from the New York Times

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Bullies, Addicts and Losers: A Poet Loves Them All

By DWIGHT GARNER

Published: April 24, 2008

A couple of years ago, writing in Poetry magazine, August Kleinzahler lighted a string of firecrackers under Garrison Keillor and his “Writer’s Almanac” segments on National Public Radio. 

Mr. Kleinzahler criticized the “anecdotal, wistful” poems Mr. Keillor often chooses to read — poems he summarized as “middle-aged creative writing instructor catching whiff of mortality in the countryside.” Mr. Kleinzahler wasn’t very nice about Mr. Keillor’s “treacly baritone” either.

Ultimately Mr. Kleinzahler boiled his case against Mr. Keillor down to these three-and-a-half sentences: “Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.”

It makes a certain kind of sense, then, that Mr. Kleinzahler’s career-spanning new book of poems, “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City,” features on its cover a nighttime photograph of a White Castle hamburger franchise. Like White Castle’s pint-size hamburgers, Mr. Kleinzahler’s poems are of uncertain if not dubious nutritional value. And while there is nothing made-to-order about them, his poems arrive salty and hot; you’ll want to devour them on your lap, with a stack of napkins to mop up the grease.

Mr. Kleinzahler is an American eccentric, a hard man to pin down. Born in New Jersey, he writes poems that have a pushy exuberance and an expert recall of that state’s tougher schoolyards — of bullies with names like Stinky Phil and of “fire trucks and galoshes,/the taste of pencils and Louis Bocca’s ear.” And he writes with elegiac insight about life’s losers, the people he calls “strange rangers,” the addicted, insane or destitute.

[ click to read full article in the NY Times ]

from the New York Times

A Broadway Flop Again Raises Its Antlers

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

It is generally not a good sign for a Broadway show when people leave the opening-night party early. That is what Arthur Bicknell noticed at the celebration for the premiere of his play. As soon as the dessert forks were down, there they went, acquaintances, cast members, even family, out the door of Sardi’s restaurant. A friend finally approached with a report on the reviews.

Two words: “the worst.”

Indeed they were. The play was “Moose Murders,” and even now, 25 years later, it is considered the standard of awfulness against which all Broadway flops are judged.

Things weren’t so grim at the L & M bowling lanes in Rochester, N.Y., on Friday night, when a cast of nonprofessional — most barely even amateur — actors had just finished a second performance of “Moose Murders” at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center. The show, a staged reading but with original music, was put together by John Borek, 58, a self-described “part-time conceptual artist” who works by day as an aide to a Rochester city councilman. 

“Maybe Broadway had its chance, and they blew it,” Mr. Borek said. “Maybe it will have a more receptive audience as a work of art.” It is certainly true that Broadway audiences were less than receptive.

“If your name is Arthur Bicknell — or anything like it — change it,” declared Dennis Cunningham, the critic at the CBS affiliate in New York.

Critics described “Moose Murders” as “titanically bad” and “indescribably bad,” a play that “would insult the intelligence of an audience consisting entirely of amoebas” (Brendan Gill, The New Yorker), that looked as it were staged by “a blind director repeatedly kicked in the groin” (John Simon, New York magazine). The columnist Liz Smith had some nice things to say, Mr. Bicknell recalled.

Years later, Frank Rich, who was then the theater critic for The New York Times, would call it “the worst play I’ve ever seen on a Broadway stage.” (Mr. Rich’s writings about “Moose Murders” have become such a part of its lore that a recent production of the play in Manila credited Mr. Rich with having written the play.)

The reviews, which were not helped by the man reeking of vomit who sat in the third row during a press preview, made the 14 performances of “Moose Murders” legendary in theater history.

[Mr. Bicknell] tried to move on, writing another play and even a midnight drag show, but eventually gave up and worked for a few years as a literary agent. Someone tried to get permission to turn the play into a musical called “Moose Murders: The Afterbirth,” Mr. Bicknell said, but he was not ready for that.

[ In the new production,] the mysterious moose character was a woman dressed in black holding an inflatable deer head emblazoned with the Miller High Life logo. Sidney Holloway, the mummified quadriplegic, was played by a mannequin, whose head rolled off during the first act.

The audience members, most of them anyway, seemed to love it.

[ click to read full article at NYTimes.com ]

from The Buffalo News

Having books in the home encourages reading and the lifelong love of learning.

Books for Kids drive is changing lives

Margaret Sullivan 

In my childhood home, my mother was in charge of birthday presents and what went under the Christmas tree. And she did it thoughtfully and well, month after month, year after year.

My father, by contrast, rarely got into the gift-giving business. But one Christmas when I was in high school, he came up with a spectacular present for his word-happy daughter: A full set of Shakespeare’s plays — four volumes, bound in red leather. More than three decades later, the books are within my line of vision, on the top shelf of a bookcase in my office. Nowthat was a gift with enduring value.

Two of the best possible gifts for children, I’m convinced, are the love of reading and the presence of books in the home. This is true now, in the Internet Age, every bit as much as it was in the 1970s when I got to know “Hamlet” and “Macbeth.”

In fact, it may be more valuable now than ever, since reading develops a child’s attention span, balancing the effects of the fast-flickering digital world that 21st century children increasingly live in.

Seeing my own children — both teenagers now — reading for pleasure has been one of the great satisfactions of motherhood for me. That’s because I know it has helped them, making them better students, more informed citizens and more interesting people.

I have no doubt that adult success is tied closely to childhood reading. This is true whether a child grows up in an affluent suburb or the inner city. It’s probably more important for those who lack other advantages.

But not every parent, and not every child, has the opportunity to make books — especially one’s own books — a part of everyday life.

In Buffalo, the nation’s second-poorest city, many families simply don’t have the money to buy books. Trips to the public library are wonderful, of course, and irreplaceable. But so is the presence of books that are owned by the family, or better yet, the child.

Study after study has shown that having books in the home encourages reading and the lifelong love of learning.

That’s where an effort called Books for Kids comes in.

[ click to read full article at The Buffalo News ]

From the Los Angeles Times

BOOK REVIEW

‘Bonk’ by Mary Roach

The scientific exploration of human sexuality.

By Tara Ison

April 20, 2008

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
by Mary Roach

W.W. Norton: 288 pp., $24.95

What Mary Roach won’t do for a book! In her delicious “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” Roach hung out with severed heads in a dissection lab, sniffed around a body farm (more politely known as a forensic anthropology facility) and studied smashed corpses donated for automobile-crash research — all to aid her investigation of an aspect of existence most of us prefer to ignore.

Now, in “Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex,” Roach has chosen a topic that is perhaps the antithesis of death: our sexual physiology and psychology. Like “Stiff,” “Bonk” (almost interchangeable titles, no?) is rich in dexterous innuendo, laugh-out-loud humor and illuminating fact. It’s a compulsively readable, informative history of the scientific inquiry into the hows and wherefores of engorged tissues and sweaty palms, from Leonardo to Kinsey and on to Annie Sprinkle, including coverage of “artificial coition machines,” panda porn, the challenges of conducting sex studies in Islamic countries and the workings of the orgasm in people with spinal cord injuries.

She details gender bias in research and language (such as the longtime male-dominated debate between the “vaginocentrists” and the pro-clitoral orgasm team), but she too often glosses over the tragic effects of misguided “treatments.” The profit-seekers or perpetrators of scientific sexual brutalities (such as Leo Stanley’s experimental testicular grafts of animal gonads into San Quentin inmates in the 1920s) often get off easy. And for a writer so conscious of the power of language, her discussion of “clitoridectomies” as the treatment for female “hysteria” up to the 1950s, with no mention of the continuing crisis of female genital mutilation, is too determinedly apolitical.

Beware, too, the queasy-making or cringe-inducing sequences. There wasn’t a sentence in “Stiff” that made me squirm, but Roach’s needles-and-tubes descriptions of Dr. Gen-Long Hsu’s surgical treatments for erectile dysfunction were hard to bear.

[ click to read complete review at the LA Times ]

From the Los Angeles Times

BOOKS

Young authors embrace the thought process

Leading a contemplative literary life isn’t dead even in these hectic times. Just ask Nathaniel Rich, left, Keith Gessen and Ed Park.

By Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

NEW YORK — Is it possible to lead a dedicated literary life in the billionaire-filled, media-crazed New York of today? To be heedless of the material world as you burrow into novels and ideas the way the old Partisan Review gang did in the ’40s and ’50s, to come up with notions that rock the intellectual landscape? And if so, who exactly is still paying attention?

Those are questions three reasonably young men are asking now in much-awaited first novels that emerge over the next few weeks. Each novelist takes a very different position toward rendering literary life in a city where bohemian writers have been forced out by hedge-fund guys. And each co-edits a journal that is proud, almost defiant about its print status — in a nation where the image has been replacing the word for at least half a century now, and even some well-funded publications are in free-fall.

Outside of a few college towns, perhaps, it’s hard now to embrace the cerebral unapologetically without a sense of irony, of operating a bit out of time. But that didn’t stop Keith Gessen and some Ivy League-educated friends from launching, in 2004, the ambitious and pugilistic journal n+1, which was greeted by some as a kind of knowing, intellectual stunt. “Oh, no,” Gessen, who has heavy brows and a wide Russian mouth, said one recent evening. “It wasn’t a joke.”

That first issue was dedicated mostly to outlining what it opposed. “We were against the New Republic, we were against McSweeney’s, we were against the war, we were against exercise,” Gessen continued, sitting in a dive bar on the Upper West Side, where he once lived in an illegal sublet before decamping for Brooklyn, like most of the city’s other literati. ” And to this day we’re against many things.”

At this point he’s kidding, but he’s a serious guy: His journal is dedicated first and foremost, he said, to bringing “a fighting spirit” back to a conflict-averse literary culture.

The Moscow-born Gessen, 33, may be the end of the line, the last of the bold, hungry, text-based thinkers, a throwback to the heyday of Dissent, the quarterly at which he once toiled. His semi-autobiographical novel, “All the Sad Young Literary Men,” came out last week to mostly strong reviews. His journal, meanwhile, takes what might be called the hard-line position on intellectual life: We don’t need more creativity, it says, we need more rigorous argument and political commitment. With Nathaniel Rich, a Paris Review editor whose surreal novel, “The Mayor’s Tongue,” came out last week, and Ed Park, the Believer co-founder and author of the upcoming “Personal Days,” which takes the glamour entirely out of the world of literary journalism, Gessen shows the pleasures and perils of taking ideas seriously in a city attuned more to Dow Jones than Irving Howe.

[ click to read full article at the LA Times ]

from the New York Times

April 27, 2008

Hardcover Fiction

[ click to view list at NYTimes.com ]

from Publishers Weekly

Music as Memoir

Life stories with a backbeat.

by Mark Rotella — Publishers Weekly

 In a poem set to music by his lover Benjamin Britten, W.H. Auden implored the patron saint of music, “Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions/ To all musicians, appear and inspire.”

Or as Nikki Sixx, bassist and songwriter for heavy metal band Mötley Crüe, acknowledges inspiration in his bestselling memoir, The Heroin Diaries: “I remember Iggy and the Stooges’ song ‘Search and Destroy’ reaching out from my speakers to me like my own personal anthem.”

And the authors of books on music—be they history or critical analysis, biography or autobiography—have surely felt a similar pull to write about music. In a field of music writing one might label “music as memoir,” authors reveal just how much music speaks to them and use music as a prism through which to view the world around them.

“Your man or your woman’s gone, the whiskey don’t work no more, you’re aching for the homeplace—and God ain’t listenin’,” writes Dana Jennings in Sing Me Back Home (Faber and Faber, May), drawing on his own dirt-poor family in New Hampshire to explain 20th-century rural America. “You just need to wallow sometimes,” Jennings acknowledges in a Hank Williams–inspired chapter titled “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

“You’ve got music fans who want a valentine of or homage to their favorite artists, and you’ve got those who just want the dirt,” says Lissa Warren, senior publicity director at Da Capo. “Some of these guys are just over the top,” says Warren’s colleague, executive editor Ben Schafer. “They have decadent stories—of women, sex and drugs.”

And riding in on the heels of autobiographies such as last year’s Slash by the Guns ‘n’ Roses guitarist are such down-and-dirty tell-alls as Stephen Davis’s Watch You Bleed (Gotham, Aug.) and W.A.R.: Axl Rose (St. Martin’s, Feb.) by Mick Wall—both of which are on, you guessed it, Guns ‘n’ Roses. Of course, old-time rockers are still garnering ink in such books as AC/DC by Murray Engleheart (Harper Entertainment).

“There has been a trend toward rock stars finally telling their life stories themselves,” says Schafer at Da Capo. “Once something like Clapton happens, they say, ‘Hey, I can do this.’ ”

Eric Clapton, Nikki Sixx, Slash, Tommy Lee, and the Police’s Andy Summers and Sting—the list goes one—have all joined the confessional club.

[ click to view full article at Publisher’s Weekly ]