About a week ago, after manic amounts of book-reading this summer, the One-Man Book Club unanimously approved a moratorium (1 in favor; none opposed) that prohibits even the cracking-open and general perusing of any book on the “to read” stack until the club confronts and discusses the entire backlog of already-read and partially-read books.

This is sort of a relief. Many of the One-Man Book Club’s members are employed as full-time television critics and are getting ready for a heap of nonsense known as FALL TELEVISION. Brains must rest, or try to.

Oh, the books: It’s a 60-mile Chinese traffic jam here. Let’s get things moving, quick, before the “fall books” start doing their dances of the seven dustjackets. Also, the One-Man Book Club is going to experiment this time with a ratings system, based on the concept of “lurve.” (Do we lurve the book? Do we sorta lurve it? Do we un-lurve it? Hmmm.)

• • •

First up, You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup, by Peter Doggett. The author is a British music journalist and the book is about the Beatles. It was released last year in Britain and now it’s here, with such a better jacket design. (And an Annie Lennox blurb! Sweet dreams are made of that.) (Would she lie to you? Would she lie to you, honey?)

Maddeningly, it arrives with Brit punctuation intact — periods and commas outside the quotes; single quotes used when someone is being quoted, double quotes for a quote within a quote. (Insane. ‘Copy editors’, he said, ‘proceed cautiously, or “bring Advil” ‘.)

Let me tell you about books about the Beatles: They aren’t just written for Beatles nuts, who will just quibble them to death anyhow. A lot of Beatles books are dulllll, written by men who can’t see the Norwegian Wood for the trees and therefore sacrifice story to trivia and second-hand news. I don’t know what it is about hefty tomes about the Beatles, but for some reason I can’t quite convey, I’m drawn to them. It’s not like I’m any more of a fan of the Beatles, than, say, the rest of the world. I don’t rush out to buy reconfigured and remastered albums or any of that.

What it is, for me, I guess, is the naive improbability of it all: How John knew George and George knew Paul and eventually they had to hire Ringo; how fast they became so, so famous. But mostly I remain stunned by how much work they accomplished between 1963 and 1969, and on drugs, no less.

I like the world they inhabited: communiques by Telex, airplane tickets, rotary telephones, escapes through kitchen entrances, susceptibility to Maharishis and other whack-jobs, women who were called “birds” and “luv,” press conferences, flashbulbs going off, gallery openings, haberdashery, sunglasses, Abbey Road sessions (EMI recording engineers in white labcoats!), publicity stunts for peace staged in four-star hotel rooms. All of that.

My friend David Segal, when he was the pop critic at the Washington Post (he’s now a marquee business-section writer at the New York Times), said something at lunch one day, about six years ago, that has always made perfect sense to me. I don’t know if the insight belongs to him originally, but maybe it does, and it goes something like this:

Elvis fans desire memorabilia. Beatles fans desire information.

That is not to say that Elvis fans don’t like information, and at the same time, many Beatles fans can go cuckoo for memorabilia rarities. But Beatles fans most want to know every last thing there is to know, to the point now where almost every hour in the Beatles’ lives between 1962 and 1970 can more or less be accounted for — travels, recording sessions, meetings, acid trips, etc.

So if a Beatles book looks interesting, I’ll give it a shot. The last one that I got really absorbed in was Bob Spitz’s The Beatles: The Biography; I’m sure someone out there can list all sorts of problems with that book, but I thought it was a great epic for the casual reader, and really brought out the good, bad and ugly of the band’s life. I got through all 992 pages (even the notes!) and wished there’d been another 300 or so. But not all Beatles books are created equal; I tried to read Philip Norman’s Lennon bio last year (snore) and also bailed on a McCartney bio recently — books about individual Beatles aren’t as good.

Caught celebrating the filing of another lawsuit, no doubt.

Now, You Never Give Me Your Money. What’s brilliant about this one is that it begins in 1969, when everything is going to shit for the Fab Four. We just skip the Irish immigration stories, no motherless John, no public art schools, no skiffle jams, no Hamburg, no Ed Sullivan, no Sgt. Pepper sessions. We start with the disastrous (but wondrous!) Abbey Road sessions and the stillbirth of Let It Be; the insinuation of Yoko and Linda; the slammed doors and lack-of-quorum meetings in executive suites.

Meet the Beatles: Manic tax evaders.

The book really dissects the horrible Apple Corps business idea that ruined the Beatles and went on ruining them (financially, emotionally) forever. Though the writing is not perfect, the reporting is about as sincere as you can hope for in a Beatles tome. By the time you get done (in present day) you won’t like the Beatles, personally. Just when you think you hate Paul more, you’ll decide John’s entire story and reputation (and talent) has been way overblown. Peter Doggett is especially good at examining the ways Lennon’s murder created a St. John Lennon who never quite existed. And you can tell this was hard for Doggett, who loves them as we all do, making this is a true work of critical analysis and fair reporting.

It’s taken almost 40 years (and counting) for the Beatles to break up. They and their survivors still — still! — can’t come to terms on everything. If you want a taste of that, simply go try to buy a Beatles album on iTunes.

You Never Give Me Your Money: A big LURVE. (Lurve is all you need.) Someone option the movie! Lawyers be damned!

• • •

Next up, Hitch-22, a memoir by Christopher Hitchens.

H E  I S  P O I S O N wrote a friend, when I told her what I planned to read on vacation.

Which might well be true, for people who’ve had to drink a whole vial or two of him over the years. (And these days he’s literally filled with poison, undergoing aggressive treatment for cancer. Which he just wrote a very nice and frank column about, as he enters the whole cancer culture and quickly advances to the most frightening stage of it.)

I am one of those so-called Washington media elites who happily elude each and every one of the circles in the Hitchens Venn diagram. There’s no possible way I could ever be invited to play with that crowd. Hitchens lives nearby and yet he is no more or less real to me than he is for Vanity Fair readers in the Midwest.

Anyhow, I like his poison in tiny drops on the tongue. I also like his courage to take on organized religion and some of God’s more egregious poseurs. (Yes, like Mother Theresa. And Pope Benedict.)

And Hitch-22 is a pleasure to read, just for the language alone. It’s basically a report from another planet, as delivered by the spongiest, most erudite plant-form on the surface. Suicidal mother, cold father; homoerotic encounters in boarding school, dalliances with socialism; falling for America, learning to write, the life of a professional intellectual … all sustains me for about exactly as long as it ran. Minus the chapter on Salman Rushdie, because, I’m sorry about the fatwas and all, I don’t care about Salman Rushdie. People who’ve read Salman Rushdie and think he’s a genius are all over there somewhere, in another room, having a drink and a smoke with Christopher Hitchens.

I marked one thing that has really stuck with me for the last few weeks. It’s about Israel and Palestine. This passage is a trademark example of the Hitchens way of being at once inflammatory and yet totally, gently sensible. Here it is:

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building — as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago — and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation?

My own reply would be a provisional “no,” but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can’t, in other words, be “leap, leap, leap” for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. “Making the desert bloom” — one of [my mother] Yvonne’s stock phrases — makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.

In the mid-1970s, Jewish settlers from New York were already establishing second homes for themselves on occupied territory. From what burning house were they leaping? …

That may or may not be sort of how I feel about it. Actually, you know how I feel about that issue? I feel like it’s going to eventually kill us all — especially those of us who have to occasionally put on our serious hats and read op-eds about it, in a struggle to “get it,” or pick a side, because we were raised white and Christian and oblivious in Oklahoma and would just as soon not be part of a nuclear apocalypse caused by who gets to vacation in Tel Aviv and who doesn’t. All over some real estate that, frankly, from the pictures on the news, looks to me like either end of El Paso.

If Israelis and Palestinians could just work it out, you know what a one-state solution would look like?

I know, because I’ve been there, many times: It would look like any afternoon at the Grove/Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles.

Drop til you shop.

Hitch-22 gets a qualified LURVE, and strong hopes (not prayer) for Hitchens’s improved health.

• • •

And now, briefly, the dreaded list of those who failed the 50-page test: four books I started and ditched this summer (and some reasons why). I promise you, this is not my favorite part of One-Man Book Club.

The club has even thought about killing this feature, but the authors in the group (one, me) ultimately felt that he, er, I would probably, in most cases, like to know at what point (and why) potential readers bailed on my own book. Yes, even if it’s hard medicine to encounter into during a self-Googling.

[I find pooh-poohs of Tinsel pretty frequently online, btw. And if it hurts, then it's my fault for asking Google and Twitter to go look for them.]

So then … the theme this time is DRYNESS. Note to all editors at New York publishing houses: do something about dryness, won’t you?

<< The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live, by Ted Conover. Wonderful idea but stultifying execution: Conover explores ancient and modern roads on several continents and talks about their immeasurable contributions to civilizations, then and now. I gotta start paying closer attention to books in the store and less to the jacket copy and NPR mentions. I snapped this up because it looked interesting — though the too-earnest subtitle should have shooed me away. About 70 pages in, I realized I was reading a collection of magazine pieces that have been padded out, in a prose style that was weirdly disengaged, by a writer who seemed interested in stories about all the things he saw that wouldn’t interest me.

Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness, by Willard Spiegelman. Seems like a perfectly nice man (English prof at SMU in Dallas) and I’ve enjoyed his pieces in D magazine before. His book explores these seven simple joys: reading, walking, looking, dancing, listening, swimming, and writing. I’m for all of them. But the book reads like a term paper, which I do not count among even the top 100 pleasures, and I wasn’t getting any smarter as I struggled to find his groove. Bailed out after p. 56, skimmed around, then bailed for good.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. Completely and totally unobjectively, I like and recommend Hamlet’s Blackberry a lot more. In an effort to recover braininess, this one discovers dryness.

In fact, cardboard prose is the real bugaboo overall. The other book I ditched was How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood, by William J. Mann, which is such an interesting idea — a Liz Taylor book that is not a biography but instead an examination of the ways she set the template for modern celebrityhood and the self-maintenance of stardom.

But gosh, does the writer prefer the sound of dead leaves. The wit, when it comes, is that sort of obvious, unoffensive wink-wink humor you get from watching Robert Osborne on TCM. It’s a fussy sort of entertainment-biography language; makes me think of stale popcorn and Rex Reed. So I really started skimming it, well beyond page 50, but not in a way that I can claim to have thoroughly read it all.

I paid closest attention the chapter about the making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which very nearly approached the kind of engagement one gets from reading Mark Harris’s excellent Pictures at a Revolution. But soon enough I was skimming again, and left the book for future readers, on the living-room shelf of our vacation rental in Provincetown, where I am sure it will find a new (and truer) friend.

This is not a jet-set post, I swear, but once in a weird while, I find myself standing on a beach, dreamily contemplating one ocean …

And then a day or so later, I get to contemplate another:

Summer is rushing by, and I offer the usual apology of negligent bloggers who feel some odd compulsion to explain their absences to their almost-nonexistent readerships. Michael and I got a nice week off in Cape Cod (seen above, as the first tourists arrive in Provincetown, 1620, and immediately open an art gallery to sell paintings of lighthouses). We had bicycle rides, good food, lots of sleep, minimal drag queens. Everything seemed to calm down. I finished reading four (!) books, and wound up skimming another for quite a chunk. All of which the One-Man Book Club will discuss as soon as a quorum can be reached.

Was home for a day, and am now in Los Angeles — here’s Saint Monica herself (also above) keeping watch over her town, humming “Mad About You,” which she hasn’t been able to get out of her stony head since 1986.

The weather is perfect. But this is not neener-neener-I’m-in-Cali time. I’m here for some very serious business about the fall TV season. As I type this, Tom Selleck is doing his best to sell the TV critics of America on his new cop drama on CBS. (How old do you think he is, off the top of your head? Guess. Readers, he is 65, according to IMDb. He was born the same year we nuked Japan — yet he has no stoop, no creak, no spread. Those are some strong bones. Strong mustache too.) Tomorrow, I’m sitting down with some (or all?) of the Real Housewives of D.C. (”Buckle up” a publicist advises.) Oh, and I’m still filing current TV reviews, from one time zone to the next. Here’s a re-consideration, just posted, of Jersey Shore.

After several days of this, I’ll be spending a few more days in New Mexico, working on something exciting and new.

Okay, everyone, settle down, and stop your goddamn clickety-clicking and distracted surfing!

I have analog media to promote (look, a book!), or, if you must, some kindling for your Kindle, an iBook to get your little greasy fingerprints all over. This is the full Tonsil blog endorsement of Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers. It just came out. I got to read a galley a while back. You’ll soon be reading about it in all the right places.

‘Cause there’s a movement afoot, and books to go along with it (such as the slightly, faintly similar The Shallows by Nicholas Carr), and it is this: Everyone slow the fuck down. Where are we going in such a hurry? Are we sure want to go there? What will happen when we get there, besides the death of thinking, writing, keeping, knowing? Is it too late for our crazybrains? Have we already lost contemplation, rumination?

This book gets at all that. It’s a combination of essay, history, and some smart suggestions for unplugging just enough to breathe and consider. William Powers is a friend I’ve never spent time with. I know his wife, Martha Sherrill, better. They both served in the trenches of The Washington Post Style section and wrote tons of great stories, and even long after they left, came to my aid when I had to write “The List” of ins and outs. They now live this tranquil-sounding life on Cape Cod (year round) with their son. From the snowdrifts, they send lovely hand-drawn Christmas cards that cause in me a sort of longing and admiration for their happiness. (It’s okay, I love it.) Check out Martha’s ongoing blog about the local neighborhood dump. No, don’t! Focus on THIS. Stop being so skittish and webby.

Hamlet’s BlackBerry offers a window on life at the Powers-Sherrill household, where there’s an “Internet sabbath” in effect from Friday night to Monday morning. I think a lot of people are able to (or try to) manage that sort of habit — blogger culture has been especially good about upholding a weekend and holiday ethic (”blogging will be light — I’ll be making apple pies for the holiday and swimming in the river and you shouldn’t be online anyhow! See you Monday” etc), if only to project an image of holistic living, i.e., I’m too busy kayaking to blog now.

Alas, for me, too many weekends are spent in some terribly pointless web surfing, blogging, e-mailing, YouTube watching, etc.

William Powers

One of my favorite things Bill wrote (and apparently one of David Carr’s favorites, too) was about the onslaught of “Did You See?” that infected our culture in the mid-2000s. (I like to write it as Didjusee?) It was about the beginning of the Internet all-you-can-eat buffet and the end of people actually reading or considering all the links they were clicking on or re-linking (now called retweeting). It no longer mattered. The question was only  “Didjusee what so-and-so wrote on Slate?” “Didjusee the Lindsey Lohan video on TMZ?” “Didjusee what Mitt Romney told the Times?” Didjusee? Didjusee?

Ah, but did you read it as well? Usually no.

This is a gentle book that describes what’s happening to paper and to life. It starts with Bill musing on what the Internet has done to us, and can any of it possibly be undone, or done better?

Then he even-more-gently walks us through some moments in history when thinkers and writers had to accept technological changes: Socrates had to accept that Gen Y’ers like Phaedrus liked to keep discourses and speeches on scrolls, so they could carry them around read them again and again, without all that talking. In Shakespeare’s world, people had to get used to the new annoying habit of everyone carrying scratch pads around, to take notes and jot down information. (i.e., Hamlet’s BlackBerry, which sort of sounds like one of these.) Gutenberg gave us a world where we could disappear into books and newspapers and tune out the world. (Are you even listening to me? etc.)

Finally, Hamlet’s BlackBerry seeks some ways in which we can make use of our new technologies and still have a life with one another. It’s a beginner’s guide for training oneself to survive the current renaissance — a tumult I think won’t be settled until long after we’re all dead. Forget jobs and media and making a living; I would just like to survive this revolution with my brain intact. Wouldn’t you?

So, hooray for Hamlet’s BlackBerry. I was sent two copies from the publisher and have pressed them into the duties of book promotion. However, I’ve purchased an additional two copies, one for me to keep AND ONE THAT I’M HAPPY TO GIVE TO A DESERVING SOUL. Simply e-mail me here (go to “contact” in the nav bar) before July 16, 2010 and tell me why you want it. (Like we did with Kim Severson’s book.)

PS: Bill’s on tour. If you live in Washington, go see him at Politics & Prose on July 20!

No intro, no explan, nothing but books. Just trying to just say, yep, read ‘em and here’s what the entire book club (still just the one member) thought. Need to clear it all out before the real summer vacation reading starts later this month.

First up, Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis. This is a re-reading, 25 years or so after the fact.

Actually, 23 Julys ago, I think? Here is the cover of the very same copy I read back then and have kept on various shelves in various apartments and dwellings all these years — still smelling faintly of Bain de Soleil and Sun-In and a waft of one’s completely manufactured angst on a semesterly break home from one’s gruelingly existential life at a private college…

You know what? It’s kinda good. It might even be better than you remember it being — even though the final third of the book is a real drag, which I believe may have been the point: the monotony of drugs, wealth, clubs, palm trees. I wasn’t surprised to find it feeling fresh; I was and still remain one of those American Psycho apologists, who admire that novel for its indictment of ’80s consumer culture, or as satire, or as anything besides something worth staging a Take Back the Night march for. Less Than Zero really deserved everything it got, including the haters and the pans, and especially including the bad movie. (Really, an egregious act of adaptation.) I decided to re-read it after all these years, mostly because I’m thinking of reading the overwhelmingly poorly-reviewed Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis’s Zero sequel-of-sorts, when I go on vacation soon. I wanted another looksee.

This time I was struck by how Clay and his world functioned without computers and phones. It’s like reading about pioneers. They were all about instant gratification — the point of the novel is that instant gratification had ruined them (all of us!) forever — and yet they spend pages waiting for one another’s phone calls, pulling over to use pay phones, checking answering machines. I really feel someone should make an incredibly faithful movie version of Less Than Zero now, with 1980s L.A. replicated down to every last detail (using David Fincher Zodiac-style CGI if need be). Sort of the way Rich Linklater did Dazed and Confused and nailed the ’70s in an overlooked way. I guarantee you this time, done right, a Less Than Zero movie would look almost like a comedy. I’d laugh, anyhow.

The only other thing you’d find, reading it now, is the way that Less Than Zero presupposed a world of Kardashians, Lohans, Hiltons, Bachelors and Bachelorettes. Dig this little bit from Ellis’s interview in Details last month:

Q: Years ago people could have read some of your books and said, ‘Oh, this is just nihilism. These people don’t exist! There’s nobody that rich and stupid and narcissistic!’

A: Ha ha ha! Surprise!

• • •

Up next, two books that got reviewed together somewhere — I forget where; Salon? Well, feel free to look it up — but here’s proof that a twinned review of two different titles can actually sucker the book consumer into buying both!

Both of these books try in different ways to get at our national obsession and heartbreak around home ownership, mortgages, domesticity, debt. One’s a memoir, one’s a novel.

The memoir: Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, by Meghan Daum. I thought this book moved along okay up to the point where the author settles down with a nice man and buys a house she really seems to like, and we’ve still got 75 or 100 pages or so to go. Then it becomes sort of like watching HGTV every night. (Which Michael and I often do. Aren’t we all more interesting when we don’t have what we want?)

So, the first half was much more engaging — after all, the tale is always taller when you’re broke in the big city and living in shitty apartments and working at shitty jobs and all of the sudden feeling … shitty. People have said this book is good because of Daum’s “courage” to tell it like it is.

But, as a reader, I was miffed by one area in which she held back on telling it exactly: a memoir like this cries out for actual numbers, personal financial data — and I’ve noticed that a lot of these Great Recession and real-estate boom/bust memoirs expect readers to be satisfied with phrases like “mid six figures” or “some money I had in a savings account.”

From Daum, I wanted not only the prices of the L.A. dream houses taunting her from the real-estate listing websites, but her own history of depressing equations, with all the plus signs and the minus signs. Such as: her salary of that first job in the 1990s? The monthly rent on her fondly and not-so-fondly remembered apartments? Credit-card balances at life’s nadir? The precise amount of the advance she got for her novel, which enabled her (at last) to buy real estate? (For a first novel? Does not compute.) I’d even consider putting copies of her tax returns for all the years discussed in this memoir in the back, as Appendix A.

You want to write a memoir about real-estate envy? We need to see the paperwork. Otherwise, it’s like writing a sex memoir with the covers pulled up to your chin.

Meanwhile, the novel is called The Hole We’re In, by Gabrielle Zevin. I stuck with it, even though I started disliking it midway. The author digs herself quite a hole here. It’s got an epic scope that reminded me of Michael Cunningham’s Flesh and Blood, stretching from 1998 into the 2010s. It’s about a religious family in the suburbs, who are up to their eyeballs in McMansion-style credit-card debt. One daughter is a bridezilla; the son runs away to New York for film school; the youngest daughter is disowned and winds up serving in Iraq, and eventually comes home to the ruburbs, where she ends up working in a Walmart analogue. It’s called (unfortunately) “Slickmart.” And Slickmart is locally-owned, instead of being a corporate box store. Slickmart is just one of many wha-hunh? sort of botched details in The Hole We’re In. Zevin’s observational lapses  on details like these disturbs the careful reader, or anyone who’s ever driven across America and paid attention.

Also, the family’s religion is off, in terms of believability. They’re not megachurchers, but instead the author calls them “Sabbath Day Adventists” (which is actually the name of a black church started in New York, sez Wikipedia) and so, instead, they’re a mishmash of evangelical vegetarians who preach an anti-consumerist streak (refusing to shop at Slickmart, e.g.), but are in credit-card debt all the same? It doesn’t add up. Even for a novel. It felt like the author had only read here and there about modern American Christianity and consumer culture. Back to the writers’ workshop for The Hole We’re In, with a suggestion to cut about 10,000 words.

But also? I read The Hole We’re In to the end, so that’s a form of praise. As demonstrated by the cruel, Fifty-Page Test, the One-Man Book Club is fickle.

• • •

Couldn’t help myself, ’twas too curious, and picked up a sale copy of The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee, by Sarah Silverman. (I’m allowed! Look, if the rest of the world can sequester itself with Stieg Larsson mysteries and Twilight novels, can I not spend a day or two reading a half-good celebrity memoir?)

I didn’t want this book for any great reason other than she has intrigued me — funny sometimes, strange always, and willing to say stuff no one else says. I appreciated this spunk, on the fourth page:

I’m not a literary genius. I’m not Dostoyevsky, whoever that is — I’m pretty sure I just made that name up. I’m only thirty-nine years old, with most of my final two years of show business still ahead of me. … I have never struggled with addiction and I was never molested. Tragically, my life has only been  moderately fucked up. I’m not writing this book to share wisdom or inspire people. I’m writing this book because I am a famous comedian, which is how it works now. If you’re famous, you get to write a book, and not the other way around, so the next Dave Eggers better get on a TV show or kill someone or something. …

She’s right, you know. Let’s have another look at some of the list of top-selling nonfiction books (with sales numbers) as of late last year, shall we? Amid all the self-help and Sarah Palin and Teddy Kennedy sales, the eye scans downward, through the top 100 …

Time of My Life. Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi (320,000 copies)

Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin. (201,000 copies)

Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea. Chelsea Handler (200,000 copies)

High On Arrival. Mackenzie Phillips. (170,000 copies)

Mommywood. Tori Spelling (146,000 copies)

Here’s The Deal. Howie Mandel (100,000 copies)

You ask: Are those good sales numbers? Let me assure you: FUCK, YES, at least for book authors. Good money for semi-famous comedians, too, I would guess.

Anyhow, the first half of The Bedwetter is as good as any weirdo-girl memoir I’ve ever read, and the back half is exactly as padded out and aimless as any celebrity book I’ve ever read. I loved her guiding moral principle of “make it a treat” (i.e., a modern twist on “everything in moderation”) and there’s a remarkable dose of honest storytelling about her family, especially her funny father. Oh, and she included a photo of a writer from her TV show wearing a co-worker’s hair clip on his dick.

But she really lost her nerve, though, when it came time to describe her relationship (and breakup) with Jimmy Kimmel. She decides, it seems, to turn it into the strangest little two-page allegory about putting a pet cat down. (Pussy euthanasia?)

Best not to think it through too much.

• • •

Wilson, by Daniel Clowes. I hadn’t enjoyed an expensive, hardbound comic book in a while (graphic novel — does it really apply here? I guess so), and Clowes is still pleasingly misanthropic. And, I’ve always liked his strong, commercial-art styleline. And Wilson is jam packed with angry observation.

Like when Wilson is waiting for a flight and asks the man next to him:

What do you do?

Man: Hmmm?

Wilson: Your job? JOB?

Man: I’m in senior management at a small equity firm. And I do some consulting for various–

Wilson: Glaze. No, I’m just kidding. Go ahead.

Man: Well, I–

Wilson: But not with all the mumbo-jumbo. I want to know what you actually DO. Like the physical tasks of your daily life.

Man: Well, like I said, a lot of it involves consulting, with a focus on how to best implement managerial strategies in–

Wilson: Jesus! Listen to me, brother — you’re going to be lying on your deathbed in 30 years thinking “Where did it all go? What did I do with all those precious days?” Some shit-work for the oligarchs? Is that it?

Man: Look, I’m proud of what I do, and I work very hard to–

Wilson:

Wilson’s great, but I wonder if David Boring, a copy of which I gave away ages ago, was a tiny bit better. All the reviews seem to agree that Wilson is Clowes’s masterwork — and there’s something deliciously mean about it. All those New Yorker covers really pay off — probably no better way for a comics artist to achieve legitimacy. Even Michael Dirda seemed taken by it, but his review makes it seem dull, as only Dirda can do. Might do better to enjoy Sam Lipsyte’s review from Sunday’s NYT on this one.

• • •

Finally, Hotel Theory by Wayne Koestenbaum. This 2007 book is two books in one, really, printed side-by-side in a two-column page format: On the left side of the page is Hotel Theory, which is Wayne Koestenbaum the essayist, doing a brilliant rumination on, and deconstruction of, the idea of hotels (life in hotels, what are hotels, who are we when we check into hotels; hotels in literature, cinema, television; hotel as a state of mind). Koestenbaum is always a dazzling read on this kind of thing — like his book about opera, or his book about Jackie O.

Then comes the other book, on the right-hand side of each page, called Hotel Women, which is written by Wayne Koestenbaum the experimental poet. It’s a darkly comic novella imagining Lana Turner and Liberace and some other folks trapped for life in a glamorous but terrifying place called Hotel Women. Koestenbaum wrote this part without ever using the words “a,” “an” or “the.” Which makes it all the more beguiling to read.

An excerpt, from the Hotel Women side:

In Hotel Women, Lana Turner and Wallace lay together on mussed sheets, windows open.

“You’re impotent,” said Lana.

“I know,” said Wallace.

“I came to Hotel Women to revive our love life. I brought along your pornography. What else can I do?”

“I’m despicable. I’m more impotent here than in your hacienda.”

“Your impotence is no joke. It’s not cinema, carnival, or concept. It’s genuine tragedy. It’s something wrong with you and therefore wrong with me.”

“If we talk about my impotence, maybe it will go away.”

“We’ve tried therapy, we’ve tried vacation.”

“Do you think this place is bugged?”

She put Wallace’s useless penis in her mouth. Lime Naugahyde furniture seemed powerful in comparison.

“You needn’t continue,” said Wallace. “Maybe I should reciprocate.”

“Don’t bother. It’ll depress me.”

She planned compensatory assignations tomorrow, one man after another, at MGM.

Do you ever get done reading a book and have the realization that, no matter how much you’ve enjoyed it, there is no one to share this particular book with? Sure, I can (and did) go online and find like-minded reviews of Hotel Theory in places like the Believer and Bookforum. But it has recently occurred to me that those people are never my people. Not anybody I actually know, anyhow.

I cannot think of a friend who would want to read Hotel Theory or talk with me about Hotel Theory, but it’s just as well. I can’t think of anyone I would foist Hotel Theory on and say “you must read this and we will talk about it.” Because then they’d have to avoid my questions about whether or not they read it or liked it, and then I’d “owe” them, in a sense, and have to read something they like that I’m not interested in. Sometimes reading Koestenbaum is like reading Gertrude Stein — or Rebecca Brown, D.J. Waldie or George Trow — or one of those authors I’ve just had to puzzle out and find delight in all on my own. Too much has to happen. I might not even recommend Hotel Theory to myself, but I’ve already read it, and thought each little piece of it was exquisite or almost-perfect in one way or another.

And that’s why this is a One-Man Book Club.

• • •

Vacation looms! For the summer dip, I’m considering the aforementioned IMPERIAL BEDROOMS, HITCH-22, DEAR MONEY, THE ROUTES OF MAN, and STATE BY STATE. Any other suggestions?

What seemed like half the freshman class of Bishop McGuinness High School went to see the Go-Go’s on their Vacation tour at the Oklahoma City Myriad Center University of Oklahoma Lloyd Noble Center (speak, memory! Or speak, Derba! Or, you know who would really know — Andrea Martinez). Thanks to the interwebs, I can at least confirm that this happened on October 2, 1982. We had the beat.

A couple days after that, this kid named Mark Marron — who was an ADD thug with a frightening overbite; one of those total assholes who always shows up in movies about how awful high school is — declared the Go-Go’s to be lesbos and called me a fag because I had the Rolling Stone cover of the band (the Annie Leibovitz photo of them in their bras-and-camis) taped up in my locker. I took it down. What a horrible feeling, even now.

From then on, none of the boys (except me) openly liked the Go-Go’s, and all of the girls did. You could write an academic paper on 1980s Bible Belt adolescent gender identification rituals about that — but do include the whole boys-who-play-Ms.-Pac-Man thing as a corollary. (A happier memory: The crisp air of the October 1984 evening the Go-Go’s came back, junior year, on their Talk Show tour and played the OKC Zoo Amphitheater. Utter bliss — dancing around with the cool girls. By then I did more or less what I wanted. What a difference two years makes.)

I stuck with the Go-Go’s even after they broke up. I liked Jane Wiedlin’s Blue Kiss album in ‘85, and I might have (might have) sang along into a hairbrush with Belinda Carlisle’s “Mad About You” a time or two. Svelte, redhead Belinda’s Heaven on Earth is surely one of my all-time guiltiest pleasures, so out of tune (and actually out of tune, on some cuts) with the 120 Minutes aterna-guise I tried to latch onto in college. I stick with them even now: Four tickets to see their “farewell” (yeah, right) reunion tour next month at Wolf Trap. That’ll be $188, please.

What a long way to get around to telling you that the One-Man Book Club seized upon a copy of Lips Unsealed, Belinda Carlisle’s new memoir, upon spying it the other day on the new-releases table in Borders. I had no idea it was even in the works. (I haven’t paid Belinda any attention in years, except to watch her gay son’s YouTube videos.)

Look, I’ve got my own deep nostalgia trip going on lately. I threw my 20-year-college-reunion invite in the trash. I’ve been making a massive playlist of “college songs” and I’m thisclose to dragging out my Mac Plus one of these nights, to plug it in and read all the old letters and musings stored on its hard drive. I don’t need a Belinda Carlisle book just right now, thanks, but …

Well, if you insist.

Here’s the thing: I’ve always wondered why Belinda became so successful, post-Go-Go’s, for doing stuff that is so mediocre. (And actually, the Go-Go’s are not arguably brilliant, either. That was more about a moment and a look and a pop-culture shift from the ’70s to the MTV ’80s.)

Guess what? Belinda wonders the exact same thing.

This book is a horribly wonderful study of the essence of mediocrity, told by someone who’s just as baffled as you and I are about it. I read the book in a night. We go from her mildly unhappy childhood in the San Fernando Valley to the punk heyday in Hollywood, where she lived in the legendarily filthy Canterbury apartment building and knew all the seminal punk and new wave rockers of the “Rodney on the ROQ” era. That’s where the Go-Go’s started — all the stuff you’ve heard before; the dresses made of trash bags, the boozin’ and floozin’; the evolution from unskilled girls with guitars to bubblegum rock group. Who doesn’t love a drug-fueled rock memoir? Once again, I had to get up and go to the kitchen spice rack so I could remind myself: How much is half a gram?

Well, those grams add up. Belinda put so much toot up her nose over the years — to hear her tell it, for pages and pages and pages, it sounds like it stopped being fun around 1985, but she was just getting started. Count me as one of those suckers who believed, when we saw the video for “Heaven is a Place on Earth” or saw her anti-drug “Rock Against Drugs — RAD!” public-service ads, that Belinda looked so good because she kicked drugs. See?

That is not the case. She marched to Bolivia for another 20 years; went on a three-day coke binge as recently as 2005, in a London hotel room. But, she writes, she’s been sober since then — thanks to the usual discovery of Jesusless spirituality, including trips to the river Ganges and dinner parties with Deepak Chopra. Eh, whatever works. Belinda, you’ll understand if we wait and see?

More intriguing is the undercurrent of showbiz that pulls Belinda along as an unenthusiastic celebrity who barely qualifies as a musician — from one bad solo record to the next, through the years, most recently finding herself quickly eliminated on Dancing with the Stars.

The refreshing (and depressing) part is how much blame she’s willing to take. Every time she heard a new recording of her voice — from “Our Lips Are Sealed” on down — she cringed. (America cringed, too, eventually; but Europe loves her.) There’s a great scene when the young Go-Go’s first hear a tape of their debut album, Beauty and the Beat. It was so not the edgy, punk record they set out to make. They were mortified. But the deal was done. Mediocrity worked its ineffable magic. Hank Stuever spent his allowance on it, many times over.

You know what she’s good at? Being a Go-Go. Michael and I went to see them four years ago at the 9:30 Club. They played every track from Beauty and the Beat, in order, to celebrate the album’s 25th anniversary.

I looked around. All the new wave girls from everyone’s high school were there, along with their very best gay male friend. Everybody get on your feet / We know you can dance to the beat…

The Tonsil Blog’s One-Man Book Club is back together, this time at Hank’s place. (Okay, every time at Hank’s place. Isn’t a book club so much nicer with one member?)

It’s been long enough since the last meeting that the beverage of choice has switched from a wintry red (malbec) to a nice, crisp white (vinho verde). Although it’s been a long time, the club has been busy reading a buncha new books.

I’ve admonished the One-Man Book Club to try to be more capsule-y this time, but no promises. If it goes too long, that’s the vinho verde typing, I want you to know.

The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte. I was gobsmacked on just about every fucking page by some painfully beautiful or hilarious or otherwise perfect sentence in this novel. I loved Home Land, too, and The Ask did not disappoint me — in fact, I feel like it surpassed Home Land.

Any writer who’s plumbing the aging issues of so-called Generation X (or wishes to observe our already-very-observed monster-stroller, overpriced-coffee, real-estate-yuppie-envy era of almost evil self-interest and hurt) will read this and want to just give up. It’s that good.

It’s about a guy, Milo Burke, who works in the development office of a mediocre college (which Milo actually refers to each time as Mediocre College). He loses his job because donations and big gifts are way off in the recession and he’s not producing any new “Asks.” Also they don’t like him. But they bring him back to facilitate a big gift from a wealthy donor (aka “the Ask”) whom he went to undergraduate school with. This is a very dark satire more than a nuanced novel — Lipsyte skewers marriage, aging, money, Internet culture, selfish elderly parents, and the way that Gen Y’s utter swiftness and hipness can get under the skin of guys my age. Oh, and there are so many wickedly uncomfortable scenes. Such as when you wake up and your wife is breast-feeding your 4-year-old, who is kicking you in the chest while he slurps away:

“Baby,” I wishipered. “What the hell are you doing? You weaned him. He’s weaned.”

“I know he’s weaned.”

“What are you doing?”

“We’re snuggling.”

“He’s sucking.”

“No, he’s not.”

“I’m not,” said Bernie.

“Maura, come on, stop it.”

“It’s okay. It’s just a little regression. It’s normal. I read about it. I don’t have any milk anyway.”

“That makes it worse.”

“Go back to sleep, Milo.”

“Yeah, Daddy, go back to sleep.”

Chilling, awkward, hilarious, sad, and extremely well-crafted. A One-Man Book Club Top Pick.

• • •

I don’t have a whole lot specifically to say about Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, by Melissa Milgrom. But I should say that it was co-edited by Amazing Andrea, who edited my book, so that right there made me want to read it.

It’s exactly what it says it is, though I’m not convinced the “adventures” label quite applies. The adventure sort of finally comes near the end, when Milgrom attempts to stuff a dead squirrel and see if it’s anywhere near the standards of pro taxidermists. Still Life is  one of those books that tries to get a handle on a broad subject by traveling to and writing about a lot of examples of the subject and people who are obsessed with the subject, which can wind up seeming like a series of magazine articles on the subject.

Critics have given Still Life pretty good notice, but it seems like everyone (including the One-Man Book Club) was hoping to read more of Milgrom’s deeper thoughts about the allure and mystery of taxidermy. The writing and sense of voice is always trickiest part of a book like this. It’s a lovely book to hold and look at, though — what a terrific cover and paper stock, all around. It opens with Milgrom’s profile of David Schwendeman, the last official taxidermist for the American Museum of Natural History, and his son, Bruce, who run a taxidermy shop in New Jersey. Milgrom could have stayed put and built a book around them, perhaps. Instead, the author is off in different directions: to England to talk about all that Damien Hirst stuff (haha, no pun intended) and then follow the auctioning off of a bizarre, Victorian menagerie of taxidermied creatures that have been assembled into 19th-century domestic scenes and dioramas. She also goes to the world taxidermy competition. (Of course there’s a world taxidermy competition. In these sorts of books, there’s always either a world competition of the [insert Weird Subject Matter here], or an annual convention of [People Who are Obsessed by the Weird Subject Matter].)

The facts and quotes and history and scenes start to stack up, and it’s really up to the writer to either do something entirely new or stylistically provocative with the prose. For all its reporting and research skill, I didn’t feel like Still Life quite did that kind of thing, but I did keep thinking it was tightly sewn, which seemed metaphorically apt.

>>TANGENT ALERT!<<

This isn’t Still Life’s fault, but reading it made me think of countless other books that are shelved in “cultural studies” (hello, make room, I’m squeezed in there too) that each try to be a broad survey of something Big and/or Odd, in order to prove that it is … Big and/or Odd. I’m thinking here of that disappointing Rebecca Mead book a few years ago about the wedding-industrial complex — One Perfect Day — where she went all over the world and gathered examples of the Bridezilla culture and then didn’t say anything. Mead’s book had an amazing cover (it was a receipt stapled to an engraved wedding invitation, see?) and yet it just fizzled and pooped all the way through. It was about something outrageous and bizarre and hilarious and heartbreaking and yet it was no fun.

These are books of reportage. Most of them lack full narratives, and instead provide glimpses and partial narratives in the form of topical profiles. They always look like they might be absorbing and strange and then often aren’t. They’re always coming out, though — books about NASCAR, about garbage, about sushi, about Chinese food, about poker, about competitive-eating contests, about beauty pageants, about spelling bees, about toilets, about interstates, about everything. My friend Mike Schaffer did a very good one about the pet industry. I maybe could have done my book about America and Christmas that way — traveled the country more, given shorter glimpses of more examples, hopping from here to there for a more “complete” and straight-journalistic picture of the holiday industry and economy. Instead, I chose to hunker down in the same place with a few people and do the story that way.

I don’t think a case can be made that one way is more right or not, because it really depends on the book. But I do wonder what convinces publishers to greenlight these sort of “a journey into the world of …” or “dispatches from the strange world of …” proposals from authors, which are basically built around a writer hitting the road to explore a subject in a survey approach. If I was an editor considering those kinds of proposals, I’d want to know what the underlying thread will be. I’d want point of view — which is different from and more nuanced than a book that will be opinionated. It’s about voice. When people pay $25 for a book (or $10 for the e-book), I feel like they’re giving you permission to write the hell out of it and have something to say.

• • •

All right, everything I just said? About books needing more style, more voice, more viewpoint, more artful writing? And what I posted on this blog earlier this month, Michael Brick’s screed about those readers and editors who complain about something being “overwritten”? Well, get ready for the radioactive blast of my contradiction bomb. Get ready for About a Mountain, by John D’Agata.

Oh, how I scowled while reading this PATHETICALLY OVERWRITTEN book, all the way to the very end. (It’s not very long. I kept throwing it across the room in disgust and then had to go retrieve it, so I could continue not liking it. So that’s actually kind of a compliment.) I am fascinated by John D’Agata’s writing, and, clearly, so is John D’Agata.

Also, there is a blurb on the front, transmitted from the grave of David Foster Wallace: “John D’Agata is one of the most significant U.S. writers to emerge in the past few years.”

One of. The past few years.

Well, I don’t think so, but I do think he is one of the most egregious Joan Didion imitators I’ve ever read, and that’s saying something, because it takes one to know one. (He who smelled it, dealt it. Smeller’s the feller. Etc.) And I don’t mean the ’60s-style “Goodbye to All That” kind of Didionesque prose that everyone equates with “writing like Joan Didion,” but the later Didion; the post-Miami/pre-Magical Thinking Didion; the ’90s Didion of all those dense New York Review of Books articles, who piles up statistics and figures and half-quotes taken from deep down in news articles or beneath layers of official reports and sculpts it all into long, lush sentences of ominous doublespeak. That’s the Didion that D’Agata is mimicking here. Really, this whole book is Didion karaoke.

The mountain in About a Mountain is Yucca Mountain — the much maligned, questionably unsafe, and recently derailed Nevada site chosen to house the nation’s nuclear waste into eternity. Yucca is always an interesting subject, I guess, but this is more about how D’Agata learned about it, read it about it, visited it, and then wrote 200 pages of dreamy, spooky, I-just-discovered-the-West, essayistic words about it.

D’Agata teaches creative writing at Iowa. He’s part of that wide world of “creative nonfiction” that I know very little about. Since I’ve worked in newspaper journalism all my life, I’m usually surrounded by people who get grouchy and prickly around the idea of “creative nonfiction,” where the rules of reporting and attribution appear to be looser, because adhering strictly to the “facts” has a way of inhibiting the art of fluid prose. I sort of straddle the fence. I like nonfiction that is diligently reported, cuts no corners, and is as accurate as humanly possible, and THEN has the courage to be imaginatively written and provocative in form and structure.

About a Mountain has, if nothing else, helped me decide where to draw the line. Here’s what you learn from D’Agata, once you get all the way to the “Notes” at the end:

“Although the narrative of this essay suggests that it takes place over a single summer, the span between my arrival in Las Vegas and my final departure was, in fact, much longer. I have conflated time in this way for dramatic effect only, but I have tried to indicate each instance of this below [in endnotes]. At times, I have also changed subjects’ names or combined a number of subjects into a single composite ‘character.’ Each example of this is noted.”

Why he had to do all this, I’m not sure. Why he chose this subject, I’m not sure — other than he had to help his mother move to Las Vegas and the place creeped him the fuck out. Clearly he was somewhat interested in the unsolvable dilemma of nuclear waste, but not too terribly much. Why he thought it would be a good idea to bother the parents of a teenager who jumped to his death off the Stratosphere hotel, so that their son’s death could work as some clumsy metaphor for Yucca Mountain, I don’t know.

I keep hearing that we’re leaving journalistic diligence behind; that creative nonfiction is really where it’s at in this era of Truthiness. It’s starting to feel more uppity and old-fashioned to complain — and anyhow, just look at all the kids who still, 40 years later, wave Hunter S. Thompson around and claim his hallucinogenic journalism is the truest thing ever written.

About a Mountain did fascinate me in its later-middle chunk, which artfully rehashed the ongoing debate among linguists, artists, and scientists about how to design a way to warn humans or other future beings to stay away from the Yucca waste tunnels. Maybe they should leave a quote from David Foster Wallace on the lid?

• • •

We’ll there’s more, but not tonight. I hogged all the time and drank all the wine. The One-Man Book Club will be back soon for one-sided discussions of the following: WILSON by Daniel Clowes; NOTHING HAPPENED AND THEN IT DID by Jake Silverstein; THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot; and THE BEDWETTER by Sarah Silverman. YES, all of those, plus three books that failed to pass the 50-page test!

And anyhow, what are YOU reading? Give me some good recommendations. Nothing written by anyone named Stieg.

This is an interesting idea for a documentary (h/t the New Yorker’s Book Bench Blog), which is making the rounds … A guy found all of the poems he wrote as a teenager, when he was convinced that he would become the world’s greatest poet. Years later, he unearths them and realizes how bad the poems were. So he takes them around to real writers (Margaret Atwood, David Sedaris, Steve Almond, etc.) to not only confirm that they are bad, but get at the elusive mystery of Bad Writing.

I like the concept. Would love to see someone do this project with something more vulnerable than bad teen poems written years ago. Like maybe someone who takes his self-published novel around to writers or critics and asks them to give it to him straight.

Bad Writing – Official Trailer from Morris Hill Pictures on Vimeo.

At long last, the greatest hits of Gene Weingarten. Coming in July.

“Resentment is like drinking poison, and then waiting for the other person to die.”

– Carrie Fisher

Since I clipped it out years ago (I think from the New York Times Magazine sometime in the late ’90s), I’ve had this picture either on a refrigerator or a bulletin board or somewhere at the ready. As you can see, it’s a UPI news photo called “Miss Teenage America, 1972.” I love what this photo says about elation and defeat; one door opens, another closes. It’s really just a Janus. (Wouldn’t it be great if one of these young women was actually named Janis?) I know it sounds odd, but more than anything, this picture makes me think of the writing process.

It’s been six months since Tinsel was released. The original purpose of this blog was to get out everything I had to say about the book (the making-of, the selling-of, the anything-of), but for the last several months, it’s mostly been a way to write about anything-but-the-book.

Putting out a book is at once thrilling and gratifying and it is also, for all but a very few authors, a letdown. We feel like jerks trying to describe why it’s a letdown, when we should feel grateful and, best of all, finished.

There are stages of letting it go. I suppose the same is true for creating and then releasing any commercial creative effort, such as a film or a record album. I’ve had very little to say to anyone (except poor Michael) about the book since the end of December, and that’s on purpose. I didn’t want to impulsively blog something here that sounded too whiny (or resentful), which would negate the good things that happened for the book. All book authors (except Tori Spelling and Malcolm Gladwell and a few others) have to grieve a little bit. Some of us, to borrow a concept from our Jewish friends, have to sit shiva for our books.

I think I’m done sitting shiva for mine.

Or, just about.

• • •

There is no better catharsis than cleaning. In late January of this year, I started going after the piles of disarray in my home office, as a way of putting the book behind me.

I boxed up only the most essential research files and kept my original notebooks, numbered 1-14. (As a courtesy to my future biographers, I saved some marked-up drafts of various stages of the manuscript and put them in order in another box. So, Harry Ransom Center, you know where to find me when the time comes. I’ll wait.)

I threw out three Hefty bags of now-unnecessary web searches, photocopies, newspaper clippings, Black Friday sales circulars from 2006-2008, church directories, mall maps, and many holiday trinkets. There was a stack of photocopies from psychiatry and psychology academic journals, where I’d found references to Christmas, strange and fascinating stuff, which wound up not being in the book at all. (Christmas and schizophrenics: academics agree, do NOT have Santa Claus pay a visit to that wing.) I took the few dozen or so books that weren’t cited in the endnotes to the donation center; I took all the Christmas movie DVDs to the used-DVD place. Basically, if it didn’t have something to do with the people and events depicted in Tinsel, who will always be with me in some way, then I tossed it.

Finally, I took down the bulletin board.

Through three-plus years, I was helped, guided and especially taunted by the bulletin board. My work on what became Tinsel really began when I bought a big bulletin board at a Container Store in Texas, shortly after arriving there to start work on the book in 2006. It hung in the room I rented in Frisco — you can see it in the fuzzy picture at left.

I took this Polaroid sometime around (or maybe just after) Christmas ‘06, when I’d already done a significant amount of searching, gathering, reporting, and then narrowing down the decisions about what the hell I was writing. All along, this board was where I’d started randomly tacking up 3×5 cards with thoughts, names, contacts, potential storylines, random facts, headlines, and anything else. Of course, I was keeping track of that sort of stuff on my computer — in Word files and also in Stickies. But I’m a bulletin board sort of guy.

Like everything else, there are software programs out there (Scrivener is one) designed to separate writers from their old-fashioned, paper-centric ways — just like they’ve tried to wean us from newspapers, clippings, actual printed books, Filofaxes, card catalogs.

These programs are obsessed with outlining, organizing. My dirty little secret as a writer is that I mostly pretend to outline. It’s like I’m creating an art collage about some work that I intend to do, but when it comes down to the actual writing, the part of my brain that writes scoffs at the part of my brain that organizes and plans. Once I’m lost, that’s when I look up at the map in front of me. There’s a pretty interesting discussion going on over at Gangrey lately about writers who outline and writers who don’t. I think it’s possible to be both. (I love this comment from Charlie Pierce: “I’m outlining less than I used to do. You know why? Cocaine. [The first part of that is true, BTW.]“)

No matter where the writing takes me, I just don’t feel like I’m working on anything good unless I can tack the plan up on the wall. Whether I follow it or not is another matter.

• • •

Bulletin Board, Part II:

I packed up the car, left Frisco, and drove back to Washington in the spring of 2007. When I got home, I bought the same exact board at our Container Store, and reassembled my mess of notes and themes and characters.

Once I’d noodled around on a few thousand words of what I thought would be the beginning of the book (I was wrong), I started trying to outline the book  or to at least get a handle on the essential plan. This picture was taken around the end of April 2007, right before I went back to Frisco for the first of many more reporting trips:

This is my desk at home. The walls are “palm leaf” green. The shade on the bowling-pin lamp is made from a photo of the Harvey Girls. The computer seen here is my old Mac Powerbook G4 (2003-2007, RIP). [By the way, I am a true believer in backing up data. Every few days I burned a new disc of all my book files, drafts, and research. Every couple weeks I backed up the entire hard drive.]

You can’t really see close enough in this picture, but the left side of the board was an arrangement of the book’s characters — people and details, exact spellings of names of extended family members, friends, etc. In the middle left, near the center, is where I have (er, had) some guiding reminders of the themes I wanted to recur through the book. Above that, up top, is the rectangular, ceramic ornament Tammie Parnell gave me on Christmas Eve, 2006 (p. 253-54 in the book) that reads BELIEVE IN THE MAGIC.

The middle of the board is a color-coded, outline-in-progress of the first 1/3 of the book — or what I had talked myself into believing was the first 1/3 of the book. In the lower center, on 8×11 paper, is my original plan for 24 total chapters. (Oh, how it changed.) To the right of the board, most of those pictures are of me with various mall Santas. In the lower middle left of the board is a newspaper ad for the Dallas Morning News Charities drive that featured Denise Matise (p. 173-77 in the book). In the upper center-right is Miss Teenage America, reminding me that happiness is most often wrapped up in someone’s sadness. And the other way around.

Below the Miss Teenage America picture is a notecard I wrote one day in Frisco, which says: SURRENDER TO IT. On my desk, to the right of the Mac, you can see many of my notebooks, propped up in front of the files.

What’s not in the frame are more boxes, more files, piles, notes — all the shit that, if nothing else, helps a writer feel busy. Often, I printed out whatever I managed to write that day (400 words? A thousand? Two thousand? Two sentences?) so that I could mark it up that night, over a cocktail. I’d tack those pages up on the bulletin board, where they’d be waiting for me the next day.

• • •

I will now NOT write about the transcribing I had to do of all the taped interviews from the first seven months of Frisco, most of which I neglected to transcribe in a timely fashion. That’s really how I spent most of April-May-June 2007. The memory is just too awful to think about.

I wish I had some more interim shots of the bulletin board from 2007 and 2008.

Like maybe from the late summer and early fall of 2007, after I’d written 125,000 words of a rough manuscript that I nicknamed “El Stinko.” At that point, I still two Christmases to go, and about eight or nine more trips to Frisco, so I didn’t even have an ending or an epilogue. (The book was published at 95,000 words — so clearly, I went down some dusty, winding, dead-end roads in that first draft.)

In a fit of outlining madness that summer, which may have just been a productive form of procrastination and worry, I replaced the color-coded notecards twice. Eventually I switched to printing out chapter outlines in a large font, then color-coding them with markers, and then scissoring them apart and moving them around on the board. At some point, my Mexican mask collection moved over to this wall too, to keep the Harvey Girls company, and to mock my insanity.

This picture (above) is from the fall of 2009. By this point, Tinsel was done — the galleys were out. There was a calm order to it by now. There are the character portraits by photographer Courtney Perry, lined up in a row above the proofs of the cover and jacket. The chart in the lower center shows holiday retails sales figures for the last decade. Denise’s charity-drive picture remained the whole way. In the lower left is my ever-present map of Stonebriar Centre mall. (I have several versions now — you wouldn’t believe how much a mall evolves and changes in three years, until you write a book where the mall is a central setting.) My black MacBook (b. 2007) is still going strong, and has received its own version of a Tinsel file de-cluttering.

• • •

And this …

… pretty much says it all these days. This was taken in March 2010.

A finished book is a strange sort of absence. Clearly something else wants to happen on this bulletin board, but what?

I’m content to wait. For the first time in my adult life, I don’t really feel any deep yearning for something I can’t quite get. I’m not trying to finish a book, or sell a book; I’m not trying to fall in love (got that covered); I’m not trying to get out of debt; I’m not trying to land a job; I’m not trying to find stories to write. (With the TV critic thing I’ve got now, I now have more subjects and material to write about than I can ever do.)

But, like those Marines in the jungle always say in bad war or alien movies: It’s a little too quiet. One half of my brain is looking for a new book to write. The other half is saying Don’t you even dare …

Kim Severson, one of the New York Times’ best feature writers (I hope you’ve been reading all her great stuff, not only in the Dining In/Dining Out section but also on the front page once in a while), has a new food memoir out, called Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life.

I got to read an advance galley, I got to read an advance galley, neener-neener!

It’s a trip! It’s funny, sad, warm — like a long, great dinner. In it, Kim tells the story of finding her way in the highly competitive snakepit of food writing, in the intense, hyperfoodie era of elevated American eating culture that really started to take hold in the 1990s and 2000s. It’s also about: growing up in a big family, growing up gay, and overcoming alcoholism. It’s told through the stories of eight women who helped Kim see the importance and wonder of good food. These include Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Leah Chase, Rachael Ray and others, and especially Kim’s mom. As a bonus, each chapter ends with a thematic recipe.

I loved it because I don’t read a lot of food books — memoirs, recipes, manifestos, whatevs.  Since I haven’t read heaps of material about Alice Waters already, I’m a good target reader for Spoon Fed. I did love Bill Buford’s Heat, but most of the biggie bestseller food books pass me by, until or unless they become movies, like Julie and Julia.

[Tangent: Check out this piece in Newsweek, that posits (half-successfully, I'd say) that the publishing culture has a certain gender bias about food writing: Food books by women must involve emotion, eat-pray-love stuff as a rule. Food books by men, on the other hand, must be balls-to-the-wall, big cock, renegade cooking. Duh, yes, but also: Hmmmm.]

So what’s that you smell wafting from my blog oven? Smells like Hank’s trying to get you to buy one of his friend’s books again, doesn’t it? Well, yes and no. Kim and I are more friendlike, in the modern social-networking style, and we share a brilliant literary agent. Mostly I’m a fanboy.

But way before the Internet introduced everybody to everybody else, in ol’ 1995, Kim and I met at a very weird, sort of awkward National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association sub-committee meeting in Washington, DC.

Basically, the still somewhat nascent NLGJA started to realize that they had failed to recruit many members from the scary hinterlands. All the members were essentially centered in NY, LA, DC — whaaaa? Big shock. So they invited Kim, who worked at the Anchorage Daily News in Alaska (and helped invent this nifty little entertainment guide that was tall and narrow shaped, like half the size of a newspaper page), and me, back when I worked at the Albuquerque Tribune. We were asked to attend a weekend-long workshop session at a Dupont Circle hotel, where we would, in theory, help enlighten the big-city gays with ideas for outreach, recruiting, and meeting the needs of us yokel gays.

Kim and I were asked to give a presentation on “hip” ideas to attract the Gen Xers that the NLGJA so needed. We were a couple of gigglebutts. I’m sure we thought our presentation was hilarious. Now, according to the confessional parts of Spoon Fed, I am presented with the possibility that KIM WAS DRUNK THE WHOLE TIME. So what was my excuse? We bombed (no pun). Our major suggestion, which I still think that useless organization should implement, was to switch the L and the G in the acronym to NGLJA, so that the group could call itself “Negligee.” (Most people wound up calling it that anyhow. Gays are clever.)

I only remember two other things from that weekend, other than it was an utter waste of time: It’s where I met Ron Reason (a big plus); and it’s where Gail Shister hissed and snapped at me in front of everyone for having the gall to read the Post Style section during one of those endless planning meetings.

All of this happened almost exactly 15 years ago, because I was rescued from the whole affair by the Oklahoma City bombing. I left a day early and headed back to New Mexico, so I could then drive to OKC and get busy.

Annnnyhoo, Kim went onto increasingly bigger things — and I think she’s stayed in better graces with the Negligee people than I surely have. I’ve always admired her work on the subject of food, but in Spoon Fed I’ve discovered that I also love reading her on life and family, and especially on journalism and newsrooms and editors and such.

I dug this one part in her book where she writes about her arrival at the New York Times, which resonated strongly with me, because I am fascinated by those precious few people who jump to the Times and manage to carve out a voice and a writing style in a place that, let’s be honest, has an institutional tendency that discourages it.

But David Carr overcame it. Mark Leibovich has more or less done it, too. David Segal totally did it. Kim did it about five years ago, when she left what sounds like an incredible gig at the San Francisco Chronicle’s vaunted food section for a job at the Gray Lady.

I would not be able to do it. (And I’m not saying I was ever offered the chance to work at the Gray Lady, but I’m not NOT saying I was ever offered the chance to work at the Gray Lady — got it? That newsroom scared the bejeebus out of me, if I’m even saying I ever visited it while wearing a Hugo Boss suit. I don’t mean the pretty newsroom in the Renzo Piano building, I mean the old 43rd Street joint, which looked like it had been turned upside down, Poseidon Adventure-like — pipes and duct work and debris and corpses and Shelly Winters swimming by. Not that I was ever in there, because I’m not saying I even was in there in 2003 or whenever. Maybe, maybe not.)

Long story short (er, too late for that), I admire how Kim broke through all that Gray Lady culture and made a big name for herself. But it wasn’t easy, as she writes in Spoon Fed:

When I finally got down to work, the writing didn’t come easily. The breezy, straight-ahead writing style that had worked so well at the Chronicle was considered sloppy and sophomoric at the Times. The funny little asides and goofy structural gimmicks just didn’t fly. In the beginning, even the good stuff got killed. It wasn’t like anyone was ordering any major rewriting. Rather, there were so many editors, each shaving a little here, grinding off a bit there, that it was death by emory board. Explanations were awkwardly thrust into the middle of otherwise perfectly good, short sentences. Contractions were eliminated.

But mostly, I had lost my confidence, and it showed. My editors and friends back in California said I just didn’t sound like myself anymore. I had lost my mojo. …

Oh, reader, you already know how this chapter ends — she perseveres and triumphs, a hundredfold, a basket of perfect peaches, a plate of delectable cheeses, a life as crispy as as a fine plate of pommes fritte.

Ah, food. I loved the book, and I’d love to make some of the recipes in it.

Now let’s involve YOU. For a long time, I’ve always made it a policy to buy two copies of books written by friends — or people I just wish were friends. One copy is for me and one is for someone else. It could be you! Just send me an e-mail by April 25, 2010 to hank [at] hankstuever.com and give me a great reason why you want a copy of Spoon Fed by Kim Severson, and I will mail it to the best entrant, FREE. It’s not signed, but it’s definitely delicious.