Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis

I wish, like James Woods, I could remember the moment I first experienced Lydia Davis (assumedly, Eggers remembers the first moment, too), but I can’t. I know I saw her name in some other author’s interview, and I know that the first thing of Davis’s that I loved wasn’t, in fact, one of her electrical and mercurial stories, but her novel The End of the Story, which knocked me several steps up or down from wherever I was—that was like 10 years ago.

Surely you know Lydia Davis—MacArthur grantee, published everywhere, Auster’s ex-, Proust translator, and now, thanks to FSG, someone whose work (the majority of it—all the stories, anyway) you can buy in one fell hard-cover swoop.

You probably saw the Woods’ effusivity a couple weeks back about Davis, and regardless of the surprise that Woods like someone like Davis’s writing, I think he’s pretty spot-on in characterizing her work as deeply, astonishingly of-the-self/selfish. Even the trickiest of her stories, the ones that only barely adhere as ’story’ (at least as typically conceived), demand some narrative self underlying all of it. Here, from Samuel Johnson is Indignant, is the entirety of “They Take Turns Using a Word They Like”:

“It’s extraordinary,” says one woman.

“It is extraordinary,” says the other.

Seriously: just dig that little bit. Start with the fact that the mundanity of the situation totally upends or ironically shatters the word they’re bothering to repeat, but past that it’s better: that title, and how we’re left aware, because of it, that speech (and, from there, that interest, that evaluation of what’s ordinary and extra-) may or may not have something purely to do with pleasure, with using a word we like. Plus there’s the social construct around it, too: maybe we love and hate who we love and hate simply because we’re all fond of words similarly, akin to how we gravitate toward those with whom we share interests in sports teams.

All this, I fully submit, is headier and more involved than a ‘typical’ short story’s gonna ask of the reader, but Davis is, I think it’s fair and safe to say, absolutely loading her stories with these sorts of questions and ideas—is loading her stories up to seem and read like the top steps of ladders descending into considerations we likely haven’t had. It’s, of course, dicey to ask readers to this stuff—the threat of over-filligree-ing things and the (perceived or actual) snootiness of making story after story so cerebral. However: Davis is a master of exactly this stuff, and her stories end up less like what some of us may like stories to end up like (solid, rest-on-able, character/plot/theme/etc) and more like whispers you turn in an attempt to hear and keep just missing. Maybe that’s the highest compliment: there’s no fiction writer today more involved with building and inventing mystery. Buy the book.

Yours Ever by Thomas Mallon

I liked lots of Mallon’s Yours Ever through the first 146 pages, but page 147 was what knocked me flat out:

“In the  realm of love, however, e-mail’s most peculiar characteristic is the way it so often

becomes not a means to romance but the entirety of any involvement. The e-ffairs into

which so many postmodern people stumble are, like the chaste pen-palships of times past,

relationships sufficient unto themselves, whereas epistolary romances traditionally sought

their own extinction—the moment when physical separation would end, along with each

party’s need to write to the other.”

Maybe it’s just me, but the insight astounded me, and I realized that though I’d been largely enjoying the first half of Mallon’s book, I hadn’t really noticed the complexity and depth at work re: letter writing.

Let’s say this: Mallon’s Yours Ever is probably as valuable a book as anybody on the anti-Kindle bandwagon could hope for. Not that he’s expressly plowing any of that territory, but it’s hard to read Yours Ever without feeling, page-by-page, some distant dinging tang of ache not for letters themselves, but for the system and style and manner they were embedded within (not to sound too old or fuddy-duddy or anything, but you read this and then cut to some local story about teenagers sexting each other and you sort of go mentally hobbled).

Here’s how the book works: in nine chapters, organized by theme (Absence to Friendship to Advice to Complaint to Love to Spirit to Confession to War to Prison), the reader’s given essentially a long and awesome walk through people s/he should already be interested in, or, with just the right stimulant, will be—we get F. Scott Fitzgerald and Meghan Daum, get Rilke and Clemens/Twain, get Heloise and Abelard, Freud and Jung, and Hanff and Doel (84, Charing Cross Road). Maybe most interestingly and excitingly, Richard Nixon comes through, by the end, as one of the most compellingly interesting characters in the book.

The book is, in the best way, an active a physical reminder—not necessarily just of the stuffy, mannered times past, when letters were easier and more common (and the USPS, subsequently, not quite in such an intense budget crunch), but of a time when more people bothered reflecting, bothered putting pencil to paper and transforming thought into narrative (insert start of argument here re: how the infinite amount of space now available for writing diminishes it—one blog’s just as good as the next and etc.). If the book works for most of us the way I’d expect it does or will, you’ll want, at the end, to write to someone you care about, and maybe offer a book recommendation.

In case anybody cares at all, some other places I’ve had stuff recently online:

Apostrophe Cast

BOMBlog

Review of Steve Langan’s “Meet Me at the Happy Bar” at Make Magazine

(I apologize for the self-love, but figure this is probably the right thing to do)

The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber

America’s best press has been putting out these slim little books for a bit now, and this last batch (and the next few) seem like the best ones yet. That’s not a knock on what’s come before, but, seriously, how can you go wrong with Joan Silber? The woman’s a dynamite writer of fiction and, it turns out now, a writer of non-fiction, too.

I know all of us who teach this stuff love to talk about questions of craft when making fiction, and it’s a pleasant little delusion, to talk as if we actually understand how these issues of craft work, but the truth is, by and large, we don’t quite know how they work. Character? Setting? These things we load up and charge, but we rarely have the pure gimlet-eyed glance we proclaim in class as necessary to execute fiction masterfully.

Even more complex: time in fiction. The ways in which sentences do or don’t sing, and in which keys. Put it this way: a class in which elements of craft are emphasized and studied would be a breeze compared to a class in which, say, one were to read Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff back to back in an attempt to understand how time fundamentally works in their short fiction. It’s a minefield, unmitigated disaster: from the first sentence, the writer either writes “he said” or “he says” or “he will say” or some other conjugation, but how does one even delicately approach that loaded world of choice?

I’ve yet to see a more lucid and delicate and well-written account of this sort of consideration than Silber’s The Art of Time in Fiction (I didn’t read Birkets’ Art of Time in Memoir, so apologies if that’s just as good and I’m simply a poorly-read heel), and I will absolutely admit that the book, in the best ways, doesn’t offer answers: this is not an entry-level book in which one can suss out tics or tendencies which could help a story’s momentum. No, the book’s a stellar complexifier, a whisk in milk: Silber’s thin book blasts wide and open ideas of time and momentum in a story, and the reader will, at the book’s end, be unable not to, somewhere deep inside, hear new tickings each time some book of fiction’s cracked. And, as ever, all praise to Graywolf for having the luxurious daring to put out these strange and life-changing little books.

Proud Flesh by Sally Mann, with a contribution form CD Wright

If you don’t like Sally Mann, there are only two explanations: 1. You aren’t familiar with her work, or 2. You’re wrong. Here’s who’s keeping American photography as lively and great as anyone could hope. It’s diminishing to call her stuff more backwoods stuff “like a southern Diane Arbus” or this latest collection “like Sarah Moon’s stuff but more emotional,” but those little aesthetic touchstones are mildly helpful in this context.

What you need to know, more than anything else, is that Sally Mann’s photography is chronically at work trying to get at and into stuff through photography, in ways that, in all honesty, seem to me most reminiscent of some of the stuff Avedon did. They’re entirely different artists, of course, but there should be, somewhere, some well-written and -thought-out piece that examines the split in photography among those whose work is fundamentally capturative and/or topical in nature vs those whose work is probing or examining in nature. If it seems a silly distinction, pick up a copy of, say, Vanity Fair, in which the pictures are all lovely but are also, essentially, time-capturing in nature: here’s Tom Hanks like this, Stephanie Seymour as that, etc.

Not so Sally Mann: this collection of images documents the body of her husband, and Mann’s got a sympathetic eye anyway, but, honestly, this collection is about as tender and loving a series of photographs as imaginable. Who other than a spouse can so carefully, lovingly capture another’s body with such delicacy, such concern? And to charge this instance further: Sally Mann and her husband Larry have been married 40 years, and he has muscular dystrophy.

It’s an astonishing collection—one of those things which, once you see it, you cannot fundamentally get back to who you were before. Mann’s got a terribly interesting mini-essay about the whole thing here, and it’s worth reading and perusing the pictures just to get a sense of this stuff, and to hear her own take on these things, but the truth is, the pictures, largely, speak for themselves: Proud Flesh is, in magical ways, a work grounded in dialogue—between Mann and her husband, between the viewer and Mann’s husband and, most frighteningly, between the reader and him/herself and his/her own ideas of what it means to look at a beloved.

As if you needed further inducement to own this book, C. D. Wright’s intro is, like the rest of her stuff, mysterious and wild and canny and twisty and liquidly electric. Surely someone you know needs this book right now: buy it and have it on hand when the time arises to pass it along.

It seems fitting that I was introduced to Matthew Ryan’s music by the same dude who first got me into the Replacements years prior, not simply because of the influence that the Mats have had on Ryan—though I guess there’s that, too—but because both artists have, in a very similar fashion, fundamentally altered the way I think about music, what it can do. Much like the Replacements, Ryan is one of those few artists whose music actually does something to the listener. What I mean is, there’s a staggering earnestness that makes it feel important and real and that also makes it impossible to discuss without thinking about first kisses and missed opportunities and all of that gushy sentimental business that, whether we’d like to admit it or not, invariably make us who we are.

And that’s sort of what his latest album Dear Lover is all about, how all of that sob-inducing crap that makes romance such a fiasco is also precisely what also makes it worthwhile. These are love songs in the best sense of the term, meaning that they aren’t songs about what we think love should be like but what it is actually like, as exemplified in the title track, “Dear Lover”: I could be your superhero/ I could be your biggest disappointment…Most of us start out just thinking it’s east/ When the hardest thing you’ll do is remember how to smile, girl.

Over the course of his career, Ryan has increasingly sought to fuse elements of his original roots rock sound with the revamped eighties’ musical aesthetic employed by bands like the Killers and Bloc Party, the result of which has been/is a catalogue of songs whose dimensionality is so pronounced you want to put your fist through it. Dear Lover alternates between synth-heavy pop tunes and meditative acoustic ballads, though it’s the humid growl of fuzzed-out guitars the allows the songs to reach their critical mass, as in tracks like “The Wilderness,” “City Life,” and “We Are Snowmen,” whose resolutions culminate in the form of bright, shuddering crescendos.

Ultimately, it’s Ryan’s voice that gives the album its weight. To call his voice is gravelly would be a phenomenal understatement. Rather, he sounds like someone who’s spent the past three weeks straight screaming at the top of his lungs, pausing every so often for a shot of bourbon and a Pall Mall. And it works! This is because he’s not necessarily trying to channel any Dylanesque phantoms, like some of his contemporaries. With the blossoming indie-and-alt-country scene popping out droves of stylishly grizzled folk singers whose overly rehearsed rasps belie the fact that most of them have only recently completed puberty, it’s easy for the listener to lose the thread of authenticity. But the distinctiveness of Ryan’s voice, the combination of gruffness and fragility, simply underscores the often heart-rending honesty of his music.

I read a review of this album (actually, it was more of a review of a performance Ryan gave in Chicago during which he talked about the recording process of Dear Lover and played the album over the club stereo system) in which the writer suggested that the work of any musician was inherently honest, because, I guess, that’s just what musicians do, or something to that effect, and naturally I couldn’t help but roll my eyes; it seems to me that part of what makes albums like Dear Lover feel so gut-clenchingly sincere is the fact that so much stuff out there feels the exact opposite. And I’m not trying to make the case that “bad” music, such as it is, is intrinsically insincere (I’ve always hated that hipsterish notion that people who make “bad” music are somehow lying to me; I have no doubt that the dudes in Smashmouth really, truly believe they’re being “honest”). All I’m saying is that part of what makes Good music really matter is the feeling that the artist or whoever is handing you something valuable and authentic, that they’re telling you something you actually need to hear. It’s a tricky thing to pull off, but that’s how I feel when I listen to Dear Lover: that in some way I’m better off for it.

(Note: the following’s by Jeremy Griffin, who also wrote this and whose name makes Google-stalking him sort of tough [note: he's not the comedian from Raleigh-Durham], though this is him)

One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur by Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard

I confess that I’ve never been a fan of Jack Kerouac, and I say “confess” because I realize that, as a white male in his late twenties who attended a liberal arts college, I am obligated by law to adore the man, particularly On the Road, his breakthrough novel, which was based on his travels with fellow Beat Neal Cassady. But the truth is that Kerouac’s influence on pop culture has become so pervasive over the years that the themes in his work, while regarded during his lifetime as wildly unconventional, now seem passé and unoriginal to me. And I understand, of course, that this isn’t actually his fault, that I just missed the boat in terms of age and that maybe I just have bad taste in literature, but, well, there it is. I don’t like Jack Kerouac.

And so of course I was apprehensive about picking up One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Music from Keruoac’s Big Sur, the new collaborative album by alt country pioneer Jay Farrar (Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt) and indie poster boy Ben Gibbard (Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, Zooey Deschanel’s husband). This was also due in large part to the fact that I am a long-time Farrar fan and that I have yet to cultivate the kind of appreciation for Gibbard that would probably entitle me to write album reviews in the first place, but whatever.

It turns out, however, that One Fast Move showcases some of the most elegant songwriting I’ve heard in years. The album (which is actually the soundtrack to the documentary by the same name) was written in a span of five days utilizing lines from Kerouac’s poem Sea and the novel Big Sur—a fitting homage considering the author’s affinity for stream-of-consciousness writing (allegedly, he wrote On the Road by gluing together many single sheets of paper to create a long ream and did not pause while typing to edit or to even consider what was to come next).

That Farrar has cited Kerouac as a major influence on his own work should come as no surprise; alt country’s mission to resurrect the spirit of Depression-era folk music and to legitimize working class America owes a great deal to the author’s interest in fringe cultures and his conception of America as a country that is constantly rediscovering its own potential.

Indeed, Gibbard and Farrar seem particularly well-suited for such an album, or at least Farrar does, mainly because so many of the songs he’s performed over the years with Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt seem to be about Kerouac, the mythology of the man’s character.

Stylistically, the songs fall on Farrar’s side of the court: calm, loping acoustic ballads, heavily rooted in his Appalachian folk aesthetic and accentuated by a healthy dose of pedal steel. However, while each track is fantastic, the ones that truly stand out are those sung by Gibbard (the duo trade off singing duties), whose voice provides a kind of new school vitality for the songs, which even a long-time Uncle Tupelo/Son Volt fan like me will admit can get a little repetitive after a while.

Ultimately, however, it’s the lyrics and their marriage to the melodies that really give the album its resonance. As one would expect, the songs are loaded with rich and often unusual imagery and tend to be thematically structured around that old Beats-y ideal of capricious travel, as evidenced in “Willamine”:

With her sad abstract letters

She talks with a broken heart

We’re going to get married and fly away

Roam the Genghis Kahn clouds

Anybody who’s never done this is crazy

It’s easy to imagine a musical project of this sort falling flat on its face; after all, how many shaggy, brooding, would-be singer-songwriters have tried unsuccessfully over the years to memorialize the Beats? (I’m looking at you, Dashboard Confessional.) Yet, Gibbard and Farrar manage to do so with what seems like a minimum of effort. And maybe that’s really the trick here, how bare and understated and fleeting the songs are. The album itself runs a meager thirty-eight minutes. However, after listening to it in its entirety the first time, I found myself suddenly wanting to reread all the old Kerouac paperbacks I’ve picked up over the years, and I guess that for this kind of album, that’s pretty much the definition of success.

Hot Damn is Ed Skoog a master. I don’t know if or where you may’ve seen his stuff before—I can’t remember where I first saw him—but you have no excuse now not to see and know his stuff: his debut, Mister Skylight, came out recently from Copper Canyon, and it’s as gasp-inducingly great a book of poetry as any I’ve read this year, and has to certainly be counted among the very best debut books of poetry in the last decade.

I’m presently teaching a poetry class, which can be fun as flying or shitty as surgery depending on the day, but one of the great things about teaching poetry is that one’s allowed real great and uncomfortable proximity to what, exactly, it is that good poetry’s doing. You put up, say, Ginsberg’s “America,” next to Cate Marvin’s “I Live Where the Leaves Are Pointed,” next to Brenda Shaughnessy’s “I’m Over the Moon,” and you’re suddenly facing this cliff: they’re all great, but how? Is there anything that conjoins these greatnesses?

And, of course, if you spend enough time with this stuff (and, I suppose, if you’re of a certain temperament), the stuff that’s typically in the “Holy Shit” category is stuff that’s using words in deft and dazzling ways—using, like Marvin, for instance, a title and first line that shocks you over and over with how she takes language in a direction you not only didn’t see on the map but could’ve barely imagined (ditto, in fact, Shaughnessy).

All this has much to do with Skoog, be appraised. There can only possibly be one complaint about Mister Skylight, and it’s ridiculous to even call it a complaint, actually—the thing that Skoog makes you do, over and over, line after stanza after page, is slow the hell down. It’s tempting to write of Skoog, like I would about other poets, that he’s using words in certain ways or something, but the truth is that the verb to consider re: Skoog is less use as place, as in bricks and mortar, as in archery or something. Just try these lines:

Sweat collects on the waterpitcher lip

like the goodbye of a woman I loved.

The clerk bends his body to pray the miracle

of the handwashing station, turns knife to loaf.

The present pours into the pepper shaker.

It settles on the silk ivy of the now. Odds fade

in the sports section fallen between the counter,

where paying my bill I orphan a dime

for a silver mint, and the window snows sun

brilliant on Fairfax, demanding the commute.

(“Recent Changes at Canter’s Deli”)

This used to be a sailor’s bar, and what

remains is this form of their loneliness,

and it becomes mine for a few hours,

reminding my body of its lusts

for close skin and how different from light

skin is, more like glass, or the breathing

of a horse in a dark, sodden field.

(“West Coast”)

Meanwhile, Cindy still sleeps nude

in the apartment overlooking the river,

and old people talk about each other.

My students find, in hallways, love;

next-door children find toys in the forest

and break them. Try looking under the porch.

(“Help in Seven Languages Written on the Skeleton Coast”)

I actually feel bad even including this much of Skoog’s stuff, simply because, as with a really great album, to tease out snippets is just not fair to the thing as a whole—believe me when I say every page of Skoog’s Mister Skylight includes miracles of compression and language.

To say nothing at all of meaning, too, though. Take a line as off-the-cuff simplistic as orphaning a dime: just that choice of words heaves loneliness into the equation’s view, imbues the simple act of getting a mint with this connect/disconnect dichotomy. Ditto the comparison of skin to both light and glass—and then, suddenly, out of the greatest left field ever, skin like the breathing of a horse in a dark, sodden field! If your heart doesn’t race from lines like that you’re totally hosed.

Because here’s the other thing that’s both fun and un- about teaching poetry: you have to be clear about what poetry actually does, what it can do. And good poetry can do a whole hell of a lot if it makes the stakes high enough. And how does one raise the takes in poetry? By trying to touch or say what’s untouchable or unsayable. Mister Skylight is, for the record (from the book’s back), “an emergency signal to alert a ship’s crew, but not its passengers, of an emergency.” So: a warning that only some of us can hear, a call to those who can/must do something.

Which is the real glory of Skoog’s book: he’s calling to those willing to listen, to those ready to slow down + let these astonishingly evocative lines into their ears and mouths. You know how little kids sometimes mouth along to what their reading? You may find yourself doing that with Mister Skylight: its firing on all cylinders of linguistic pleasure, and your mouth’s gonna want to get in on the act as soon as the lines enter your head. If you’re looking for autumnal gifts for yourself, you’ve found the best one possible: Ed Skoog’s Mister Skylight. Also: pray for more.

Adland by James P Othmer

I’m like congenitively drawn to books on advertisements and products and the navigatory dance each of us does each day as we try to get through our public hours without feeling at every second like we’re gigantic targets, aimed at squarely and increasingly brilliantly by those who want our dollars (if that sounds anti-capitalist, I don’t intend it to; there’s something literally dehumanizing about spending some megachunk of each day feeling like nothing more than, essentially, meat with money, cattle with a coin purse). And so of course Othmer’s Adland was almost like torture-porn or something for me: dude’s a former ad executive. I came to the book chin totally forward, looking for secrets, apologies, occult whisperings…I didn’t even know.

And what’s stranger: I’m not totally sure what I ended up getting from the book. Adland reads like a half-organized book written by someone who has been in the enviable position of being able to bullshit his way out of things before; the book’s got an unshakeable off-the-cuff vibe. We bounce roughly chronologically through Othmer’s time as a career adman, and, maybe halfway through the book, we’re treated to this sort of academic-ized take on one man’s day and the tonnage of ads he lives through. It’s a decent take on things, though the half-academic-ization of the enterprise does nothing but make the thing feel pseudo-stuffy.

The final bit of the book—the last 100 pages (so, really, the last third, though the middle section is only 60 pages, so the math’s dicey)—is about the future of advertising. I suppose personality tests could be crafted around how a reader reacts to these pages. Because here’s the thing: Othmer’s got withering irony and self-awareness and cynicism in spades, as the reader’s picked up thoroughly by page 200. And so the reader likely comes to this prognostication section with, at very least, a slightly raised eyebrow: fortune-telling’s predicated hugely on attitude, and Othmer’s almost schizy rapture/shudder response to advertising makes it hard to read his views on what may come next.

Hard to read, doubly, not just because Othmer’s got certain attitudinal stuff that prohibits anything approaching objectivity, but also because of—well, let’s just say it—because of Black Swans (bone up on N. Taleb if you’re unfamiliar, though the term got used in last week’s episode of “Flash Forward,” too, so). The black swan in Adland? The subservient chicken. I won’t got into it—it’s worth reading Othmer’s take on it—but Othmer puts himself in a dicey position by the book’s end, even trying to pretend to approach charting what might come next in advertising. As we’ve all likely experienced: good fucking luck guessing what comes next. Advertising, like good art, succeeds in exact proportion to its ability to surprise, zig when we expect zag, etc.

Still, for all that: I’d argue for reading Adland. I’d argue for reading that and, also, Branding Only Works on Cattle (I liked Adland a hell of a lot more than Branding, but the former’s for everybody and the latter’s real specifically for those in the biz). I’d argue for reading this stuff not just because the golden arches are supposedly a more recognized global symbol than the cross, and not just because the Fox-News-ization (or, I suppose in fairness, the NPR-ization as well—if one side’s doing it, so is the other, to some extent) of daily life makes brand-awareness and a certain marketing savvy necessary just to navigate the simplest social interaction (meaning: you might literally, fundamentally disagree with someone about something as factually beyond-debate as the president’s birthplace, simply because you get your news from different outlets. I’d love to hear someone argue that that development is not drastically and terrifyingly new and different). I think we all need to read these books just because everything is run by ads. That episode of “Flash Forward” I saw recently? It was on Hulu, which is free, and which is only free because of ads.

I don’t need to vent, and there’ve certainly been plenty of diatribes which’d cover exactly what I’d here say re: ads. And maybe it’s just because I’m in education, but still: the best way to disempower something is to understand it better. Read what you can about advertising, starting with Adland.

Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein

Adelstein’s got a pulpy, noir-ish voice that all but lights its own Chesterfields and will seduce you in about the first three pages. Overtly about his time working for the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun (largest newspaper in the world–read the wikipedia article + proceed to gasp), Adelstein’s debut’s actually got quite a bit more mileage than a simple this-was-my-job story.

Picture him, too: tall, white, midwestern, Jewish guy who goes to Japan and gets a position with the country’s best newspaper. Also: gets a position on the police beat, which is almost criminally (ha ha ha ha) hard to do for anyone, let alone a gringo.

And in his sights as a reporter? The yakuza, Japan’s organized crime operators. The book actually, cinematically, opens with a scene of Adelstein getting threatened by a member of the yakuza, so the reader knows from the start how the story will end: Adelstein smoking cigarette after cigarette and listening to a man threaten his and his family’s existence. And, I suppose, just by knowing that much, you know what Adelstein decided.

Still: it’s fascinating, the story of how he got to that threatened and threatening point. Along with a cast of characters that’ll keep the reader fully plugged-in and laughing, and along with casual but significant doses of more abstract stuff (honor gets significant play throughout Tokyo Vice, and that virtue ends up being one of the big muscles behind the book’s heart; the yakuza have, of course, their own notions of honor, as does Adelstein [as both a man and as a foreigner]…it all gets real complex, but the quickest and easiest thing to say is that this book’s got a hell of a lot more on manners and virtues than you’d necessarily expect from some pulpy shoot-em-up/bang-bang book), Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice is, ultimately, about human trafficking—about various ways in which people use each other. Of course, overtly, the crime story of human trafficking is the book’s main emphasis—a young woman disappears, and she’s disappeared into a world in which young women are lured to Pacific islands and forced into sex work—but it’s hard, once that story’s threads start flapping, not to notice how the issue resonates through the whole book, every character.

It’s also worth at least noting that I’m a bastard who finds, in just about every first-person work of nonfiction, that voicey-voice crap that ends up being about as pleasant as the sound of microwaved cats. I’m happy to here acknowledge/report that Adelstein’s voice is not voicey-voicey, is not troublingly frustrating or me-me-me or in any real significant way annoying.

And so: what are you waiting for? The thing’s on sale, right now, probably not too far from where you’re sitting.

Dinosaur Jr., Farm

Here’s what the average listener knows about post-grunge outfit Dinosaur, Jr.: 1.) their only big single, despite a career spanning over two decades, was 1994’s “Feel the Pain, and 2.) that the video for this song was exceptionally cool; it featured the band, decked out in turn-of-the-century golf apparel, putting their way across New York City. What most people don’t realize about the band, however, is that singer/songwriter J. Mascis is an amazing guitar player—a fact made clear on the band’s latest release Farm. Maintaining the crunchy, loud, indie aesthetic that the band has honed over the past twenty years, the album strikes a balance somewhere between hook-heavy power pop and jam band solo showcase—this latter from Mascis’ skillful yet often longwinded solos, which don’t add the depth that the band was probably hoping for (and in some cases, like the eight-minute “I Don’t Wanna Go There,” become just flat-out annoying), but do offer a melodic counterbalance to the thick layers of distortion and feedback and cymbals.

While all of the songs on the album are “good,” inasmuch as they don’t all out suck, none of them are especially memorable. And in a weird way, this seems almost intentional: like most of their indie/grunge peers, Dinosaur, Jr. is much less interested in establishing any sort of musical legacy and much more interested in contributing to an already extensive catalogue of catchy guitar-driven songs that consciously refuse to lend themselves to any sort of in-depth analysis (I guess this is one of the larger lessons borne out of Seattle in the early nineties: music doesn’t have to have staying power in order to be good, and in fact sometimes this is even preferable). Farm is raucous and sharp and, above all, fun in an uncomplicated sort of way. It offers few surprises in terms of originality or craft, but it’s sure to satisfy those looking for a solid rock album that sounds better the louder you play it.

(A note: this is by Jeremy Griffin, a hell of a writer who lives in Virginia)

So, the weighing in’s been going for at least a week—Richard Powers’s Generosity prompted a pretty glove-free and vicious razor-dashing from James Woods in the New Yorker, and, so far, the best refutation I’ve read is at the consistently phenomenal Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits…which piece, by Champion himself, earns a response from Woods, and the piece’s comments are interesting enough to head on over and check out. Regardless: this is simply table-setting, an establishment of dim facts that fade in the face of other, larger facts.

Facts: Richard Powers’s Generosity is one of the best books that we’ll see this year, and he’s now, with the still-echoing absence of DFWallace, one of the top two or three white male fiction writers now at work (though I should’ve posted more about this earlier, and have been tempted to for a bit, but I just keep feeling it’s too late to be timely—Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun is stunning. Stunning. Read the thing. If you’re at all like me, you think of Eggers and you think clever or funny or interesting—and he’s all those things, plus so inspirationally philanthropic it takes work not to feel like a slacker at all times when reading about him. But he’s also, through a through a ferociously good writer, and his sentences move like awesome machinery, and Zeitoun should be required reading for all Americans to have some better/freakier glimpse of post-Katrina New Orleans).

More facts: Ed Champion’s rant against Woods is that Woods doesn’t read for ideas, only for characters; Woods responds that, even if Powers’s novels are novels of ideas, the writing’s still shitty. You’ll have to read Powers’s stuff for yourself to decide for yourself about both points (I think Woods’s contention—that there are flat sentences—is at least worth acknowleding, if only so as not to be a horrible fingers-in-the-ears maniac; I think Champion’s pretty correct that Woods doesn’t dig novels of ideas; let’s recall that this is the guy who propped Wallace and Z. Smith up as the harbingers of contemporary doom). Yet more facts: I’d argue strongly that Powers writes for a group we’ll just have to admit might be called nerds.

Who do I mean by nerds? I mean me; I mean, likely, you (anyone willing to take time to read book reviews on a tiny blog has to at least entertain the nerdy possibility). I mean people for whom the movement of thought is a satisfying sensual experience—were the folks who cry and/or shiver at certain stuff by Wallace Stevens, for instance. This gets dicey quick, because Champion and Woods are nice figureheads for the two sides of this argument—idea vs. character—but there’s a sort of third way, and that way offers a satisfaction that’s a conjunction of both idea and character.

Before we get further, let’s just go ahead and tackle the room’s elephant: Powers writes sentimental sentences sometimes, yes. If Woods chooses to see those exclusively as simply bad writing, more power to him, but I think that’s a shittily missed point. Powers writes enough cathedrally gorgeous and arching sentences to hip any reader to the fact that he’s not, when he writes some of the more sentimental stuff (think of the dialogue, for instance, toward the end of Three Farmers), writing like that because he’s incapable of writing any other way. In other words: what Woods is choosing to see as bad writing is, I think, flawed. The truth is, Powers’s sentimental stuff is basically of a piece with Dickens’s sentimental stuff, and if Woods wants to get into all that, by all means, let him start it up. But the sentences that Woods wants to focus on and wrestle to the ground sort of miss the point, and Champion’s awesome and astute defense of Powers as an ideational writer also, I think, doesn’t full-throatedly enough defend what Powers does, is doing, has been for more than 20 years doing.

Because what he’s doing is making emotionally satisfying stuff for intellectuals—meaning nerds, of course. Meaning us. Lorrie Moore’s puns operate on a similar sort of principle—you get an aesthetic satisfaction from her work, from how pretty and well-made her sentences and stories are, and then you get puns on top of that as, like, icing or something, little intellectual cherry-ringers every page or so. Poetry’s where it’s easier to find this stuff, and the folks I can think of who do this best are Jorie Graham (especially her first few books…though maybe all the way through Never [skipping Swarm, obv]) and Wallace Stevens, both of whom load up their lines with great ideational stuff that’s satisfying at an intellectual level and but which also delivers the emotional goods (read Graham’s last three poems in Never, for instance, and try to avoid getting the chills, especially in the homeless woman one). I can think of few fiction writers who are remotely capable of doing stuff like this; certainly there are great things being written (hello DeLillo and McCracken and the perfect Elizabeth Hay), but nobody I’ve seen is getting emotional about intellectual stuff like how Powers is (Wallace wasn’t either, really: his work was intellectual in a deeply personal, almost solipsistic way; the smarts were clearly there, but the emotional stuff was usually felt as a result of stopping the over-intellectualization).

The point is actually a line from Jack Gilbert: we must risk delight. Powers’s stuff—the stuff that strikes Woods as bad or flat writing—is actually, I contend, stuff that, fine, may not have the firecrackery brilliance Powers is eminently capable of, but which is emphatically from and of a place of intellectual delight. That’s Powers’s real power: his stuff’s largely about smart people feeling joy and having fun from/with/because of ideas. If that puts it beyond the realm of what Woods is willing to concede as great writing, that’s fine–he’s got his tastes. But, for your own sake, don’t take his word on Powers, especially on Generosity, without at least reading the thing first.

Because it is a great and fun and smart and satisfying book—satisfying in the way only art which respects your intelligence can be (remember how good it feels to walk from, say, a Charlie Kaufman movie? How you don’t feel like you just got peed on by the director? How it feels to be respected as a thinking and autonomous human, capable of making connection between various abstractions at different levels?). Russell and Thassa and Candace—they’re fine characters, and various scenes from this book will lodge in your gray matter for a long time, I’m guessing (lights out Chicago, for instance). More than fine characters, though: they’re not simply there for us to observe and feel toward and for: they’re there, on more than one level, to act as mirros—to help us feel more toward and for and about ourselves, about our own world. If giving a reader new ways in which to feelingly think about the world isn’t the greatest act of art there is, I’d very much appreciate anyone’s insight into what might be. Generosity is exactly what it claims to be, and such, such an act of it.