The Paris Review online

I've become completely addicted to the Paris Review online offerings. My way in was Louisa Thomas' blogging about the US Open (tennis, of course, not golf). Simply some of the finest sports writing I've read in a long while. I hope she keeps it up somehow, somewhere.

Then this morning I discovered that Nelly Kaprièlian has begun keeping a "culture diary" for the same outlet. Her first two entries are rather long, and I really don't know where she finds the time. In addition to being an editor and writer at the French weekly Les Inrockuptibles (I'm a subscriber and actually contributed a handful of record reviews in the late '80s), she often pundits — she's a regular on the radio critics roundtable Le Masque et la plume, for instance, and I keep catching her on various public-radio outlets. Plus her first diary entry reveals an active social life.

I confess to a love-hate relationship with Kaprièlian. On the one hand, she's a tireless defender of American fiction in France, and I will always cherish her memorable tongue-lashing of Jean-Louis Ezine, a fellow Masque literary critic and serial interrupter. (He's so witty and charming, however, that he's my favorite on the show!) On the other hand, Kaprièlian is a remarkably humorless snob (very French, that) and she shares the inexplicable (to me) Gallic enthusiasm for Philip Roth — even his latest novels.

But back to the culture diary, which I can see myself becoming addicted to. The prize so far is Kaprièlian's account of her interview with Michel Houellebecq, whose new novel, La Carte et le territoire, is a critical and commercial hit in France. I've read and loved all his books, and can't wait to get my hands on this one. Susannah Hunnewell's new chat with him is a must, too.

More Castle!

No, not the TV show Castle -- I love Nathan Fillion, but not enough to watch his latest vehicle.

Here I'm talking about Terry Castle. I've been a big fan for a while (see this earlier post) and so I was particularly delighted to see that the essays I mentioned a couple of years ago have been collected in one handy volume, The Professor and Other Writings. Yesssss! [pumps fist in geeky excitment] Sadly, what I wrote then still stands: As far as I know, Castle still doesn't have a regular outlet in the US, while The New Yorker's "humor" page continues to require quotation marks.

Even better, the titular essay makes up half of the book and is new. Despite being swamped with work right now, I couldn't help but take a peek, the same way I can't help lunge for a treat when a box of marrons glacés happens to be in the vicinity. Oh it's going to be so good! (I'll even overlook the reference to a "régime amaigrissante" instead of "régime amaigrissant" -- that's how much I love Castle's writing.)

Spend the summer with Georges Simenon

I've mentioned before that I regularly listen to French public radio via podcast. Of the various units of Radio France, I'm partial to France Inter and to France Culture. The former has particularly good talk shows and political satirists during the year but I'm not so keen on its summer schedule. The latter, on the other hand, can be stuffy during the year but really comes alive in July and August.

Last year, I raved about that the 16 hours France Culture dedicated to François Truffaut. This year, they're doing the same thing to Georges Simenon, with five distinct parts, each one centered around a location important to the writer: Liège, Paris, France, America, Switzerland. The whole thing should run about 17 hours.

Go to this site, which lists all the France Culture podcasts, and scroll down to "Simenon" to subscribe.

And while you're there, you might also check out "Conversation avec Losey" (Positif boss Michel Ciment chats with Joseph Losey in the late ’70s) and "Paroles d'actrices" (hour-long interviews with contemporary French actresses).

Post-ap book group

You now have less than ten days to read John Wyndham's The Chrysalids before it's discussed at the next meeting of the Brooklyn post-apocalyptic book group. This will be on January 22 at Freebird Books & Goods in Red Hook. Typically for Red Hook, the convoluted directions from the subway stop include the likes of walking "until you can't go any further" to a venue located "across from the packing containers." This, of course, is perfectly appropriate to the subject at hand.

My fondness for post-apocalyptic fiction has long been in evidence on this blog, and I share it with my esteemed colleague Joshua Rothkopf. (We can often be seen huddled by a desk, discussing reissues of obscure novels and relevant new movies.) And so we were both psyched to hear about the book group. Clearly we are not the only ones who dream of the day after.

Also, to clarify: I am not particularly interested in End of Days scenarios—the religious element pretty much leaves me cold, as it does in real life. I'm also not that into the catastrophe itself, so I tend to pass on descriptions of meteors hitting Earth or plagues unleashing out of a lab.

That said, I'd definitely read a book about the last three days before nuclear armageddon, and I'd watch any movie involving Christina Hendricks in a lab coat saying, "We only have two minutes before the virus wipes out humanity." It hasn't been made? Well, what are you waiting for, Hollywood?

About Jon Raymond

My review of Jon Raymond's new collection, Livability, is in Time Out New York.

Raymond is best-known for adapting two of his own stories with director Kelly Reichardt for the movies Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. I didn't have the space to expand on this thought in the review, but Raymond frequently reminded me of Adrian Tomine at his worst—when he tries to spin meaning out of nothingness.

Butcher's Crossing

Reading John Williams's 1960 Western Butcher's Crossing while Rome—well, Wall Street—burnt was perfect timing.

The book tells the story of young Will Andrews who drops out of Harvard College in the 1870s and goes west to find himself. Under the guidance of man named Miller, he ends up funding a hunting trip to a quasi-mythical Colorado valley, high in the Rockies, where, Miller says, thousands of buffalo roam. The plan is to spend a couple of weeks, kill as many beasts as possible during that time, bring the hides back on a wagon and sells them in the small town of Butcher's Crossing, from where they departed.

They find the valley all right, but Miller gets obsessed with the slaughter and refuses to leave until he's killed every animal—and there's thousands of them. Alas, when he awakes from his bloody reverie, the weather has turned and the four men in the party are snowed in; they spend several months under a makeshift shelter made of hides. After they emerge in the spring, filthy, weak from hunger and the cold, and with one of them pretty much insane, things actually get worse! The trip back turns into a nightmare and Butcher's Crossing itself has changed in ways our Rip van Winkles were not expecting. The ironic twist Williams springs at the end is to deliciously grim to reveal.

Williams doesn't pull punches (I learned more than I ever wanted to know about how to kill, skin and dress a buffalo) but his grim poetry is absolutely mesmerizing. And it's hard to find a better description of a man driven by greed—not so much financial, though Miller certainly wants dollars for his hides, but the elemental need to satisfy a constant craving for more, more and more, even after you have more than enough. Add to this man's destruction of of nature in his quest to control it, and you get a dizzying allegory of a society gone mad.

Indeed, how not to be chilled by the parallel with our barons of finance, who kept wanting more and more and more, and would do anything to get it? As with Miller, who kills buffalo for the same reason too many idiots climb the Everest—because it's there—we now have to deal with the insanity created by morons who got drunk on their own financial wizardry and couldn't stop themselves.

The only good news in this: Williams has only written three novels, making it easy to read his entire oeuvre.

RIP David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace killed himself on Friday. The Times' obit focuses on his importance as a fiction writer and glosses over his nonfiction, which I much preferred—and where he used many of the same postmodern tricks. I can't emphasize enough that how great his two collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster, are; all would-be journalists should read them. (Kakutani does mention his nonfiction in her tribute.)

I first discovered Foster Wallace in 1994, when I read his article about the Illinois State Fair in Harper's; in 1996, he wrote about going on a cruise for the same magazine. Both articles were illuminating and incredibly funny—I clearly remember laughing out loud over and over at his descriptions of the fair's food and rides (his approach to this kind of deep Americana has become the norm, though DFW's imitators are just that).

But what made DFW stand out wasn't so much his love for footnotes but the way he wrestled with his role as a writer and with thorny moral issues, something current popular essayists like David Sedaris or Chuck Klosterman never do. The title essay of Consider the Lobster may well be his finest in that regard.

Noir whiteout

Because it's been lovely and sunny here in New York for the past couple of weeks, I sought a bit of a cold draft by tearing through four novels from Scandinavia.

First up was Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, translated from the Swedish. I previewed it in the new issue of Time Out New York, so check that out for more info. Basically Larsson has fitted together financial muckracking + serial killers + a locked-room disapperance, three plots that may or may not be linked, making the book the lit equivalent of Russian doll. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first volume in a trilogy but unfortunately Knopf isn't putting out the next one until summer ’09. I may have to buy the French version, which has been out (and on the best-seller lists) for a couple of years now, as I'm not sure I can wait a whole year to find out what happens next. Yes, Larsson's that good.

Second was Per Petterson's marvelous To Siberia (which my colleague Drew Toal covered in the aforementioned issue of TONY). I hadn't read Pettersson's critically lauded Out Stealing Horses, so this literary novel (which actually predates Horses) was a discovery. Pettersson crams a lot in a small number of pages, and I guess my surprise at it says something about the bloat that's crept into fiction over the past few years, making short novels a rarity.

Third was Henning Mankell's Depths. This stand-alone novel (so no Kurt Wallander) takes place in 1914 and has got to be one of the bleakest things I've read in a while. In fact, it's like a parade of all the clichés people associate with northern Europe: relentless gloom, miserable characters, frozen landscapes, and depression, alcoholism and death at every corner. And yet I made it all the way through, slogging through the tale of Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, an officer reading depths for the Swedish Navy. Unsurprisingly, it turns out the methodical Tobiasson-Svartman is ill-prepared to measure, let alone deal with the depths lurking within himself (I bet you didn't see this one coming), and all's bad that ends badly.

Mankell provided a blurb for fellow Swede Kjell Eriksson's The Demon from Dakar, ie book no. 4 and a return to genre. Nothing special about this one, a by-the-number procedural. I have no idea why I even finished it, considering I had thought the exact same thing about Eriksson's The Cruel Stars of the Night. Recommanded only to hardcore Scandi-noir fanatics.

Read elsewhere

My review of Billy Mernit's novel Imagine Me and You is out in today's LA Times. Elsewhere—that is, on the SundayArts blog—you can check out, if so inclined, some of my thoughts on Manon Lescaut and other women who kick butt (or not).

I'm bummed to have been leaving the Dilettante a bit unattended lately, but my schedule has been on the hectic side. I did manage to see Paul Rudnick's The New Century and the revival of Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses with Laura Linney over the weekend. More on the latter in a few days, after TONY's review has run; as for The New Century, it's very sweet and often very funny, even if it doesn't amount to very much in the end. The best thing was finally being able to see Linda Lavin on stage. No contest: Few have her sense of timing and delivery when it comes to zingers.

Ranking pages

I'm almost done with the new Jeanette Winterson novel, The Stone Gods, and much to my surprise I've really enjoyed it—actually the mere fact that I've read so much of my own volition is telling. I usually find Winterson's overheated rococo stylings tiresome but this time around she's harnessed them in the service of an absorbing science-fiction tale. The sci-fi angle has more holes than a moth-eaten sweater and feels like a mere excuse for meditations on the power of language and what it means to be human, but then that's what sci fi is often for and I'm not enough of a purist to begrudge Winterson's cavalier attitude towards plot mechanics.

I'm particularly happy to enjoy Winterson because I'd been on a frustrating roll lately—except for Richard Price's new Lush Life, which is a good ol' read, particularly if you're familiar with the New York locale. But it was downhill after that. For instance I got my mitts on a handful of reissues of early-20th-century adventure classics such as H. Rider Haggard's She and Conan Doyle's The Lost World, all in a rather nice collection of $10 undersize pocket books that actually fit in a pocket (thank you, Penguin). That's the good news. Since I read them all as a kid, I started off with G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908); despite the book's good rep, I was bored stiff by its allegorical rampage—elegantly written but please deliver me from Christian authors. Still, I can see how this could make for a good movie. (Weird how this can be a disparaging assessment for a book.)

I was also let down by two Scandi noirs: K.O. Dahl's The Fourth Man tries to update the typical femme-fatale-leading-to-cop's-fall premise but is so dull that it almost tumbled off my hands, while Håkan Nesser's The Return is a middling procedural that does not stand out from the pack. I'm such a sucker for Scandi noir that I keep falling for it—I'd been disappointed by Nesser's Borkmann's Point, for instance, and yet I inexplicably went back for more.

Disappointing yet again, but this time because of poor editing: Angie David's Dominique Aury. I actually bought that book quite a while ago but never got around to actually reading it from beginning to end, contenting myself with grazing some chapters. Whoever was supposed to help David shape her manuscript was asleep at the wheel: redundancies and repetitions abound, along with unfortunate contradictions. This was hard to avoid because David structured her bio not chronologically but thematically, so some things are bound to pop up more than once, but a better editor would have made her cut the book by at least a third. Still, those interested in the politics and inner workings of the post-WWII French literary scene will find plenty to discover in there.

Girls on page

The new book by Jonathan Coe, The Rain Before It Falls, will surprise fans of previous efforts such as The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle. First of all, this satirical specialist of blokes has written a "women's novel" he says was inspired by Rosamond Lehmann; second, the narrator is an elderly lesbian. Not being a fan of the "write about what you know" school (a novel is fiction, after all), I enjoy it when writers step out of their comfort zone—in this particular case, when a straight man writes a good lesbian character. And Rosamond (yes, she is named Rosamond) is a good character, in both senses of the word: She is a good soul and a good person to have around in a book.

In The Rain Before It Falls, bad things happening to good people (and bad things happen to bad people, too), but one of the book's central conceits is the senselessness of not letting go. Rosamond never recovers from her two-year affair with Rebecca, and she never gets over her childhood friendship with Beatrix either—even when it becomes clear Beatrix is manipulative, selfish and uncommonly mean. The self-defeating trajectory of Rosamond's life is what makes the book so deeply melancholy.

I've also polished off Marie-Dominique Lelièvre's fascinating new biography of Françoise Sagan (pictured), Sagan à toute allure. It's actually elegantly written and far from your standard American or English bio loaded with meaningless details such as "Monday, March 15, 1973, was a rainy day, the stock exchange was down, he was wearing green socks, etc." Instead, Lelièvre trims the fat and captures what Sagan meant in her times and how she operated—this should be what all bios are about, but they rarely are, drowning those insights under an avalanche of "I did my homework" minutiae.

And the author has a quirky way with background detail. For instance, Sagan was in a terrible, life-changing (it led to her being hooked to drugs) car accident when she was 22 or so, but instead of getting into mindnumblingly boring medical details, Lelièvre talks to J.G. Ballard about the meaning of car crashes! Another fun one: Sagan's writing was often described by reviewers are being light, casual, transparent; Lelièvre takes some of her books to Jean-Louis de Boissieu, a Sorbonne grammarian, so he can analyze the vocabulary and sentence construction. He finds them a lot more sophisticated and complex than Sagan was ever given credit for, pointing out that when they wrote about her books, reviewers actually described Sagan's life rather than her literary worth.

American readers may find Lelièvre's often-elliptical approach frustrating but I find it challenginly cool. And there's plenty of great goss, like the fact that Sagan had an affair with Ava Gardner, or her love story with Peggy Roche, fashion editor at French Elle, or the story that her dog Banco OD'ed after sniffing one of her coke-saturated handkerchiefs. Oddly, no mention whatsoever of Annick Geille, editor in chief at French Playboy in the 1970s, who recently published Un amour de Sagan, a memoir about her lengthy affair with the novelist.

Flaubert's parrot

I guess that'd be me, 'cause I just finished reading his novel Sentimental Education and can't resist quoting a couple of passages. (I read the book in French but am borrowing from the Penguin Classics translation—who has time to translate Flaubert for fun?)

The scene takes place at a party, with guests whipping themselves up in a frenzy of fun. Suddenly, Flaubert opens up to an abyss with suggestive economy:

"The Sphinx was drinking brandy, shouting at the top of her voice, and throwing herself around like a madwoman. Suddenly her cheeks puffed out, and, unable to hold back a mouthful of blood, she put her napkin to her lips, then threw it under the table.
Frédéric had noticed.
'It's nothing!'
And when he urged her to go home and take care of herself, she answered slowly:
'Oh, what's the use? It it wasn't this, it would be something else. Life isn't much fun.'
He shivered, in the grip of a glacial melancholy, as if he had just caught sight of whole worlds of misery and despair, a charcoal stove beside a trestle-bed, corpses in the morgue, in their leather wrappings, cold water from the tap running through their hair."

And here's a description of the blah-blah during the at-home day of a wealthy woman:

"The luxury of the setting underlined the triviality of the conversation; although the subject-matter was not as stupid as the manner of its delivery, which was aimless, lifeless, and inconsequential. Here were men with experience of the world—a former minister, the curé of a large parish, two or three high government officials—yet they confined themselves to the most threadbare commonplaces. Some looked like tired old dowagers, some like crafty horse-dealers; and old men displayed wives who might have been their granddaughters."

Plus ça change…

Foreign tongues

Listening to France Inter radio recently, I learned that Mimi Perrin, the founder and lead member of les Double Six vocal group in the 60s, also translates books from English into French. The revelation came in a discussion of the latest John Le Carré novel, which just came out in France; turns out Perrin and her daughter Isabelle have been Le Carré's regular French translators for the past 20 years.

What's fascinating about this is that les Double Six specialized in translation as well: the transformation of an instrumental jazz solo into a vocal one, with lyrics. Known as vocalese, this exercise has been made famous by Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, and the Manhattan Transfer, and les Double Six was the best-known (the only?) French act specializing in it.

Another fun tidbit is that during its short existence (1959–64), les Double Six featured a great roster of singers, including Ward Swingle (founder of the Swingle Singers), Eddy Louiss (usually known for his piano and organ playing), Bernard Lubat (also a drummer) and Christiane Legrand (sister of composer Michel, and the singing voice of Delphine Seyrig in Jacques Demy's crackpot musical Donkey Skin).

French is usually perceived as a language that's rhythmically unwieldy because it lacks a tonic accent as strong and adaptable as the one in, say, English. Since Perrin was the one writing the Double Six lyrics, she was accutely aware of that problem as she formed sentences that could flow in a way similar to a flute, trumpet or sax solo. You can check out how she did by "Rat Race" and "Meet Benny Bailey" (two Quincy Jones composition, with the Double Six adaptation based on Count Basie recordings), and Gershwin' s"Fascinating Rhythm" (based on a Stan Kenton recording).

Les Double Six "Rat Race" (Perrin's sings Billy Mitchell's sax solo)
Les Double Six "Meet Benny Bailey" (Christiane Legrand sings Frank Wess' flute solo, Perrin sings Henry Coker's trombone solo)
Les Double Six "Fascinating Rhythm" (Claude Germain sings Frank Rosolino' trombone solo, Eddy Louiss sings Bill Holman's sax solo, Perrin sings Bill Perkin's sax solo, Louis Aldebert sings another Perkins solo)

Le It man

Few contemporary French writers get translated in the US, and even fewer have any kind of name recognition. Michel Houellebecq is one of them. For better or for worse, he's been the It man of modern French lit for more than a decade now: His novels are best-sellers, he gets sued for racist language (he once famously stated that Islam is a stupid religion), he asks a NY Times reporter if she'll take off her clothes, etc. Not only did he record an album on which he sang/spoke some of his own poems, set to music by (him again!) Bertrand Burgalat, but he toured it on French beach resorts one summer.

For his latest project, Houellebecq is directing the film adaptation of his last book, 2005's The Possibility of an Island (one I wasn't crazy about initially, but which had won me over by the time it hit its desperate post-apocalyptic ending). Shooting is about to wrap up in Spain, where Houellebecq resides. Benoît Magimel plays the lead, and Arielle Dombasle is also on board, but I'm more intrigued by some of the behind-the-scenes contributors: Rem Koolhas is slated to design the remnants of a futuristic city, while conceptual artist Rosemarie Tröckel and curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist are working on made-to-measure dioramas—kinda like the ones at the Museum of Natural History, but, you know, arty. Also intriguing: Houellebecq claims that one of his visual influences is Kraftwerk circa Robots.

MP3 Michel Houellebecq "Paris-Dourdan" (from Présence Humaine, 2000)
Michel Houellebecq "Derniers Temps" (from Présence Humaine, 2000)

Still reading

My review of Ana Castillo's novel, The Guardians, in the Los Angeles Times is up. Quite a good yarn that book is, too. Actually it's been slowish on the arts front lately so I've been doing quite a bit of reading, and I'll post an update on that as soon as possible. Scoop: None of that reading involves anything by Khaled Hosseini.

Coe dependent

I'm only halfway through Jonathan Coe wonderful novel The Rotters' Club but I feel the urge to post about it. The book, which is set in 1970s Birmingham, is so funny that I find myself laughing out loud—one of the teenage characters writes a spot-on review of Tales of Topographic Ocean for instance, and a dinner party drenched in a horrific-sounding cheap wine called Blue Nun is described with deadly accuracy.

But like many English filmmakers, Coe is at his best on class and sexual politics, especially since he's fully aware of the inconsistencies of lefties when it comes to gender issues (the portrayal of a philandering union steward is particularly good). The way he can mix moods, going from comic to pained in a sentence, is downright masterful.

The use of musical references is also impressive in that unlike in too many American novels, they are not used as either decorative props or lazy shorthand to describe characters. Instead, they're only one among the many elements that help shade personalities. One boy enjoys bombastic Yes-style prog; another, who seems to be the Coe stand-in, discovers English eccentrics like Henry Cow and the Canterbury-affiliated Hatfield & the North, whose 1975 album was titled…The Rotters' Club (Coe actually wrote an affectionate article about that hairy scene last year.) A third embraces punk (his trip down to the London office of NME, where he gawks at the cubicle shared by Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, is a hoot). But Coe goes further—when that third boy, Doug, serendipitously attends an early Clash gig, the revelation isn't so much the feverish pogoing but his meeting with a posh girl who introduces him, a 16-year-old Brummie "prole," to the delights of upper-class life.

While I'm tearing through the book, I also don't want it to end. Fortunately there's more in store, since in 2004 Coe published a sequel, The Closed Circle, taking place in the Blair years.

It's the context, stupid

Just finished reading two novels by Irène Némirovsky, written (obviously) before her posthumously published and megasuccessful Suite Française. "Reading" is a bit of an understatement, actually, as I tore through the books in a couple of days.

Quite a few Némirovsky books have been reprinted over the past two years, and not knowing which I should go for, I picked La Proie (1938) and Le Maître des Âmes (1940) solely based on their being affordable paperbacks. They turned out to have similar narrative arcs that describe the rise and fall of ambitious men. In La Proie, poor Jean-Luc Daguerne impregnates his girlfriend, the daughter of a rich banker; their marriage marks the beginning of his climb to a still-unsatisfying top. The portrayal of affairiste France in the 1930s is appropriately acidic, confirming Némirovsky's status as a clear-eyed social portraitist.

More problematic in light of the accusations of antisemitism that have plagued Némirovsky's oeuvre recently, Le Maître des Âmes is about a crook of a doctor, Dario Asfar, who happens to be a "métèque" (a common word in the 1930s for dark-skinned people) from some unspecified Eastern European country. While Némirovsky is entitled to the novelist's license to create morally ambiguous characters, she showed singular lack of judgment by publishing the novel in serial form in Gringoire, an antisemitic, anticommunist, pro-Franco, pro-Mussolini weekly magazine. She contributed pseudonymously to Gringoire through the 1930s and early ’40s, which strikes me as odd since after the success of her novel David Golder in 1929, she should not have had problems finding outlets, and the politics of Gringoire weren't a secret to anybody with two eyes and half a brain.

In their introduction, Némirovsky biographers Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt contort themselves to explain away her choices, both in terms of publishers and in terms of her depicting Dr. Asfar in ways that would feed French xenophobia and antisemitism—two unsavory traits that really did not need to be encouraged, particularly in the early 1940s. I mean, it's easy to say that Le Maître des Âmes isn't xenophobic compared to Céline's Bagatelles pour un massacre: What could possibly be? I do think Némirovsky's book works because it is uncompromising fiction, written by a masterful stylist (the descent into Asfar's tortured psyche is detailed with equal parts elegance and harshness). What trips me is the context in which it was published: Its first readers would have taken it not as a piece of art but as something reinforcing their worst prejudices.

To stay in the mood, here are a few French tunes from the late ’30–early ’40s. Suzy Solidor was a bodacious blonde, famous for her sailor/sea songs and (among those in the know) her sapphic conquests. Alas, her attitude during WWII wasn't beyond reproach, and she was said to be the mistress of a high-ranking Nazi officer. Perhaps she shared Arletty's attitude: When the actress was accused of bedding a German during the war, she is said to have replied "My heart is French but my ass is international!"

MP3 Suzy Solidor "Sous tes doigts" (1936, cowritten by regular Piaf collaborator Marguerite Monnot)

Though the Nazis thought jazz was a decadent art, it was never officially banned in occuppied France and so Irène de Trébert, aka Mademoiselle Swing, was able to have a thriving career singing in big bands, notably that of Raymond Legrand (who happened to be her lover). When the war ended she got a slap on the hand and was forbidden to perform for ten months; she tried to resume her career in 1946, but with little success. Legrand, who regularly played the collaborationist Radio-Paris and toured Germany in 1942 (bad idea!) was blacklisted; he's now mostly remembered, if at all, as the father of composer Michel Legrand.

MP3 Irène de Trébert "Je t'aime" (1942; written by Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grapelli). Backed by the Marius Coste Orchestra.
MP3 Irène de Trébert "Swing Reverie" (another Reinhardt tune, recorded in 1942). Backed by the Raymond Legrand Orchestra.

Field research

In an article in New York magazine, Peter Carey talks about teaching creative writing in New York. Toward the end, he mentions what some of his students are up to:

"So that student over there, the one who arrived from San Francisco, is now working as a research assistant with Jonathan Franzen. (…) And there is A. working for Toni Morrison, and V. working with Salman Rushdie. And C. who went to work with Richard Price and found him a psychic and a haunted house on the Lower East Side. E. researched for Siri Hustvedt. G. worked with Patrick McGrath and collected information on spinal injuries for the book he is now just finishing. The list of mentors goes on and on."

What I wonder is: Why aren't these acclaimed writers doing their own research? What do they have to do other than research and write, write and research? They don't have day jobs to worry about. It's not like they have to pull lobster shifts proofreading at law firms. They may teach creative writing, but honestly, how much of their time can it possibly consume? Reaserching actually is part of the writing process, and getting Cliffs Notes from MFA students can't be the same as immersing yourself into a topic. As for the MFA students themselves, they should use the $60,000 in tuition to travel, live, read—above all, read—instead of learning how to craft innocuous prose in windowless college rooms.

Storytelling and scheduling

My review of Rebecca Barry's "novel in stories," Later, at the Bar, is now in The Los Angeles Times.

Completely unrelated: In today's New York Times, Sharon Waxman writes about how Disney cannily scheduled the international release of the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. "Disney took care to open the film on Wednesday in France, when children are out of school, and on Thursday in Germany, when films traditionally open in that country."

Fine, except that films traditionally open on Wednesdays in France, so Disney taking care to open its new barrel o' bilge on that day wasn't exactly out of the ordinary. In both countries, the movie came out on regular opening days. So what's the point, exactly?

Pink is the new black

The upcoming New York Times Book Review includes Marilyn Stasio's regular roundup of crime and noir fiction. I don't always agree with Ms. Stasio's taste but whatever, that's par for the course. But what really stopped me in my tracks is a sentence in her review of Kjell Eriksson's The Cruel Stars of the Night (which, incidentally, is sitting in my "to read" pile). The novel seems to be rather grim: Stasio talks about "the autumnal melancholy that pervades the story," while a detective acknowledges "a nauseating feeling of indifference." No surprise here: We're talking not only about a crime novel, but about a Swedish crime novel.

But then Stasio muses, "Why genre readers are tickled by such morbid views of suffering humanity is anyone's guess."

Come again? Stasio wasn't describing, say, gratuitous scenes of torture by that Thomas Harris hack but a cop who doesn't just have a blues day, but an entire blues month. Ms. Stasio, the title of your column, which you have been writing for years, is "Crime." We indeed may be talking about genre here, but it's not romance or science fiction—it's not called noir for nothing. Suffering humanity is the name of the game, and acting all prim about it strikes me as either hypocritical or deluded. Should crime books have more happy endings? Should they be either about cats or cowritten by them? Would the inclusion of recipes help? What about even more cutesy bios for the lead characters, like a nun-turned-investigative mechanic, a snooping golf pro or a sleuthing chiropractor? And should these characters be put on a solid diet of antidepressants, lest they give the readers a bummer of a ride?

And what about that use of "tickled," as if readers of noir fiction found its often-pitch-black worldview sexy? Of course readers get tickled, but Stasio gets the source of that tickling wrong. Or should we assume that someone who's been reviewing genre lit for the Times for years isn't, on some level, tickled—not by violence but by clever plotting and well-drawn characters? I, for one, certainly hope she is.