So it went

How a musical version of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, conducted by an 8-year-old, led Maureen Johnson to write a novel called Suite Scarlett. An interesting trip, all told. 

Do or diorama

Turns out that I missed a trick when I was promoting my book The Last Three Miles. Instead of just focusing on readings, public talks and trying not to grunt too many times during radio appearances, I should have been doing like Sloane Crosley, who not only constructed dioramas illustrating each of the essays in her book I Was Told There’d Be Cake, she also recorded a video tour for each diorama.  

Since the paperback edition of The Last Three Miles probably won’t be out until the fall, I have some time to contemplate building a diorama of the Pulaski Skyway, with profiles of Frank Hague and Teddy Brandle looming in the background while little bursts of gunfire flash in the phragmites below. Since interest in the book was significantly goosed along by the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, I should consider building it in a way that would allow me to demonstrate what a Skyway collpase would look like. 

Not-so-bright young things

Apparently the only way to get attention for your “literary” novel (apart from offering sacrifices to the gods and hoping Oprah will bring you into her club) is to write what people take to be a roman a clef about literary novelists, and therefore get columnists and journalists speculating about which literary authors you’re writing about. In other words, you  make like Keith Gessen and write All the Sad Young Literary Men, and get the likes of Gawker wondering about the true identities of Keith, Mark and Sam. Hey, I subscribe to the NYRB and visit GalleyCat regularly, so I took a crack at the guessing game, but it turns out I’m still a piker at lit-gossip. And now Joyce Carol Oates and Scott McLemee point out that simply reading the book for its own literary sake would be a far better use of my time.

Join the colony

My pal Nick DiGiovanni, the world’s greatest unpublished writer, hopes to land himself a stay at the Yaddo artists colony in upstate New York. In fact, he asked me to write him a letter of recommendation — not because I have any juice with the Yaddo judges, but because I have a book out and I’ve read just about all his manuscripts, enabling me to comment on his steady, intriguing development as a writer long overdue for wide recognition.

I’d always been aware of Yaddo as a Big Deal, but only now do I appreciate just how Big a Deal it is. That’s because for a bit of relief from research reading I’ve been dipping into Beautiful Shadow, Andrew Wilson’s great biography of Patricia Highsmith, where I just learned that Highsmith spent the summer of 1948 at Yaddo, working on her first novel, Strangers on a Train. According to Wilson, Highsmith won her spot with the very helpful help of Truman Capote, who agreed to pull strings for her at Yaddo if she in turn allowed him to sublet her apartment on East 56th Street, where he would finish his story collection A Tree of Night.

Highsmith liked her liquor, as did many of her fellow artists that summer, and when work was done they would often hoof it to Saratoga Springs for cocktails. And what a crowd! Gawd, I love to think of Flannery O’Connor, probably working on Wise Blood, down the hall from Chester Himes, the father of Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, while just across the way, Patricia Highsmith worked on a mean little novel about two men who exchange murders.

Highsmith loved Yaddo so much that she willed to it the bulk of her estate, including future book royalties. So if you pick up a copy of The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Price of Salt or Edith’s Diary, rest assured you are helping support future writers — including, I hope, a certain Nick DiGiovanni.

Burn on

My man Les Standiford, novelist and popular historian par excellence, has a new book coming out called Washington Burning: How a Frenchman’s Vision of Our Nation’s Capital Survived Congress, the Founding Fathers, and the Invading British Army.

Sound interesting? Let Les describe it for you:

While there have been a number of books dealing with the founding of Washington in the 1790’s, as well as a number detailing the dramatic story of its burning by the British during the War of 1812, I had not read any that connected the two threads in any substantial way when the idea began to form in my mind. Until the British thought enough of Washington D.C. to reduce its public buildings to rubble in 1814, the new capital was a source of great friction in our new nation–Northern interests found it too “Southern,” and Southerners found it not “Southern” enough. But that action by the British, meant to frighten an ill-prepared United States military into capitulation, had the opposite effect of what was intended. Americans were outraged, not intimidated–and when the British moved on from Washington to a true military target at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, they were soundly defeated and the tide of the war changed. Washington D.C. was transformed from a locus of division to a symbol of pride and unity, and in essence, it was the desire to avenge the destruction of our “national city” that led to the final break from Great Britain.

In one way, the city itself is the “main character” of this book, though the attempts of George Washington, and Pierre L’Enfant and others to see a new capital rise from a wilderness (despite the heated opposition of Thomas Jefferson, for one) form the human story that came to fascinate me. L’Enfant was a brilliant man, but an eccentric and difficult one as well, and he was utterly consumed with the correctness of his “Grand Plan.” In essence, he was a poet, and though W.H. Auden has suggested that “poetry makes nothing happen,” L’Enfant made Washington happen, and exactly as he sketched it out on a couple of taped-together scraps of paper more than 200 years ago.

Les also has a new blog called Grand Standiford Station. His previous narrative histories, Last Train to Paradise and Meet You in Hell, were part of my relief reading when I was in the midst of writing The Last Three Miles and wanted something diverting that would keep my head properly calibrated to the task at hand. This led me to contact him for blurbage, which he graciously provided. There’s always a spot for Les Stdnaiford on my blogroll, and if he ever comes by this way I’ll gladly stand him a drink or two or three or . . . well, let’s just say I’ll make it worth his while.

Worlds enough and time

When you read John Scalzi’s blog, you learn that science fiction writers have problems above and beyond those of ordinary writers:

World building is hard. You want us to have to build an entire universe from scratch every single time we write a book? Well, okay. You want us to have to run a marathon every time we walk down to the corner store to get some milk, too? Or maybe assemble a car from the wheels up, every time we want to drive to the mall? We spend all this time building this ginchy universe and its rules, and then you say “Oh, that world again?” No one ever pulls that shit with other genres. People don’t go up to Carl Hiaasen and say “What? Another book on Earth?” And he didn’t even make up that planet! It’s an open source planet! Damn slacker.

Blue Monday I (Prohibition edition)

In the course of my reading on the culture of Prohibition-era America, I’ve come across this little anonymously written ditty about the joys of home brewing:

Mother’s in the kitchen/ Washing out the jugs;/ Sister’s in the pantry/ Bottling the suds;/ Father’s in the cellar/ Mixing up the hops;/ Johnny’s on the front porch/ Watching for the cops.

I first came across it in John Kobler’s great popular history of Prohibition, Ardent Spirits, and Paddy Whacked, Thomas English’s history of Irish-American gangs and gangsters. No Bobcat worth his or her salt will miss the echo of the opening lines of “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which leads off Bringing It All Back Home and inspired the famous opening of the D.A. Pennebaker film Don’t Look Back, the original rock music video and still one of the very few word-image pairings that doesn’t get stale after only a few viewings.

Johnny’s in the basement/ Mixing up the medicine;/ I’m on the pavement/ Thinking ’bout the government.

Since Dylan has shown himself time and again to be a veritable walking juke box of Americana, there’s not a doubt in my mind that he was toying with that Prohibition rhyme when he wrote “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Certainly the drug-soaked mid-Sixties milieu would have had Prohibition in the back of anyone’s mind, and no less an authority than producer Don Was has said that it’s impossible to stump Dylan on an old tune. I may be out to lunch here, but I don’t think so. If any other Dylan work out there has mentioned this parallel, please send me the cite.

Meanwhile, it gives me an excuse to run not only the famous Pennebaker video, but this clip of the parody/ homage performed by the cast from I’m Not There:

 

Take back those Oscars!

Anybody want to join a grassroots movement to rescind those Oscars the Coen Brothers just won for No Country for Old Men? It’s not that I have anything personal against the Coens or the movie: I rather like most of the Coens’ flicks, and I thoroughly enjoyed No Country for Old Men.

But I just burned through Cormac McCarthy’s underlying novel — and for anyone who’s had to hack a path through some of the guy’s denser works, take note that this is one sleek, fleet-footed read — and pretty much everything that’s great about the movie was already on the page before the Coens went to work. It’s virtually a scene-for-scene transposition from book to screen. All the Coens needed to do was hire the right actors, work out the camera placements and then stay the hell out of the story’s way, a task they managed quite well. As far as I can tell, their biggest and most original contribution was to give Anton Chigurh that mop-top Beatles haircut. McCarthy did all the heavy lifting.

And yet we’ve heard endless choruses about the genius of the Coen Brothers, how stark and spare they made the film, what wonderfully pared-down storytelling they employed. The ungrateful dweebs didn’t even give McCarthy his props on Oscar night. So take back those statuettes and put Cormac McCarthy’s name on them. When it comes to Old Country for Old Men, the auteur is Cormac McCarthy, not the Coen Brothers.

Say now, there’s a title for a movie — No Country for Ungrateful Dweebs. If I knock out a treatment, you think the Coens would sign on as producers?

Quote of the day

From Michael Swanwick, whose essay on James Cabell I praised to the skies not all that long ago, comes this pearl of wisdom:

My single best piece of advice for new writers is to go to as many signings, readings, and other public appearances by writers you know are good as you possibly can. That way, when only three people show up for your signing, you won’t slit your throat.

I’ve logged about twenty appearances for The Last Three Miles since the hardcover came out in June, and all of them have had at least one redeeming quality, usually more. But the abyss always lurks just around the corner, sprouts, so read and take heed.

Harry Potter and the Bootleg Fan Lexicon Court Injunction

I wish this Guardian piece about J.K. Rowling’s lawsuit to prevent publication of a fan-written Harry Potter lexicon hadn’t opened with a reminder of how wealthy J.K. Rowling has gotten from sales of her Potter novels. Even rich people deserve copyright protection, and since she is the one who willed the Hogwarts universe into existence, I think her wishes ought to prevail on any question involving authors’ rights. The case raises some very big issues that are only going to get bigger now that the Internet has provided such a rich growth medium for really ambitious fan projects, and the fact that Rowling has a lot of money in the bank really isn’t relevant to any of them.

The question, judging from the story, is whether Rowling and Warner Brothers are entitled to block the dead-tree publication of a Harry Potter lexicon, compiled by a group of ardent fans, that has been readily accessible on the Internets for the better part of a decade. The site is so well known, and so accurate, that even Rowling’s editors have sent thank-you notes to the site’s authors. Even Rowling has admitted to using it for a quick reference when she lost track of her labyrinthine creation. According to the lawyers for the small press that’s publishing the lexicon, this means Rowling can’t oppose the lexicon making the jump to hard copy.

I actually have a slight personal angle on this story. Several years ago, a friend and I came up with the idea of writing a readers’ companion to George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series. The books are so loaded with cross-references and arcane historical lore that we couldn’t figure out why nobody had thought of doing it before us.  We sent our proposal to Fraser and, after waiting impatiently for about two months, we got a letter from Fraser and found out that plenty of people had had the idea before us, only to be shot down each time by the author himself. Fraser was quite pleasant about it, but he made it clear that if anyone were to write an official Flashman companion, it would be George MacDonald Fraser and nobody else.

As far as we were concerned, that was that. There was no question of proceeding with an unauthorized book. If you respect an author enough to want to write such a book, you should also have enough respect to listen when he tells you to knock it off.

Of course, there are a few ambitious Flashman fan sites on the Web that serve pretty much the same purpose as a readers’ companion and Fraser let them slide, just as Rowling decided to let the fan sites continue operating. As the Guardian article points out, the argument that the fan lexicon may cut into demand for the Harry Potter encyclopedia Rowling plans to write doesn’t really hold water — there can be no doubt that fans rabid enough to buy the amateur lexicon will flock to buy the real thing when it comes out. But it’s up to her to decide.  

Fans of a Certain Age will remember the time when the initial Ballantine paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings carried an endorsement on the back cover from J.R.R. Tolkien. Ace Books had taken advantage of a copyright loophole to issue an unauthorized paperback edition that paid no royalties to Tolkien. Promoting the approved Ballantine edition, Tolkien sugegsted that readers who “believe in showing courtesy — at least! — to a living author will buy it and no other.” 

It’s Rowling’s sustained creative endeavor that sparked this fight, and it’s up to Rowling to decide what she will and won’t tolerate from fan tributes and fan knockoffs. It’s too bad that people who claim to admire her work has pushed the issue this far, and opened the way to a legal decision that could penalize Rowling and other creators. Rowling has shown herself to be remarkably solicitous of her readers. The readers involved in this case should return the favor and stop trying to piggyback on her artistry. It’s a metter of courtesy — at least! — to a living author. It’s also the right thing to do.