Buy the Book - Again!
Part 2 of our attempt to circumvent the censors and fly in the face of literary convention by having our own Anton Alterman interview himself.
Herewith we resume our descent into the opinionated literary world of the (insufficiently) noted author of this column, The Lamppost. The unsolicited self-interview began in our previous post; please see that for additional revelations about the author's twisted views on modern literature.
Interview questions courtesy of, or apologies to, the NY Times Book Review "By the Book" column, the latest of which has by now dried out on the author's radiator after being delivered a sopping wet mess on Saturday morning. Editorial "we" courtesy of The Lamppost.
Also, stay tuned for tomorrow’s edition, in which we complete the present journey, like a dog that finally catches its tale (sic).
What's your favorite book no one else has heard of?
"No one else" here is an example of what we sophisticated writers call hyperbole, also known to competent English speakers as "exaggeration"; for if I knew of a book that literally no one else had heard of it would have to be my book. (Therewith I abandon the attempt at an editorial "we".) Yet even that might not do it. For my (so far) unpublished (because unfinished) novel has come to the attention of at least one individual: my wife, who refers to it as another one of my "vanity projects”. What does she know?
But I can try to satisfy the spirit of the question. Take for example the NY Times publications The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story and Bill Cunningham On the Street: Five Decades of Iconic Photography. No one who doesn't read the NY Times has ever heard of these books, because contrary to what the editors believe, the former is not an important work of history but an attempt to repurpose known facts to fit a political agenda (but that is a whole 'nother Lamppost article), and the latter is not the work of an important photographer but a guy who took snapshots of people on Fifth Avenue and at society functions. These are my favorite books that almost no one else has heard of, not because I like them, but because I can't think of too many other books that come close to that description.
However, I can think of a couple that more people should have heard of than most likely have: the two self-published novels by the rock critic Ira Robbins. The subject of Kick It Till It Breaks is similar to that of Phillip Roth's American Pastoral (see below under "Overrated, not good, sucks, waste of time, boring and stupid") – it is in fact the book that Roth might have written if he were capable of actually writing rather than spitting out words like watermelon seeds. Marc Bolan Killed in Crash, based on Ira's considerable experience as a journalist covering the British punk rock scene, is possibly even better. It also contains more British slang than the combined total of all books published by Cambridge and Oxford.
Full disclosure: Ira and I were childhood friends and he published one of my pieces in the online version of the journal he has edited since the 1970's, Trouser Press. But I am completely objective and never let things like that cloud my judgment.
Perhaps this is the place to hold forth on the decrepit, moribund, unsavory, demoralizing state of American literary institutions today – possibly even worse than the state of the popular musical institutions that Ira has spent much of his life writing about. You go through a creative writing program today to learn the rules that you must obey so that the young, inexperienced interns who will be the first to judge your work can have bullet points to measure against your writing, and when you fail, in their estimate, to live up to these formulaic, academic, not to mention social, requirements they can feel smart about dismissing it and throwing it on the sludge, I mean, slush pile:
"The lead character doesn't have agency." "What is her motivation?" "The author used two semicolons and an elipsis on the same page – in a short story!" "I don't like the sexual politics here, maybe the author has a problem with their mother." "The author mixes her metaphors." "The ending is too contrived." "The author tells us what he should show us." "There are too many non-sequiturs, and isn't it a lovely day?"
Not a single one of the authors who created and carried on the institution of fiction before the mid-20th century ever went to an academic writing program, and at least half the works of literature that made today's creative writing graduates want to become writers in the first place would be tossed onto the smudge pile if they had to go through the modern literary selection process.
But I digress. Which I meant to do, so shoot me. And by the way, if you do read Ira's novels please don't tell anyone, otherwise word will get around, they will become much better known, and I will not be able to provide this answer when the Times actually calls on me for this column.
What's the best book you ever received as a gift?
I assume you are not asking me to consider whether The Letters of Sean O'Casey was better than Danny and the Dinosaur, but rather, which book that I received as a gift was the best gift. I do wish you illustrious gatekeepers of the literary world would learn to ask questions clearly. Besides, how do you know anyone gives me books as gifts? Certainly not my wife. (See below.)
My uncle Norman, a highly accomplished aeronautics engineer, gave me a couple of astronomy books as a kid, which led to an unsuccessful stint as an astronomy major in college. I never regretted it, though, and continue to harbor illusions of being the guy who proves that there is no such thing as "dark matter". Or maybe finds a meteorite in his backyard. (Attention, those who long for things to worry about in this otherwise placid world: scientists assert that there is a decidedly non-zero chance of being killed by a meteorite.)
Dad was not a great accumulator of capital, shall we say, and after he passed away about all I got was books. They weren't exactly a gift, and a lot were brittle or outdated or for other reasons headed for the street. The rest I divided up with my equally literary siblings. One, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico by Bernal Diaz, 1st Edition, I returned to the Brooklyn Public Library exactly thirty years after the due date. But I did discover a couple of reprints of underground Victorian journals, way up in a closet, where kids are not expected to go while you are alive. Now that was a gift! The gifts you cherish most are the ones you would not have bought for yourself, and I certainly would have been too shy to walk up to a counter with these literary gems. Dad was on the front lines in World War 2 and a man of great courage. Then again… could it be Mom who bought them? I never thought to ask her.
The Long Island Philosophical Society presented me with the Emerson collection mentioned in the previous post, which made me feel less ignorant about the work of that important American philosopher. His religious Platonism is not for me, but he sure could write – better, in fact, than 99% of the philosophers alive today. Hell, better than 99% of all writers alive today.
And for my 60th birthday someone (if I could remember who it wouldn't have been such an appropriate gift) gave me Dr. Seuss's You're Only Old Once, a brilliant take on old age and his only book written specifically for adults - though any adult who cannot appreciate his children's books, even after 25 or more readings, needs to have their head attached better than the Collapsible Frink.
Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?
Well, those Victorian journals I mentioned certainly promoted bonding.
On the other hand, all my literary friends abandoned me when they found out I didn't like Richard Ford. I won some back when I said I didn't like Philip Roth either. Finally, after I opined that John Cheever was overrated we all went out to a bar and ordered a round of Old Fashioneds.
What came between me and my wife wasn't any one book, but thousands. You see, she doesn't read many books, certainly not in English, and least of all on paper; and she thinks bookcases are an eyesore and a waste of space that could be occupied by a small vase on a sleek white stand, or better yet, nothing. So, with a wall of built-ins on the second floor, supplemented by shelves over the doorways and smaller book tables here and there and an additional large IKEA bookcase in the extra bedroom, and four more bookcases in the basement, as well as one CD rack partially repurposed for some narrower titles, she thinks I have more than enough books and resolutely refuses to let me install the two additional basement bookcases for which I have already cut the wood.
I have tried to reason with her, asserting that however awful the books might look on the shelf, the 16 boxes in which they are now stored look worse. No luck; she assures me that if I put up one more bookcase she will move out. So far I have not had the courage to test her resolve.
What's the last book that made you laugh, or cry, or want to shave your head and move to the South Pole?
All memoirs by people planning a political campaign make me laugh, and I don't even have to read them to enjoy the humor. Where else can you find 200 pages of pompous, self-serving bullshit dressed up as serious autobiography and social criticism? Other than that, I must admit that one or two of the Harry Potter books had me and my daughter in stitches at the snarky backstabbing between the characters. Which may show how depraved my sense of humor is, and why you should never take my reading recommendations seriously.
A book that made me cry? The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and the film even more, when George Méliès walks in and realizes his secret past life has been discovered. Does this make sense? If not, I can't explain it to you. Raw emotion opens the tear ducts, but sadness rarely does it for me, except maybe in Italian neo-realist films. The recognition of artistic triumph beyond all reasonable expectations releases my emotions. There must be a shrink somewhere who can figure out what happened to me.
Describe your ideal reading experience
Medium to long hike through a dense forest, up to an overlook where a great canyon spreads out before me. I look down at the hawks circling below, find a flat rock, and, having uncharacteristically remembered to bring a soft pad or inflatable pillow for my butt, sit there and crack open the novel or short story collection I am currently working my way through. It's lightweight, but only in physical mass, of course. In fact, it's a hermetic, modernist work, and getting through one paragraph might justify taking a coffee break. Yet I have already turned one page, and I'm thinking it is only 2:00 in the afternoon on a not unbearably hot summer day, so I have tons of time to make some literary progress out here in the wild.
No, I don't. I begin to calculate how long it took me to get up there, when the sun is going to set behind the east-facing side of the mountain I have to climb down, and the likelihood that if I am still in the forest after nightfall with my meagre survival skills I will perish and my body will never be found except for a few ribs with bits of meat left on them. I quickly tuck the book in my backpack, take a swig of water, pull the plug on the inflatable, and down I go, musing on the fact that reading was my main purpose in coming up here. Maybe next time a short hike to a swimming pool?
Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?
Yes, all of them. I could be doing something that makes money. I could be having sex, or more realistically, fantasizing about doing so – though the Victorians are helpful in that regard. I could also be helping to save the world from a cabal of rightwing demagogues who are going to censor all the books I haven't read yet. And here I am wasting precious time looking at words on a page. Oh, the guilt!
Truth is, few books so bad that I might feel guilty about reading them have a fighting chance of making it into my general vicinity. But I will acknowledge one kind of "guilty pleasure": that of looking at physics books loaded with equations that I will probably never understand.
I feel guilty about that because someone might see me with one of these and think that I do understand it, and start trying to have a coherent conversation with me about about lattice gauge theory or fermion scattering or whatever, and I would have to endure the look of disappointment on their face when my most erudite contribution to the discussion was, "Er, sure." This is much worse than being caught with a Victorian journal.
Do you prefer books that reach you emotionally or intellectually?
Thank you for recognizing that unlike every other human being born on this planet, my emotions and intellect are completely divorced. Therefore, when something reaches me emotionally I utterly fail to understand it. And when it reaches me intellectually, I don't feel anything at all about it. So I regret that I cannot answer this question; I mean, I know I cannot answer this question. I just don't know that I regret it, or regret that I don't know it. Next question, please?
Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?
Pig Latin. There are so few novels about Pig Latin. I on't-day ow-knay i-whay.
But there is one thing I wish fewer authors would write about: themselves. If you look carefully at the "literary fiction" of our time you find that again and again, writers are writing about writers. About fiction writers, journalists, professors, critics, or other allegedly creative types who are nothing but stand-ins for themselves.
Why? Who cares about the lives of writers? They get up, make a cup of coffee or tea, grab a bagel, and sit over a keyboard for the next three hours, banging away until they get stuck. Then they pour themselves a drink, if they haven't already done so, and go for a long walk or hang out in a coffee shop. When they get back, exhausted from the exercise, they make a sandwich, pour themselves a drink, sit on the couch and read. Maybe a shower, feed the dog (ever since Steinbeck writers are required to have dogs), reluctantly pay a few bills, if they can. Order dinner, and if the mood strikes them, prepare for the class they have to teach tomorrow, but only if the mood strikes them. Then head for their favored nocturnal milieu, the writer's bar or lounge, where they commiserate with other writers about how tough it is to be a writer, and somebody else can pour the drinks for a change.
Who really gives a damn about the lives of writers? Or professors – believe me, a story about an anthropology professor is a story about a writer in disguise. A story about a painter is a story about a writer who hallucinates. A story about a lawyer is a story about a frustrated writer who settles for stitching together legal briefs. But there are no stories about lawyers that you would want to read anyway.
Why this authorial solipsism? Why are writers so self-obsessed? Because that's all writers today know about. They did not fight in the Spanish Civil War or work on a whaling ship or travel to the Congo. Instead of accumulating the kind of experience that is worth writing about, they march off to a college writing program. After graduating they send off manuscripts to at least 100 journals before they get a story published, which still requires a former fellow student who knows the editor to put in a good word for them, or a desperate call to a respected author who once taught a writing workshop they attended and has a ceremonial position on the board of some 3rd-tier journal. After years of these efforts they manage to get an agent – not a publisher, not an editor, just an agent, one who has just graduated from maybe Amherst or Northwestern and landed an internship. At last they are on their way to a consumately boring life of writing stories that take years to polish and earn them $50, and books that get miniscule advances if any and make less in royalties than The New Avocado Cookbook, 3nd Ed. They pay the rent by teaching others how to claw their way to the same dull life, and by doing the occasional book tour, where they read out loud, badly but with undeniable authenticity, from what is already in print.
And then, having finally achieved success, they write a memoir about their troubled childhood.
(Tune in next time for the exciting denouement, a French word that means ending, as we deliver Part 3 of this exciting serial interview.)