Reading is the only way to learn how to write. I kept pushing this point all semester and I certainly assigned a lot of readings. This being college, and these being college students, we operate with this wonderful notion that everyone has the time and desire to read it all.

But anyone who ever went to college knows that’s not true. Although I “loved to read” as a teenager and college student, I didn’t truly get busy reading until after I left college. At about age 22 or 23, I suddenly wanted to read everything, especially longform feature writing, nonfiction books, cultural criticism and serious magazines and newspapers. I started reading not only for content, but to study the craftsmanship.

It’s a habit, like exercise. Wondering why a particular writer seems to have so many ideas and great stories in him is like wondering why someone has six-pack abs. (Sorry for this sorta macho metaphor.) People with beautiful bodies make it look easy, because the rest of us don’t get up every single morning and see them working out for hours and hours. People with beautiful words in them are working out, too, when they read. Last week’s New Yorker is basically 100 stomach crunches or a series of stretches, just a warm-up to our real regimen. Reading is regarded by most as a leisure activity, but it isn’t — or not only. It takes the same sort of discipline as exercise. It requires the same amount of effort.

There are several articles I wanted us to read as a group in the class that we just never got around to. (I always knew we’d never get to all of it.) When I tweaked the final two weeks of class and altered the final story assignment, I abandoned quite a few examples of pop-culture narrative, especially the longer stuff.

So here’s a list. You might not ever get around to it. Many years may go by, and, in a nostalgic twitch, you’ll return here for these links. They’ll be here.

My biggest regret is that we didn’t get to do the fraught genre of Celebrity Profiles. I was going to start with two classics …

• “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” by Gay Talese in the April 1966 issue of Esquire, which has been studied and autopsied time and again.

• Pair this with “Do You Sleep in the Nude?,” a profile of Ava Gardner by Rex Reed, also from Esquire. (Not online, that I can find, but reprinted here in The New Journalism.)

For the sake of discussion, I wanted to contrast that with a couple of celebrity profiles from the current day that provoked a lot of debate about the genre, including self-indulgent writing, breaking conventional formats, crossing ethical boundaries, jealous writers, “girly” journalism and whatnot:

• “American Marvel,” Edith Zimmerman’s profile of actor Chris Evans from GQ in 2011.

• “The Full Tatum,” Jessica Pressler’s profile of Channing Tatum, also from GQ in 2011.

… and I was also going to ask the Jour494 students to fan out into the world and bring back a celebrity profile from the current crop and dissect it, looking for how it was assembled and where (or if) any journalistic compromises seem to have been made.

Some other readings we never got to:

• Maureen Tkacik’s 2011 takedown essay about Steve Jobs. This remarkable, measuredly brutal essay ran during a wave of hagiographic obituaries after Jobs’s death. It also gives us a lot to think about, argue about, and consider –not only about Jobs, but about our tech-consumer culture.

• I wanted us to read Dan Kois’s 2012 New York Times Magazine profile/story about Lynda Barry’s writing workshops, mostly for the pure pleasure of it.

• I wanted us to read a couple of Chris Jones (former Pollner prof, Esquire writer) articles: One, a gorgeous 201o profile of Roger Ebert, and the other, also from 2010, was a mysterious case of a man who won The Price is Right’s Showcase showdown with a correct (to the exact dollar) bid, which had never happened before.

• Another casualty of time and syllabus space: A 2012 story in Rolling Stone by Josh Eells, The Secret Life of Tom Gabel.

• Most college students have read (or were asked to read) journalist Barbara Ehrenreich‘s Nickel and Dimed. (If you haven’t read it, please do. One of our era’s finest works of immersion journalism.) I wanted us to read her essay on the pink-ribbon cancer culture industry, “Smile or Die: The Bright Side of Cancer.” You can read the original Harper’s magazine version of it here. I recommend her book Bright-Sided: How Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. (I would add: “and Journalism,” so we could talk about the uses of skepticism in this relentlessly upbeat, big-hugs, magical-thinking age.)

• Jake Silverstein’s book, Nothing Happened and Then It Did, is something I’d like to give anyone starting out on his or her first journalism job. It’s a strange book, in that it reprints some of Jake’s longform nonfiction for magazines and alternates with fictional chapters about a “Jake Silverstein,” a young journalist in pursuit of big stories in the west Texas wastelands. I would much rather that young journos with wandering hearts and an appetite for adventure read this instead of Hunter S. Thompson.

• We were supposed to read Washington Post music critic Chris Richards’s page 1 tale of the hunt to find the ruins of George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic’s missing “Mothership,” rumored to be buried in the kudzu jungles of suburban Maryland.

• I also wanted us to read Michael Kruse’s piece about a woman who died in her garage and whose body went undiscovered for a long time, even after the house went into foreclosure. The pop-culture angle here is difficult to determine, but I wanted us to examine the power in the details of the things we own and keep in our homes. Once you’ve read it, you really must read this.

• There’s something fun and startling about “Eating Beef Jerky at the Bodies Exhibit,” written in 2010 by Trent Moorman of The Stranger. I wanted to incorporate this piece somewhere between our talks about criticism and scene stories.

• Tony Earley’s 1998 Harper’s essay, “Somehow Form a Family,” about a childhood spent watching television (“The Brady Bunch” especially), almost made our reading assignments during the personal-essay stage. Here’s a link to the book version.

• It probably wouldn’t have been a huge hit in class, but someday check out Rebecca Brown’s “Hawthorne,” an essay about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, from her book American Romances.

• I had picked out the first chapter of Joshua Gamson’s “The Fabulous Sylvester,” a biography of the late, gender-bending disco singer of the ’70s/’80s. Just read the first 13 pages, “Get Ready for Me” — an amazing act of setting scene and character while describing a whole other world, in this case, that of South Central Los Angeles teenagers of the 1960s.

Also:

• More Susan Orlean — including her profile of schlock painter Thomas Kinkade. Just go ahead and get yourself a copy of The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup.

• A little more Joan Didion — pictured above in her everyday guise, smoking next to her Corvette — including the title essay from The White Album.

• Take a look at David Samuels’s magazine stories in his collection Only Love Can Break Your Heart. Likewise, check out Nathan Rabin’s The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture.

• I had flagged a couple of chapters to share from Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.

• Don’t forget Henry Allen: Going Too Far Enough (collected essays from the Washington Post) and What It Felt Like (an epic 10-part essay on the 20th century).

Also don’t forget everything else ever written. Get busy. There will be a quiz, and it will be given by everyone in the writing business who thinks they’re smarter than you.

PS: If you want to share thoughts about books, I’m on Goodreads.

Sorry for the delay in recapping. You can tell that the semester has reached the frenzy point here at the School of Journalism. My crew in the Pollner seminar (aka this class) is spread so thin that you can hear the knives clanking in their mayonnaise jars; just being around them makes me vicariously exhausted. I remember this part of college quite well: all the term papers coming due at once, the looming finals, the registration (and graduation) deadlines for next semester, and the inescapable realization that the student newspaper still has to come out. A good number of my students went to Helena on Tuesday to cover election night for their advanced reporting classes, but managed to return, bleary-eyed, in time for our Wednesday Skype session with the multi-Pulitzered Gene Weingarten. (Depicted above, as he is every Sunday in the Washington Post Magazine, by illustrator Eric Shansby.)

On Monday (the 5th), we had discussed seven stories in Gene’s book, The Fiddler in the Subway, and once again, it turns out that a Weingarten story will start about 100 different discussions about 100 different things — some of them related to the topic, many of them tangential. That’s why his Washington Post online chat has evolved into a free-associative conversation among like-minded strangers/readers about the many ways that the human condition is both funny and horrifying.

I was happy to let the class conversation spin out too, so long as we kept noticing how damn entertaining (and gripping) Gene’s feature stories are. Remember: They all ran in a newspaper. Stories like this can and should run alongside the day’s news, in print and online. If you ghettoize (or elevate) great feature writing to some special twee place on the web or in heavy-paper-stock journals, a la McSweeney’s, you significantly lessen their power to surprise. You also reduce the potential audience.

Talking to Gene in person (or as close as we can get — Skype really is amazing, when the signal is strong) can give readers a whole new insight into why his stories are the way they are, and why they are so good.

Our one-hour conversation addressed some of the stories we read from The Fiddler in the Subway — especially “The Great Zucchini,” “The Armpit of America,” “Doonesbury’s War,” and “Tears for Audrey.” (Shockingly, we never even got to talk about “The Fiddler in the Subway,” probably Gene’s best-known piece, in which he installed master violinist Joshua Bell in the Washington, D.C., subway system as a busker, to see if anyone would notice greatness in their hectic midst.)

The real takeaway from Gene’s work — the lesson I’ve always taken away, anyhow, from reading him and knowing him — is the sense of adventure or quest that defines almost all of his stories, whether they are humorous or tragic. They’re all trying to answer a question, sometimes not always answerable, but always about the human condition in one way or another: Why does Washington’s most successful children’s entertainer-for-hire have such a disorganized personal life? Why did the Hardy Boys books seem so great to a 12-year-old Gene and yet so awful to a middle-aged Gene, and who wrote those books anyhow? What’s the “worst” town in America, subjectively speaking? What’s up with someone who never votes?

Many of the stories are written and structured as a quest, in such a way that you can see how the reporting went, how the facts were discovered, how the story is built. It’s like visiting a cathedral that is still surrounded by the scaffolding.

We talked to Gene about reporting and structure. I noticed — and tried to get him to explain — how easily people tend to let him in, even when he is upfront with them about the sarcasm and humor that may work against their best interests when the story is published. Such as when he calls up a non-voting Michigan man named Ted Prus and asks if he can profile him — a conversation recounted at the top of the story:

“Hi. This is The Washington Post. Are you registered to vote?”

“No.”

“Are you planning on voting?”

“No.”

“We’d like to write a long story about you. Would you be interested? It would make you famous.”

“You mean a famous idiot?”

“Actually, we’re not sure. There’s no guarantee one way or the other.”

“Sounds good.”

A similar exchange happens (and is recounted in the story) with Sharlene “Shar” Peterson of the Battle Mountain, Nev., Chamber of Commerce before Gene embarks on a 2001 story pronouncing the little town to be “the armpit of America”:

She told me a little about the town, and then I told her what I was proposing to do.

She laughed, then didn’t say much of anything for a bit.

The Battle Mountain Chamber of Commerce was thinking.

Shar?

“Well, I mean, who wants to be called an armpit? But, you know …”

I sensed where she was going. I wanted to kiss her.

” … This could be an asset. We’re just a dying, ugly little mining town without a real identity. It could be an opportunity.”

Is this a great country or what?

“Listen,” Shar said, a trace of concern creeping into her voice. “I have to tell you we now have a Super 8 Motel and a McDonald’s. I hope that doesn’t knock us out of the running.”

How does Gene do this? He is upfront with people right away, perhaps more than most reporters are. Why do people still say okay to it? Many of us are already socially awkward about calling people up and asking for permission to hang out, take notes and publish intimate details. Gene says he is too, but that he’s pretty much always told all his subjects, right away, that if they let him write about them, three things will happen when the story is published and they first read it: 1., They will feel like it is fair. (If nothing else, it’s fair — people get their say and are quoted accurately and attempts have been made to depict the situations from all sides; complexities have not been sanded down into oversimplified descriptions, etc.)

2., They will end up liking about 3/4 of it.

And 3., They will be upset — possibly very upset — by 1/4 of it.

He tells them this at the beginning. He also follows up with them after the story runs to see what their reaction was; even if it they’re furious at him, he wants to know.

Gene and I both agree that your allegiance is to the truest possible story you can tell, even if it’s painful for the subject. I’m more of the Joan Didion “writers-are-always-selling-somebody-out” type. I do a lot of what Gene does at the end of the process, in my fact-checking and farewell phase, instead of the beginning; but I do agree that sources need to know what they’re getting into at the beginning, how deep things will get, and they also need to be reminded of the journalistic process while the reporting is going on.

The most important thing is that you have to sweat this out every time. You have to wake up at night and fret about the struggle between staying true to the story and potentially hurting some feelings. I think the balance we’re all looking for exists in those anxiety attacks.

Gene says he saves the hardest questions — the most sensitive, painful things — for last. Smart man.

• • •

There is NO CLASS on MONDAY, NOV. 12 (Veterans Day).

For Wednesday, Nov. 14: Our time is running short — only six classes left. We will continue brainstorming and nailing down ideas for the long(ish) narrative feature story, which is due Dec. 3. I’m going to ease up on the readings for the duration of the semester. (There are many fantastic pieces I’d assign if we had another semester to keep going, but I want us to get as much time as possible to discuss, troubleshoot and pre-edit the students’ features.) I have assigned one reading for Wednesday: “Can You Say Hero?” Tom Junod’s classic Esquire profile of (Mister) Fred Rogers in 1998. Read it, mark it up, and come ready to talk about it.

And don’t forget: Your second review (of a film, album, live performance, video game or book, etc.) is due by Nov. 26. That’s most of you. The last of the TV recappers are finishing up in the next week.

PS: Everyone successfully filed their scene stories — some later than others, but all got it in by late Wednesday night, so thanks very much. I’ll bring printouts for you on Nov. 14 and we’ll do our roundtable critique on the 19th.

Wednesday in class we talked more about the reported essay, which the students are beginning to work on and will file on Sept. 17.

What the heck is a reported essay? I think the adjective “reported” is there mainly to make those of us with journalism degrees feel a tiny bit better about publishing essays alongside the news. There are a lot of fine lines and danger zones in this form of writing, many of which invite the journalist into a less comfortable but potentially more creative realm. (Important: creative does not equal “made up.”) Should all the reported facts — the things you learn in the course of reporting, talking to experts, talking to anybody — be attributed (he said, he said, he said) in a feature essay or does that somehow bog down the beauty of it? (It depends, he said.) Should the facts speak for themselves and take on such qualities as irony, resonance, symbolism, metaphor? Or should the reporter’s notes instead build toward a kind of authority, which sets a vibe or tone? When does a riff start to read too much like a stoner story? How do we synthesize a lot of information about a thing (or a place, or a person, or a personality type) and turn it into its own piece of art? It usually takes a couple of drafts, that’s for sure. That, and a good and patient editor.

We talked about my piece from way back about plastic patio chairs: how it came to be, how I tried to do it, how I got it right on the second draft (or whatever “right” is — it never, ever feels pristine).

I also read aloud (and handed out copies of) a short reported essay that Ben Montgomery wrote five years ago in the Tampa Bay Times (nee St. Petersburg Times) about the unheralded majesty of the 7-Eleven taquito.

(Class: If you’re not checking into gangrey.com, a blog where Ben and a couple of other fantastic writers post daily links to current examples of daring work appearing in newspapers and magazines, please have a look.)

Henry Allen, self-portrait

I also talked a lot about Henry Allen, who, in my opinion, is pretty much the master of this kind of thing. Henry was my editor for almost a decade. I read the contents page of his 1994 book Going Too Far Enough, a compilation of his best Washington Post essays from the 1980s and early ’90s. The book’s contents page reads almost like an essay in list form, in which each piece is titled as a single subject. It really gets the idea-factory going. Read it and let your mind imagine what these pieces might have been about …

State fair, Summer houses, Casablanca, WASPs, Clouds, Tract mansions, Landscape, New Hampshire, Kennedy, Zsa Zsa, The Wyeths, Batman, Stephen Hawking, Dennis Hopper, Hoover, Guns, Thomas Hart Benton, The ‘80s, The Daily News, Mice, Harvey Pekar, The bus, Young fogies, Vietnam, Cigarettes, Sweat, Folklife, Crayons, Marching, Miss America, Good wars, Bad vacations, Space, Fireworks

I talked about some other reported essays I wrote and filed to Henry over the years — I spared the class the torture of actually having to read them — some of which were okay and some of which were sort of duds: Blue tarps, Above-ground pools, Interstates, Flip-flops, Living alone, “Sheetz vs. Wawa.” I could go on and on. (The students now know this about me.)

SO. Why are we doing this kind of assignment first, instead of last? Isn’t it kind of … daunting to start like this? Yes. I want the students to try something ambitious, perhaps a form they’ve never tried before. It’s a good way to stretch their wings and show me how they write.

More than that, the reported essay assignment is about NOTICING THINGS, which is going to serve them well on later, more traditional assignments. Noticing the popular culture motifs and objects and talismans all around us. Thinking about them. Finding out why they are the way they are. Talking to people — experts, and just plain people — about them. Finding the meaning in them. And then writing the hell out of it.

Already some of the students have pitched me some fantastic ideas for their essays. I’m dying to share them with readers of this blog, but I won’t — not yet.

No class on Labor Day. Our next class is Wednesday, Sept. 5. Here are the reading assignments. More reported essays, none of them very long, by writers with entirely different voices and approaches:

My raging case of nostalgia continues unabated, and I’ve decided it’s a good thing. Unless and until it causes me to obsessively scan images of old diner menus and matchbox covers and spout vaguely jingoistic observations about the end of civilization and the people I encounter in the Target parking lot.

It occurred to me the other day that is has been 20 years — late summer/early fall of 1990 — since I felt as free as I have ever felt. I finished an internship at the Los Angeles Times and had packed my car with clothes, books, a tent, a sleeping bag, some other supplies, and set out to camp along the Pacific coast all the way up to Seattle, thrillingly alone and in charge of my fate. That was the plan/no plan. (My car was a tan 1989 Ford Probe, for real, and perhaps my favorite car I’ve ever owned; I still have dreams where I suddenly own it again.)

For the first time since I was 5, I was not in school in September. I was 22 years old. Back then there was no such thing, officially, as “the pre-adult” stage of life that unemployed twentysomethings now claim as their right. Our parents were not our best friends, and even if they were, we would never had said so; moving back home was a stigma, or worse, uncreative. I probably had about $500 in the bank and a Visa card with a $500 limit. (Privileged middle-class white person disclosure: My father was having a good year, as far as any of us then knew, and he made my car payments — $237 a month — for a bit.)

I had no job offers — in fact, I had plenty of rejection letters, including the nicest one from a guy at Hallmark, where I’d responded to an ad looking for funny greeting card writers.

So I camped — as in paid permit, not hobo style — on state beaches and in forested parks along Highway 1. I made campfires and snacked on Tostitos and salsa. I read books: What Am I Doing Here by Bruce Chatwin; Democracy by Joan Didion; Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver –  I ask you Kindlers and iPadders, because I want to know: Will we be as able, years from now, to remember which e-books accompanied us on our journeys and travels, with the same tactile powers of recall? Is there an app for that, keeping track of when we read a book, with a corresponding GPS coordinate?

Because when a book is taking up space in your luggage or in your car, you are consciously and literally with that book, unless you lose it someplace, and then its absence is just as with you in a whole different way, mentally. I can close my eyes and see the cover of the Chatwin book reflected in the light of a candle flickering on a concrete picnic table at a beach campground in Morro Bay. I can also get up right now, walk over to the shelf and produce that very same book, and give it a sniff for traces of old smoke.

When I recently visited the apartment of my friends Jonathan and Scott, I spied on their bookshelves a copy of the very same guidebook, The Real California, I had with me in 1990, and have long since discarded. I recognized the spine of it it immediately and took it down and thumbed through it with awe.

Music is the same way. With the same certainty, I know the tapes I was listening to in the car on that trip included Depeche Mode’s Violator, the Pixies’ Bossanova, and a Nina Simone compilation that included “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl” (but not “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”). What happens to memories like this, when our entire music collections go wherever we go, in our pockets, whether down the street or around the world?

* * *

The trip didn’t last long.

Fate intervened, in San Francisco. With one phone call — a message relayed to me through my mother in Oklahoma, whom I had called a couple days earlier from a pay phone at a campground in Big Sur — I went a whole other way.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 1990, after a boozy San Francisco night, I tore out south down I-5, across the desert through Tehachapi, and east to I-40 — a 17-hour drive, or something like that — to try out for two weeks at a job in New Mexico.

And that changed everything. The road trip toward the question mark of my life was over, just 10 days in.

Another trip, of sorts, started then and there — a career that has been financially secure and intellectually satisfying, to such a degree that I am co-dependent on it. And yet, turning the Ford Probe around that morning all but assured that many of my future choices would be made around practical, level-headed things like paychecks, outstanding credit card balances, health plans, 401(k) matches, vacation time, story lengths, editors, deadlines. From then until forever, I would always have a piece of writing due. (Like today. I have four reviews to finish, and this is what I’m doing instead.)

I have no complaints, but I can count on one hand the true forks I’ve encountered in The Road, where the choice was either/or, and entirely mine. I kinda wish there had been more moments like that one, and I hope there are some ahead. I definitely sense there are some ahead.

Shit! Is this what a midlife crisis sounds like? I just briefly felt the crazy ghost of my father in the room.

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.

Colony Palms Hotel, Palm Springs, Calif.

I’m back. It’s been more than a month, I know, and I hope I can get people to come visit the Tonsil blog again. Last I left you, I was Tinsel-ed out (and so you were you) and Michael and I made a getaway to California for the (un-)holidays. I’m getting some thoughts together about the book experience, but still haven’t quite got them together. Hang on for another entry. It’ll come in short takes.

The California trip went splendidly, really. And by splendid, I mean we did nothing much at all. Michael pronounced it the best Christmas ever, sans cockney Tiny Tim accent. We were in Palm Springs for a few days, which means something to a certain kind of homo, but we just don’t make that grade. We stayed at this ultra-quiet refurbished motor lodge (no, not the trendy ACE motel) called the Colony Palms. Michael read the literature on it more closely than I did — I think it said somewhere it used to be some sort of gangster getaway in the desert. Now it’s just an enclave of not-overly-trendy rooms, a big pool, a pretty good restaurant, lots of trees and flowers, a nice hot tub, and an outdoor fireplace — where I did a lot of reading. Although the food in Palm Springs is legendarily mediocre, our best meals were breakfasts — check out Cheeky’s if you’re ever there, and order the tamale and eggs, with a side of homemade maple sausage.

Oh, and we saw mediocre movies, like the drecky It’s Complicated — and later that week, in LA, we saw Sherlock Holmes, The Road, The Lovely Bones.

Fast reviews:

It’s Complicated: My medium Coke Zero was spiked with estrogen. D-

Sherlock Holmes: Minus the CSI-style f/x and clue review, I mighta liked it better. The haberdashery saw me through. C-

The Road: Honored the book and yet missed the point? Also, for all that praise, I thought the kid wasn’t very good. B-

The Lovely Bones: My new Exhibit-A when people talk about how good books become bad movies. This was really awful, sappy, stupid-looking and boring. D+

Anymore, it almost seems I’d rather talk books than movies. (And if I could keep up, and people still cared about records, I’d love to talk about records.) It’s no fun to keep throwing yourself at the movies with holiday optimism, only to have them not catch you as you fall — those four movies are $100 in tickets, and I’ve never resented ticket prices, ever, even when I couldn’t afford to go to as many movies as I wanted. I’ve always felt like it was important to go, to take the good with the bad, and just enjoy movies the way they’re meant to be, in a theater. I never treated the movies with some Consumer Reports-like expectation that my money never be wasted. But these movies? Thud, thud, thud, thud. It’s Complicated probably annoyed me the most, not for the menopausal mania but for the outrageous wealth in which the characters obliviously dwelled, free of traffic and hassle (other than, well, the complicated sex stuff), where a woman just “owns a bakery” and lives on an estate and is remodeling her woefully small (read: huge) kitchen, and picking ripened tomatoes in her garden on a day which we’ve been lead to believe is late spring. I mean, I can only take so much of that sort of Hollywood fantasy where conspicuous wealth is passed off as normal, upper middle-class. Do we really go to the movies for this kind of escape? Not me. Not in THIS ECONOMY.

The Monday after Christmas we relocated to Los Angeles, checked into the Sunset Tower (no conspicous, complicated wealth for us — they had really cheap rates over Xmas!), and we did even more than nothing than we did in Palm Springs. (At least in Palm Springs we went horseback riding in the mountains for an afternoon.)

We ate and slept and drove around in our rental (Mustang convertible) with the top down and the floor heater on, which is sort of the perfect combo, the environmentally unfriendly version of salty and sweet.

Here’s me in the Arclight Cinema, waiting for The Lovely Bones to start, but first, waiting for more food.

The food! The night before New Year’s (Dec. 30), we had what I think is one of the best meals of my life (I’ll let Michael make his own decisions about his own best-meals-evah), at Gjelina in Venice. It’s one of those totally 21st-century California Alice-Waters-is-our-Jesus places. Reclaimed wood, bare Edison blubs tastefully dangling from the ceiling, firepit out back on the patio; staff undoubtedly sporting some pig tattoos among them. Here’s what we ate (I typed it out in an e-mail to Janet Duckworth almost as soon as we got back to the hotel) …

Gjelina

Starters:
>> Roasted beets with burrata cheese and sherry toasted walnuts. (I am in the fan club for beets these days, even the bland ones at the Post cafeteria salad bar, but when they’re great — oh boy oh boy)
>> Grilled seckel pears with grilled treviso, burrata, prosciutto and vinaigrette (the burrata cheese is just — wow. How great that we picked two items with it.)

Then we had a pizza: eggplant, tomato, oregano, mozzarella

Then we ordered some vegetable dishes:
>> Charred Brussels sprouts with dates, bacon and vinegar
>> Wood-roasted Tahitian squash with sea salt and rosemary

Small plates:
>> Crispy Niman ranch pork belly with corn grits, mustard greens and apple cider (I’m STILL thinking about how good this one was. It just dissolves on your tongue, with a perfect charred crunch…)

>> Grilled peruvian octopus with charred escarole, fingerling potato and saffron aioli

>>Grilled lamb chops with rapini-mint pesto

I know it sounds like we ordered every goddamn thing, but the servings were just right, and there were many more items I would have tried if I was slated for execution the next morning. But the governor called, and gave me a reprieve, so we had to call it quits, but not before…

Desserts:

>>Pear and blackberry crisp with pistachio gelato (this was great and it  would have been perfect if I didn’t know how good the other dessert was going to be…)

>>Butterscotch pots de creme with salted caramel. This last thing was so good that I lost my mind with each bite. I still think about it. Big flakes of rock salt on that caramel with that butterscoth creme underneath. I always thought people were sort of exaggerating when they compared sex to dessert. I don’t now. (See? See? It’s Complicated DID make me grow a vagina and then it made me nutty about a dessert. Woman, thou art cursed.)

Also we had a scrumptious bottle of rosé wine — forget the name. Will have to look. It was French.

We had other fun. Some nice drives around L.A. (Michael got up two mornings in a row to go make some Mulholland Drive photographs.) Some excellent breakfasts. New Year’s Eve over at Janet’s apartment for a while, and then to the Mint to see a band called Dengue Fever. I think it’s safe to say we would move to L.A. in a heartbeat, with the same insufferably daffy optimism of all newcomers, if there were jobs to be had. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to spend at least a week or two in L.A. every year for most of the ’00s. I was hooked at 21, when I moved there to be an LA Times summer intern. At 33, I made a promise to myself to find a way to move to L.A. by the time I turned 40. That didn’t work out. Maybe 45?

Sorry for this disjointed, rambly post. If I don’t post it now, I might never get the blog up and going again, and I want to; I just have to rediscover that loosey-goosey bloggy voice again. Speaking of California and Californians, I’ll leave you with the Cold War Kids’ new song, “Santa Ana Winds.” This is the acoustic version. I highly recommend you check out the studio cut on their new EP. Finally, finally (and not to drag out an LA cliche)  — someone has namechecked Joan Didion in a pop song!

All these books-of-the-year and books-of-the-decade lists are out now. I’m too far behind on ’09 to make any sort of guess about what book I liked most. But I can feel some coalescence about the decade by just looking around my study. If a book stuck around from my circa-2000 apartment and made it here to my 140 square-foot retreat in 2005, and is still here today, it must’ve meant I thought it was a pretty freakin’ good read. Here are faves from the ’00s, I think. I’m sure I’ve left something out, likely because I gave my copy away to someone else to read. There has to be more to this list, and I’ll realize later “Oh, no, I left off [blank]!” but I also like the pop-quiz nature of this blog post, on which I’ll spend no more than 15 minutes throwing together a list. No particular order…

FICTION:

• “Harbor,” by Lorraine Adams. Best 9/11-era novel, in my opinion, and really gripping. Also, if you’ll notice (which you shouldn’t), fantastically researched and reported.

• “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” by Michael Chabon. More like this, please, and less of Chabon mucking around on collaborative comic books, children mysteries, unfilmed screenplays and essays about fatherhood. Get to work, genius.

• “Gilligan’s Wake,” by Tom Carson. The 20th century as reimagined through the prism of TV’s castaways. I am a freak about this book. I think it is amazing and re-read it every couple years.

• “American Wife,” by Curtis Sittenfeld. I know, I know — enough with the Hank/Curtis lovefest, but I think this is a brilliant, towering novel by a writer who is really going to last. (“Prep,” too!)

• “Everything is Illuminated,” by Jonathan Safran Foer. Hard to not be jealous of this one.

• “Home Land,” by Sam Lipsyte.

• “Pastoralia,” by George Saunders.

• “March,” by Geraldine Brooks. Still gobsmacked by how good this one was. (Also her “Year of Wonders.”)

• “The Blind Assassin,” by Margaret Atwood.

• “Dear American Airlines,” by Jonathan Miles. Heartbreaking and hilarious. Made even better by the fact I read it on a nice vacation.

• “Lying Awake,” by Mark Salzman. Gorgeously spare novel about cloistered nuns. Amazing. I still laugh about the sin of “wasting Joy.”

• “Shopgirl,” by Steve Martin. The movie was kinda meh, but the first time I read this, I thought it was so beautiful. I still do.

• “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy. On the afternoon I finished it, I just stared at the ceiling for an hour and mourned for a world that was not yet technically gone, but felt gone. That’s what I call good.

NON-FICTION:

• “Nickel and Dimed,” by Barbara Ehrenreich, a shining example of two things, I think: morally conscious journalism and hilariously illuminating feature writing.

• “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” by Marjorie Williams, someone who has been dead almost five years and whose work I still hear about (or think about) all the time.

• “Where I Was From,” by Joan Didion. She finally became household-namous in 2005 by writing about her husband’s death (“The Year of Magical Thinking”), but I think this book, two years earlier, was better — it’s about the death of her California notions and ideas.

• “The Whole Equation” by David Thomson (and also his “Nicole Kidman”). I’m late to the game when it comes to savoring Thomson’s film writing, but I really do.

• “Pictures at a Revolution,” by Mark Harris. Loved this book, which was well-assembled and fascinating and not only explains a lot about our movie culture, but scintillates the ’60s as well. (The actual ’6os, and not “the Sixties,” if you know what I mean.)

• “The Beatles,” by Bob Spitz. I read someplace that the original draft of this book was twice as long as the 800 pages that were published. I would have happily kept going. It’s still amazing, after all these decades, to have the story of the Beatles told in a linear way.

• “Heat,” by Bill Buford. You don’t have to care about cooking or Italy. This is just an amazing work of reporting and synthesis and good writing.

• “Dog Man,” by Martha Sherrill. Made me cry. Such a strangely inviting and determined little book about living and aging in a faraway place.

• “The Fabulous Sylvester” by Joshua Gamson. I think this book has one of the most amazing opening chapters I’ve ever read. And I’ve never read such a compelling biography of such a marginalized celebrity. An excellent book made possible by deep, deep reporting from primary sources.