"The world is peopled by ghosts."

"The Office Girl," a short story by Joe Meno.

On keeping things separate

Image via ThomasMoronic.

I had with me a copy of Le Rouge et le noir. He riffled the pages. Do you like this?

Yes. I read it first in Arabic. Now I'm rereading it in French. And I added: Julien's family life is like my own in some ways. One thing in particular is almost identical: Monsieur Sorel bound out his son Julien to the mayor of the town for three hundred francs a year, and my father rented me for thirty pesetas a month to a hashish-smoker who ran a cafe in the quarter of Ain Khabbaz where we lived in Tetuan.

I see your trouble. And you're not the only one. You'll never find beauty in literature that way. You shouldn't read with that sort of thing in mind, with the idea that the life of one or another protagonist has something to do with your own life. You have to keep things separate. Your life is nobody else's life.

-Jean Genet in Tangier by Mohamed Choukri, translated by Paul Bowles (page 7)

Exercise

by ReadingWritingLiving.

L.A. Weekly on golden anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death

Judith Freeman on the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death:

Chandler understood how loneliness would become our new modern disease, the condition of a whole culture. It’s the source of much of the controlled, half-poetical emotion that lies at the heart of Marlowe and of every Chandler story.

Joe Meno

Can we please talk about Joe Meno for a few minutes?

I've posted before about his novel Demons in the Spring. I once recommended The Boy Detective Fails to a stranger at the Brooklyn Book Fair, and he loved it so much he wrote to me to say thank you. I dragged my roommate to see Meno read at the KGB on his Spring book tour, and she loved his reading so much she bought the whole book even though it was $27 in hardcover. An extremely thoughtful person I am lucky enough to know bought me a copy of Tender as Hellfire for Christmas and I recently finished it in an airport after my flight was canceled.

Here is what Meno always gets right: the complex and unusual way that characters think. There is a level of detail that he strikes that few authors can match. He never underestimates his readers. However, Meno's first novel is messy and unedited. It's a testament to his talent that his characters endure this, that they are as resonant as they are; that Val, the diner waitress whom Dough worships, can appear beautiful, disgusting, and tragic all at once.

Meno really hits his stride in The Boy Detective Fails, a book that combines the traditional with the modern. This book makes me think of The Royal Tenenbaums - it's equally dark and funny. Meno uses the traditional format of a children's mystery book, and practically opens with an unsatisfactory ending. He asks, what happens next? What does a famous detective do when he's past his prime? What happens when the source of your fame and identity unravels, and you feel it's all your fault? Meno weaves in a secret code on the bottom of each page, using ROT-13 (the geek term for A = 13, used in primitive computer coding). Not to mention the stories in Demons in the Spring, which are simultaneously heartbreaking and hysterical. The illustrations in this volume are the icing on the cake, making the book a valuable art object as well as a polished work of fiction.

You can read an interview with him on Bookslut, or listen to an interview with him on NPR.

He's also an excellent reader, and an amiable person. I believe firmly that he's got the right balance of traditional story-writing and the DavidFosterWallace/DaveEggers generation quirkiness to endure the weight of the recession.

I cannot tell you how excited I am to read his upcoming novel from W. W. Norton, titled The Great Perhaps.

His short story "An Apple Could Make You Laugh" was published in Ninth Letter, and you can listen to it read aloud on Ninth Letter's website. I would like to record this story aloud. I would like to read you, Dear Reader, a short story each week. I will think about this idea when I am back in New York with my (former boss's) Mac.

Honestly, he's worth it. Look into Demons in the Spring or The Boy Detective Fails when you next reach a bookstore. I'll let you know how Hairstyles of the Damned is when I've finished it - hooray!

Even the critics are stumped

Earlier this fall, I saw John Ashbery read at the 92nd Street Y.

I wish I'd read this piece by Meghan O'Rourke first.

Video from 4th Estate

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

(Thanks, Gene.)

Hadn't occurred to me that this was kind of dorky, but

Hey, there's a Literary Pub Crawl in the city tonight.

Rivka Galchen and Sarah Manguso are reading at the R Bar for FSG. I just finished The Two Kinds of Decay, and am pretty psyched to see her (even though it's a terrifically painful book).

Hope you're having a good weekend.

Little Nadia's not in peril

Pleasure literacy, academic literacy, cultural literacy and informational literacy are all different genres, and we should welcome new sources with delight.

The Times has a nice letters-to-the-editor section upon online reading, in response to Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

My thoughts, in case you were interested, are as follows: Yes. Yes, you're really reading.

Differently, maybe; in less depth, sure. Should we be worried about the moral decline in America? Somehow I'm not convinced.

What I Want From My eReader: (A Wishlist)

The Kindle is about to be born again, and plenty of people have thoughts for it. I can't blame them. Newspapers are falling apart, book reviews are scarcely published in print, and magazines are investigating the future of eInk, debuting sex columns, and jabbing on another with their covers.

All right, Sony, Amazon, and whoever else is working. Here is what I, your future consumer, desire from the product you are trying to create:

1) Access to the OED, Wikipedia, Google, JStor, and YouTube.

I want to be able to touch a word and bring up articles related to it. But this feature has to be turn-off-able. Sometimes you want to read to connect to people - that's when you read on the internet - and sometimes you want to read to disconnect from everything else - that's when you open a book on the subway. The eReader will have to make both a possibility.

2) Pages you can "turn."

I want to be able to click a corner at the top or bottom of the page to flip forward or flip back.

3) Color, but still those lovely "paper" screens.

Your eyes shouldn't hurt as you read; Amazon got this right. But if you're making a device that allows us on the internet, we have to be able to view the internet for real. Think iPhone.

4) Marginalia.

We should be able to write in the margins of our books, and save the notes. We should also be able to dog-ear pages. I'd love to have a Wikipedia-ish setting where I could access a dialogue within AND outside the text (debating the alternate endings of Great Expectations with other readers). Or view some YouTube interpretations of great books as created by high school students. When I got sick of my honors reading list senior year, I would Google it for a while just to laugh about it. Nothing lights up Beloved like a silent reenactment by some kid's Sims. And nothing makes Benito Cereno quite like Legos. Again, I don't want this feature on ALL the time, but it would be fun to turn on during an all-nighter.



4) Annotated margin notes for an academic setting.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to "log in" to a textbook and read my professor and classmates' notes in the margins. This way professors can assign postings in the margins or on a message board, so students will be able to fully engage with their class as they read.

5) Waterproof pages and an elastic band.

I'm thinking Moleskin 2.0. What if it were pocket-sized, waterproof, and stayed closed with that black elastic band? It would appeal to literate people everywhere, and would gain respect from an older audience. People would see it and get huge technology crushes instantly. It's an aesthetically perfect volume, and connects to a literary history. And when it's closed, it's sealed and safe.

There could be a second one available in the large, slim size for textbooks.

6) Audio technology. Who wouldn't want to hear David Sedaris read his book?

7) Adjustable font size.

8) Paper color that's adjustable. In the mood for papyrus? Water-marked granite? Whatever suits your fancy.

9) Please break away from the prefix "e." Be yourself. Don't be defined by this Appleish internety techno-jargon.

10) This is why I love the idea of eBooks: What if you could purchase short stories for $.99? Literary journals would become more relevant than they have ever been. Just link to short stories by authors next to the authors' names in each search. That way before you buy a book, you can read a short piece to get a sense of tone. When you buy an album on iTunes, you usually buy a single track first. This would be the perfect opportunity to make short stories marketable and relevant.

Okay, Amazon. Please create this device, and maybe by the time you do, I will have a salary to purchase such a device. Thank you! Xoxo, Your Future Consumer