Updates + Nate Silver + Neruda + David Skinner: yessing through November.

by Weston Cutter

So, briefly: there’s this, which is always cool, and also this, which was super cool, and this, which I’ve been excited to see into print for a year now—as you’d imagine/guess, Helen’s fun as hell, and ‘lively’ (read: she is mercifully bullshit-free), and it’s super rad to have something in the Believer. Thus concludes the updates part of the program.

 

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

 

Had I been smarter I’d've reviewed this before election day, given the drumbeat re: his prognostication abilities. Fortunately for him (and math, and the country), 538 was, as most of us could’ve guessed, tremendously accurate, and you’ve got to imagine that Penguin, now, is even more thrilled to have published this: imagine how quickly the thing would’ve been remaindered had his modeling shat the bed. Regardless of what you think about Silver and 538 blog, the dude’s a master at math and statistics. Indeed, for some of us who love almost nothing (at the abstract level) more than the calm, satisfying beauty of arithmetic, statistics is the most glorious manifestation of the art: interesting and slightly abstract but still grounded in the numbers one first learns in Kindergarten.

The Signal and the Noise is, I think, as good as Thinking, Fast and Slow, and perhaps would be a good buddy book for that one: between the two, the reader’s all but forced to consider and contend with certain blind spots—in the case of Thinking, it’s confirmation bias; in Signal, it’s the trickiness of numbers, and how (to use John Allen Paulos’s term) innumerate most of us are. For instance: we get pissed about the weather forecast being wrong, but forecasting is getting better—and, for it to get way, way better, to get it to the ways we want it to be, it’s an uphill fight against exponential difficulties (literally: it’s not a 1:1 thing of, well, there’s more info, we should have better info: forecasters, to make even modestly better predictions than the present ones, need massive amounts of data). Silver’s book tackles weather, tackles earthquakes, tackles baseball, and offers what’s gotta be one of the most stomach-churning chapters ever in anything, which is about a professional gambler. We know this stuff intuitively already: that something with better-than-50/50 odds is something which, in the long run, is worth taking a gamble on, yet imagine dropping six-figure sums on games in which yr chance of winning is close to 65%: a good bet? Sure, technically, but, still, almost four times in ten you’ll be out yr cash.

There was plenty written on this book when it came out, of course, as there should have been: it should be required reading for this math-challenged country in these math-fearful times. That Silver’s a commie liberal bastard[1] at the NYTimes doesn’t matter in the slightest: he’s a hell of a statistician, and this is a hell of a book.

 

All the Odes by Pablo Neruda

 

This is exactly as the title claims and explains: all the odes. It’s a curious book—good, certainly, and worth existing, and certainly seeing all of Neruda’s odes in one mammoth collection offers something, if nothing else that he was awesomely devoted to a form and took it for rides and workouts that helped the rest of the 20th century make better use of it. Which is great. But the completist aspect of all the odes is kind of weird, and there are weak and strong odes in here, plus there’s the fuck-the-greatest-hits aspect of any “collection,” no matter how complete: you can, for instance, through purchasing two multi-disc box sets, own the entire output of Led Zeppelin, but most of us’d contend that knowing Led Zeppelin III as an actual album’s crucial (fill in the band of yr choice there: Beatles, Stones, Springsteen, Devo, whatever). The odes were originally in other books—ones Neruda chose and gathered, and there’s something (at least to this reader) to that, something important. Maybe it’s just me. Who knows. It’s a fine book, certainly, but promise that if you buy it, you’ll also buy one of his individual collections from, say, New Directions.

 

The Story of Ain’t by David Skinner

 

This is a bio of a moment and movement and book, the book being Webster’s Third, which book you may, given that yr reading this on a nerdy book review site, know something about. If you’re like lots of folks, the entirety of what you know re: this book comes from having read Wallace’s “Tense Present”—this is the dictionary that came out and laid the groundwork for what Wallace termed the usage wars, the split between de- and prescriptivists (descriptivists: folks who think that anything used in common American speech/vernacular is suitable for dictionary inclusion; prescriptivists: folks who believe English is a threatened glory under assault from mouth breathers who say “impacted” and who use borrow where they should use lend and etc. etc. etc.). It’s a fairly great book, honestly—funny and lively and contextualizing, making clear how this moment of ain’t was arrived at to begin with.

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[1] (As, for the record, am I: that’s out of affection.)

Anthologies for Crying and Laughing

by Weston Cutter

The Art of Losing, edited by Kevin Young

Let me first say this: I’d read anything by Kevin Young, edited or written. I had my copy of Jelly Roll the second it hit, and, though it was my first Kevin Young book, I (of course) traced backward from there, discovering he’d covered Basquiat (in To Repel Ghosts, which he a decade later remixed from the “double album” of the book he’d originally presented), and then watched and read, rapt, as he burned whole layers of bright, as he, like some one-man magician, kept building tendons, kept spinning things close. Make no mistake: among whatever other skills KYoung’s got (he’s got tons, not least the best ear and the ability to make some of the most musical lines in contemporary American poetry), his greatest talent might be his ability to join disparate things, to infuse poetry into, say, a film noir structure, or into a biographical look at Basquiat, or the blues, or whatever. Think I’m kidding? His For the Confederate Dead‘s working on so many levels (rebuttal/antithesis to R. Lowell’s For the Union Dead, reclamation of conflicted/troubling past) it’s a treasure before you even find your way into the poem.

Of course, while making his own poetry, he’s also editing like a madman, and the latest book he’s had a hand in is The Art of Losing, subtitled Poems of Grief and Healing. The book, just as an object, is gorgeous (well done as usual, Bloomsbury), but the poems within are staggering for all sorts of reasons, though here’s the biggest, for me. Say you’re interested in poetry, and someone asks what poetry is finally for (the someone can be yourself). What’s the answer? What’s poetry do or for? I’ve trotted answers out to students—to say the unsayable, to put a structure around an otherwise structure-less feeling/thought/idea—but of course the simplest answer, and the one Young’s maximizing in this book, is best: poetry makes you feel better.

I haven’t felt grief or needed much healing in the past year, but the real magic of the poetry contained in this book is that it will still make you feel better, make you feel fuller, larger. It’s a magic book. I feel like I’ve seen a few poetry anthologies recently that’d endeavored to make people feel better (like Poetry for Down Times or whatever—it was a Keillor thing, I think), but nothing will come close to this. Even if you’re for some reason anti-anthology, The Art of Losing is worth having shelved somewhere nearbye (if only for the E.Bishop poem whose lines supply the book’s title, though if you don’t already have that poem somewhere in your life you need way, way more than just this book).

You’re a Horrible Person, but I Like You: The Believer Book of Advice

Hm. I don’t quite know how to even approach reviewing this book: it’s great, and huge fun, and out-loud laugh-inducing in several parts, and I’m (mostly) all for anything remotely Believer-related. It’s a book in which absurd questions are asked to howlingly funny people, and those funny people give hilariously demented responses (and the dementia ranges, stylistically, from intense irony to mumbling deadpan to single-word brush-offs). It’s a book most of the people I know and like would want around. So what’s the hitch? What’s the hold-up?

That website Stuff White People Like? This book is like a perfectly calibrated text for the sorts of people he’s talking about on his website. It’s a hilarious book in lots of ways, and it does a (mostly) decent job of balancing clever/cutsey-ness. It’s actually a fascinating book if one’s looking for a good cross-section view of 80% of current humor in America: the contributors are people like Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter, David Cross, Amy Sedaris, Michael Cera, Judd Apatow, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Patton Oswalt, Jim Gaffigan…and the book will likely be entertaining in direct proportion to how much you like, say, Flight of the Conchords or Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis (which, if you haven’t seen, I’ll put video below: you will not believe how great it is).

I’m hemming and hawing all over the place on this one. I like the book, I do, and I’m glad to have it, glad to read it. It’s also, at times, a little uncomfortably targeting, or at least that what it feels like to this reader. Like Conan? You’ll like this book. Like Sarah Silverman? Ditto. Like Wonder Showzen, or Mr. Show, or The State/Stella, or Tim and Eric? You’ll love this book. In fact, this book was made for those of us who like such things, which means that, in fact, the book could be acting as a good litmus for how you view yourself. Who knows. Buy the thing. It’s funny, and god knows there’s nowhere near enough funny shit published.

S. Burt and S. Dixon

by Weston Cutter

Close Calls with Nonsense by Stephen Burt

             I suppose there’s some handful of us who hear Stephen Burt’s name and don’t think of him as a critic, or as a poet, or as a Harvard Professor, but as the writer of several articles for The Believer about the WNBA (that handful of people’d be made, I’m guessing, of folks who got into The Believer right when it started—his WNBA articles were early on) and as a former professor at Macalester (where he was teaching when The Believer started). I bring all this up only because Burt’s a dude who’s got more than a few hats in his arsenal—the sort of guy who, even if you think you know the full length/breadth of his work (poet, WNBA essayist, critic), chances are good he’s actually done even more than you knew.

            For instance: Burt could earn his keep forever simply for having coined the term elliptical, as in “The Elliptical Poets,” which in Close Calls with Nonsense starts the fifth section, and which you’d be wise to grab and read asap if you give even the merest smidgen of a shit about contemporary poetry (‘contemporary’ can be tricky in that usage—the essay clearly wasn’t written last year, yet it holds up well and, more, does a solid job of establishing things like struts and supports: it offers a way to see contemporary poetry, even if it doesn’t encapsulatingly cover the present poetic moment). Most of us are probably better of not knowing how we’d fare if we wrote something as good and clear-eyed as “The Elliptical Poets”: I’m more than a little inclined to believe I’d just coast as much as possible off the burn from that single rocket.

            Burt, though, does not coast, and this book’s a testament not only to his indefatiguable interests, but to something far more rare, a tone and clip that’s flat-out heartening in these dark-for-book-reviewer times: Burt digs books, and I mean really, really digs them—you can almost feel SBurt’s enthusiasm as he wens his way through books by, say, H.L. Hix or Muldoon or Neidecker or Ammons. He’s critical, let’s be clear: his isn’t just this yutzy voice of positivity, problaiming awesomeness at each phrase’s turn. No, it’s better: Burt’s an honest, tender-hearted reader, and he’ll holler hugely for the bits that work (for instance, read his stuff on C. D. Wright, a writer he clearly [and smartly] adores) and fairly document a poem’s or book’s faltering moments.

            Which, if the world were a better place, wouldn’t be too much to ask from critics; and, sure, there are plenty of critics who do a fair and even-handed job of weighing a books merits and demerits. That said, Burt’s enthusiasm’s singular and intoxicatingly fun to catch, and his tone’s so reassuring it’ll make all the consistently-reported bad news on book reviewing feel, well, slightly less apocalyptic. Stephen Burt’s among a tiny, tiny group of critics (John Leonard and Francine Prose and some others) whose work is worth not just owning, but worth reading again and again.

 

The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal by Sean Dixon

 

            Man, this is a fun book. Here, actually, is the most amazing thing: this book started as a play (!!). The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal might be the first book I’ve read since Plascencia’s oh-my-god great People of Paper that feels totally and entirely its own; I don’t know what to compare this book to, honestly. Here’s the premise: it’s the story of a book club, and the story starts with the girls in the club (it’s an all-girl club, sort of)(it’s complicated) choosing their next book, which book happens to be Gilgamesh, the book they pick. I almost don’t want to go on from there: it’s too satisfyingly weird and interwoven a book to spoil.

            All that said: this book’s not perfect. It’s an unbelievably engaging book, and gets huge marks for its audacity and daring, but, like any book which uses what could reasonably (by someone like, say, James Wood) be called a ‘trick’ (‘trick’ might be too harsh a word: maybe ‘affectation’), Lacuna‘s trick/affectation is the same thing which, in the end, undoes it in places. The trick/affectation in this book’s case, for the record, is its voicy-ness, this sort of emphatically and constant into-the-reader’s-ear whisper from the narrator(s), and I’d like to here, again, call for someone with more time and brains than I to write a good, long piece about how narrative voice (and, expecially, a sort of maximal, excessive-detail-noting voice) seems to be this present moment’s Achilles Heel (a good, long piece about that might, in fact, end up laying the blame for the whole mess at dear passed DFW’s feet—the more I consider it, the more that seems likely)(I think his voice was great and balanced and perfect, but I think, like Carver, he so perfectly nailed a style that he ended up ‘inspiring’ all these people to cop something similar, hoping for something like genius run-off).

            Anyway, all of that sort of strays from The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal itself: the short criticism’s that the narrative voice can be overly cutesy and therefore frustrating. There’s a whole other thing, though, that this book emphatically deserves praise for: the thing’s trying, in total good faith, to engage with the present world. Meaning, in this case, Iraq and blogging and wars, meaning nationalism and antiquities, meaning how all good stories not only overlap but are literally, at a genetically-coded level, made of the same stuff. For the sake of the book and it’s really great narrative riches, I won’t go further into it than that, but know that, reading Lacuna is not akin to reading some slow-burning navel-gazer about middle-classers coming of age, nor is it some hijinxy send-up of mores and morals and manners. The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal‘s a fierce and challenging and spunky book, and it’s fun as hell (even if it’s, yes, annoying as hell in parts), and it deserves an audience, prefereably a large and vociferous one.

Fake Fake Fake Fake Fake

by Weston Cutter

I assume all us dorks who read lit. journals have writers they track and keep dear, writers whose books (especially their debuts) are great big Happenings and Events just because we’ve seen so much for so long in such small doses (most recent list of my writers like that: Blake Butler, Caren Beilin, Crystal Curry, Lauren Jensen). And so, toward the end of last year, it felt like this great and magical gift when I found out that two of my old, old favs—Paul Maliszewski and Wells Tower—would both have books coming out early in 2009: Paul Maliszewski’s Fakers, out 1/19 from The New Press, and Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, from FSG in March.

            What’s funny (and maybe telling about the full extent of my dorkiness re: this stuff) is that Tower and Maliszewski both write fiction and nonfiction, and if I’m totally honest I have to just admit that I like Tower’s nonfiction more than his fiction, and Maliszewski’s fiction more than his nonfiction, and so it was an odd sort of…not disappointment, but letdown, when I got both books. Because, seriously, have you read Maliszewski’s fiction in old copies of Gettysburg Review? Or have you read those old nonfiction pieces Tower had in Harper’s (esp. this one, about working in Florida for Pres. GWBush leading up to the 2004 election)? All that writing’s freakishly good, yet it’s apparently gonna be longer till we get those pieces in hardcover. Which, really, is not some hugely hard-to-deal-with thing, but it’s worth at least noting.

            None of the above is to in any way say that Maliszewski’s Fakers (and Tower’s Everything Ravaged, but that’s a review for later) is not hugely entertaining and fun and funny and almost sneakily deep and thought-provoking: it’s all those things. The book starts with what’s got to be Maliszewski’s most famous (idle Q: how would one measure?) piece, the one from The Baffler called “I, Faker,” about Maliszewski’s time at an upstate NY business newspaper, a time during which he wrote and sent letters, signed by fake individuals, to his own newspaper, which newspaper, of course, ran the letters, and so the falseness had to enlarge, and eventually Maliszewski even had to make a real website for his fake business…all of which is worth just going ahead and reading about (I’m sure the essay’s in one of the two Baffler anthologies, too, which you should have, obv).

            But what’s most interesting, as Maliszewskis sort of digs into stories of overt fakery (see: JT Leroy, a writer let me here say I never even liked and whose graceless fall gave me a bigger surge of schadenfreude than I’m comfortable admitting) and more borderline stuff (Sandow Birk’s paintings of the Great Wars of the Californias, which war was fake, but which paintings mimic/mock/push-at ideas of ‘historical’ paintings, how the narrative of history is made, etc.), is how dicey the whole concept of fakery even is. Obviously, the bulk of getting duped is about having trust destroyed: a prank may piss someone off, but the angered person wouldn’t likely say s/he’d had her trust betrayed by the prank, meaning the victim can sort of get at the impulse or intent of the act. Yet, for instance, people got pissed, deep-down, I-want-my-money-back pissed, about J. Frey and M.L.Pieces. Could he have just gone on Oprah and said his book was a prank, was a thing designed just to reflect something satirical back onto the culture that’d spawned it? That his book was, in fact, a high-minded critique of exactly the sort of ravenous vampiricism that drives most contemporary non-fiction? Would that’ve pissed anyone off less? More?

            The thing is, fakery’s a subject that’s maybe more important now than it’s ever been, because now that the whole idea of ‘authenticity’ is so slippery, the notion of ‘fake’ will, likewise, get messed with (though, in fairness, Maliszewski doesn’t really go into that brave-new-digital-world aspect, though with long-ish pieces on Jayson Blair [NYTimes] and S. Glass [New Republic], he’s certainly working toward that terrain [since the web's officially passed printed newspapers are the place most folks get their news]). And, of course, Maliszewski can’t, any better than anyone, find the Magic Secret that’ll allow us to all see through deceptions with ease, that’ll stop even the most cold-eyed cynics among us from (stupidly) opening that junk e-mail message that looks suspiciously possible, the one about the money… (though Maliszewski does tell the story of the Drake fortune, and the schemers who worked the midwest, netting millions for duping people the same way e-mail scammers are now duping people).

            Which is maybe the craziest part of Maliszewski’s Fakers: how uncomfortably close it has to come to basically pointing a finger at us, at the gullible, the duped, the folks taken by these deceptions. We’re not to blame, and it’s not an issue of fault, but Maliszewski does a really cool and interesting job of showing how deceptions works and hurts in the ways it does because of how closely deceptions hew to what we deep down want—want to own, or believe, or hear, or see, or whatever. Some fundamental aspect of getting duped involves not just a participant, but a willing participant: we must be drawn in, somehow. And that juncture—the moment when a story hinges, where the about-to-be-duped is ready to consider the whole thing true—is one of the most interesting things I can think of, and Maliszewski’s just written the best book that’s been written about that small, loaded, strange place.

 

            (The last chapter’s about Chabon, and I wanted to write about it here, but the chapter really, really threw me for a loop. If you’re going to get this book just to be able to impress friends at the bar or whatever, read the last chapter first. I still haven’t made my mind up about the chapter, which means that, in just that chapter, Maliszewski’s done one of the greatest magic tricks there is: he’s made something that might appear simple infinitely, infinitely complex).

Tom Perrotta’s Abstinence Teacher

by Tim Lockridge

In a recent issue of The Believer, Nick Hornby writes about The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta’s new novel, in regards to its depiction of our particular American moment. Hornby asserts (and I’m remembering/paraphrasing here, as I don’t have the article before me… and okay, okay, I’ll admit it, I don’t have a Believer subscription and regularly read the magazine over a cup of coffee at my local bookstore… and yes, this makes me a bad person, because The Believer is an incredible magazine and we should all subscribe… but back to Hornby’s assertion) that too many authors concern themselves with timelessness, with a desire to strip away contemporary cultural allusions for fear of dating their work. And work that adopts a timeless posture, he argues, is often drab, and we need more timely work, more work willing to step up and say something about the bizarre America we’ve become.

And Hornby is one-hundred percent correct, and The Abstinence Teacher is about as culturally relevant and revealing as you can ask a book to be. The narrative follows two characters in two mostly separate plot arcs: Ruth is a recently divorced sex-ed teacher entrenched in a curriculum change and challenging the pro-abstinence group propelling it; Tim is a recently remarried recovering addict, a born-again Christian caught in The Tabernacle, Stonewood Heights’ newest strip-mall store turned Evangelical church.

And it’s worth noting that both characters initially seem “too easy:” Ruth is the jaded baby-boomer that dismissively rejects organized religion in theory and practice, while Tim is the recovering addict searching for something to fill a void. As the book progresses, however, and as Perrotta begins to build the characters, it becomes apparent that these aren’t cliches or caricatures, these are real people and real elements of our contemporary America. Perrotta effectively distills a nice chunk of the contemporary cultural rift into a compelling narrative and starts asking questions: What is compromised in an America fueled by fear and insecurity? And how does this climate divide our friends and families and choices? And what happens when these polarized worlds inevitably cross paths?

Much like Little Children, The Abstinence Teacher finds Perrotta writing adult characters entrenched in troubling personal and cultural matter. And in this departure from his earlier (and still excellent) work, Perrotta creates perfectly broken people, characters with tremendous wounds and no solutions beyond waking up again tomorrow. (Is this the world the modernists warned of?) Ruth and Tim feel tremendously real, like people whose grocery cart you’ve crossed in the supermarket. And it’s easy to dismiss many of the book’s characters as too simple or slightly cliched, but such a dismissal misses one of The Abstinence Teacher’s central conceits: our America is slowly becoming a place of assimilation, a place where individuality, or individual thought, was long ago bought and franchised, where our public school curriculum is entangled with arbitrary moral standards, and where fundamentalist churches sit next to (and look like) factory outlets.

Still, the book’s title ultimately becomes something of a head-fake: While sex-ed curriculum offers an inciting incident, The Abstinence Teacher takes larger aim, zeroing-in on an America where Mike Huckabee campaigns on promises to erase Amnesty and equates homosexuality with bestiality. And this is, and always has been, Perrotta’s specific gift, to point toward the absurdity around us, and still, even amongst the hatred and the indoctrination and the questionable actions, still manage to find something inherently human and humane in the mess. Perrotta isn’t the kind of writer that’ll blow you away with his lyrical chops: he’s telling a story, and you’re either on board or you aren’t. But in terms of pure narrative, in terms of capturing people entrenched in this bizarre present-tense, Perrotta’s Abstinence Teacher is one of the best.