use the word ‘soul’ but I don’t believe in souls.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the first couple conversations, I wondered whether the diction wasn’t a little high-flown for a bunch of Buffalonians in their twenties. But it works. It works because the characters are deadly serious grad students, playing intellectual. They talk that way self-consciously, purposely trying to impress each other and convince themselves that they contain something other than hot air. Nathaniel just sees Coolberg as an annoyance at first, not a danger, despite the warning. He meets a girl named Theresa, flirts heavily, does his best to seduce her and eventually does, with her enthusiastic help. Nathaniel also cooks for the poor at a soup kitchen alongside Jamie, a tough, blond, purported lesbian who he finds deeply erotic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Coolberg keeps reappearing. Unsettling events continue to take place. Nathaniel catches a burglar rummaging through his meager belongings. He only steals some clothing, which Coolberg is later seen wearing. Coolberg appropriates parts of Nathaniel’s life story as well, taking his past and passing it off as his own. How did Coolberg learn all of this, anyway? Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Coolberg steals Nathaniel’s girl, too. Nathaniel falls further and further down the rabbit hole, unable to get a grip on reality. Then, in the second half, the book fast-forwards several decades in time. Nathaniel, now a married father, gets a call from his old college buddy, Jerome begins to spill out. At this point, the reader starts to realize that everything that’s been said so far might not be the truth. In fact, we may not even know who’s actually telling the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I got to the end of \u003cb>The Soul Thief\u003c/b>, I wanted to immediately go back to page one and read it a second time, to see if I could figure out what the hell just happened to me. The only other book that’s had that kind of effect (in a GOOD way) is Paul Auster’s \u003cb>New York Trilogy\u003c/b>. Charles Baxter (as I’ve \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/lit/index.jsp?id=19260\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">noted before\u003c/a>) is one of those writers who is not a household name, but who has a towering reputation in the world of writers, because he can do things that don’t seem possible. \u003cb>The Soul Thief\u003c/b> could be called metafiction, or postmodern, because of the way it messes with the reader’s head. It raises questions of authorship. It uses \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/lit/index.jsp?id=16605\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">unsourced, appropriated dialogue\u003c/a> from other books and movies. It ends in the same place it starts, like a snake eating its own tail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Soul Thief\u003c/b> pulls you out of the “world” of the story and draws attention to the way the story is being told. If it wasn’t Charles Baxter doing this, it could be showy, or annoying. I think that some writers, especially young ones, rely on po-mo trickery to distract from the lack of a plot or strong characters. Thankfully, Baxter knows it’s not enough to just play with the conventions of narrative if you can’t write a heart-stoppingly good STORY in the first place. And he can. \u003cb>The Soul Thief\u003c/b> is heart-stoppingly good, by any measure.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Nikola Tesla is best remembered for inventing engines that produced alternating current (AC) electricity. AC, developed by Tesla and sold by his partner George Westinghouse, was a superior alternative to Thomas Edison’s direct current (DC). Edison, fearful that the comptetition would drive him out of business, staged a number of grisly experiments to “prove” that AC current was too dangerous for everyday use. Dogs, cats, horses, and eventually, heartbreakingly, a condemned rogue elephant named Topsy were all forced to stand on an electrified plate and “Westinghoused” to death. The sadistic PR campaign couldn’t stop a better technology, however, and eventually AC current became the standard. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tesla was also the first person to produce artifical lightning, and invented wireless radio. But like many briliiant scientists, Tesla was no business man. Without patents for his inventions, the financial spoils went to other, better-known people. (Every time a children’s textbook refers to Edison and Marconi as the “inventors” of electricity and radio, Tesla must do another rotation in the grave.) Poor, dismissed as a crank, and mostly forgotten, Tesla lived out his final days as a long-term guest in Manhattan’s swank New Yorker Hotel, caring for Central Park pigeons, and working on plans for many more strange and shocking inventions. Upon his death, those plans were confiscated by the US government, declared classified, and then “lost.” Among his never-finished ideas was a means for harvesting the “free energy” given off by every living thing, which he hoped would provide a never ending, clean source of electric power. That, and a “death ray” that could destroy the universe. As you might imagine, those lost documents have been conspiracy theory fodder ever since. Who could make this stuff up?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tesla’s name has graced a late ’90s hair metal band, and a high speed electric car. Lightning-producing Tesla coils have become a necessary staple in any film that features a mad scientist. David Bowie even played him in the movie \u003cb>The Prestige\u003c/b>. But who was he really?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of all the authors I admire, if I had to guess which one of them was going to write a fictionalized account of Nikola Tesla’s life, Samatha Hunt would not have been at the top of that list. Her first novel, \u003cb>The Seas\u003c/b>, was a strange and beautiful monologue by a troubled young girl in a remote, unnamed seaside town. She is convinced that she is a mermaid. In one scene, she believes that King Neptune has washed up on the beach and is talking to her. Beautifully written tragedy ensues. Sad and poetic and incredibly strange, that book made me feel like I’d been pummeled by a particularly cold and strong wave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Seas\u003c/b> took place in a world that didn’t need to be limited by the laws of physics or the constraints of actual history. \u003cb>The Invention of Everything Else\u003c/b>, Hunt’s second book, required extensive research. All the most fascinating and bizarre tidbits in the book are invariably the ones that are based in fact. Tesla dreamed of building a stationary ring around the earth, to be used for ultra-fast world travel. A woman published a book during Tesla’s lifetime advancing a theory that he actually came from the planet Venus. In contrast, the purely fictional elements of the book seem, at times, too studied and too wooden, as though the effort of having to hew to reality was bogging down Hunt’s prodigious imagination. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tesla is, unfortunately, a relatively minor character in the book. Much of the action centers on Louisa, a chambermaid at the New Yorker Hotel. She is fascinated by strange old Mr. Tesla whose bill goes long unpaid and who never allows anyone to enter his room. Louisa’s mother died in childbirth, her father still mourns. Her father’s best friend Azor reappears after a several-year gap and reveals that he’s been in Far Rockaway, building a time machine. Meanwhile, a handsome young man introduces himself to Louisa on the subway. He insists that they went to school together, but she doesn’t remember him. He seems to know so much about her. Where did he come from? \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Louisa reads from Tesla’s journal while she’s supposed to be cleaning, and it’s from this journal that we hear most of his backstory. But not much in the way of scientific detail. “I suppose I could try to tell you again how it works, but you would be horribly bored by the telling, and even when I was done you still might not understand entirely. But that is all right, old friend. There is a much better way for you to understand what I invented. Plug in your phonograph. Plug in your toaster or reading lamp…” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tesla does not strike me as the type who worried about boring his listeners. Most scientists I’ve known are more than happy to go into great excruciating detail about their research, whether you want them to or not. And many of them are able, through their obvious enthusiasm, to take a complex thing like electrical current and make it fascinating. Even if you don’t really get how it works, you get why they love it. Did Hunt shy away from hard science because she was afraid she wouldn’t render it well? Not sure. What she does render beautifully is Tesla’s lonely inner world. The descriptions of his Serbian childhood are especially great. Early on, he recounts a story about his beloved older brother, Dane. Describing his twin feelings of overwhelming love and jealousy, he says, “The hole of what I had missed, the hole of not being my brother, after some time, dug down into my ear canals, through my nose and mouth. Envy and love choked me like a drill.” That’s the kind of original, Samantha Hunt observation I was hoping for when I picked up the book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The descriptions of the evil Edison workshop are also wonderful. “I already recognized how Edison enjoyed pairing men who despised each other. Repulsion, frustration, disagreement, and anger were, Edison believed, the forge of good ideas. There was coughing, spitting, matches being lit to burn pipes, lunch pails tossed aside at the sudden burst of a good idea[…]and there was the sound of Mr. Edison taking credit for it all.” Angry men with tools hurl invective at one another, and you feel like you need to duck.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unfortunately, we don’t get to keep Nikola Tesla as our sole protagonist. We’re interrupted with Louisa, the chambermaid, and her love story; her father, Walter, trying to reclaim his past; and his friend Azor who may or may not be insane. There is a lot of running around and high drama about a time machine that may or may not actually work. I wished that Hunt had either jettisoned all the secondary story lines and stayed with the marvelous Tesla voice, OR she had expanded the relatively slim 250 pages a lot further, into a huge, 600-page multi-voiced romp, \u003cb>Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay\u003c/b>-style, so that each wacky subplot could be drawn out to its full and logical conculsion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the two books Samantha Hunt has written thus far, this one isn’t my favorite — but that’s not to say it isn’t sweet and delightful and quite an accomplishment nonetheless. (It’s only “less good” in relative terms, not absolute.) Hunt has said in interviews that she had never heard of Nikola Tesla before she embarked on this book. This is good and bad news. If you’re already well-versed in the Tesla legend, there won’t be anything in here that is especially new. Because it’s fiction, it necessarily contains all kinds of conjecture — if you’re a stickler for accurate biography, Hunt’s book might drive you crazy. If, however, you’ve never heard of Tesla either, \u003cb>The Invention Of Everything Else\u003c/b> is a terrific place to start. There are even footnotes in the back of the book: Hunt uses quite a few direct quotes, and she cites all the sources. Most of those sources are wonderful books in their own right, which could lead you on your own time-travelling voyage of discovery.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Nikola Tesla is best remembered for inventing engines that produced alternating current (AC) electricity. AC, developed by Tesla and sold by his partner George Westinghouse, was a superior alternative to Thomas Edison’s direct current (DC). Edison, fearful that the comptetition would drive him out of business, staged a number of grisly experiments to “prove” that AC current was too dangerous for everyday use. Dogs, cats, horses, and eventually, heartbreakingly, a condemned rogue elephant named Topsy were all forced to stand on an electrified plate and “Westinghoused” to death. The sadistic PR campaign couldn’t stop a better technology, however, and eventually AC current became the standard. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tesla was also the first person to produce artifical lightning, and invented wireless radio. But like many briliiant scientists, Tesla was no business man. Without patents for his inventions, the financial spoils went to other, better-known people. (Every time a children’s textbook refers to Edison and Marconi as the “inventors” of electricity and radio, Tesla must do another rotation in the grave.) Poor, dismissed as a crank, and mostly forgotten, Tesla lived out his final days as a long-term guest in Manhattan’s swank New Yorker Hotel, caring for Central Park pigeons, and working on plans for many more strange and shocking inventions. Upon his death, those plans were confiscated by the US government, declared classified, and then “lost.” Among his never-finished ideas was a means for harvesting the “free energy” given off by every living thing, which he hoped would provide a never ending, clean source of electric power. That, and a “death ray” that could destroy the universe. As you might imagine, those lost documents have been conspiracy theory fodder ever since. Who could make this stuff up?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tesla’s name has graced a late ’90s hair metal band, and a high speed electric car. Lightning-producing Tesla coils have become a necessary staple in any film that features a mad scientist. David Bowie even played him in the movie \u003cb>The Prestige\u003c/b>. But who was he really?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of all the authors I admire, if I had to guess which one of them was going to write a fictionalized account of Nikola Tesla’s life, Samatha Hunt would not have been at the top of that list. Her first novel, \u003cb>The Seas\u003c/b>, was a strange and beautiful monologue by a troubled young girl in a remote, unnamed seaside town. She is convinced that she is a mermaid. In one scene, she believes that King Neptune has washed up on the beach and is talking to her. Beautifully written tragedy ensues. Sad and poetic and incredibly strange, that book made me feel like I’d been pummeled by a particularly cold and strong wave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Seas\u003c/b> took place in a world that didn’t need to be limited by the laws of physics or the constraints of actual history. \u003cb>The Invention of Everything Else\u003c/b>, Hunt’s second book, required extensive research. All the most fascinating and bizarre tidbits in the book are invariably the ones that are based in fact. Tesla dreamed of building a stationary ring around the earth, to be used for ultra-fast world travel. A woman published a book during Tesla’s lifetime advancing a theory that he actually came from the planet Venus. In contrast, the purely fictional elements of the book seem, at times, too studied and too wooden, as though the effort of having to hew to reality was bogging down Hunt’s prodigious imagination. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tesla is, unfortunately, a relatively minor character in the book. Much of the action centers on Louisa, a chambermaid at the New Yorker Hotel. She is fascinated by strange old Mr. Tesla whose bill goes long unpaid and who never allows anyone to enter his room. Louisa’s mother died in childbirth, her father still mourns. Her father’s best friend Azor reappears after a several-year gap and reveals that he’s been in Far Rockaway, building a time machine. Meanwhile, a handsome young man introduces himself to Louisa on the subway. He insists that they went to school together, but she doesn’t remember him. He seems to know so much about her. Where did he come from? \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Louisa reads from Tesla’s journal while she’s supposed to be cleaning, and it’s from this journal that we hear most of his backstory. But not much in the way of scientific detail. “I suppose I could try to tell you again how it works, but you would be horribly bored by the telling, and even when I was done you still might not understand entirely. But that is all right, old friend. There is a much better way for you to understand what I invented. Plug in your phonograph. Plug in your toaster or reading lamp…” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tesla does not strike me as the type who worried about boring his listeners. Most scientists I’ve known are more than happy to go into great excruciating detail about their research, whether you want them to or not. And many of them are able, through their obvious enthusiasm, to take a complex thing like electrical current and make it fascinating. Even if you don’t really get how it works, you get why they love it. Did Hunt shy away from hard science because she was afraid she wouldn’t render it well? Not sure. What she does render beautifully is Tesla’s lonely inner world. The descriptions of his Serbian childhood are especially great. Early on, he recounts a story about his beloved older brother, Dane. Describing his twin feelings of overwhelming love and jealousy, he says, “The hole of what I had missed, the hole of not being my brother, after some time, dug down into my ear canals, through my nose and mouth. Envy and love choked me like a drill.” That’s the kind of original, Samantha Hunt observation I was hoping for when I picked up the book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The descriptions of the evil Edison workshop are also wonderful. “I already recognized how Edison enjoyed pairing men who despised each other. Repulsion, frustration, disagreement, and anger were, Edison believed, the forge of good ideas. There was coughing, spitting, matches being lit to burn pipes, lunch pails tossed aside at the sudden burst of a good idea[…]and there was the sound of Mr. Edison taking credit for it all.” Angry men with tools hurl invective at one another, and you feel like you need to duck.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unfortunately, we don’t get to keep Nikola Tesla as our sole protagonist. We’re interrupted with Louisa, the chambermaid, and her love story; her father, Walter, trying to reclaim his past; and his friend Azor who may or may not be insane. There is a lot of running around and high drama about a time machine that may or may not actually work. I wished that Hunt had either jettisoned all the secondary story lines and stayed with the marvelous Tesla voice, OR she had expanded the relatively slim 250 pages a lot further, into a huge, 600-page multi-voiced romp, \u003cb>Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay\u003c/b>-style, so that each wacky subplot could be drawn out to its full and logical conculsion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the two books Samantha Hunt has written thus far, this one isn’t my favorite — but that’s not to say it isn’t sweet and delightful and quite an accomplishment nonetheless. (It’s only “less good” in relative terms, not absolute.) Hunt has said in interviews that she had never heard of Nikola Tesla before she embarked on this book. This is good and bad news. If you’re already well-versed in the Tesla legend, there won’t be anything in here that is especially new. Because it’s fiction, it necessarily contains all kinds of conjecture — if you’re a stickler for accurate biography, Hunt’s book might drive you crazy. If, however, you’ve never heard of Tesla either, \u003cb>The Invention Of Everything Else\u003c/b> is a terrific place to start. There are even footnotes in the back of the book: Hunt uses quite a few direct quotes, and she cites all the sources. Most of those sources are wonderful books in their own right, which could lead you on your own time-travelling voyage of discovery.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Nicola Barker: Darkmans",
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"content": "\u003cp>A useful new word (and concept) I learned from the internet is “griefing.” Normally used to decribe a video game opponent who doesn’t play fair, a real-world griefer is someone who plays nasty tricks on other people, to the point of ruin, humiliation, or death, in the guise of “humor.” Recent noteworthy examples include a \u003ca href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_collins\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">suburban mom\u003c/a> who allegedly helped several teenagers invent a fake online persona they used to taunt a neighbor girl until she committed suicide. Then there’s the person or persons known as the \u003ca hef=\"http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/01/navy_hormuz_iran_radio_080111/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Filipino Monkey\u003c/a>, who nearly started World War 3 by playing a little radio-prank on an American warship in the Straits of Hormuz. Ha ha.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While modern technology certainly makes it easy and convenient to sociopathically destroy your fellow man for your own amusement, griefing has existed for as long as humans have harbored resentment. Take, for example, John Scogin: a court jester so famous that books about his merry jests and pranks remained popular for hundreds of years after his death. Among his mirthful tricks was the time he lured the aggressive, unpleasant beggars of Oxford into a church by promising a feast, then set the church on fire. The malevolent “joker” Scogin is a spectral presence in Nicola Barker’s huge and ambitious novel. He comes to represent another, even more famous trickster: the cloven-hooved one, the man downstairs, Beelzebub, the titular \u003cb>Darkmans\u003c/b> itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what does John Scogin have to do with the residents of modern-day Ashford, a dull English town of tract homes and theme restaurants at the end of the Channel Tunnel? Barker, in 838 pages, slowly and methodically lays it out for us. It appears that when the Chunnel was dug, large portions of Ashford’s priceless history (buildings, antiques) were dug up, plowed under, or misplaced. Beede, armchair scholar and hospital laundry manager, spent years fighting for Ashford’s past via petition and committee. But he was defeated. And he gave up. Or did he? He’s clearly up to something. But what?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beede’s son Kane (note the character names, by the way) would love to know what the heck his boring old dad thinks he’s doing. Kane, as a drug dealer who sells pills passed to him by one of his father’s hospital laundry co-workers, knows more than a little about what a man looks like when he’s hiding something. So he starts poking around. But everything he finds makes him even more confused. Why is Beede arranging secret meetings with Kane’s vulgar, screechy ex-girlfriend Kelly? What’s the relationship between Beede and his strangely alluring foot doctor Elen, and why do they spend so much time together? And why is he secretly studying this weird old manuscript, written in funny old-fashioned language, about some long-dead jester?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elen’s husband is a German man named Isidore. Dory (as he’s known) has fallen victim to a worsening series of episodes he can’t explain: forgetting who he is, abandoning his car on highway off-ramps, stealing horses, speaking archaic languages he never learned. Elen and Dory’s little boy, Fleet, if anything, is even stranger. With the steely calm that is the hallmark of all Creepy Clairvoyant Kids, Fleet has built a huge, precise replica of an ancient cathedral he’s never seen. And out of nowhere, he recounts, in hideous detail, the horrible jests of one John Scogin. And he has the same speaking-ancient-languages problem that his dad has. But he’s only six: how could he know all this stuff? What the Devil is going on in Ashford?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This barely scratches the surface of \u003cb>Darkmans\u003c/b>‘ incredibly intricate plot. Telling you any more would spoil it. Much of the fun is remaining befuddled and confused, shocked and surprised. \u003cb>Darkmans\u003c/b> is the first 838-page novel that has ever seemed too short. Nicola Barker is clearly a graduate of the William Gaddis school of trusting your reader to be smart enough to puzzle out what’s happening with minimal expository assistance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most hilarious and gloriously-written scene comes about 300 pages in, when Beede visits a neighbor with the intention of resigning from the chairmanship of the Ryan Monkeith Memorial Road Crossing Initiative, but ends up a guest at the most uncomfortable dinner party ever. In a dozen pages of verbal fencing, every weakness is probed, every buried resentment bubbles its way to the surface: “‘Please forgive my wife,’ Charlie told the table. ‘She’s taking antidepressants and they’re making her a little…’ he paused, speculatively, reaching for the perfect word ‘…\u003ci>irritating.\u003c/i>‘” It was this scene that started to make me think of Gaddis’ doorstop of a masterpiece, \u003cb>The Recognitions\u003c/b>, which contains a crucial, epic cocktail party dialogue scene. Late in \u003cb>Darkmans\u003c/b>, a shadowy art forger appears, and all the pieces of the puzzle start falling together. It was at this point that I was sure Barker was making a deliberate tip of the hat to Gaddis: the major themes of \u003cb>The Recognitions\u003c/b>, as in \u003cb>Darkmans\u003c/b>, are father-son estrangement and the murky moral universe of forgery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> Nicola Barker is obviously a mad genius. But there was one aspect of the writing that began to drive me absolutely bonkers after the first 200 times she did it. Because every character in the novel is hiding something from someone, there is necessarily a lot of evasion in their speech. But every single character expresses it exactly the same way: by answering questions with questions. Like this:\u003cbr>“Are you planning on going to work?”\u003cbr>“Why wouldn’t I be?”\u003cbr>or this, a couple hundred pages later, between two totally different people:\u003cbr>“Why?”\u003cbr>“Huh?”\u003cbr>“Why? Why were you interested?”\u003cbr>“Why the hell shouldn’t I be?”\u003cbr>And so on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The best scenes are the few where Barker departs from the question-question-question-evasion format and does something more interesting: Like the dinner-party scene, which could be performed as a one-act play as written, or the monologues of Gaffar, a Turkish Kurd who switches between broken English and eloquent Turkish, indicated by changing typefaces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not an “easy” read. But if you’re hungry for something truly new and enormously ambitious, give it a shot. It helps if you have tackled some Pynchon or Gaddis in the past (Barker’s book reads like a breezy novella compared to, say, \u003cb>Gravity’s Rainbow\u003c/b>). There’s nothing this wild and big going on in American fiction at this moment, especially not by women. Whether that’s a failure of our imaginations or our publishing industry, it’s hard to tell. The conclusion of \u003cb>Darkmans\u003c/b> came as a complete surprise to me. And yet, Barker had been setting up for it, dropping hints and clues the entire time. But I was still fooled, right up until the final pages. Now that’s what I call a merry trick.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "A useful new word (and concept) I learned from the internet is \"griefing.\" Normally used to decribe a video game opponent who doesn't play fair, a real-world griefer is someone who plays nasty tricks on other people, to the point of ruin, humiliation, or death, in the guise of \"humor.\" Recent noteworthy examples include a \u003ca href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_collins\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">suburban mom\u003c/a> who allegedly helped several teenagers invent a fake online persona they used to taunt a neighbor girl until she committed suicide. Then there's the person or persons known as the \u003ca hef=\"http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/01/navy_hormuz_iran_radio_080111/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Filipino Monkey\u003c/a>, who nearly started World War 3 by playing a little radio-prank on an American warship in the Straits of Hormuz. Ha ha.",
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"description": "A useful new word (and concept) I learned from the internet is "griefing." Normally used to decribe a video game opponent who doesn't play fair, a real-world griefer is someone who plays nasty tricks on other people, to the point of ruin, humiliation, or death, in the guise of "humor." Recent noteworthy examples include a suburban mom who allegedly helped several teenagers invent a fake online persona they used to taunt a neighbor girl until she committed suicide. Then there's the person or persons known as the Filipino Monkey, who nearly started World War 3 by playing a little radio-prank on an American warship in the Straits of Hormuz. Ha ha.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A useful new word (and concept) I learned from the internet is “griefing.” Normally used to decribe a video game opponent who doesn’t play fair, a real-world griefer is someone who plays nasty tricks on other people, to the point of ruin, humiliation, or death, in the guise of “humor.” Recent noteworthy examples include a \u003ca href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_collins\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">suburban mom\u003c/a> who allegedly helped several teenagers invent a fake online persona they used to taunt a neighbor girl until she committed suicide. Then there’s the person or persons known as the \u003ca hef=\"http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/01/navy_hormuz_iran_radio_080111/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Filipino Monkey\u003c/a>, who nearly started World War 3 by playing a little radio-prank on an American warship in the Straits of Hormuz. Ha ha.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While modern technology certainly makes it easy and convenient to sociopathically destroy your fellow man for your own amusement, griefing has existed for as long as humans have harbored resentment. Take, for example, John Scogin: a court jester so famous that books about his merry jests and pranks remained popular for hundreds of years after his death. Among his mirthful tricks was the time he lured the aggressive, unpleasant beggars of Oxford into a church by promising a feast, then set the church on fire. The malevolent “joker” Scogin is a spectral presence in Nicola Barker’s huge and ambitious novel. He comes to represent another, even more famous trickster: the cloven-hooved one, the man downstairs, Beelzebub, the titular \u003cb>Darkmans\u003c/b> itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what does John Scogin have to do with the residents of modern-day Ashford, a dull English town of tract homes and theme restaurants at the end of the Channel Tunnel? Barker, in 838 pages, slowly and methodically lays it out for us. It appears that when the Chunnel was dug, large portions of Ashford’s priceless history (buildings, antiques) were dug up, plowed under, or misplaced. Beede, armchair scholar and hospital laundry manager, spent years fighting for Ashford’s past via petition and committee. But he was defeated. And he gave up. Or did he? He’s clearly up to something. But what?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beede’s son Kane (note the character names, by the way) would love to know what the heck his boring old dad thinks he’s doing. Kane, as a drug dealer who sells pills passed to him by one of his father’s hospital laundry co-workers, knows more than a little about what a man looks like when he’s hiding something. So he starts poking around. But everything he finds makes him even more confused. Why is Beede arranging secret meetings with Kane’s vulgar, screechy ex-girlfriend Kelly? What’s the relationship between Beede and his strangely alluring foot doctor Elen, and why do they spend so much time together? And why is he secretly studying this weird old manuscript, written in funny old-fashioned language, about some long-dead jester?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elen’s husband is a German man named Isidore. Dory (as he’s known) has fallen victim to a worsening series of episodes he can’t explain: forgetting who he is, abandoning his car on highway off-ramps, stealing horses, speaking archaic languages he never learned. Elen and Dory’s little boy, Fleet, if anything, is even stranger. With the steely calm that is the hallmark of all Creepy Clairvoyant Kids, Fleet has built a huge, precise replica of an ancient cathedral he’s never seen. And out of nowhere, he recounts, in hideous detail, the horrible jests of one John Scogin. And he has the same speaking-ancient-languages problem that his dad has. But he’s only six: how could he know all this stuff? What the Devil is going on in Ashford?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This barely scratches the surface of \u003cb>Darkmans\u003c/b>‘ incredibly intricate plot. Telling you any more would spoil it. Much of the fun is remaining befuddled and confused, shocked and surprised. \u003cb>Darkmans\u003c/b> is the first 838-page novel that has ever seemed too short. Nicola Barker is clearly a graduate of the William Gaddis school of trusting your reader to be smart enough to puzzle out what’s happening with minimal expository assistance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most hilarious and gloriously-written scene comes about 300 pages in, when Beede visits a neighbor with the intention of resigning from the chairmanship of the Ryan Monkeith Memorial Road Crossing Initiative, but ends up a guest at the most uncomfortable dinner party ever. In a dozen pages of verbal fencing, every weakness is probed, every buried resentment bubbles its way to the surface: “‘Please forgive my wife,’ Charlie told the table. ‘She’s taking antidepressants and they’re making her a little…’ he paused, speculatively, reaching for the perfect word ‘…\u003ci>irritating.\u003c/i>‘” It was this scene that started to make me think of Gaddis’ doorstop of a masterpiece, \u003cb>The Recognitions\u003c/b>, which contains a crucial, epic cocktail party dialogue scene. Late in \u003cb>Darkmans\u003c/b>, a shadowy art forger appears, and all the pieces of the puzzle start falling together. It was at this point that I was sure Barker was making a deliberate tip of the hat to Gaddis: the major themes of \u003cb>The Recognitions\u003c/b>, as in \u003cb>Darkmans\u003c/b>, are father-son estrangement and the murky moral universe of forgery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> Nicola Barker is obviously a mad genius. But there was one aspect of the writing that began to drive me absolutely bonkers after the first 200 times she did it. Because every character in the novel is hiding something from someone, there is necessarily a lot of evasion in their speech. But every single character expresses it exactly the same way: by answering questions with questions. Like this:\u003cbr>“Are you planning on going to work?”\u003cbr>“Why wouldn’t I be?”\u003cbr>or this, a couple hundred pages later, between two totally different people:\u003cbr>“Why?”\u003cbr>“Huh?”\u003cbr>“Why? Why were you interested?”\u003cbr>“Why the hell shouldn’t I be?”\u003cbr>And so on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The best scenes are the few where Barker departs from the question-question-question-evasion format and does something more interesting: Like the dinner-party scene, which could be performed as a one-act play as written, or the monologues of Gaffar, a Turkish Kurd who switches between broken English and eloquent Turkish, indicated by changing typefaces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not an “easy” read. But if you’re hungry for something truly new and enormously ambitious, give it a shot. It helps if you have tackled some Pynchon or Gaddis in the past (Barker’s book reads like a breezy novella compared to, say, \u003cb>Gravity’s Rainbow\u003c/b>). There’s nothing this wild and big going on in American fiction at this moment, especially not by women. Whether that’s a failure of our imaginations or our publishing industry, it’s hard to tell. The conclusion of \u003cb>Darkmans\u003c/b> came as a complete surprise to me. And yet, Barker had been setting up for it, dropping hints and clues the entire time. But I was still fooled, right up until the final pages. Now that’s what I call a merry trick.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "32nd Annual Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses",
"headTitle": "32nd Annual Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>In the land of \u003cb>American Idol\u003c/b> and endless “favorite 100 kid stars of the 80’s” countdowns on VH1, there’s nothing that entertains better than a) contests, and b) best-of lists, compiled for our covenience. Both lend themselves well to the real fun, which is betting on who the chosen ones will be, and arguing for favorites who were unfairly passed over. The literary world doesn’t shy away from this. Pick up any issue of \u003ci>Poets and Writers\u003c/i> magazine and the listings of contest finalists wlll be the thickest part of the whole publication. The Nobel, Booker, and National Book Award finalists are endlessly discussed. And there’s a whole host of annual best-of publications that come out every year, some of them so highly specific as to be redundant. The \u003cb>Best American\u003c/b> series publishes annual books of sports writing, science writing, essays, and magazine writing. If you wrote an essay about, say, the physics of sports, and it was published in a magazine, which book would they put you in? All four?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I haven’t even gotten to \u003cb>Best New American Voices\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Best Nonrequired Reading\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Best American Short Stories\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Best American Poetry\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Best American Comics\u003c/b> — and that’s just ONE Houghton Mifflin series. There are other volumes as well, like Da Capo’s \u003cb>Best Music Writing\u003c/b>, the \u003cb>O. Henry Prize Stories\u003c/b> and occasional magazine issues like \u003ci>Granta\u003c/i> magazine’s \u003cb>Best of Young British Novelists\u003c/b>, and the \u003ci>New Yorker\u003c/i>‘s New Fiction Issue. The ultra-narrow specificity of the best-of books can get a little annoying. The magazines that the editors draw on in order to compile the list is, similarly, ultra-narrow. Lately, \u003cb>Best American Short Stories\u003c/b> will throw a bone to small and innovative publications like \u003ci>One Story\u003c/i>, but for the most part you’ll see a lot of \u003ci>Harper’s\u003c/i>, \u003ci>New Yorker\u003c/i>, and \u003ci>Atlantic Monthly\u003c/i> reprints.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of this is just a preamble to my real point: thank heavens for the \u003cb>Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses\u003c/b>. If you want to know where the real engine driving American writing is, one must look to the indie presses and magazines run by people with day jobs who do it out of the love in their hearts for literature, and who don’t give a crap about losing subcribers (possibly because they don’t have any). The brick-sized \u003cb>32nd annual Puschcart Prize Anthology\u003c/b> throws together memoir, essay, fiction, poetry, science, sports, and music writing, and a bunch of unclassifiable works that wouldn’t comfortably fit in any of the tiny niches the Best American crew has carved out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pushcart Prize nominations are made by editors at independent publications, who alert the Pushcart editors, headed by Bill Henderson, to their choices. The selections are winnowed down to, in this year’s case, 63 pieces. (By contrast, best \u003cb>American Short Stories\u003c/b> chooses precisely twenty stories per year.) The list of contributing presses is many pages long, and includes both venerable old survivors like SF’s very own \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"http://www.zyzzyva.org/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">ZYZZYVA\u003c/a>\u003c/i>, and new upstarts like the terrific \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"http://www.apublicspace.org/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">A Public Space\u003c/a>\u003c/i>. Inclusion in the anthology IS the prize itself. There is no process of longlisting and shortlisting and declaring one person a winner, while the rest grit their teeth and pretend they were happy just to be nominated. If you’re in, you won, and congratulations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bill Henderson’s stirring and brief introduction to the new volume is enough to make you want to leap out of your boring little life and do something fabulous yet financially non-remunerative. “Money is the yellow brick road. Oligarchs pick our entertainments, our celebrities, our presidents, and our wars. We children of the spirit are yesterday’s news, if we ever were news. Yet for three decades…[we] have flourished. The reason? (Simple, stupid.) Spirit will never be quelled, certainly not by mere bucks and bluster.” Henderson goes on to eulogize the woman to whom this year’s book is dedicated: one Hannah Turner. Up until her death this year at age 88, Turner penned a HAND-WRITTEN, calligraphed announcement for each and every Pushcart winner — at least 20,000 over the course of several decades. “She did it for a pittance, tirelessly, and was adamant that we not change the nomination format to make it easier for her.” Nobody loves a paying job as much as a dedicated amateur loves their avocation, and the loving dedication of the Pushcart organization, which still assembles its annual book through unpaid labors in a backyard shed, is a beautiful testament to this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Plenty of Bay Area locals make appearances here, as usual. Rebecca Solnit’s essay from Orion, “Winged Mercury and the Golden Calf,” lays down all the ways the Gold Rush scarred, permanently, the Northern California landscape. Its most terrible legacy is all the mercury it left behind. This is something I never knew: mercury is used in large quantities in gold mining, and most of it escaped into our waterways: “Much of it is still there — a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist once told me that he and his peers sometimes find globules the size of a man’s fist in pristine-looking Sierra Nevada streams — but the rest of it ended up lining the bottom of San Francisco Bay.” It’s enough to make you shudder.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The short story “Pampkin’s Lament,” by local and Stegner fellow Peter Orner, was pulled from The Mission’s own \u003ca href=\"http://www.mcsweeneys.net/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">McSweeney’s\u003c/a> for inclusion. It’s a bittersweet story of a young boy watching his father, a campaign consultant, as he works for a losing Illinois gubernatorial candidate. “Pampkin got run over by a fez-wearing Shriner on a motorized flying carpet. The Shriner swore it was an accident, but this didn’t stop the Waukegan News Sun from running the headline PAMPKIN SWEPT UNDER RUG.” Its ending is suprising, sweet, and sad. Robert Olen Butler’s “18 1/2,” originally published in \u003ca href=\"http://www.all-story.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Zoetrope\u003c/a>, is a hysterical re-imagining of the missing eighteen and a half minutes on one of Nixon’s Watergate tapes. Nixon talks about Elvis, childhood poverty, why he wears his wingtips on the beach, and a late-night run-in with a certain drunk young man from the Texas Air National Guard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A beautiful essay, “Fathead’s Hard Times,” by San Francisco resident W.S. Di Piero appears from Berkeley’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.threepennyreview.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Threepenny Review\u003c/a>. In it, he describes how his deep love and appreciation of music have helped him handle the chronic pain of a crippling spinal condition. “While in the hospital and for a long time thereafter, at night I kept by my ear a transistor radio…So whenever the pain spiked me awake — IT seemed deranged, because it migrated: now in my lower back, now knees, now upper legs — I had sounds running into my ear that instead of being a balm or distraction laytered me more deeply into the pain, its rhythms and registers.” Local legend Herbert Gold gets a Pushcart nod, as well, for his essay “A Genius of Grief: Memories of Saul Bellow.” His description of life as a young man in postwar Paris, hanging out with Bellow in St-Germain-des-Pres, is enough to make you wish you had a time machine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> If I had to complain about the book at all, I’d say that it skews a bit on the safe side, and the old guard is far more heavily represented than the young. As far as I can tell, they only draw from print publications and not online ones (this is common: as far as I know, \u003cb>Best American Nonrequired Reading\u003c/b> is the only major Best-of annual that regularly publishes internet-based work.) Pushcart’s Advisory Council is chock-full of gray eminences like Joyce Carol Oates, John Irving, and Gerald Stern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The best thing about the book is how skillfully it’s been curated. Solnit’s gold-mining essay sits alongside a short story called “The Best Jeweler” by Clancy Martin, a tale of love and betrayal and macho behavior in a mall jewelry shop. Robert Olen Butler’s whimsical take on Richard Nixon’s inner life precedes a poem called “Skinny Dipping With Pat Nixon” by David Kirby, in which the poet discovers a latent carnal urge for the former first lady, now that he is the age that she was then. Like paintings in a museum, the pieces are set up in such a way that they complement and comment on one another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Read the \u003cb>32nd Annual Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses\u003c/b> in order, start to finish, and you’ll feel like you’ve been invited to the wittiest and most interesting cocktail party ever. And it’s one that won’t end anytime soon: Pushcart is a nonprofit entity, buffered from the cruel winds of commerce. Says Bill Henderson, “Our endowment insures that our non-profit project will endure despite the oligarchs. Our only overhead is that 8’x8′ shack, and it’s real sturdy.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "In the land of \u003cb>American Idol\u003c/b> and endless \"favorite 100 kid stars of the 80's\" countdowns on VH1, there's nothing that entertains better than a) contests, and b) best-of lists, compiled for our covenience. Both lend themselves well to the real fun, which is betting on who the chosen ones will be, and arguing for favorites who were unfairly passed over. The literary world doesn't shy away from this. Pick up any issue of \u003ci>Poets and Writers\u003c/i> magazine and the listings of contest finalists wlll be the thickest part of the whole publication. The Nobel, Booker, and National Book Award finalists are endlessly discussed. And there's a whole host of annual best-of publications that come out every year, some of them so highly specific as to be redundant. The \u003cb>Best American\u003c/b> series publishes annual books of sports writing, science writing, essays, and magazine writing. If you wrote an essay about, say, the physics of sports, and it was published in a magazine, which book would they put you in? All four?",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In the land of \u003cb>American Idol\u003c/b> and endless “favorite 100 kid stars of the 80’s” countdowns on VH1, there’s nothing that entertains better than a) contests, and b) best-of lists, compiled for our covenience. Both lend themselves well to the real fun, which is betting on who the chosen ones will be, and arguing for favorites who were unfairly passed over. The literary world doesn’t shy away from this. Pick up any issue of \u003ci>Poets and Writers\u003c/i> magazine and the listings of contest finalists wlll be the thickest part of the whole publication. The Nobel, Booker, and National Book Award finalists are endlessly discussed. And there’s a whole host of annual best-of publications that come out every year, some of them so highly specific as to be redundant. The \u003cb>Best American\u003c/b> series publishes annual books of sports writing, science writing, essays, and magazine writing. If you wrote an essay about, say, the physics of sports, and it was published in a magazine, which book would they put you in? All four?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I haven’t even gotten to \u003cb>Best New American Voices\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Best Nonrequired Reading\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Best American Short Stories\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Best American Poetry\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Best American Comics\u003c/b> — and that’s just ONE Houghton Mifflin series. There are other volumes as well, like Da Capo’s \u003cb>Best Music Writing\u003c/b>, the \u003cb>O. Henry Prize Stories\u003c/b> and occasional magazine issues like \u003ci>Granta\u003c/i> magazine’s \u003cb>Best of Young British Novelists\u003c/b>, and the \u003ci>New Yorker\u003c/i>‘s New Fiction Issue. The ultra-narrow specificity of the best-of books can get a little annoying. The magazines that the editors draw on in order to compile the list is, similarly, ultra-narrow. Lately, \u003cb>Best American Short Stories\u003c/b> will throw a bone to small and innovative publications like \u003ci>One Story\u003c/i>, but for the most part you’ll see a lot of \u003ci>Harper’s\u003c/i>, \u003ci>New Yorker\u003c/i>, and \u003ci>Atlantic Monthly\u003c/i> reprints.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of this is just a preamble to my real point: thank heavens for the \u003cb>Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses\u003c/b>. If you want to know where the real engine driving American writing is, one must look to the indie presses and magazines run by people with day jobs who do it out of the love in their hearts for literature, and who don’t give a crap about losing subcribers (possibly because they don’t have any). The brick-sized \u003cb>32nd annual Puschcart Prize Anthology\u003c/b> throws together memoir, essay, fiction, poetry, science, sports, and music writing, and a bunch of unclassifiable works that wouldn’t comfortably fit in any of the tiny niches the Best American crew has carved out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pushcart Prize nominations are made by editors at independent publications, who alert the Pushcart editors, headed by Bill Henderson, to their choices. The selections are winnowed down to, in this year’s case, 63 pieces. (By contrast, best \u003cb>American Short Stories\u003c/b> chooses precisely twenty stories per year.) The list of contributing presses is many pages long, and includes both venerable old survivors like SF’s very own \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"http://www.zyzzyva.org/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">ZYZZYVA\u003c/a>\u003c/i>, and new upstarts like the terrific \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"http://www.apublicspace.org/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">A Public Space\u003c/a>\u003c/i>. Inclusion in the anthology IS the prize itself. There is no process of longlisting and shortlisting and declaring one person a winner, while the rest grit their teeth and pretend they were happy just to be nominated. If you’re in, you won, and congratulations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bill Henderson’s stirring and brief introduction to the new volume is enough to make you want to leap out of your boring little life and do something fabulous yet financially non-remunerative. “Money is the yellow brick road. Oligarchs pick our entertainments, our celebrities, our presidents, and our wars. We children of the spirit are yesterday’s news, if we ever were news. Yet for three decades…[we] have flourished. The reason? (Simple, stupid.) Spirit will never be quelled, certainly not by mere bucks and bluster.” Henderson goes on to eulogize the woman to whom this year’s book is dedicated: one Hannah Turner. Up until her death this year at age 88, Turner penned a HAND-WRITTEN, calligraphed announcement for each and every Pushcart winner — at least 20,000 over the course of several decades. “She did it for a pittance, tirelessly, and was adamant that we not change the nomination format to make it easier for her.” Nobody loves a paying job as much as a dedicated amateur loves their avocation, and the loving dedication of the Pushcart organization, which still assembles its annual book through unpaid labors in a backyard shed, is a beautiful testament to this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Plenty of Bay Area locals make appearances here, as usual. Rebecca Solnit’s essay from Orion, “Winged Mercury and the Golden Calf,” lays down all the ways the Gold Rush scarred, permanently, the Northern California landscape. Its most terrible legacy is all the mercury it left behind. This is something I never knew: mercury is used in large quantities in gold mining, and most of it escaped into our waterways: “Much of it is still there — a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist once told me that he and his peers sometimes find globules the size of a man’s fist in pristine-looking Sierra Nevada streams — but the rest of it ended up lining the bottom of San Francisco Bay.” It’s enough to make you shudder.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The short story “Pampkin’s Lament,” by local and Stegner fellow Peter Orner, was pulled from The Mission’s own \u003ca href=\"http://www.mcsweeneys.net/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">McSweeney’s\u003c/a> for inclusion. It’s a bittersweet story of a young boy watching his father, a campaign consultant, as he works for a losing Illinois gubernatorial candidate. “Pampkin got run over by a fez-wearing Shriner on a motorized flying carpet. The Shriner swore it was an accident, but this didn’t stop the Waukegan News Sun from running the headline PAMPKIN SWEPT UNDER RUG.” Its ending is suprising, sweet, and sad. Robert Olen Butler’s “18 1/2,” originally published in \u003ca href=\"http://www.all-story.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Zoetrope\u003c/a>, is a hysterical re-imagining of the missing eighteen and a half minutes on one of Nixon’s Watergate tapes. Nixon talks about Elvis, childhood poverty, why he wears his wingtips on the beach, and a late-night run-in with a certain drunk young man from the Texas Air National Guard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A beautiful essay, “Fathead’s Hard Times,” by San Francisco resident W.S. Di Piero appears from Berkeley’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.threepennyreview.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Threepenny Review\u003c/a>. In it, he describes how his deep love and appreciation of music have helped him handle the chronic pain of a crippling spinal condition. “While in the hospital and for a long time thereafter, at night I kept by my ear a transistor radio…So whenever the pain spiked me awake — IT seemed deranged, because it migrated: now in my lower back, now knees, now upper legs — I had sounds running into my ear that instead of being a balm or distraction laytered me more deeply into the pain, its rhythms and registers.” Local legend Herbert Gold gets a Pushcart nod, as well, for his essay “A Genius of Grief: Memories of Saul Bellow.” His description of life as a young man in postwar Paris, hanging out with Bellow in St-Germain-des-Pres, is enough to make you wish you had a time machine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> If I had to complain about the book at all, I’d say that it skews a bit on the safe side, and the old guard is far more heavily represented than the young. As far as I can tell, they only draw from print publications and not online ones (this is common: as far as I know, \u003cb>Best American Nonrequired Reading\u003c/b> is the only major Best-of annual that regularly publishes internet-based work.) Pushcart’s Advisory Council is chock-full of gray eminences like Joyce Carol Oates, John Irving, and Gerald Stern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The best thing about the book is how skillfully it’s been curated. Solnit’s gold-mining essay sits alongside a short story called “The Best Jeweler” by Clancy Martin, a tale of love and betrayal and macho behavior in a mall jewelry shop. Robert Olen Butler’s whimsical take on Richard Nixon’s inner life precedes a poem called “Skinny Dipping With Pat Nixon” by David Kirby, in which the poet discovers a latent carnal urge for the former first lady, now that he is the age that she was then. Like paintings in a museum, the pieces are set up in such a way that they complement and comment on one another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Read the \u003cb>32nd Annual Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses\u003c/b> in order, start to finish, and you’ll feel like you’ve been invited to the wittiest and most interesting cocktail party ever. And it’s one that won’t end anytime soon: Pushcart is a nonprofit entity, buffered from the cruel winds of commerce. Says Bill Henderson, “Our endowment insures that our non-profit project will endure despite the oligarchs. Our only overhead is that 8’x8′ shack, and it’s real sturdy.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Full disclosure: The funny book I’ll be reviewing this week comes from \u003ca href=\"http://www.towbooks.com\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">TOW Books\u003c/a>, a brand new humor imprint of F+W Publications. TOW is headed by a certain John Warner. Back in 2003, I worked on a humor book as one of half a dozen co-editors, including this selfsame John Warner. We exchanged some email over the course of the project, but have never met. We haven’t communicated since that book came out 4 years ago — except for maybe one email on our shared discomfort at the fact that our book was being touted in the Amazon comments as “the perfect toilet read.” (Ew.) But my decision to review \u003cb>Really, You’ve Done Enough\u003c/b> by Sarah Walker came before finding out that Warner was behind its publication. Warner is still the editor of \u003ca href=\"http://www.mcsweeneys.net/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">McSweeney’s Internet Tendency\u003c/a>. Sarah Walker’s writing has appeared there as well, but not until after my employment with that esteemed group of overeducated funny people had ended. She and I have never met. I don’t believe that my tenuous tangential relationship to these folks has biased my opinions at all, but I figured I’d let you know. So, let’s get on to the actual reviewing, shall we?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sarah Walker is a sketch-comedy actress, half of a performing duo called Walker and Cantrell. She is currently a writer for \u003cb>The Daily Show\u003c/b>, and has worked for both David Letterman AND Conan O’Brien. (She has thus hit the trifecta of popular nightly TV shows that are actually good. Way to go Sarah!) Walker kicks off the TOW Books imprint with a perfect holiday read: \u003cb>Really, You’ve Done Enough: A Parent’s Guide to Stop Parenting Their Adult Child Who Still Needs Their Money But Not Their Advice\u003c/b>. In the introduction, Walker notes that she wanted to title the book \u003cb>You Can Stop F@#king Me Up Now\u003c/b>. It purports to be a self-help book — a guide to teach parents how to back off and stop “helicoptering” over their almost-30-year-old offspring. But it quickly becomes way weirder than that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book’s narrator is a (hopefully) fictional character also named Sarah Walker, an aimless, jobless, probably alcoholic, twentysomething Brooklynite. The book she narrates isn’t really intended as a guide for all parents; it’s a guide for HER parents, very specifically. She wants them to stop meddling in her life, but to continue sending checks. So she pens this confused, digressive screed, combining fake but official-sounding statistics with badly-concealed bitterness and occasional flights of total insanity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It has recently been noted,” Walker writes, “…by Danish scientists wearing monocles that twenty-eight is the new twenty-one.” At age 28, Sarah says, young people suffer from a new ailment called “Financial Age Time Stoppage,” and one’s job as a good parent is to continue sending money no matter what. “Do not consider this to be delusional and unhealthy, it is merely good parenting by way of supporting your child’s dreams.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Sarah character is kind of a spoiled jerk, the kind who is totally oblivious of her spoiled jerkiness. Chapter headings include “Helping Your Child Get a Job: Only bitter people hate nepotism” and “The Gift of Technology: Helping your child through their stay-at-home twenties.” In comedy, of course, timing is everything, and many a humorous book has become tiresome because it went on too long. Walker has done a good job of keeping the length under control and the pace brisk. But she’s never met a digression she didn’t like. She tells all about various social networks, explains the rules for Beer Pong, and extols the career highlights of actor Tim Curry in a footnote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the start of the “Partying With Your Child” chapter, Walker writes, “I came home to visit my parents on a random weekend and my dad caught me smoking a joint out of my window in my room. Instead of being angry with me, he asked if he could have a drag, except he said ‘toke,’ which made me die a little.” The conclusion of the “partying” chapter is: please don’t do it. Ever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You could reduce all the funniest bits of \u003cb>Really, You’ve Done Enough\u003c/b> into a list of don’ts, which paradoxically work to illustrate how Mr. and Mrs. Walker behave. Don’t challenge your children’s friends to Beer Pong. Don’t have “loud hotel sex” when your adult child (who knows exactly what you’re doing) is asleep in an adjoining room. Do not ever create an online social network profile of any sort, and “If you start dating your much younger Yoga teacher post-divorce, please acknowledge that this is a cliché.” In the “do” category are just two things: “leave your kids alone” and “send money.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you really start to think hard about the social realities underpinning the book’s humor, it might make you depressed. Walker’s book is the perfect illustration of the findings in Dr. Judith Wallerstein’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Unexpected-Legacy-Divorce-Landmark-Study/dp/0786886161/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196653256&sr=8-2\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">landmark 25-year study\u003c/a> of dysfunctional families, \u003cb>The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce\u003c/b>. To be totally reductive and overly simple for a moment: Wallerstein found that children of divorced families in the ’70s and ’80s were in some ways forced to grow up too fast (their parents sometimes treated them more like friends than kids). They also tended to act like immature, overgrown children well into adulthood, often remaining financially dependent, self-centered and underemployed jerks. If you really want to get whiplash, read Walker and Wallerstein at the same time, like I did. You won’t know which one will make you laugh and which will make you cry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you have no plans for the holidays this year, I suggest you buy a copy of \u003cb>Really, You’ve Done Enough\u003c/b> and a few large bottles of top-shelf liquor. Perhaps also buy a book of poetry by Philip Larkin that contains the bleakly hilarious poem \u003ca href=\"http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar2.htm\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">This Be The Verse\u003c/a>, which Walker acknowledges as an inspiration. Pay by credit card, and send your parents the bill. Lock yourself in your apartment. Pour, read, and enjoy.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Full disclosure: The funny book I’ll be reviewing this week comes from \u003ca href=\"http://www.towbooks.com\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">TOW Books\u003c/a>, a brand new humor imprint of F+W Publications. TOW is headed by a certain John Warner. Back in 2003, I worked on a humor book as one of half a dozen co-editors, including this selfsame John Warner. We exchanged some email over the course of the project, but have never met. We haven’t communicated since that book came out 4 years ago — except for maybe one email on our shared discomfort at the fact that our book was being touted in the Amazon comments as “the perfect toilet read.” (Ew.) But my decision to review \u003cb>Really, You’ve Done Enough\u003c/b> by Sarah Walker came before finding out that Warner was behind its publication. Warner is still the editor of \u003ca href=\"http://www.mcsweeneys.net/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">McSweeney’s Internet Tendency\u003c/a>. Sarah Walker’s writing has appeared there as well, but not until after my employment with that esteemed group of overeducated funny people had ended. She and I have never met. I don’t believe that my tenuous tangential relationship to these folks has biased my opinions at all, but I figured I’d let you know. So, let’s get on to the actual reviewing, shall we?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sarah Walker is a sketch-comedy actress, half of a performing duo called Walker and Cantrell. She is currently a writer for \u003cb>The Daily Show\u003c/b>, and has worked for both David Letterman AND Conan O’Brien. (She has thus hit the trifecta of popular nightly TV shows that are actually good. Way to go Sarah!) Walker kicks off the TOW Books imprint with a perfect holiday read: \u003cb>Really, You’ve Done Enough: A Parent’s Guide to Stop Parenting Their Adult Child Who Still Needs Their Money But Not Their Advice\u003c/b>. In the introduction, Walker notes that she wanted to title the book \u003cb>You Can Stop F@#king Me Up Now\u003c/b>. It purports to be a self-help book — a guide to teach parents how to back off and stop “helicoptering” over their almost-30-year-old offspring. But it quickly becomes way weirder than that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book’s narrator is a (hopefully) fictional character also named Sarah Walker, an aimless, jobless, probably alcoholic, twentysomething Brooklynite. The book she narrates isn’t really intended as a guide for all parents; it’s a guide for HER parents, very specifically. She wants them to stop meddling in her life, but to continue sending checks. So she pens this confused, digressive screed, combining fake but official-sounding statistics with badly-concealed bitterness and occasional flights of total insanity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It has recently been noted,” Walker writes, “…by Danish scientists wearing monocles that twenty-eight is the new twenty-one.” At age 28, Sarah says, young people suffer from a new ailment called “Financial Age Time Stoppage,” and one’s job as a good parent is to continue sending money no matter what. “Do not consider this to be delusional and unhealthy, it is merely good parenting by way of supporting your child’s dreams.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Sarah character is kind of a spoiled jerk, the kind who is totally oblivious of her spoiled jerkiness. Chapter headings include “Helping Your Child Get a Job: Only bitter people hate nepotism” and “The Gift of Technology: Helping your child through their stay-at-home twenties.” In comedy, of course, timing is everything, and many a humorous book has become tiresome because it went on too long. Walker has done a good job of keeping the length under control and the pace brisk. But she’s never met a digression she didn’t like. She tells all about various social networks, explains the rules for Beer Pong, and extols the career highlights of actor Tim Curry in a footnote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the start of the “Partying With Your Child” chapter, Walker writes, “I came home to visit my parents on a random weekend and my dad caught me smoking a joint out of my window in my room. Instead of being angry with me, he asked if he could have a drag, except he said ‘toke,’ which made me die a little.” The conclusion of the “partying” chapter is: please don’t do it. Ever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You could reduce all the funniest bits of \u003cb>Really, You’ve Done Enough\u003c/b> into a list of don’ts, which paradoxically work to illustrate how Mr. and Mrs. Walker behave. Don’t challenge your children’s friends to Beer Pong. Don’t have “loud hotel sex” when your adult child (who knows exactly what you’re doing) is asleep in an adjoining room. Do not ever create an online social network profile of any sort, and “If you start dating your much younger Yoga teacher post-divorce, please acknowledge that this is a cliché.” In the “do” category are just two things: “leave your kids alone” and “send money.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you really start to think hard about the social realities underpinning the book’s humor, it might make you depressed. Walker’s book is the perfect illustration of the findings in Dr. Judith Wallerstein’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Unexpected-Legacy-Divorce-Landmark-Study/dp/0786886161/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196653256&sr=8-2\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">landmark 25-year study\u003c/a> of dysfunctional families, \u003cb>The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce\u003c/b>. To be totally reductive and overly simple for a moment: Wallerstein found that children of divorced families in the ’70s and ’80s were in some ways forced to grow up too fast (their parents sometimes treated them more like friends than kids). They also tended to act like immature, overgrown children well into adulthood, often remaining financially dependent, self-centered and underemployed jerks. If you really want to get whiplash, read Walker and Wallerstein at the same time, like I did. You won’t know which one will make you laugh and which will make you cry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you have no plans for the holidays this year, I suggest you buy a copy of \u003cb>Really, You’ve Done Enough\u003c/b> and a few large bottles of top-shelf liquor. Perhaps also buy a book of poetry by Philip Larkin that contains the bleakly hilarious poem \u003ca href=\"http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar2.htm\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">This Be The Verse\u003c/a>, which Walker acknowledges as an inspiration. Pay by credit card, and send your parents the bill. Lock yourself in your apartment. Pour, read, and enjoy.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Clane Hayward: The Hypocrisy Of Disco",
"headTitle": "Clane Hayward: The Hypocrisy Of Disco | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Whether it’s a rainy redwood forest, a red-clay desert, or a shiny subdivision outside of Las Vegas, the American West is the place you go in order to become someone else. A new name, a new life. Clane Hayward’s parents did this. They ended up in the Upper Haight in the year Clane was born, during the Summer Of Love, in search of a new kind of world. At the opening of Hayward’s beautiful and heartbreaking memoir of her childhood, \u003cb>The Hypocrisy of Disco\u003c/b>, she is eleven. She is living with her mother H’lane and two of her younger siblings, Haud and Ki, in a tumble-down house on the Russian River. Hayward writes from a child’s perspective, partly misunderstanding and partly ultra-perceptive, angry and rebellious but wanting to be cared for and loved more than anything. Her descriptions of the small joys of a wild childhood are achingly beautiful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book opens with Clane, her siblings, and the kids of her mom’s best friend running out of the house together at dusk. “Slap bang goes the screen door three or four times fast, because the seven of us kids are all leaving the house at once…Together we make a sound of slapping tennies on dirt, of jeans and corduroys whistling, of gravel skipping ahead of our hurrying feet.” The West might be the place you go to be free, but the price of that freedom is loneliness. “How come there’s so many of us kids with our parents spread all over the place having different kids wherever they go? I ask H’lane. H’lane says, free love, man…I haven’t seen my dad for a few years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite living in various “communal” settings, Clane’s childhood is one of the most regimented and isolated you can possibly imagine. One of H’lane’s lovers introduces her to macrobiotic food, and afterwards forbids her children from eating tomatoes, soyburgers, or uncooked vegetables. They’re also not allowed to sleep on their stomachs, drink more than a certain prescribed amount of water, or use more than two squares of toilet paper at a time. In addition, they are forbidden from wearing synthetic fabrics or day-glo colors. In 1978, this is really too much to ask. For long stretches there is no school and no roof, just a patch of dirt and a picnic table. Not surprisingly, the kids spend most of their energy scavenging for junk food and discarded clothes, shoplifting, and doing things like sneaking into a neighbors’ house to gulp white sugar straight out of the container.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It would have been easy for Clane Hayward to pen a straight-up indictment of hippie culture and of her parents. But thankfully she is too good a writer to fall into that trap. She writes about her time attending Monte Rio Alternative (a “free school” where children can essentially do whatever they feel like) with a real and deep affection that will make you wish you got to go there. But even alternative school was not alternative enough for H’lane, so Clane didn’t get to go there long. Any kind of good, common-sense stable structure Clane had would eventually be snatched away. You get the feeling that if Clane’s mom had relented in her lifestyle strictures just the slightest bit, if she’d let Clane wear polyester and eat a peanut butter sandwich every now and then, she could have halted the separation between them that grew wider over time. “The next thing, we were on the road walking home and she was tugging me by the collar of my shirt, saying, Clane, I don’t know what your trip is. I want you to be Cleopatra but you want to be Minnie Mouse.” When H’lane’s best friend Susan’s little boy suffers a bad injury from falling into the campfire, H’lane tells her, “no way should you take him to the hospital. Western medicine is death culture.” Susan, posessing the larger share of common sense, takes her kids (and her food stamps) and leaves Clane’s family in dire straits. Eventually, H’lane is doing nothing but meditating and eating nothing but rice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second act of the book takes place in the Southwest, where Clane and Haud have been packed off to live with their outlaw dad in a dirt-floor house. He’s often absent for days at a time. Clane befriends some kids from a neighboring Latino family, and her fascinated description of their home is devastating. Although the neighbors are equally dirt-poor, they have a bustling little “abuelita” who spends all day cooking in a scrubbed linoleum and formica kitchen, providing all the things that Clane and Haud never got: yummy food, a clean home, scoldings when they’ve done wrong and praise when they’ve done right. Emotionally, Clane’s like an American version of the Little Match Girl, freezing to death outside a home where a loving family is safe and warm. By the time Clane and Haud are handed off yet again, this time to their grandmother in suburban Las Vegas, they are nearly feral, years behind in schooling, with no social skills whatsoever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most beautiful of the book’s many lyrical descriptive passages comes when Clane’s uncle is driving her across the desert to Vegas. You can see and feel the scene, the long hot day, the sunset across the sky. That night, the impossibly bright neon lights on the horizon symbolize the rupture with everything that came before. Clane stares in awe at the contents of her grandmother’s side-by-side refigerator-freezer: concentrated orange juice, frozen waffles, cartons of cigarettes, cocktail onions and maraschino cherries. It’s like they’ve landed on a new planet. If Clane Hayward was just writing this book to condemn the 1970’s counterculture, then this would be the happy ending, the rescue. But nothing is ever so simple. New bell bottoms and school books are not a substitute for a stable childhood, or parental love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hayward’s perception for small detail is absolutely tremendous. \u003cb>The Hypocrisy of Disco\u003c/b> is an elegy for something she never had, a eulogy for the hope of one day being “normal.” But throughout all the unstable tumult, the one thing that never leaves Clane is her love of the American West itself. She shows us the trees, the sunsets, the smell of the desert after a much needed rain. Hayward does what all great writers should do: she shows us an unfamiliar view of familiar territory. She strips away stereotype and narrative expectation and leaves us alone with this whip-smart and achingly sad twelve year old girl, wearing her only pair of ragged green pants, wishing she had somewhere to go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hayward is a Navy veteran, and after many years of living in San Francisco she is now a middle school teacher in Austin, Texas. There’s obviously a lot more story to tell. I hope she’ll tell it.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Whether it’s a rainy redwood forest, a red-clay desert, or a shiny subdivision outside of Las Vegas, the American West is the place you go in order to become someone else. A new name, a new life. Clane Hayward’s parents did this. They ended up in the Upper Haight in the year Clane was born, during the Summer Of Love, in search of a new kind of world. At the opening of Hayward’s beautiful and heartbreaking memoir of her childhood, \u003cb>The Hypocrisy of Disco\u003c/b>, she is eleven. She is living with her mother H’lane and two of her younger siblings, Haud and Ki, in a tumble-down house on the Russian River. Hayward writes from a child’s perspective, partly misunderstanding and partly ultra-perceptive, angry and rebellious but wanting to be cared for and loved more than anything. Her descriptions of the small joys of a wild childhood are achingly beautiful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book opens with Clane, her siblings, and the kids of her mom’s best friend running out of the house together at dusk. “Slap bang goes the screen door three or four times fast, because the seven of us kids are all leaving the house at once…Together we make a sound of slapping tennies on dirt, of jeans and corduroys whistling, of gravel skipping ahead of our hurrying feet.” The West might be the place you go to be free, but the price of that freedom is loneliness. “How come there’s so many of us kids with our parents spread all over the place having different kids wherever they go? I ask H’lane. H’lane says, free love, man…I haven’t seen my dad for a few years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite living in various “communal” settings, Clane’s childhood is one of the most regimented and isolated you can possibly imagine. One of H’lane’s lovers introduces her to macrobiotic food, and afterwards forbids her children from eating tomatoes, soyburgers, or uncooked vegetables. They’re also not allowed to sleep on their stomachs, drink more than a certain prescribed amount of water, or use more than two squares of toilet paper at a time. In addition, they are forbidden from wearing synthetic fabrics or day-glo colors. In 1978, this is really too much to ask. For long stretches there is no school and no roof, just a patch of dirt and a picnic table. Not surprisingly, the kids spend most of their energy scavenging for junk food and discarded clothes, shoplifting, and doing things like sneaking into a neighbors’ house to gulp white sugar straight out of the container.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It would have been easy for Clane Hayward to pen a straight-up indictment of hippie culture and of her parents. But thankfully she is too good a writer to fall into that trap. She writes about her time attending Monte Rio Alternative (a “free school” where children can essentially do whatever they feel like) with a real and deep affection that will make you wish you got to go there. But even alternative school was not alternative enough for H’lane, so Clane didn’t get to go there long. Any kind of good, common-sense stable structure Clane had would eventually be snatched away. You get the feeling that if Clane’s mom had relented in her lifestyle strictures just the slightest bit, if she’d let Clane wear polyester and eat a peanut butter sandwich every now and then, she could have halted the separation between them that grew wider over time. “The next thing, we were on the road walking home and she was tugging me by the collar of my shirt, saying, Clane, I don’t know what your trip is. I want you to be Cleopatra but you want to be Minnie Mouse.” When H’lane’s best friend Susan’s little boy suffers a bad injury from falling into the campfire, H’lane tells her, “no way should you take him to the hospital. Western medicine is death culture.” Susan, posessing the larger share of common sense, takes her kids (and her food stamps) and leaves Clane’s family in dire straits. Eventually, H’lane is doing nothing but meditating and eating nothing but rice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second act of the book takes place in the Southwest, where Clane and Haud have been packed off to live with their outlaw dad in a dirt-floor house. He’s often absent for days at a time. Clane befriends some kids from a neighboring Latino family, and her fascinated description of their home is devastating. Although the neighbors are equally dirt-poor, they have a bustling little “abuelita” who spends all day cooking in a scrubbed linoleum and formica kitchen, providing all the things that Clane and Haud never got: yummy food, a clean home, scoldings when they’ve done wrong and praise when they’ve done right. Emotionally, Clane’s like an American version of the Little Match Girl, freezing to death outside a home where a loving family is safe and warm. By the time Clane and Haud are handed off yet again, this time to their grandmother in suburban Las Vegas, they are nearly feral, years behind in schooling, with no social skills whatsoever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most beautiful of the book’s many lyrical descriptive passages comes when Clane’s uncle is driving her across the desert to Vegas. You can see and feel the scene, the long hot day, the sunset across the sky. That night, the impossibly bright neon lights on the horizon symbolize the rupture with everything that came before. Clane stares in awe at the contents of her grandmother’s side-by-side refigerator-freezer: concentrated orange juice, frozen waffles, cartons of cigarettes, cocktail onions and maraschino cherries. It’s like they’ve landed on a new planet. If Clane Hayward was just writing this book to condemn the 1970’s counterculture, then this would be the happy ending, the rescue. But nothing is ever so simple. New bell bottoms and school books are not a substitute for a stable childhood, or parental love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hayward’s perception for small detail is absolutely tremendous. \u003cb>The Hypocrisy of Disco\u003c/b> is an elegy for something she never had, a eulogy for the hope of one day being “normal.” But throughout all the unstable tumult, the one thing that never leaves Clane is her love of the American West itself. She shows us the trees, the sunsets, the smell of the desert after a much needed rain. Hayward does what all great writers should do: she shows us an unfamiliar view of familiar territory. She strips away stereotype and narrative expectation and leaves us alone with this whip-smart and achingly sad twelve year old girl, wearing her only pair of ragged green pants, wishing she had somewhere to go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Millard Kaufman: Bowl of Cherries",
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"content": "\u003cp>I can hear the detractors rolling their eyes already: leave it to the cutesy tongue-in-cheekers at McSweeney’s to publish a debut novel by a 90-year-old man. You can put it on the shelf next to the book by Amy Fusselman that won a contest allegedly looking for a book about “electrical engineering on boats,” The novel \u003cb>Lemon\u003c/b> which had 10,000 unique hand-drawn front covers, and the issue of the quarterly designed to look like a pile of junk mail. Either this outside-the-box thing is terribly exciting or painfully precious, depending on how cynical you’ve become and how long it’s been since your college graduation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Millard Kaufman might be a 90-year-old debut novelist, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t already an acclaimed, accomplished writer. Kaufman had a long screenwriting career and was nominated for Oscars twice. He co-created \u003cb>Mr. Magoo\u003c/b>. And although he didn’t actually write it, he was given screen credit as the writer of the seminal, unmatched Noir film \u003cb>Gun Crazy\u003c/b>, as cover for the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. I watched one of Kaufman’s films this week, \u003cb>Bad Day At Black Rock\u003c/b>, which garnered Oscar nominations for both Kaufman and star Spencer Tracy. A train stops in a dusty desert town, a mysterious man disembarks, and begins asking uncomfortable questions to the leathery, tightlipped locals. They are all hiding something, and eventually the truth comes out: in the heightened emotional climate of the days following Pearl Harbor, a mob killed and torched the home of a Japanese-American rancher. “We were drunk,” one of the guilt-stricken participants confesses. “Patriotic drunk.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kaufman is a great chronicler of the hangover that follows a binge of Patriotic Drunk. And that is the subject of his goofy, rollicking, absurdist, bad-dream carnival ride of a novel, \u003cb>Bowl Of Cherries\u003c/b>. You might expect a gentleman of his age and accomplishment to write something that takes place during his own glory years, or something transparently autobiographical. No way, not here. \u003cb>Bowl Of Cherries\u003c/b> is the tale of teenage Judd Breslau. Abandoned first by his angry professor father and then by his poet mother, Judd is packed off to Yale, where he’s been given a scholarship he doesn’t deserve. Judd is quickly kicked out when he fails to distinguish himself as a scholar. His dissertation is “full of seepage.” (He’s more interested in finding uses for great-sounding words than in actual meaning.) “A host of favorite terms bounces around my mind, derived from half a dozen legitimate languages, melded into a kind of lobotomized esperanto so piss-elegant they self-destructed on the tongue into parody.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Judd stumbles across a bathrobe-wearing benign kook named Phillips Chatterton, who has some crazy notions about the pyramids and sound waves. He offers Judd a place to live if he’ll help with Chatterton’s “research,” playing a tuba at a block of wood in the hopes that it will levitate. Judd accepts for one reason only: Nutty old Chatterton has a beautiful daughter, Valerie, and Judd figures that once he can get rid of her pesky boyfriend, he’ll have a shot. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parsing the plot would be a fool’s errand. When we first meet Judd, he’s trapped in a prison in the Iraqi province of Assama, “a flat depression in the shape of a chicken.” How he came to be there, and whether he will escape his fate (“ganching,” a method of execution by which one is thrown out of a tower onto sharp stakes) is what drives the engine of the book. I will say that Judd ends up in Assama in the employ of a contractor called Resource Analysis and Technology (RAT), a subsidiary of Ultra Global Husbandry (UGH), engaging in various shenanigans involving the secret ingredient of an inexhaustible building substance, and covertly providing nuclear materials to the American-friendly local tribal chief. My favorite scene is one in which Judd and the director of RAT meet with the President of our United States. “Frowning or grinning, he spoke in that bourbon-and-branch baritone, renowned for his state of the union speeches, his justly famous jokes with journalists, his congratulatory messages to winners of the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the Westminster Dog Show. I felt the weight of the man’s magic.” While referring to the province variously as “Assara,” “Assoko” and “Asexual,” the unnamed President shoots baskets into a hoop hidden behind the Great Seal of the United States.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When writers of a certain age try rendering the Kids Of Today, often they run into trouble, dating themselves with incorrect slang and less than up-to-date cultural references. Kaufman avoids this by focusing on the things that the Kids Of Today have in common with the kids of any day: aimlessness about the future, sexual jealousy, problems getting along with their parents. Though it’s supposed to be 2003, the slang of the young characters’ speech is peppered with 1940’s-isms. (“Suddenly Miss Goody-Shoes had transmogrified before my eyes into Mistress Dolly Drop Drawers.”) But since the whole book is an absurdist funhouse it doesn’t feel at all out of place. A few anachronisms creep in, as when Judd is sent out to purchase a specialty porn movie and returns with a reel of film, purchased from a brick-and-mortar movie studio. Doesn’t Kaufman know that these days any young porn starlet worth her salt could run her entire empire without leaving her dorm room?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings me to the other problem. Kaufman seems to have a notion, shared by Tom Wolfe (as displayed in Wolfe’s recent college campus novel \u003cb>I Am Charlotte Simmons\u003c/b>) that all young women of the 21st century are routinely expected to have sex with anyone, at any time, at the slightest provocation. Three major characters in \u003cb>Bowl Of Cherries\u003c/b> are girls in their late teens/early twenties, and all three of them are prodigious sexual athletes, who spend most of their time allowing themselves to be groped and sullied by various unworthy male paws, without blinking an eye. (I mean come on, everyone knows that was the SIXTIES.) There’s something Hugh Hefner-esque in the portrayals of the girls which I could have done without. But I digress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Quibbles aside, Kaufman is a hell of a writer. If the world is fair, \u003cb>Bowl Of Cherries\u003c/b> will go down as one of the great satiric treatments of the current ongoing conflict. At different points I heard echoes of \u003cb>Catch-22, Dr. Strangelove, M*A*S*H,\u003c/b> even in some weird way, Brecht’s \u003cb>Mother Courage and Her Children\u003c/b>: in each case, a realistic portrayal of war doesn’t even begin to get to the root of it, you have to paint, in garish colors, the whole absurd cartoony circus that allows us to justify something as hideous as war. Kaufman is a veteran, both of actual combat and its Hollywood version. One thing he knows for sure is that you can’t stay Patriotic Drunk forever. At some point you sober up.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>I can hear the detractors rolling their eyes already: leave it to the cutesy tongue-in-cheekers at McSweeney’s to publish a debut novel by a 90-year-old man. You can put it on the shelf next to the book by Amy Fusselman that won a contest allegedly looking for a book about “electrical engineering on boats,” The novel \u003cb>Lemon\u003c/b> which had 10,000 unique hand-drawn front covers, and the issue of the quarterly designed to look like a pile of junk mail. Either this outside-the-box thing is terribly exciting or painfully precious, depending on how cynical you’ve become and how long it’s been since your college graduation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Millard Kaufman might be a 90-year-old debut novelist, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t already an acclaimed, accomplished writer. Kaufman had a long screenwriting career and was nominated for Oscars twice. He co-created \u003cb>Mr. Magoo\u003c/b>. And although he didn’t actually write it, he was given screen credit as the writer of the seminal, unmatched Noir film \u003cb>Gun Crazy\u003c/b>, as cover for the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. I watched one of Kaufman’s films this week, \u003cb>Bad Day At Black Rock\u003c/b>, which garnered Oscar nominations for both Kaufman and star Spencer Tracy. A train stops in a dusty desert town, a mysterious man disembarks, and begins asking uncomfortable questions to the leathery, tightlipped locals. They are all hiding something, and eventually the truth comes out: in the heightened emotional climate of the days following Pearl Harbor, a mob killed and torched the home of a Japanese-American rancher. “We were drunk,” one of the guilt-stricken participants confesses. “Patriotic drunk.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kaufman is a great chronicler of the hangover that follows a binge of Patriotic Drunk. And that is the subject of his goofy, rollicking, absurdist, bad-dream carnival ride of a novel, \u003cb>Bowl Of Cherries\u003c/b>. You might expect a gentleman of his age and accomplishment to write something that takes place during his own glory years, or something transparently autobiographical. No way, not here. \u003cb>Bowl Of Cherries\u003c/b> is the tale of teenage Judd Breslau. Abandoned first by his angry professor father and then by his poet mother, Judd is packed off to Yale, where he’s been given a scholarship he doesn’t deserve. Judd is quickly kicked out when he fails to distinguish himself as a scholar. His dissertation is “full of seepage.” (He’s more interested in finding uses for great-sounding words than in actual meaning.) “A host of favorite terms bounces around my mind, derived from half a dozen legitimate languages, melded into a kind of lobotomized esperanto so piss-elegant they self-destructed on the tongue into parody.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Judd stumbles across a bathrobe-wearing benign kook named Phillips Chatterton, who has some crazy notions about the pyramids and sound waves. He offers Judd a place to live if he’ll help with Chatterton’s “research,” playing a tuba at a block of wood in the hopes that it will levitate. Judd accepts for one reason only: Nutty old Chatterton has a beautiful daughter, Valerie, and Judd figures that once he can get rid of her pesky boyfriend, he’ll have a shot. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parsing the plot would be a fool’s errand. When we first meet Judd, he’s trapped in a prison in the Iraqi province of Assama, “a flat depression in the shape of a chicken.” How he came to be there, and whether he will escape his fate (“ganching,” a method of execution by which one is thrown out of a tower onto sharp stakes) is what drives the engine of the book. I will say that Judd ends up in Assama in the employ of a contractor called Resource Analysis and Technology (RAT), a subsidiary of Ultra Global Husbandry (UGH), engaging in various shenanigans involving the secret ingredient of an inexhaustible building substance, and covertly providing nuclear materials to the American-friendly local tribal chief. My favorite scene is one in which Judd and the director of RAT meet with the President of our United States. “Frowning or grinning, he spoke in that bourbon-and-branch baritone, renowned for his state of the union speeches, his justly famous jokes with journalists, his congratulatory messages to winners of the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the Westminster Dog Show. I felt the weight of the man’s magic.” While referring to the province variously as “Assara,” “Assoko” and “Asexual,” the unnamed President shoots baskets into a hoop hidden behind the Great Seal of the United States.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When writers of a certain age try rendering the Kids Of Today, often they run into trouble, dating themselves with incorrect slang and less than up-to-date cultural references. Kaufman avoids this by focusing on the things that the Kids Of Today have in common with the kids of any day: aimlessness about the future, sexual jealousy, problems getting along with their parents. Though it’s supposed to be 2003, the slang of the young characters’ speech is peppered with 1940’s-isms. (“Suddenly Miss Goody-Shoes had transmogrified before my eyes into Mistress Dolly Drop Drawers.”) But since the whole book is an absurdist funhouse it doesn’t feel at all out of place. A few anachronisms creep in, as when Judd is sent out to purchase a specialty porn movie and returns with a reel of film, purchased from a brick-and-mortar movie studio. Doesn’t Kaufman know that these days any young porn starlet worth her salt could run her entire empire without leaving her dorm room?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings me to the other problem. Kaufman seems to have a notion, shared by Tom Wolfe (as displayed in Wolfe’s recent college campus novel \u003cb>I Am Charlotte Simmons\u003c/b>) that all young women of the 21st century are routinely expected to have sex with anyone, at any time, at the slightest provocation. Three major characters in \u003cb>Bowl Of Cherries\u003c/b> are girls in their late teens/early twenties, and all three of them are prodigious sexual athletes, who spend most of their time allowing themselves to be groped and sullied by various unworthy male paws, without blinking an eye. (I mean come on, everyone knows that was the SIXTIES.) There’s something Hugh Hefner-esque in the portrayals of the girls which I could have done without. But I digress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Quibbles aside, Kaufman is a hell of a writer. If the world is fair, \u003cb>Bowl Of Cherries\u003c/b> will go down as one of the great satiric treatments of the current ongoing conflict. At different points I heard echoes of \u003cb>Catch-22, Dr. Strangelove, M*A*S*H,\u003c/b> even in some weird way, Brecht’s \u003cb>Mother Courage and Her Children\u003c/b>: in each case, a realistic portrayal of war doesn’t even begin to get to the root of it, you have to paint, in garish colors, the whole absurd cartoony circus that allows us to justify something as hideous as war. Kaufman is a veteran, both of actual combat and its Hollywood version. One thing he knows for sure is that you can’t stay Patriotic Drunk forever. At some point you sober up.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Ask a writer who their favorite living writer is. There’s a good chance they’ll throw out the name Jim Shepard. (The other correct answers are Alice Munro and/or Charles Baxter.) If you’re a regular \u003ci>New Yorker\u003c/i> or \u003ci>Harper’s\u003c/i> reader you’ve probably encountered him. If you’ve attended an MFA program or a summer writer’s conference, you may have taken a class from him. If you have had the good fortune to see him read, perhaps as an “opening act” for a more famous friend, you most likely roared with laughter, applauded loudly, and then lined up to buy his book, thinking, “why haven’t I heard of this guy before?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re anyone else (and “anyone else” here constitutes probably 98% of the American populace) you have no clue who he is, other than maybe a vague but erroneous notion. “Oh yeah, he’s Sam Shepard’s son, right?” is a common response. (Unless Sam became a father around age eight — no.) Jim Shepard has a small but vocal cohort of rabid fans, all of whom wait with bated breath as each book is released, saying “maybe this will be the one.” Maybe this will be the book that finally pushes him over into the fame-and-fortune, celebrated-author column, where he can win National Book Awards and hang out in a special secret room to smoke cigars with Don DeLillo and William T. Vollmann and Cormac McCarthy. Actually, he might do that already. And if he does, Don and Bill and Cormac probably say to him, “Hell, Shepard, why aren’t you more famous? Maybe this next book will be the one.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Like You’d Understand, Anyway\u003c/b> is Shepard’s ninth book. Yes, NINTH. Six novels and two story collections precede this one. The last story collection was \u003cb>Love and Hydrogen\u003c/b>, and its title story appeared in the \u003cb>Best American Short Stories\u003c/b> collection for 2002. That story was about a deeply felt love affair between two men, Gnuss and Meinert, crew members on the Hindenberg’s final voyage. It demonstrated Shepard’s trademark ability to set up a scene that is incredibly historically specific and emotionally universal at the same time. “…Gnuss was a child during the absolute worst years of the inflation… [his]most cherished toy for a year and a half was a clothespin on which his father hand painted a face.” We may not all be German, or zeppelin crew members, or World War I survivors, or even gay; but we can all understand how a forbidden passion might lead two people to tryst feverishly on a ladder up against a giant balloon of flammable gas. Shepard’s most recent novel was \u003cb>Project X\u003c/b>, a brutally accurate portrayal of what it’s like to be a bottom-of-the barrel outcast in junior high school. The two boys at the center of that book plot a terrible revenge, and up until the last second it’s still impossible to tell if it’s all a little boy fantasy or horribly real. Mark my words, \u003cb>Project X\u003c/b> will wreck you, it’ll make you do that thing where you laugh out loud and sob at the same time. But this new collection? This WILL be the one. It has to be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I almost don’t want to tell you about the stories in the book, so as not to spoil your experience. As I read each of them I sat openmouthed, like I was watching a tightrope walker or magician do something that should be impossible. The backdrops for the action are dizzyingly different. “The First South Central Australian Expedition” is the diary of men dragging a whaleboat across a bone-dry and deadly expanse of desert. Disasters, disappointment, hunger, thirst, and mutiny are rendered in heartbreakingly understated Victorian prose by their deluded captain: “We are now fifteen weeks out and for the last six have continued to wait for some kind of happy transformation in the path ahead.” The first story, “The Zero Meter Diving Team” is narrated by Boris Yakovlevich Prushinsky, Soviet chief nuclear engineer during the Chernobyl disaster. His hour-by-hour account of the chain of missteps leading up to the reactor meltdown, and the relationship between him and his two brothers, both of whom are hideously wounded by the radiation, is unforgettable. “Here’s what it’s like to bear up under so much guilt: everywhere you drag yourself you leave a trail. Late at night, you gaze back and view an upsetting record of where you’ve been.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Trample The Dead, Hurdle the Weak” is a peek inside the training regimen of an elite high school football team. “We’re talking summer practice, two-a-days, guys keeling over in the heat. When more than one guy has the dry heaves we call it Hee Haw because of the sound.” The narrator has come to believe, through Google research, that the star of a rival school’s team might also be his half-brother, another son of the father he never knew. He pours all of his energy in training into the thought of meeting his double on the field, in hopes of kicking his ass.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> That’s just a tiny taste. You may have noticed some of the running themes here: men, manliness. Relationships between brothers who love each other, but can’t express it in any way except fierce competition. Sons who will do absolutely anything in pursuit of acceptance by fathers who are continually disappointed. There are practically no women in the whole book. Normally something like that would irk me, but in this case it works, since most of the stories are set in high-testosterone, all-male environments: battlefields, summer camps, nuclear reactors, expeditions to dangerous and remote locales. This is the only short story collection I’ve ever seen that had a two-page bibliography of historical sources. Not only does Shepard take us inside Chernobyl and high school football, but we also meet a young Roman soldier guarding a lonely outpost in “Hadrian’s Wall,” an executioner punctiliously manning his guillotine during the Reign Of Terror in “Sans Farine” (a story tapped by Stephen King for inclusion in \u003cb>Best American Short Stories 2007\u003c/b>), and in “Ancestral Legacies,” Nazi mountain climbers yeti-hunting in Tibet. Just for starters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shepard’s fame problem is demographic. He’s a middle-aged, married white guy with kids. He’s a college professor by day. Nine books deep in a long career you can’t call him a “debut” anything. The publishing machine loves nothing more than hype. Unproven, talentless knuckleheads like Kaavya Visnawathan or James Frey or, ye gods, JT “Laura Albert” LeRoy have big checks thrown at them and then publishers have to dissemble and apologize when they turn out to be frauds. Shepard’s personal life doesn’t have any obvious edgy elements on which hype can be built. But here’s all the hype you need: Jim Shepard is one of America’s greatest underrecognized literary giants, and if you run out and buy a copy of \u003cb>Like You’d Understand, Anyway\u003c/b> tomorrow, this will be your chance to tell all your friends you liked him before it became cool to say so.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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(Unless Sam became a father around age eight — no.) Jim Shepard has a small but vocal cohort of rabid fans, all of whom wait with bated breath as each book is released, saying “maybe this will be the one.” Maybe this will be the book that finally pushes him over into the fame-and-fortune, celebrated-author column, where he can win National Book Awards and hang out in a special secret room to smoke cigars with Don DeLillo and William T. Vollmann and Cormac McCarthy. Actually, he might do that already. And if he does, Don and Bill and Cormac probably say to him, “Hell, Shepard, why aren’t you more famous? Maybe this next book will be the one.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Like You’d Understand, Anyway\u003c/b> is Shepard’s ninth book. Yes, NINTH. Six novels and two story collections precede this one. The last story collection was \u003cb>Love and Hydrogen\u003c/b>, and its title story appeared in the \u003cb>Best American Short Stories\u003c/b> collection for 2002. 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The two boys at the center of that book plot a terrible revenge, and up until the last second it’s still impossible to tell if it’s all a little boy fantasy or horribly real. Mark my words, \u003cb>Project X\u003c/b> will wreck you, it’ll make you do that thing where you laugh out loud and sob at the same time. But this new collection? This WILL be the one. It has to be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I almost don’t want to tell you about the stories in the book, so as not to spoil your experience. As I read each of them I sat openmouthed, like I was watching a tightrope walker or magician do something that should be impossible. The backdrops for the action are dizzyingly different. “The First South Central Australian Expedition” is the diary of men dragging a whaleboat across a bone-dry and deadly expanse of desert. 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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shepard’s fame problem is demographic. He’s a middle-aged, married white guy with kids. He’s a college professor by day. Nine books deep in a long career you can’t call him a “debut” anything. The publishing machine loves nothing more than hype. Unproven, talentless knuckleheads like Kaavya Visnawathan or James Frey or, ye gods, JT “Laura Albert” LeRoy have big checks thrown at them and then publishers have to dissemble and apologize when they turn out to be frauds. Shepard’s personal life doesn’t have any obvious edgy elements on which hype can be built. But here’s all the hype you need: Jim Shepard is one of America’s greatest underrecognized literary giants, and if you run out and buy a copy of \u003cb>Like You’d Understand, Anyway\u003c/b> tomorrow, this will be your chance to tell all your friends you liked him before it became cool to say so.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"airtime": "FRI 4:30pm-5pm, 6:30pm-7pm, 11pm-11:30pm",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareportmagazine",
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"order": 10
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM3NjkwNjk1OTAz",
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},
"city-arts": {
"id": "city-arts",
"title": "City Arts & Lectures",
"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/cityartsandlecture-300x300.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.cityarts.net/",
"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
"subscribe": {
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/City-Arts-and-Lectures-p692/",
"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
"id": "closealltabs",
"title": "Close All Tabs",
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"info": "Close All Tabs breaks down how digital culture shapes our world through thoughtful insights and irreverent humor.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"order": 1
},
"link": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"meta": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy9yc3MvcG9kY2FzdC5waHA_aWQ9NTEwMzEy",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"meta": {
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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}
},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
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"info": "Freakonomics Radio is a one-hour award-winning podcast and public-radio project hosted by Stephen Dubner, with co-author Steve Levitt as a regular guest. It is produced in partnership with WNYC.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/4s8b",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
"rss": "https://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio"
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},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
"info": "Hosted by Terry Gross, \u003cem>Fresh Air from WHYY\u003c/em> is the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues. One of public radio's most popular programs, Fresh Air features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.",
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"link": "/radio/program/fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/381444908/podcast.xml"
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
"title": "Hidden Brain",
"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain",
"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510313/podcast.xml"
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"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. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"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. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"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",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
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"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"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>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"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?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"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",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
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"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "pbs"
},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
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