Reading List: November 2009

Despite a decision over two weeks ago to shift the focus of this space, noting has yet happened because (1)I have been busy and stressed, and because (2)I just haven't felt as though I have had anything worth saying. Yet my commitment to the change remains theoretically strong, so hopefully I will spend some time this month writing about interests of mine.

There are several films that fall into the hyperlink cinema genre that I have yet to watch though they sit in my living room, and I have also been pondering the seeming cultural superiority that Star Trek's Federation inhabits yet simultaneously denies, especially as this pertains to the Ferengi and Deep Space Nine. Thoughts on such topics shall, hopefully, be forthcoming.

In November, I completed 5 books and 5 graphic novels:

• The Never-Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• Are the Humanities Inconsequent? by Jerome McGann
• The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite by Gerard Way & Gabriel Ba
• Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
• Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America by Jeph Loeb, et al.
• Green Lantern: Secret Origin by Geoff Johns & Ivan Reis
• Invisible by Paul Auster
• Assignment: Earth by John Byrne
• The Umbrella Academy: Dallas by Way & Ba

Unreserved recommendations for The Umbrella Academy, which is a cross between a typical superhero family and a Wes Anderson movie. Auster's new novel was also decent and a departure from his last few works. However, I was quite disappointed in Chronic City, not because it was bad but because it was just mediocre and I expect better from Lethem. And while Loeb's Captain America story wasn't very good, he did do some interesting things with the layout and using 70s era artwork, with the reduced color scheme, to contrast modern sensibilities in flashback portions of the narrative.

Questions, comments, et cetera, ad nauseum.

Novel Excerpts Disguised as Individual Stories

There are only a handful of authors that warrant me paying full price for a hardcover they day a new book is released, yet Jonathan Lethem is one of those writers. Since his upcoming novel Chronic City has been announced for a few months now, I’ve begun to wonder about its content. More specifically, I’ve begun to wonder about how much of that content I have already read and what such practices might mean for the future of publishing.

It took little searching to find what I believe to be the cover copy from the novel:

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties. Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning.

Perkus's countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.

After reading ‘Ava’s Apartment,’ a short story by Lethem in the latest issue of The New Yorker, I had all but determined that Perkus Tooth would be a major figure. While I enjoyed the story about Perkus in The Book of Other People, which came out last year, I didn’t find this latest story very compelling. Without giving it away, it involves a sort of rejuvenation and change in the man’s mind that one can see easily as being the turning point of a novel. My problem here though is not with these stories, but with so much about the character’s history and arc being established outside the context of the novel, not only reducing suspense but also creating a weird sense of déjà vu when encountering it within the novel itself.

Back in November, Lethem published ‘Lostronaut,’ again in The New Yorker. It is an epistolary story told only by using the letters sent from an astronaut trapped in space. Rather than a standalone story as I had assumed, it appears to be directly from the novel as well.

Back in 2001, I began to come across several stories by acclaimed novelist Tim O’Brien that I had yet to read. Culling them from the websites of a variety of publications, I enjoyed them immensely. Then in July of 2002, I went to B&N on the day his new novel July, July was released and quickly read through it. Imagine my surprise when I had previously digested about half the book, word for word, for free, thus being disappointed on two levels.

All this said, I understand why such things are done. For one, the publishing industry is having some problems, so merely be printing a few stories from an upcoming work of fiction, an author may be able to earn quite a bit of extra money (especially if they are publishing in The New Yorker). From a marketing standpoint this makes sense as well, with samples of a novel going out to a wide audience that otherwise may not have heard about the book. Indeed, this is done every week by someone publishing nonfiction, especially if that nonfiction concerns the Bush Administration or the war in Iraq. And while I accept all this, it still irks me that after waiting two and a half years for another Lethem novel, and about five years for a good Lethem novel, I’m not going to be able to experience the work freshly, and instead will remember just enough to have the situation gnaw at me.

In addition, I would imagine that stories will be pulled from novels even more often in the age of the Kindle and given away for free in the hopes that a reader will like it enough to buy the whole work, much as I predicted might happen with the introductions to a lot of books.

Perhaps I should get over it, and indeed this thought process did lead me into some interesting areas of amateur analysis. I would imagine that come October, you will be able to read my thoughts on this work.

The Ecstasy of Influence

In an attempt to respond to the challenge of creativity, I attempted to create a mash-up of my own this week, using Jonathan Lethem’s essay on copyright and literature to form the basis of the project. Published by Harper’s Magazine in February of 2007, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’ concerns the nature of cultural borrowing among artists, specifically novelists. Nearly every word of the essay is appropriated from another source and cobbled together to form a cohesive whole. Lethem has a lengthy afterward in which he explains where each appropriation came from.

But this is more than a stunt. It’s a passionate salvo in the copyright wars, a crowd of voices coralled together by Lethem to say, basically: without borrowing, stealing, cribbing, remixing, mashing-up, collaging and compiling — without influences great and small, in other words — there is no creating. No hip hop, sure, but also no blues, no Shakespeare, no Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream.’ Everything ‘created’ comes from something else; none of it is new at all.

Yet creating a mash-up of this article with my own thoughts was much more difficult than I had imagined. For one, I am a bit unfamiliar as to how a mash-up really would work in this sort of scenario, so rather than an integrated piece, my response tends to be an annotation of Lethem’s article with thoughts of my own. While I believe I raise some worthwhile points, overall I think the mash-up fails to be its own sort of creation.

The most striking idea that kept coming to the forefront for me was the thin line we as academics use to separate plagiarism from scholarly work. In any essay I may write for class, much less for publication, at least half of the words use are either someone else’s or used to explain the ideas of another person. Certain conventions like quotation marks allow one to escape the charge of plagiarism, but it goes much further. I often will appropriate the methodology of another researcher and apply it to my own research, often with the barest of mentions. Everything I have done as a student/scholar has been based on the previous work of countless others. No one in academia is creating order out of madness; instead, that madness has been shaped into something resembling order for thousands of years and we use this without citation everyday.

While I won’t use this space to rehash all the ideas I shoved into Lethem’s essay, I will take a few moments and discuss another literary mash-up that may speak more directly to the sort of audience that reads this forum, but if you are interested in taking a look at what I’ve done with Lethem’s work, my attempt will be posted in the TRACS site and is available via email for those of you who are interested but lack access.

Announced a few months ago, the upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a literary mash-up of Jane Austen’s famous novel by Seth Grahame-Smith. Here is the description: ‘Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead.’

Grahame-Smith has been reported to use over 85% of Austen’s original text in this work and has already been signed by a publisher for two more works of a similar nature, starting with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. He has also spawned dozens of other authors into trying something similar, including me. However, so far I have some sort of mixture of Jasper Fforde and true mash-up, and my track record on projects leads me to believe that it will never see the light of day.

Lethem’s essay is definitely worthy of your time, especially if you have even the slightest interest in the idea of copyright and how it affects art. As for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I haven’t read it yet, but when I do you can be sure that I will be discussing it here.