After the photo of the president’s line-editing style, now we get to go with him to Prairie Lights, the awesome bookstore next to the University of Iowa. This photo was on the front of the NYT today. This is what I like to do in bookstores, too: make fun of books that I think look terrible.

Here’s the humorous pool report, via Politico’s reporter, courtesy of the Times, too.

Meantime, ace Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow (aka the next gen’s David Von Drehle), was out there too, writing this story for A1, a sort of sad account of Yet Another Angry Man. We ran pictures of him too, by Linda Davidson:

I would love for my friend Robin Givhan to write a piece exploring the sartorial choices of the right and the left nowadays. She’s done that before, most recently last summer with the Town Hall folks. I’m amazed how ideologies changed without changing their look.

What I mean is: It used to be that Sturgis ponytails and long scraggly beards were standard-bundled with liberals, hippies. And the clean-cut Alex P. Keaton look signified conservative, Republican. Now, the slobs are right-of-center, and as they become more radical, the more they resemble street musicians. (I realize, of course, that the biker look was always opposed to the Man and suspicious of government in any form.) They use megaphones to insist that they want to reclaim and return to the America they knew growing up. But if that America came back, it would immediately insist that these dudes cut their damn hair and shave. Meanwhile, today’s preppies? Repp-stripe neckties and trim figures and hornrims and J. Crew sweater sets and pearl strands? They’re left of center.

America, you’ve gone all Freaky Friday on me! (Have a Vampire Weekend.)

I was struck by this picture I saw on the New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog, which they found on the White House’s Flickr photo account. Those are the president’s hands. That’s his health-care bill signing speech. [UPDATE: A couple of commenters here have said it isn't Tuesday's speech; I was going by some of the content of the speech -- health care -- and the fact that the upload date on the photo is March 22. If anyone wants to analyze or report it out from what we can see, please do.] [UPDATE 2: see comments below.] That’s Jon Favreau, his speechwriter, next to him. Just look at what sort of line-editing you get when you write speeches for Obama. (Click here for a close-up)

A photo like this is thrilling, gratifying and also terribly frightening to anyone who delivers his or her own writing to an editor. (Or a group of editors.) I wonder how this picture makes other people feel. I see it and feel a swelling of pride — not in the president so much as in the hard work that goes into good writing.

But I also get a lurching feeling in my stomach. I have marked up my own drafts like this, and, when invited, I have done the same for other writers. (Though probably not to this extent.) I certainly have received manuscript pages back from George Hodgman that looked like this.

When it comes back to you in this condition, you have to take a deep breath and just deal with each mark, one by one.

At the Washington Post, we don’t edit on paper. The equivalent to this picture would be to come over to your editor’s desk and see your story up on his or her screen, filled with “red notes,” sort of like the edit-track function in Microsoft Word. Questions are in red. Cuts are in red. Suggestions for rewrites are in red. My eye is trained to immediately look for instances of red; only once, on an edit with Henry Allen several years ago, did I open the file and see more red than black. (Which turned out to be false panic — most of the red was actually a long note from Henry after the lead paragraph suggesting that I veered off in the wrong direction.)

I think Joel Garreau might have been the last editor I had who liked to mark up a hard-copy printout of a feature by one of his reporters. (Sometimes he’d disappear to the men’s room with it, which lends a whole new meaning to clean copy.)

I do know a lot of my colleagues still hit ctrl-P so they can edit their own work from a hard copy. Delightfully, we even have an option to print it out as justified columns of type in the Post font. I still love to print out a story and, if there’s time, take it with me to a quiet bar, order a glass of wine, and have at it.

I did a lot of that with Tinsel chapters — mark, mark, scratch, circle, fix, scribble [pause for sip of wine, maybe a Sancerre, maybe a Malbec, sometimes not wine, sometimes a Jack and 7] and then read on, scribble some more, try not to eat too many bowls of snack mix.

The sort of paperwork created by hard-copy editing mostly belongs in the recycling bin, but it is a gold mine for research archives and literary sleuths. It’s too bad future researchers won’t have many of this era’s marked-up drafts to pore over.

This picture also makes me think of how many people would shit their pants if you handed back their writing with this many marks on it.

Starting about a decade ago, there were lots of stories about teachers who switched from red pens to happier colors (purple, green) when marking-up student assignments, so as to soften the blow to kids who grow up in a cocoon of praise and esteem-building feedback.

You can only imagine what sort of parent-teacher conferences would be arranged, or formal complaints immediately filed to the department chair or dean’s office, if teachers and professors started handing back papers that looked like Obama’s edits. I say Jon Favreau is earning his pay. ($172,000.)

This is SNL Homowatch, where I track the number of haha-that’s-GAY jokes that the writers at Saturday Night Live deliver each week on their forlorn (for Lorne? haha) march toward 1 a.m.

I laid (haha x 2) my mission statement out for this project in last week’s inaugural edition, including a “lighten up, Hank, why don’tcha!” disclaimer. So you might want to go back and read that before you give me a freshly made batch of lighten up, dude. That said, thanks to all of last week’s commenters and the linky-linkersons who pointed new readers here.

Let’s do it.

Air date: 3/13/10

Host: Jude Law

Musical Guest: Pearl Jam

Homo jokes: Four? (Two very big jokes about the tickling-groping congressman and two much more subtle).

1. Disgraced, tickler-Congressman Eric Massa gave SNL the biggest homo-haha-hoohoo present ever. Even Larry Craig didn’t deliver like this, because he chose to scandalize himself in the summer months when SNL wasn’t on. The show cold-opened with Brian Moynihan (as Massa) and Kristen Wiig doing a skit where the congressman has his exit interview. Pretty much speaks for itself. Also, I don’t really count this among SNL Homowatch tropes. How could the show NOT go to town with this guy’s foibles?

2. “Secret Word”: A ’60s game-show spoof. At one point, Jude Law comes out as a Russian emigre ballet dancer contestant and attracts the subtle attentions of the game show host (Bill Hader) with the bulging endowment seen in Law’s leotard. This barely qualifies for homo watch, except it does. It’s funny that the host is attracted to the ballet guy because…?

3. “Weekend Update”: More Massa, during Seth Meyers’ “Really?!” bit, featuring super special guest star, Jerry Seinfeld. Homo Watch is delighted. Here we see SNL in full disgust at all things homo, co-delivered by the man who performed the ur-schtick of the modern era of enlightened homophobia, Seinfeld, which was: “Not that there’s anything WRONG with it.” That has been the favorite punchline of wink-wink/nudge-nudge comedic homophobia for nigh 15 years. Because of course there’s something wrong with it. It’s the founding document of all SNL sketches and comedy movie jokes that make fun of gays. But, like I said, the Massa scandal is giftwrapped with a giant bow for these writers. “The worst part of the story is that you ruined snorkeling for me.” “If that’s snorkeling, then what’s scuba diving?” (Translation: Nothing delights us more than jokes about gay sex.)

Anyhow, Seth, the “sarcastic ‘really’” skit is still funny? Really? (Really?)

4. Finally, don’t think I didn’t notice k.d. lang as one of the unwanted intruders in that home-alarm commercial spoof.

SNL is on a break until April 10, when Tina Fey comes back, and she loves a good gay joke. Meanwhile, I’ll blog the repeats.

Where were we? The one-man book club (which shall now be written as One-Man Book Club, after a unanimously ratified amendment to the One-Man Stylebook) is adrift. Members keep offering excuses: “I have too many TV reviews to write.” “I’m too goddamn tired.” “I feel too fat to blog.” “I would rather drink a little and read these magazines.” Etc. etc.

But we (me) are back. There are three books left from the Great Reading Binge of Late ’09 and Early ’10 — and one book to give a friendly shout about.

First up, The Room and the Chair, by Lorraine Adams: The author, a Pulitzer winner for reporting, used to work at the Washington Post. I didn’t know her, but I did wind up at a New Year’s Eve party back in the very early aughts at the nice, big house she used to live in on 19th Street. She was a great newsroom character, and now she’s written a novel about some great newsroom characters. But let me back up for a minute to her first novel, Harbor (2004), which I had on my list of my favorite books of the ’00s, and is, I think, among the very best novels to come out of the immediate vibe of the 9/11 era. I strongly recommend Harbor.

As for The Room and the Chair, I’m much more ambivalent. It’s a vivid (often too vivid) story of a female fighter pilot (who barely survives the crash of her fighter jet, which lands in the Potomac River between the Kennedy Center and Roosevelt Island); a spook (aka “The Chair”) who works for one of those No-Such-Agencies out in an office park in McLean; and a young, black reporter who is assigned by the night editor of the Washington Spectator to look further into the plane crash, long after the rest of the newsroom (“The Room”) cares about it. Based on all that, you’d think it’d just be another Washington potboiler AND a Post roman-a-clef. But Adams has a whole lot more ambition than that. The writing is often amazing and she clearly means to bend a lot of Washington cliches (actual and literary) into some new form of art. The first 100 pages are maddeningly lush — it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, which is partly the the intent of the story. The theme is not “You can’t handle the truth!”, the theme is more there is no such thing as truth. To achieve this, Adams has thrown a lot of gauzy language in front of the reader’s vision.

As for the Washington Spectator, I couldn’t help but gobble up the details of a very Washington Post-like environment, where some of the characters definitely possess traits that any Post-ie will recognize. There are some delicious analogues; a Bob Woodward, who in this weird parallel realm, seems to have married the Sally Quinn. A few pages in, I started taking notes, if for nothing else than to save Amy Argetsinger the work of having to read it herself! I don’t wish to slag on The Room and the Chair — there’s something lovely and cool about it, but I don’t expect many people will find it a satisfying read. It’s far too arty for people who like Washington thrillers and it’s not fully realized enough to score with the highbrow reviewers. And for those of us who loved Harbor so much, it’s a teeny bit of a comedown. Want to read something far more articulate and spot-on about this book? I point you now to Louis Bayard’s review in the Post.

After that, I took on You Are Not a Gadget, a manifesto by Jaron Lanier. This is one of those books that gets talked about a lot when it comes out; sometimes you can probably get what you need to know about this kind of book from the reviews of it.

But I was intrigued by his central premise, which sort of goes like this: the Internet revolution got off to the wrong start, constrained by fixed ideas that were part of the initial software designs of the 1980s and ’90s, and biases of the people who fashioned together the World Wide Web, and then ruined by the anonymous bad manners of its users.

There’s a lot more here too, much of which had me nodding along in sound agreement. I especially liked a mini-rant midway through that bemoaned the ultimate result of the Internet: people went to things that comfort them in a nostalgic sense, looking up old friends and enjoying long-gone cartoons and songs — instead of creating something new. The whole thing is trapped in cultural “retro economy.” Lanier makes a compelling argument that the music of the post-Internet generation fails to sound unique, in the way that music from other decades clearly does.

That’s just one example. I feel like if I’d been reading Wired all these years (I havent; have you?), I would have followed Lanier better down some of his rabbit holes. But on the whole, I enjoyed this book because it validated a lot of my heartache about the Internet, which is not a Luddite response (or the death bleats of a newspaper employee), but just the sinking feeling that this renaissance we’re in is in fact a false start, and is destroying more than it invents. This is one book where I wish my One-Man Book Club actually had another member, because I want to talk about it with someone who’s read it. Also, though, it’s been about three weeks since I finished it, and I have to admit, much of it has already left me. Hmmm.

I read Union Atlantic in one long day, a day in which I absolutely needed a book like Union Atlantic, a day which I spent waylaid in Memphis — a missed flight connection, a night in a Hyatt, and then most of the next day spent reading on a sofa in the Hyatt lobby, ordering diet sodas and waiting to go back to the airport for an airplane. (Does that sound awful to you? Let me tell you, I love those sort of days. File under: I’m really not hard to please.)

Union Atlantic is a novel by Adam Haslett, and it’s being hailed by some as the best novel yet about the economic excesses of the 2000s. It weaves together several stories, set in and around Boston. Union Atlantic is a big, Wachovia-like banking institution, at which Doug Fanning runs a big hedge fund. Doug is a former Navy officer who served on the USS Vincennes when it shot down that Iranian airliner in the 1980s. Now (middle ’00s) he’s a cutthroat hedge fund asshole — and he’s just built a fittingly ostentatious mansion in a wealthy little burg outside Boston. This brings the wrath of his neighbor, a kooky old lady living in squalor next door, with her two dogs (who talk to her). She also happens to be the older sister of the head of New York Federal Reserve Bank. The old woman, a former history teacher, is hired to tutor a young man who (I’m going to keep this short) winds up having an inappropriate (but pretty damn hot, if emotionally abusive) affair with a character I’ve already mentioned. There’s more, but that gets us started.

I voraciously liked this book, if only because I was hooked. In hindsight, the last 50 pages get somewhat ridonkulous plot-wise (and a little obvious), but so what? It delivers a strong dose of catharsis to the BS that’s gone on with our economy AND Union Atlantic has the added bonus of knowing what it’s talking about. Haslett’s done his research and it feels right, down to the elegant descriptions of the economic hocus-pocus that ruined the American economy. He’s not an elegant prose stylist; the thing to admire is his (no pun) economy with words and images. For all its sprawl, this novel comes in at 300 pp. I’m not sure it’s the be-all/end-all novel that captures our era and will therefore last for the history of western lit, but I got a real bang out of it.

• • •

Finally, you’ve been to Hawaii, right? Actually, have you ever been to any place that tries to put forth a “tropical” summery vibe, up to and including the place that rents innertubes at Harper’s Ferry? Then you know the sound of Iz.

That would be Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. (Everyone called him Iz.) He’s the one who recorded that ukelele version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which appeared on his album “Facing Future,” which was released in 1993. (The “Over the Rainbow” cover was made one drunken night in 1988.) Millions of record sales later, that song has been used in commercials — especially commercials aiming to make yuppies feel more ethereal about their purchases and vacation plans — and basically anyplace you’ve ever ordered a daiquiri. As much as it makes me think of the Sheraton in Kona, it also makes me think of the Internet bubble economy circa 2000.

Ah, but the story behind it: Who was Iz, the imposingly large Hawaiian who, long after his death in 1997, has come to be such a revered icon in Hawaii?

That’s where my friend Dan Kois comes in. He’s written Facing Future for the 33-1/3 book series. (The series of books pairs a writer up with a legendary album and has the writer do a pocket-sized book-length essay about it.)

I had the pleasure of reading Facing Future in manuscript form last summer. Of all the friends who’ve ever asked me to read their book for them, this was the one I put the least amount of red pen marks on. It’s an engaging and tragic story, quite well told, about a darker and more wistful side of life and death in Hawaii. Do my bruddah Dan a solid and pick it up. It’s a bargain.

Amy Adams, some dude nobody knows, Penelope Cruz, Sean Penn: Vanity Fair Oscar party, 2009

It’s Oscar night again. For the first time in a long time, I’m not in Hollywood, sweating east-coast newspaper deadlines on a west-coast story and then medicating the adrenalin crash with alcohol once I stagger into the afterparties. (See above, courtesy vanityfair.com.) Right about now (11:30 a.m. PST), I’d be putting on my tuxedo for an 18-hour shift.

People ask: Will I miss it?

Hmmm. I’d say my answers moves back and forth on the spectrum between “not really” and “sorta” to “hells-to-the-no.”

Anyhow, I’m excited to see what Amy Argetsinger, Dan Zak and Jen Chaney do with it. In 20 years of general-assignment journalisming, Oscar night is the only thing I’ve ever been assigned to cover over and over (and over and over and over and over — total of 6 overs). Last year was a blast — all deadlines reasonably met and a really fun Vanity Fair party and a Prince concert into the wee hours with Amy — but I could sort of feel it in my bones, that it would be the last one for me.

I can report that my body and mind definitely became accustomed to the usual late-winter escape to Los Angeles for a week or so, and despite a whiff of spring this weekend in D.C., my body and mind are a little WTF? Where’s LA?

See, I would always stretch the Oscar trip into several more days with a feature story assignment or two. One of the best ones I ever did that way was to spend days reporting a long piece in 2004 about the Ambassador Hotel before it was torn down.

I’d also build in some time off, hanging out with Janet Duckworth. Time off in LA is the best kind of time off there is. I am elated to read Dan‘s blog items about rambling around LA this week, before he has to report for after-party duty. If Michael and I had not just had such a perfect trip to LA over Christmas, I’d be more wistful about it.

But let me just say: I don’t know if my tuxedo pants fit at the moment — and I don’t want to know. These pants have been taken in, let out, and taken in a couple of times. The last time (in svelte 2007, they were taken in), the Korean tailor said “Not again. Last time. No more.” So it’s a good thing I’m not going.

Also? More than anyone in my life ever really knows (except Bill Booth and Leslie Yazel, and David Carr, and now Amy Argetsinger), the desperate act of filing copy on Oscar night — and everything leading up to it and immediately after it — is really hard. Not “Baghdad bureau hard,” but much harder than you’d ever guess.

This year, I’m still on the horrible Oscar night deadline, but in a different way: I’ll be in the Post newsroom tonight, watching the TV broadcast and writing a review.

One of these future Oscar nights, I vow: Couch, sweatpants, green-chile queso & chips, and not a laptop or a notebook in sight.

PS: I forgot to mention my favorite part about covering Oscars. Getting up, hung over, driving over to Bill Booth’s house to write the afterparty story for Tuesday’s paper. Always a brisk, cool, sunny morning. All the windows and doors open in Bill and Annie’s house. Dogs happy. Sitting at the kitchen table and calling out laugh lines to Bill.

Well, his life has changed, too. He’s the Mexico bureau chief.  Last year, while I was setting up in the press room at the Kodak theater (with Amy), Bill sent a note from Tijuana, where, he said, “the teenagers are pregnant with Oscar anticipation.” Haha. This year? He’s in Port-au-Prince: Check out his dispatch on rubble today. Bill was the zenmaster of Oscar reportage. He’s good at everything.

Every member of the one-man book club has to review tonight’s Oscar broadcast on a serious deadline. We’ll reconvene asap.

For years I’ve been vaguely (in a teensy way) bothered by Saturday Night Live’s complete dependence on sketches that make fun of being gay. I don’t know exactly why. I’ve written a little about this before — “enlightened homophobia,” which is probably socially harmless (as is most televsion, really) but nevertheless irritates me. In the 1990s, after her disastrously unproductive season on SNL, Janeane Garofalo was quite free with her gripes about the SNL culture and one of them was that the male writers were obsessed with gay and anal sex jokes. In a 1995 interview with New York magazine she said:

They love the anal sex here [at SNL]. That’s considered incredibly funny.

So. Years and all those Judd Apatow-generation movies later, we are still at that point. The current crop of performers on SNL have made fun of gay in every way possible — all the men on the cast have kissed one another (with tongue!) for sketches. The “Not That There’s Anything WRONG With It” era of accepting gays while making fun of them has evolved: Gay is so okay in our culture now (plus) that it can be mocked constantly and topically (another plus, sorta), but in a way that ultimately makes clear that being gay is bad, by making endless jokes about how ooky and weird and gross and hilarious being gay is, as told and performed by hetero performers and writers. (A net minus.)

For an example of what I consider the nadir of this trend, see Brian Juergen’s breakdown of the horrible Paul Rudd episode from 2008, at Afterelton. It seemed like every skit was gay-related that night, and, being SNL, a lot of them fell flat. It bordered on unhealthy obsession. I resolved to start counting the gay jokes each week in SNL. I usually get up to three or four before “Weekend Update,” and then “Update” usually puts it past half a dozen.

I’m certainly, totally, definitely not the first person to point this out.

So I’m going to start a weekly SNL Homowatch and see if it starts to make any more sense. Why do I care? (Besides the fact that I’m gay and I think about TV and popular culture for a living?) I dunno. Clocking SNL’s gay weirdness feels not only futile, but horribly PC. Two reasons, I guess:

1. Because SNL, after all these years, through all its up and downs, is still considered a social mirror. The show certainly takes credit for its influence on the political and cultural sphere whenever possible.

2. No openly gay performers. The same way they have Fred Armisen playing half-black President Obama and Keenan Thompson playing every single black person (including Mo’nique last night), SNL does “gay” all the time, but without any gays.

So, on to this, the inaugural installment of Hank’s own SNL Homowatch:

Air date: March 6, 2010

Host: Zach Galifianakis

Musical guest: Vampire Weekend.

Homo jokes: 3. Miraculousy, given Galifianakis’s cohort and past work, I only caught three moments of enlightened homophobia in this week’s episode:

1. The Inappropriate Family: SNL has done this skit a lot before, which is basically about a family (dad: Fred Armisen; mom: Kristen Wiig, sons: Bill Hader, Brian Moynihan, others, and host Galifianakis, playing their inappropriate Orthodox priest) who show inappropriate amounts of affection. It starts with a lot of kissing and ultimately ends up with the men giving one another deep long kisses while the audience SCREAMS in disgust. (You’d think the performers were eating Hormel chili out of a toilet bowl or something, from the decibel level of reaction.) Question: Is the disgust about the incest or the homosexuality? (Or, at the end, homo necrophilia?)

2. “Weekend Update”: Remember, I watch this show half-awake, but I only heard one gay joke from Seth Meyers, to the effect of: “It was announced that the cast of Glee will be going on a seven-city concert tour [pause] said your teenage son who never quite mastered a spiral throw.” (Haha. Sissies can’t play football.)

3. Beauty pageant gay guy skit in the show’s final minutes, spoof of a talk show (80 percent of SNL’s skits are spoofs of talk shows: WHY) hosted by a super-lispy gay man with a frosted pompadour hairdo (Galifianakis) who is a beauty pageant consultant. As far as I’m concerned you can make fun of that all you want. Galifianakis wasn’t too far off most of the “pageant queens” I met while covering Miss America many years ago, and the makeup people did a neat job of turning Galifianakis’s beard into a double chin. And speaking of beards, they made it (barely) funny by having Wiig play his chain-smoking wife. And brought on Bill Hader as another gay man who was the show’s guest. Both Galifianakis and Hader really played up the lisps and effeminacy. It goes nowhere, but it satisfies one of SNL’s core missions: Make fun of gay people whenever possible.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Hank, sometimes this stuff is really funny, so just lighten up, wouldja. I agree. They can and do get it right. Would you like to see something I think is really, really funny? Check this out. Please note — it stars a woman and an openly gay man, both doing a sort of drag. It’s so much funnier with Neil Patrick Harris than it would be with, say, Paul Rudd. Why? Because Harris is working with something innate, something more intelligent, nuanced, subtle. He knows.

It’s one-man book club week here in Tonsil-land, where I say all the things I would say if I was in a book club (and the selections were all up to me). Monday and Tuesday I blogged about seven books.

But today is the dark-interlude portion of the one-man book club meeting, where a moment is taken to grieve for the misfires — those books that did not pass the FIFTY-PAGE TEST.

Let me explain. I give every book I buy or borrow the first 50 pages (one sitting) to get me in there. Sometimes I’ll push it to page 75 or 80. But if it’s not happening, I give myself permission to put it down and move along. Nobody’s fault. That’s important to underline. I’m not going to take the book back and demand store credit or anything. I just read until hooked, or until I make a decision that it’s not for me and I move along. On the chance that these authors self-Google (and who doesn’t? Dave Eggers probably doesn’t), I’ll keep it brief so as not to upset karmic literary balance.

Fast farewell to these, and I’m sorry there’ve been so many lately:

Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda. My fault. I didn’t want to read “a history” of memoir, I wanted to read more about the psychological impulse (nowadays, especially) to commit the act of memoir. And there it is plain on the cover: “A history.”

Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America’s New Rootless Professional Class by Peter T. Kilborn. Loved it as a New York Times story however many years ago. This book-length extrapolation was recommended to me by a few people who got the same vibe when reading about Frisco, Texas, in my book. But 60 or so pages in, it just felt spun out (and stretched out) to me. Too dry and newspaperly about something that can also be absurd, odd, funny.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. Sorry, McsWeenies, I gotta save my Katrina interest so I can review Treme on HBO in a month or so. This book comes from the calculated enterprise that is Eggers’s earnest effort to save society through literature. Although journalist pals at Gangrey were excited to delve into it, I was corn-fused by the reporting process as spelled out in the acknowledgments. Zeitoun is intent on being matter-of-fact. Frankly, it struck me as boring. (I know: how can a flood be dry? You’ll see.)

Finally: This Is Where I Leave You, an angsty-comic family drama novel by Jonathan Tropper. That is where I left it, right around page 50.

• • •

More one-man book club on FRIDAY, with reviews of THE ROOM AND THE CHAIR, UNION ATLANTIC and YOU ARE NOT A GADGET. Plus a little ukelele.

We continue today with More Things I Would Have Said if I Was Actually in a Book Club (and If The Club Chose Books That Were Exactly the Books I Want to Read) … By now I’d be a little drunk on the very excellent wine we serve at my book club. It appears I’m going to drink the whole bottle. In a one-man book club, there’s always plenty to eat and drink.

Yesterday I turned in my book reports on Sweet Thunder and Gutshot Straight, which I read in the darkest days of January, under blankets. Let’s time warp a bit, back to middle-late November, when I headed out on the Tinsel tour and needed some books to read that were:

a.) not about Christmas and

b.) slender.

I’m a bit of a David Thomson fanatic. Got there late, “discovering” him in 2005, when The Whole Equation came out; then I marvelled at the no-net trapeze act he did in 2006 with Nicole Kidman. Now he’s one of my favorite film writers. His new one (and he just bangs them out, apparently, both fat and thin) is The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder. It’s a succinct gem of Thomsonian filmthinking, and exactly what the title promises. He starts by artfully capturing American character and social thought in 1960 and then walks us through the film. I don’t get to the museums enough, but I was really glad, some years back, to catch an exhibit where an artist had slowed Psycho down frame by frame so that the movie took 24 hours to play. When I was at the exhibit, the movie was sloooowly clicking through the scene was where the detective is questioning Norman Bates. (But Hank! The shower scene! Yes, I know, but it was hard to catch it just right. I would have had to build my day around it.)

Fellow Thomson fan Dan Zak didn’t like this book as much as I did (and it does drag a bit in the wind-up), but it was just what I needed as I went from one Hampton Inn and Hilton Garden Inn and Hyatt Place to the next, where I showered every time, happy as could be.

The frigid Saturday night I read at Village Books in Bellingham, Wash., (yes, the night seven people showed up and didn’t buy a single copy of my book) I bought myself a book I’d read about in The Stranger: Rebecca Brown‘s collected essays, American Romances. This book was published by City Lights, the venerable San Francisco bookstore, and clearly by someone who thinks Rebecca Brown writes the real good shit. Her essays are about herself and popular culture and literature (and history), but they basically work as almost hallucinogenic collage. The first essay connects Brian Wilson and Nathaniel Hawthorne across American history, and every word is perfect.

That’s not to say these are all easy to read dispatches. Later she gets into Gertrude Stein (Brown is a total child of Stein) and here things get wobbly and clouded. Her writing about her parents is painful (good painful) and I get the stuff about John Wayne, but there are some boulders on this trail, too. Brown writes uninhibited (but precise) essays, full of something quintessentially Western, that I once longed to do, if I’d been … hmmm. If I’d been crazy. Or crazy enough to not, like, need to be employed by newspapers so that I could have things like paychecks and health plans.

There was a phase, when I was working in a somewhat more free and unhinged way at the Austin American-Statesman, where I approached some similar neurotic-confidence that Brown seems to have; a trust in joining together oddly connected themes in madcap ways. (At the Post I did it in a much more linear fashion; crazy but not nutty — plastic chairs, or Sheetz v. Wawa.) Everyone spends so much perfecting their writing so that it is clear, spare, direct, show-don’t-tell, etc. It feels like Brown completely trusts herself to be beautifully odd in her sentence structure and thinking. I encourage people who would like to write weirder than they currently do to give this book a whirl. I’d bet 60 percent of the people who try to read it will just go “hunh”? (I’d bet that 98 percent of the people who read my blah-blah-blah about it here — all three of you — will also go “hunh”?)

• • •

When Michael and I went to California for Christmas and New Year’s, I took along these three (slightly heavier) books:

Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife by Francine Prose. I was drawn to it by an intriguing review in the NYT, but also by the cover: There, with the usual schoolgirl picture of Anne Frank that we’ve come to know on millions of book covers, are outtakes from the same photo session. More Anne. It’s always spooky to know there’s more.

I read the diary itself in seventh grade, like everyone else, and haven’t looked back. Of course, there’s usually a pretty constant shitstorm occurring just off the coast of Anne Frank — from school boards that still ban the diary to Holocaust deniers claiming the whole thing was cooked. Frank scholars (Frankies? Frankenfolks?) have done heaps of work comparing the original to the revision and then comparing that to the version Otto Frank edited and sold to publishers. The movie and play are a travesty of happifying impulses to tidy up the Holocaust for American audiences in the 1950s.

All of this is really fascinating to me, and Francine Prose is exactly the kind of tough but reasoned writer I want to read on the enduring allure of Anne Frank and the puzzling ways people have appropriated the diary to their own thinking. Here’s what I didn’t know: Anne revised and polished two years of her original, way-too-girly diary with the hope that it would win a contest and get published. All this time I (and maybe you) thought the diary was purely a found document, a naive work of genius. Rather, as Prose walks us through it, we can finally see it as the intentional work of an emerging writer who is in a way much more aware of her audience and market.

And a week or so after I read it? Miep Gies died. I felt so up-to-date on it all.

And just yesterday, I got a screener in the mail of a NEW dramatic film adaptation of the diary, which will air on PBS in April. I’m looking forward to watching it.

Madly shifting gears, as Michael and I relocated from Palm Springs to LA, I started reading Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby. Ten years later, here’s the novel we all wanted after High Fidelity. It’s about a woman named Annie, a museum curator who lives in a dreary coastal England town with her irritatingly selfish boyfriend, Duncan, who has an unhealthy obsession for a once-successful American rock singer named Tucker Crowe.

Crowe disappeared in the late ’80s, walked away from fame and his career, leaving his fans to obsess forever and ever about why he quit and where he now lives. They are particularly obsessed with his last and best album, Juliet. If you’ve ever known anyone who thought there was something to gain by discussing music in online forums and chat rooms, and who supplements that with tedious collecting of bootlegs, memorabilia and other ephemera, AND (this is key) you don’t think the music in question is really all that great to begin with, then you have to read this book.

Some reviews said the plot was too thin or predictable, but I was right there with it, merrily reading along and laughing a lot. Some books are excellent vacation enhancers — smart and light all at once — and this is one. I love the hard work Hornby put in to the language of liner notes, Wiki entries, obsessive fan chatter, and strange e-mails. I’d also happily pony up to see whatever movie version is (inevitably) made from Juliet, Naked. I was trying to cast it in my head.

Finally, on the long flight back to cold and gloom of a D.C. winter, I read The Kids Are All Right: A Memoir, by the siblings Welch: Liz, Diana, Amanda and Dan.

Strange thing: While I was on book tour, the Welches were too, and it seems like I was always a few days ahead of them or a few days behind them — at bookstore events, or on public radio shows, etc. The more I heard (or read) about this book, the more I wanted to read it.

Basically, they were growing up fine and classy on the East Coast in the 1970s and early ’80s — handsome Dad was a businessman (in a somewhat suspicious and ultimately debt-deep sense of the word) and lovely Mom was a soap-opera actress. Then Dad died in a car crash. A couple of stressful and crazy years later, Mom died of cancer. The kids — ages grade-school tyke to high school — went to live with a variety of family friends or acquaintances/guardians, with widely different results, slight traumas, and an overall sense of abandonment until years later, when they reunited and formed a more cohesive sibling bond. The first couple of pages really sing, right from the first sentence:

Our mother died three times. We have the first death on tape, recorded the day it aired in 1976: Morgan Fairchild, wearing a trench coat and pale pink lip gloss, shot her in the back. Over the past thirty years, we’ve each watched the tape several times, pulling it from the dusty cardboard moving boxes and crossing our fingers it doesn’t get eaten by the VCR. It’s our only copy.

… There is a loud bang. A tiny circle of dark red appears on the back of her pink satin robe. The next shot is a close-up. Our mother’s face fills the screen in a death snarl revealing upper teeth.

I was so with them from the introduction, but the book quickly strays from that lyric quality. That’s not to say I don’t recommend it; I did follow along right to the end, as tedious as it got. Most of it is written by Liz (the second oldest) and Diana (the youngest), in alternating chapters told in first-person singular, as opposed to Our mother died three times. …

The oldest, Amanda, chimes in every so often with very short chapters, mostly to call B.S. on Diana’s and Liz’s recollections or add her own perspective; the brother, Dan, drifts in and out to demonstrate how detached he was through their adolescences spent apart. Some of the online reviews have really pounced on the book, calling it whiny and spoiled. Yes and no; their “struggles” are a tad oversold. When the Welches lost their parents, the upper-middle class inhabitants of their world stepped in to keep them afloat in a certain status. The untethered emotions they describe aren’t quite the sob story that the book’s marketing material describes. I think other readers might have gone in expecting a really incredible story (read: unbelievable, a la Running with Scissors) and got bored.

In a strange way, the things that work about this book are the same things that drag it down. Liz is and always was the star of this family, and she seems to have the most detailed memories — especially about her own achievements in school and do-good travels abroad. Reading her is like being trapped at a dinner party with a guest who won’t shut up about herself and yet also wants you to hire for some job you didn’t know you’d posted, and when you learn more (from interviews) about how the book came about, it’s clear that this is Liz’s book proposal, brought to fruition by the innovative idea to get her siblings to chime in.

Diana had a much more painful life after the parents died; she was taken in by a family that seemed to resent her presence. She turned out very earthy, laid-back. Her prose is more slack, especially compared to Liz’s, which feels overly self-centered. I actually liked the bluntness of Amanda’s and Dan’s contributions better — which seem to have come about in response to reading Diana’s and Liz’s early drafts? Messy as it may have been, I kind of wish they’d worked harder to create one draft written in a plural voice. We. Our. She. He; Our mother died three times, with _occasional_ forays into first-person by each of them.

This is what’s alluring about The Kids Are All Right — it’s a study in the pitfalls of memory (especially among siblings) and writing a memoir. If you asked my three sisters and me to write a book about, say, our parents’ marriage and divorce, you would get back four different accounts that would bear a passing resemblance to one another, with big and little details in constant dispute. That’s why I admired the experiment here, if not necessarily the result. I guess I’m like other readers who plowed through this book, got to the end because I wanted to see what happened, and thought eh, big deal. That’s it?

Nothing helps one grieve for the demise of one’s own sad little book than … reading other people’s books!

And knowing, as you read them, that every single one of these books may well nearly have killed its author and also knowing that somehow, someway every single one of these books is also someone’s letdown. (The author? The editor? The author’s mother? The marketing department? The accounting department? Michiko Kakutani? The Millions? The Pulitzer committee? There’s no end to the disappointment a book can bring.)

So here’s a long overdue report from my one-man book club — brief reviews of books I’ve read since mid-November or so.

Oh, the books. The books! Last month I did a huge purge of books from both my newsroom cubicle and the overflowing shelves my home office. I unloaded probably 250 books. Things are much tidier in the home office now — but still (still!) the “to read next” pile is high — about 30 books. 

I just did my tax stuff for 2009 and it turns out I spent more than [exact figure tastefully deleted] on books last year. The amount would sound obscene to some of you, yes, and I am luckier than a pile of luckypants to have the means to wander through the store and buy four or five books at once. (No kids to feed. No tuition to pay.)

I buy books because I believe in them. Six centuries of printed matter can’t be wrong. I buy books because I think of the authors (and the editors, and the jacket designers, and the independent booksellers, and the big-box sellers, and everyone else), and how hard it is to get a book right.

Of course they’re not all good.

Laura Miller, the book critic par excellence at Salon, had a great resolution essay back in January, about how all of us need to try to read books outside of our usual preferred genres. She lays out her own hilarious (but valid, I say) biases:

“I will resist any book set on a ranch like a cat fighting a bath; likewise, memoirs by women obsessed with their mothers. If I happen to flip through a graphic novel and see a scene in which 20-something characters complain about their relationships in a cafe — back on the display table it goes posthaste. Historical fiction set in early 20th-century America, especially the silent movie business? No, thank you very much. …”

Ha! She also avoids novels about “stage magicians” and “rabbis in Prague” and has to force herself once a year to try to a novel from the French contemporary fiction scene.

My biases just as bad — probably worse. This New York Times story about the James Patterson empire did nothing to persuade me that I somehow need to be keeping up with the latest airport thrillers. I also can’t do addiction-recovery memoirs, and try mightily to steer away from “a year spent [blanking]” memoirs. Also, I pretty much say no to any books that started out as blogs.

And if it looks like it has anything to do with India, I’m out.

Books about sports and biographies of sporting legends are hard for me. I find so much sportswriting succeeds with sports fans (it employs the dreaded Morgan Freeman Voice when it wants you to feel emotion) and fails to connect me to what anyone involved is actually feeling. Hate’s a strong word, but while we’re on the subject: books about cards (poker, gambling) and Las Vegas and the big con and the wheel of fate and the Strip and the strippers and the criminals and the neon and the Bellagio fountains and so on and so on. Pass.

• • •

So, having said all that, I now bring you: A book about a sports legend, followed by a book that is not only a thriller (and has been described as a combo between Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen — oh, jeez) but also has as its title something to do with poker.

The good news? They were both written by friendly acquaintances of mine so I dove in with mind wide open. (And by the way, I am not going to link these to any one bookstore. If you want them, go get them from your usual retailer, but do kindly think of the independent stores as you shop. I will link to author sites, if they’re there.)

First up, Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson, written (sweated over, I can attest) by the man who sits in the newsroom cubicle next to mine, Wil Haygood. (I just found out the other day that Wil is headed upstairs to the National desk. Good for him, drat for Style.)

Sweet Thunder is a dense biography of the ups and downs of the famous boxer. It’s not just about boxing, of course — it weaves together darn near the entire 20th-century Negro experience. It’s about jazz, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, nightclubs, New York, the media, transcontinental hype, discrimination, civil rights, hero worship and that eventual human frailty that claims us all.

Every sentence reads with the resolve of incantation; a prayer, part of a poem. The style of the book is likely to seem musical to the right ear, and as likely to sound too purple for some readers. I had the benefit of being able to hear the voice of the writer himself as I read along. The book is total Wil, and it is about depth. I loved Wil’s book about Sammy Davis Jr. several years ago — equally epic in scope — and if I knew or could appreciate boxing even a little bit, I might have liked this book even more. Simply from the black American history contained within, I’m glad I read it. It’s sad for me to say that I could not have been in more foreign territory with something so American (so guy) as BOXING. But there it is.

Speaking of guys, let’s talk about Gutshot Straight. Yes, that refers to a poker hand, but I gave it my trust. This was written by Lou Berney — we’ve been friends for 20-plus years and only met two months ago. (It sounds like something out of Lost, but here you’ll find a simpler explanation.) Lou is a screenwriter — one of those screenwriters who gets paid to write movie screenplays that never get filmed, which must take a certain zenlike ability to let it go. During the 2007-’08 writers’ strike, Lou banged out the manuscript that became this — and I’m not giving out free ass-smooches here — really absorbing, really fucking funny novel. It’s about a nice, kinda Lou Berney-esque (in my mind) guy who gets out of prison and immediately accepts a job from an Eastern European crime boss (who used to be his girlfriend). The orders are: deliver a car (and whatever’s in the trunk) to some undesirable, even badder bad guys at a Vegas rendezvous point. So what’s in the trunk? A pretty woman. A tough pretty woman who says she’s a nice Mormon housewife, but turns out she works as a stripper and a thief. There’s a whole scheme — schemes within schemes. There are some wonderfully rendered bad guys.

So I was reading along in Gutshot Straight and very much enjoying just watching it go pop, pow, zip, zing (I read this book in three rollicking nights) and then I stopped and wondered: Is this why people read thrillers by the same authors over and over? Because if Lou had five more of these, I’d probably read them. It made me think of the first time I saw Romancing the Stone — which was a giddy, teenage, mid-’80s Saturday afternoon at the North Park 4 with my cousin. It also made me think of Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan, not sure why, but weirdly enough, Smith’s book The Ruins makes a cameo quasi-appearance later on. There’s some seriously good writing going on here. My favorite character is Jasper, the major domo, the go-to thug who works for Mr. Moby, the bad guy. He’s heartbreakingly sensitive:

But Jasper felt a special kind of bad for Lucy, and not just because Mr. Moby was a special kind of evil boyfriend, which most certainly he was. Jasper had read a newspaper article once about a river in the jungle that flooded, and how the tops of the trees drooped heavy and black with tarantulas. That had made him — he didn’t know why — think of Mr. Moby.

I am still thinking about trees filled with tarantulas. Buy it, people.

• • •

TO BE CONTINUED … TOMORROW: I’ve already read them (seriously, it’s a dull winter and I haven’t been doing much else besides escaping into books) so up next, THE MOMENT OF PSYCHO, AMERICAN ROMANCES, and ANNE FRANK: THE BOOK, THE LIFE, THE AFTERLIFE; plus JULIET, NAKED and THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT.