Little Toy Robot

Hey, look who’s on the cover of this month’s Locus Magazine! It’s Pulitzer-prize winning author Michael Chabon! The issue will be on sale this week, and you can be sure that, if the interview reveals anything good, I will mention it here.

Locus, for those who don’t know, is the trade magazine for the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror fields. They do an astounding job every month of making bestselling authors look awkward and diseased on their garish covers.

“Uh oh,” I thought, looking at the outrageously priced catalogue of the exhibition on Sunday. “It’s an article, not a story. It’s not what I thought.”

I was fooled.

The promised postscript to Kavalier & Clay turned out to be a well fabricated “Talk of the Town” piece from The New Yorker, which looked all too real at first.

A friend in Pittsburgh writes:

Last week, at IronCon, a convention of comic book dealers and fans held annually at the Hotel Duquesne, I screwed up my courage and …

I thought it was an early non-fiction piece by Chabon, but if I had persevered for just a few more words I would have realized that it was indeed a fiction, a completist addendum to the Kavalier & Clay story bringing it extraneous and excessive closure. (I bought it anyway.) I should be used to this after following a year of the Escapist comic, loyally but not always happily, in which Chabon, often listed on the masthead as the publication’s “Escapologist,” fills in the story of the Escapist and friends in excruciating detail up to the present time under the pseudonym of Malachai Cohen.

The exhibition, which was good, was passed mainly in the endeavor of poking fun at the bright-eyed optimism of the early comic book heroes, keeping well away from the fake kryptonite, and appreciating the paranoid world of my grandparents which feels a little less strange after these past few years.

The highlight of the catalogue, however, was not Chabon’s piece, which, as I said, I was compelled to collect even as my enthusiasm for the comics related portion of K&C has worn off (my favorite scene was the party with the Salvadore Dali Incident). The highlight (except for either a failing pun or a loud typo in its last line) was Jules Feiffer’s “The Minsk Theory of Krypton,” which actually articulated the point of the show, if you couldn’t figure out why you were in a Jewish museum staring at pop art created by men with distinctly familiar ethnic names ending in “-witz” or “-ov” (or “-off”) or “-berg” or “-stein”:

Superman was the ultimate assimilationist fantasy. The mild manners and glasses that signified a class of nerdy Clark Kents was, in no way, our real truth. Underneath the schmucky facade there lived Men of Steel! Jerry Siegel’s accomplishment was to chronicle the smart Jewish boy’s American dream. Acknowledge that, and you can better understand the symbolic meaning of the planet Krypton. It wasn’t Krypton that Superman came from; it was the planet Minsk or Lodz or Vilna or Warsaw.

David Mitchell’s first novel, Ghostwritten, is not as strong as the more recent Cloud Atlas, but it’s still an engaging read.

Both books are comprised of linked stories. Ghostwritten contains 10 sections dictated by 9 narrators. Eight of the narrators write in the first person. Each narrative is connected, sometimes obliquely, and the result paints a refracted picture of a plot centering on international intrigue, the art world, and the underworld.

Particularly strong is the section that investigates the life of a record store clerk in Tokyo who reminds me a little of Murakami’s Watanabe in Norwegian Wood. This story bleeds into the tale of a young international lawyer in Hong Kong who is at a crisis in his life and sees ghosts. This element of an otherworldly presence is apparent throughout the book and is one of Mitchell’s main themes, taking the forefront in a section that is actually narrated by a ghost.

Cameos are made by Denholme Cavendish and Luisa Rey, characters that also appear in Cloud Atlas. Since Mitchell is fascinated by the invisible tethers that connect people across time and space, why should his characters be hermetically sealed inside just one novel?

The one flaw in Ghostwritten is the ghastly final section, written from the point of view of a late-night NYC free form radio host who has a show that reminds me of Vin Scelsa’s “Idiot’s Delight.” This section is dialogue heavy, like David Mamet’s prose, and degenerates into chaos and confusion. Mitchell is extremely talented at matching style to plot, but in this case the result is simply painful, and it’s a sad ending to an otherwise good book.

• The Arcade Fire album is growing on me.
• Can’t say it’s my favorite music right now, though. I really like Aloha’s Here Comes Everyone, though it’s a little less spaced out than their earlier albums. It’s well written music, with interesting instrumentation, even when it occasionally veers into neo-prog rock. Check out “You’ve Escaped” if you can find it online.
• Tom Adelman’s The Long Ball is a dramatized retelling of the seminal 1975 baseball season. He chronicles the birth of free agency, the decline of the Oakland A’s dynasty, and of course the “best world series ever.” Sure he plays hard and loose with the facts, but it’s a kind of creative non-fiction, almost “New Journalism,” that we rarely see in sports writing, and I like it. It’s a compulsive read.

If you haven’t guessed by now, the picture to the right isn’t me; it’s Pulitzer Prize winning writer Steven Millhauser. Here’s a snippet from an interview by Jim Shepard (a great writer himself):

js: Don Juan in “An Adventure of Don Juan,” the second novella in The King in the Tree, longs for “a madness of desire, a journey into feeling so intense that he would ride through himself like a conqueror of unknown inner countries.” Is that what fiction should enable?
sm: I’m fanatically reluctant to say that fiction ought to do one thing rather than another. I do know what I want from fiction. I want it to exhilarate me, to unbind my eyes, to murder and resurrect me, to harm me in some fruitful way. But that said, yes, the journey into intense feeling and the conquest of unknown emotional territory is something fiction can make possible.

Michael Chabon’s latest update, on his very own Web site, is filled with nothing but goodness. Buried among the myriad exciting facts and relevations is this:

What else? An apocryphal epilog to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay can be found, not perhaps without a certain amount of difficulty, in the catalog to an exhibit currently on view at Atlanta’s Breman Museum. I can’t give the title of the exhibit because it’s too embarrassing, though the show itself looks terrific.

Hey, I thought to myself, I LIVE IN ATLANTA! I work three blocks away from said Museum. I’ve been saving it for a rainy weekend, but I think I’ll go soon. Or at least get my hands on the catalog.

Also of note:

Down the road: an introduction to a proposed reissue, by NYRB, of one of the most important books of my childhood, that dark and luminous compendium, the D’Aulaires’ Norse Gods and Giants, which has somehow, shockingly, gone out of print.

This is exciting because I have been annotating Chabon’s Summerland on and off for the past year or two, with the goal of putting it on my Web site to show how cool I am and to attract members of the opposite sex. Recently Chabon namechecked Trickster Makes This World, and I’ve been reading the book with a recognition of its relevance to Summerland, which is a story that mixes baseball with mythology and has an important trickster character. The mythology is partially Norse, so I am very happy to find, in the D’Aulaire book mentioned above, another possible source to apply to my annotations.

And if that wasn’t enough Chabon for you, Scott Esposito recounts Chabon’s one and only appearance for his book, The Final Solution, at Cody’s in California.

I’ve added a recent photo of myself at the right.

Today is the official release date of the following DVDs:

• Space Ghost Coast to Coast - Volume Two
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force - Volume Three
• Home Movies - Season One

(I wonder [I say sarcastically] if the recent Adult Swim media blitz is somehow related to this?)

• The Office Special
• The Office - The Complete Collection (First And Second Series Plus Feature Length Special)

Buy them all, citizen consumer!

This is a post on baseball blogs that is really relevant to all blogs. It’s getting a lot of linkage today, so I’ll join the herd.

I had been anticipating the release of Jonathan Lethem’s story collection, Men and Cartoons, and Michael Chabon’s novella, The Final Solution, for months. I diligently manipulated my reading schedule in order to be able to read them both, short volumes each, as soon as they came out. Even though neither book is its writer’s best, I wasn’t disappointed.

In general, I agree with this Times review of Lethem’s book, although I grant the leadoff story “Visions” a little more respect due to its effectiveness in setting the tone for the collection. “Super Goat Man” shows Lethem at his best: the author of The Fortress of Solitude (a difficult book worth reading!) who takes the best in realistic psychological writing and stirs it with an appreciation for the exaggerations of cartoons to show a hidden dimension in the world his characters populate.

In fact, “Men and Cartoons” is something of a companion piece to The Fortress of Solitude. The pseudo-autobiographical elements of growing up in Brooklyn with one foot in the real world are broken up into bite size pieces in these stories, generally well written and articulate, though without the humor that endeared his breakthrough Motherless Brooklyn to many readers.

Chabon shows more ambition, in my opinion, by imagining a retired, bee-keeping detective who is unwittingly embroiled in one last mystery on the British homefront during the second World War. An 89-year old Sherlock Holmes (never named in the book or on the dust jacket, whether for rights considerations or cheekiness) is no less astute than he was in his middle age, even if he has trouble rising from his chair and smells like old person (actually, like ogre). Chabon is a profoundly beautiful writer prone to flights of fancy in all his works, but here his style tends to be poetic and descriptive to an extreme, creating an odd aesthetic balance in a short, dense novella with an inordinate space devoted to practical matters of beekeeping. Such passages ooze and drip with metaphorical significance, but at the expense of the mystery itself.

The transition to the new host is complete. All I lost was some old graphics, which I forgot to back up because they were in a weird folder from my pre-Wordpress days, and my last post over at my old host, which I made after I backed up the Wordpress database. Oh well!

Will be tweaking the site over the next few days. RSS feed shouldn’t change.

My hosting company is crapping out royally, and LTR has been up and down over the past few days. I am switching hosts soon and will be back in some form or another.

Off to Alabama for the weekend. Music for the drive:

More Adventurous, by Rilo Kiley
Smile, by Brian Wilson
Chutes Too Narrow, by The Shins
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (Reissue), by Pavement
El Oso, by Soul Coughing
Funeral, by Arcade Fire
The Ugly American, by Mark Eitzel
Revive, by The Imaginary Baseball League
Here Comes Everyone, by Aloha

These past few weeks have been awful. It seems that everything I’ve backed has gone bust.

First, it was was baseball. “Dear God,” said I, “please let anybody win the World Series but the Red Sox.” We know how that ended up.

Then it was the election. “Dear God,” said I, “anyone but Bush, please!” And we know how that ended up.

Now I find out that Bloghosts, this seemingly great little hosting company that I have shilled for and promoted the heck out of to friends and neighbors alike, is going belly up.

Thanks, Rusty, and apologies to all for the inconvenience. I’m probably going to pack up this blog and join a team of desert monks, where I can devote myself to menial housechores and do little harm to the world.

Seriously, folks, there is only one thing on everybody’s mind today, so let’s all vote and then cross our fingers that we elect John Kerry so that we can move forward with mopping up the mess of the past four years.