BOOK(s): Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son ~ Michael Chabon & Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace ~ Ayelet Waldman
It made sense to read these essay collections co-currently. Chabon and Waldman are married, were recently were profiled in the NY Times Styles section, and also named one among the “annoying literary lovebirds” by Gawker. There are so many reasons I should loathe them: their charming Craftsman-style house in Berkeley, their four hip kids, their literary fame and fortune, the fact that Waldmen writes a lot about parenting. However, Chabon is one of my favorite modern authors (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is one of my favorite books, ever), and I admire that Waldman admitted in a NYT “Modern Love” column that not only did she still have mad, passionate sex with her husband, she loved him more than her kids, and was able to defend herself after being savaged by every media outlet, mommy, and mommyblogger in the known universe. Seriously, it pissed off a lot of women, but I think it’s a beautifully written essay, where she compares her husband to the sun and her children to the moons. I don’t begrudge her for loving her husband more than her kids one bit. In fact, I think that’s the reason my parents have been married 50+ years.
Still, I must admit that I preferred Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs because we share many of the same interests (e.g. comics, music, reading). He includes essays about all of these topics, along with the bris of his first son, the early death of David Foster Wallace, and how upon entering the MFA program at UC-Irvine at age 22 he was clearly a “little shit”: “Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the mid-sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age. Because I was a bright and would-be artiste, my own misogyny wore a beret, as it were, and quoted Nietzsche.” As a graduate school survivor, I knew many of these “little shits” from seminars, constantly playing the game of “my academic wang is bigger than your academic wang, and you sitting over there, since you don’t even have an academic wang, just an academic gash, your opinion on the subject at hand means absolutely nothing”.
I also enjoyed “Verging”, where Chabon recounts sleeping with a 35-year-old friend of his mother when he was 15, and “The Splendors of Crap”, an appreciation of vintage crappy kid entertainment, and how his kid’s crap entertainment differs from his (and is vastly inferior.)
While Chabon’s collection focuses on all aspects of his masculinity - as a son, as a brother, as a single man, as a husband, as a father - Waldman’s Bad Mother is almost entirely mom-focused. While I would normally find this vomitous as a committed childfree person, I enjoyed the collection. Most likely this is because Waldman didn’t write about how cute her kids’ bodily functions are, but about the ugly truths of parenting instead, without being all “Dooce-y” about it. Waldman is a writer (and probably developed the skills from her years as a lawyer), not just a blogger who happened to hit it big and get a book contract.
Waldman’s best essay in Bad Mother is “Breast is Best”, a call to action of how women need to stop judging each other’s childcare choices straight to their faces without having all the facts. She recounts an incident while standing in like at a bakery, giving her infant son a bottle. The woman standing behind her scolded her for not breastfeeding. Waldman, exhausted, broke into tears and explained that it was breastmilk, but she had to feed him from a bottle because of her son’s palate abnormality. “What is it about parenting that allows us to indulge our inner scold? Normally most of us don’t feel particularly threatened about the choices other people make. You live in a split-level ranch, I live in a Craftsman bungalow. I might like your house more than yours - I might even tell a friend I think your house is ugly - but I’d never stop you on the street and tell you to do something about your aluminum siding.”
Another good selection is “Tech Support”, in which she examines the way pregnancy and parenting online were so much different in 1997 as opposed to 2007. In 1997 Waldman participated on a private listserv with about 50 other women due in the month of June; all used their full names when posting. By the time she started writing a column on Salon in 2005, web discourse had completely devolved, something she attributes in part to the ability to hide behind screen monikers and non-identifiable e-mail addresses (like Gmail or Hotmail). Now that there’s no more reliance on “official” e-mail address (like those with .edu or .gov), it’s so much easier to criticize people for their choices. The most painful essay is “Rocketship”, her story about terminating a pregnancy after a genetic abnormality - which may or may have not have manifested itself into physical, mental, and developmental defects after birth - was detected with amniocentesis. After hours of reading and internet research, she finds herself debating “how much defect” she could handle: “I did calculations in my mind of what I could tolerate - physical malformations, fine. Who cares? I measure five feet - I bet there are parents in the world who’d be horrified at the prospect of having a child doomed never to grow taller than that. But developmental delay. That shook me to my core. Mental retardation. I couldn’t go there.”
Yes, I probably should find Chabon and Waldman annoying and smug. But these collections are just so well done (especially Chabon’s, but then again I may be a bit biased) that I’ll just reserve my literary-related hatred for talentless, flash-in-the-pan bloggers with cushy, unnecessary book contracts.
The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment ~ A.J. Jacobs
For this capsule review, I’m going to utilize “Radical Honesty”, a technique Jacobs tests out for 30 days in the course of his nine “experiments”: Mr. Jacobs, I did not enjoy this book at all. You have a smug, snickering writing style that perhaps is fine for an article in Esquire magazine from time to time (from whence the bulk of this book originated), but is grating and annoying en mass. I don’t care about you as a person, don’t really believe you learned anything from trying to outsource your life to India, learning to only do one task at a time, or doing all of the tasks your wife usually handles. Hopefully your sock puppeting as an attractive woman on a dating site (while utilizing your nanny to go out on the dates) exposed you a little bit to the misogyny and violent sexual hatred women face every day. But it probably didn’t. Mr. Jacobs, you’ve already read the encyclopedia and lived by the Bible for a year, maybe it’s time to give up this stunt writing and leave it to younger, fresher people. For example, The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose, one of your former interns was engaging, interesting to read, and never truly ridiculed its subjects (students of Liberty University). Roose respected his “subjects” (so to speak), you do not. In closing sir, you are an asshole.
BOOK: Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life ~ John Sellers
I found the first half or so of this memoir quite compelling, especially since Sellers’ believes (as do I), that 1970 was an awesome year to be born: “But a subtler factor - and I suppose that this part applies to most Gen-X kids, not just those born in 1970 - is that we have been blessed with a prosperous shuttle run through pop-culture history. We have the good fortune of being too young to have any real memories of Watergate, Vietnam, and Tiny Tim, and too old to have been susceptible to Barney, New Kids on the Block, and the expression “gettin’ jiggy wit’ it”. The book lost my interest when it turned into specifically “How Guided By Voices Saved My Life”. While I completely understand falling in love with a band (more than I’d like to admit, actually), reading about someone else’s obsession with a disbanded band I have little interest in, about albums and songs I’ve never heard (outside of the Alien Lanes album), and how cool it was to get drunk with lead singer Robert Pollard at his house, aka the “Monument Club” got tired quickly. In addition, the use of mammoth footnotes should have started and ended with David Foster Wallace.
BOOK: Shadow of the Hedgemon ~ Orson Scott Card
Sorry OSC, I tried. I really did. Ender’s Game was interesting, Ender’s Shadow was even more compelling, but this novel about what happens to the members of Ender’s Dragon Army after the bugger war was a boring, boring, read. Full disclosure: I actually gave up halfway through and tracked down a summary of the rest of the action, which actually wasn’t much more action at all.
BOOK: Sandman Slim ~ Richard Kadrey
I was expecting to enjoy this “supernatural urban noir” novel about escapee from hell (literally) James Stark and his revenge on those who banished him there 11 years prior, as it had the William Gibson blurb of approval on the back cover. However, even with the dirty Los Angeles setting, the interesting juxtapositions of the real and the supernatural worlds existing alongside each other, and dark bloody violence, it became a drag after about 300 pages and a chore to slog through the remaining 100 pages. This could have been a great pulpy novel if it had just been tightened up to about half its length, or even broken into a series.
BOOK: I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-up Comedy's Golden Era ~ William Knoedelseder
Very compelling read about a scene I knew little about: stand-up comedy in Los Angeles in the 70s, which was fairly insane. This “golden era” ended after the strike against The Comedy Store in 1979, with comedians protesting for compensated performances as opposed to the unpaid “workshop” in which they had been working for years. This book is a solid investigation of the decade from the POVs of the comedians (Letterman, Leno, Richard Lewis, Tom Dressden), the club owners (Mitzi Shore of The Comedy Store, Bud Friedman of the Improv), producers and others in the entertainment business. While it’s a small detail, I also appreciate that I’m Dying Up Here is carefully indexed, something I don’t find often enough in non-fiction books such as this.
BOOK: GEEKTASTIC ~ EDITED BY HOLLY BLACK AND CECIL CASTELLUCCI
Subtitle: Stories from the Nerd Herd
(Note: In this case, “Nerd Herd” has nothing to do with the television show Chuck.)
Fun, fantastic short story collection by a group of YA authors including MT Anderson, Garth Nix, and Scott Westerfeld. The stories are largely girl-centric tales about geeky pursuits like role playing games, science, academic bowl teams, MMORPGs, Rocky Horror, and more. Sandwiched between the stories are comics drawn by Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O’Malley (Scott Pilgrim). A great, empowering even, read. I only wish something this cool had been around for me a quarter-century ago - I might have felt less lonely.
Book: THE BIG REWIND: A MEMOIR BROUGHT TO YOU BY POP CULTURE ~ Nathan Rabin
Nathan Rabin’s memoir was constructed a bit different than what I expected, but still completely compelling. THE BIG REWIND one of my favorite reads of 2009. With so many writers (both paper and blog-based) coming from positions of privilege, with unlimited access to capital resources, it’s great to read the story of someone who came about this “writing” thing (finally landing at The A.V. Club) after many potholes along the way.
While Rabin certainly did not have an easy upbringing (parental abandonment, institutionalization, group foster homes, torturous relationships with the opposite sex), he really doesn’t seem to wallow in self-pity (maybe self-punishment, but not pity), and by the end of the book he’s made peace with himself.
You can’t always get what you want. Sometimes you get stuck with the worst possible outcome. Sometimes an opportunity you desperately desire goes to someone who represents everything you hate in the world. Sometimes a trip to the emergency room turns into a month in a mental hospital. Sometimes five or six days in a group home becomes five or six years. Sometimes a fifteen-episode renewal turns into a cancellation. Sometimes “Please don’t tell me about anyone you’re having sex with” gets misinterpreted as “Please tell me about how wonderful it was getting gang banged by five strangers.”
But that’s OK.
BOOKS: RIPPED: HOW THE WIRED GENERATION REVOLUTIONIZED MUSIC ~ Greg Kot / ROCK ON: AN OFFICE POWER BALLAD ~ Dan Kennedy
While Greg Kot is one of my favorite current rock critics, his new book RIPPED: HOW THE WIRED GENERATION REVOLUTIONIZED MUSIC is mildly disappointing. Instead of examining in-depth about the mp3/file sharing/future of digital music distribution, it provides a weak overview of selected events over the past ten years. There’s discussion of the original Napster and other file sharing services, the RIAA file sharing lawsuits, and how major labels bungled the handling of digital distribution. Kot spends most of the book with “case studies” on how selected musicians, small labels, and journalists took advantage of digital distribution of their music. There are chapters about Conor Oberst and Saddle Creek Records; the rise of Death Cab for Cutie thanks to many mentions on The O.C.; Prince breaking free from the major labels and becoming his own label; and the requisite chapter on Wilco (Kot has also written a book on Wilco). The Pitchfork Media effect is mentioned in a chapter about MP3 blogs. Somewhat awkwardly jammed into the book is a discussion of sampling, mashups, and remixes (the Girl Talk project, “George Bush Doesn’t Care About White People” by the Legendary K.O., Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album etc.). In the end, RIPPED is more of a sampler CD of topics in digital music/distribution rather than a deep study of one issue. For any music listener who has been paying attention to events such as the RIAA lawsuits, failed major label attempts to control file sharing, and the more groundbreaking distribution methods of individual artists and smaller labels, RIPPED offers nothing new.
There are also glaring errors and oversights in RIPPED. Some of these were probably unavoidable given how fast things change in a digital society. For example, Fluxblog now carries advertising, and U2 no longer shills for Apple but for Blackberry (RIM). However, the one error that should have never passed editorial review is the opening line of chapter three. It will make anyone with even a passing knowledge of Internet history cringe:
“The Internet was conceived as a utopial ideal, designed by nonprofit researchers in 1990 as an undiscriminating conduit for information.”
No, Mr. Kot. You might has well have said “Al Gore created the Internet” - it would have been just about as accurate.
Other omissions and missteps in RIPPED include no mention of eMusic, the digital music service that pre-dated the iTunes Music Store by three years, always offered 100% DRM-free files, and included hundreds of small labels. (To be fair, there’s little deep examination of the iPod effect, either.) The Sony BMG “rootkit” debacle, which installed spyware and other nasty buggers on computers under the guise of “copy protection”, is given exactly one sentence in the book.
The ideal audience for RIPPED just might be older music executives who still don’t understand why their sales have tanked over the past ten years, or less tech-savvy parents who don’t understand where their kids are getting all the music to fill up their iPods. Kot also doesn’t offer any insights where digital music distribution is heading next, such as streaming, personalized radio stations like Pandora, nor does he offer suggestions to labels left ten years behind.
The ideal reader of RIPPED just might be the major label executives Dan Kennedy, author of ROCK ON: AN OFFICE POWER BALLAD, worked with if there was a viable time machine available. Kennedy was a marketing grunt for Warner Brothers in the early part of the decade, in the years before the company was absorbed by Seagrams to form the massive Universal Music Group and laid off thousands (including him). ROCK ON is a sharp compendium of everything that is wrong with the major labels, from insane management salaries, shitty music, and out-of-touch executives. For example, their “groundbreaking” idea of how to take advantage of the digital marketplace is to charge users a monthly fee so they can stream the company’s catalog on their computers, and only their computers and no digital devices. Note that this idea was presented in approximately 2004, when online radio stations were streaming for free. Is it any surprise that major label music sales are in the crapper? ROCK ON is a quick read, one that will hopefully encourage you to start a record label in your basement, spare bedroom, or even hall closet as opposed to dreaming about working for the majors.
Book: Penguin By Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 ~ Phil Baines
The design history of Penguin paperbacks (and Pelican plus additional imprints) from the beginning, in full color with hundreds of covers spanning all eras and lines. Incredibly inspiring, even if it only includes a small percentage of everything the company has published. It’s going to be where I turn when I’m stuck for zine cover designs. (Fair warning: expect a 30s-era Penguin cover homage for an upcoming zine issue.)
There are many collections of Penguin covers online as well.
BOOK: SHELF DISCOVERY ~ LIZZIE SKURNICK
Subtitle: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading: A Reading Memoir
(Also features contributions from Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries), Laura Lippman (Tess Monaghan series), Cecily von Ziegesar (Gossip Girl), and Jennifer Weiner)
Read my appreciation at SPCHQ: My (and a lot of other people’s) Back Pages
BOOK: WHY IS MY MOTHER GETTING A TATTOO? ~ Jancee Dunn
Subtitle: And Other Questions I Wish I Never Had To Ask
Harmless collection of personal essays from a child of a surprisingly functional family, despite how she tries to portray them. Kind of “meh” overall, proving Tolstoy’s famous opening line about fucked up families being infinitely more interesting to read about.
Book: STARSHIP TROOPERS ~ Robert A. Heinlein
Okay, now I understand why purists of this novel absolutely hated, hated, hated the 1997 movie version, described by a friend as “90210 in space”. It’s also understandable why it’s on the recommended reading lists for the military academies and the U.S. Navy’s Navy Reading program (an interesting list which also includes Ender’s Game). It’s incredibly detailed, and for me, incredibly turgid and boring. Obviously, military science fiction is NOT my thing. (E.g., I enjoyed Ender’s Shadow - which was less military oriented - more than Ender’s Game.)
Book: THE DISCOMFORT ZONE - A PERSONAL HISTORY ~ Jonathan Franzen
Brain pan cleaner after THE STRAIN. Interesting enough essays, if not just a little self-absorbed. (Although, the book is subtitled “A Personal History”, so it was to be expected.) Particularly enjoyed the essay “Two Ponies”, where Franzen writes about how Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts affected his childhood. (He also contributed an essay to The Complete Peanuts 1957-1958 collection.)
Book: THE STRAIN ~ Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
Horror is a genre that I rarely read. Just as I like smart science fiction stories that take time to develop their plot, the horror literature I’ve enjoyed has similar structure. I don’t like print splatter any more than screen splatter. What is terrifying is the horror of knowing something is wrong, but not knowing exactly what that is. It’s terrifying when that horror takes on a human form, and is indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd.
Since THE STRAIN is part of a trilogy, there’s room for plot development and tension to build. The characters actually have personal histories, and are allowed to develop personalities. Also, since the vampiric virus takes about a week to fully manifest in a person after they have been “turned”, it’s not immediately obvious that a friend has become a threat, especially if you don’t know what to look for.
THE STRAIN’s vampires are nasty, hungry, dirty, feral, soulless, unstoppable, completely inhuman monsters. They are the plague. I for one, welcome our new (fictional) vampire overlords. Enough with the sparkly, sensitive, sexy vampires that can be saved by the love of a teen girl or telepathic waitress. Please, more “hard vampire fiction” that makes me ill at ease, and too freaked out to read it at two in the morning.
(Read the first 29 pages of THE STRAIN here; opens as PDF. Also visit the official book site; bandwith intensive with sound.)
