The litter in littérateur. Ricky Opaterny on Books, Music, Art, and Sports

2/10/2008

Change Audi A4 B6 ignition coils yourself

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 7:33 pm

ignition_coil.jpg

If you have a B6 platform Audi A4 like I do, you’ve probably experienced the failure of an ignition coil while driving. You know the feeling—you suddenly lose power, the car shakes when you accelerate, and the check engine light flashes. This has happened to me three times in the past five months, including one on the Golden Gate Bridge in December. It happened to me again last Friday on my way to work. And, although it’s no fun and potentially dangerous to be driving when a coil fails, replacing it is a snap. All you need to do is remove the engine cover to access the coils. The only frustrating part is that, unless you have a VAG-COM or some other way to read the CEL code, you’ll need to find the bad coil by replacing one at a time and starting the car until the CEL disappears. Nonetheless, the whole thing can be done in about five minutes, and you’ll save time and about $150 in so-called “labor” costs at the dealer. Honestly, I’m not sure how such a quick procedure can cost so much, but the dealers will get away with what they can. Changing an ignition coil on this car is far easier than changing a headlight or windshield wiper blades. You can buy the coils here for about $30 each.

Giants Super Bowl parade

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 7:09 pm

giants_fan_small.jpg

I made it back to New York last Tuesday morning and caught the end of the Giants Super Bowl victory parade down Broadway. Overheard afterwards on the street was a man asking a police officer, “Officer, do you know at which bar in the City I can find the cheapest beer?”

My favorite things

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 7:04 pm

katespade.jpg

Well, actually, these are Kate and Andy Spade’s favorite things. I recently discovered the “Things We Love” page on KateSpade.info, which contains everything from Moleskine notebooks to the band Architecture in Helsinki to red velvet cake. Of particular interest to me were the French sweets at Laduree and this set of Pantone pens made by Pentel. If anyone knows where to find these pens, let me know!

And, as you may be aware, I’ve long kept a page here on this site of things I recommend.

1/13/2008

Shout Out Louds and Impossible

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 9:32 pm
ourillwills.jpg

I have been listening often to “Impossible” by Shout Out Louds over the past few weeks. Emotionally, it touches similar territory as David Gray’s “Shine,” though on a different level. Anyhow, the point is that right around the four-minute mark of “Impossible,” the song seems to be winding down, but then it returns when you least expected it—just when you thought it was over, it isn’t. I could get into the way that the formal break here in the song echoes its content and question whether you can actually separate form from content, etc., etc., but I’ll leave it at that.

Lorrie Moore on Hillary Clinton

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 9:10 pm

In this weekend’s New York Times, one of my favorite writers, Lorrie Moore, dismisses Hillary Clinton’s appeal as a woman in the 2008 election cycle, asking: “Does her being a woman make her a special case? Does gender confer meaning on her candidacy? In my opinion, it is a little late in the day to become sentimental about a woman running for president.”

Moore continues:

Boys are faring worse [than girls] — and the time for symbols and leaders they can connect with beneficially should be now and should be theirs. Hillary Clinton’s gender does not rescue society from that — instead she serves as a kind of nostalgia for a time when it might have. Only her policies are what matter now, and here — despite some squabbling and bad advice that has caused her to “go negative” — the Democrats largely agree. But inspiration is essential for living, and Mr. Obama holds the greater fascination for our children.

Mr. Obama came of age as a black man in America. He does not need (as he has done) to invoke his grandfather’s life in colonial Kenya to prove or authenticate his understanding of race. His sturdiness is equal to Mrs. Clinton’s, his plans as precise and humane. But unlike her, he is original and of the moment. He embodies, at the deepest levels, the bringing together of separate worlds. The sexes have always lived together, but the races have not. His candidacy is minted profoundly in that expropriated word “change.”

11/11/2007

The amateur athlete

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 9:59 am

When I interviewed Moneyball author Michael Lewis back in September, he mentioned a piece he was working on, which argued thatt college football players should be paid for they create a product that generates a significant amount of revenue for their universities. Growing up, I had a somewhat romatic notion of the amateur athlete who works on and displays his skills, untained by commercial interests. Of course, commercial interests are all over collegiate sports, so why not just call a spade a spade? Lewis writes in today’s New York Times:

College football’s best trick play is its pretense that it has nothing to do with money, that it’s simply an extension of the university’s mission to educate its students. Were the public to view college football as mainly a business, it might start asking questions. For instance: why are these enterprises that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with profits exempt from paying taxes? Or why don’t they pay their employees?

This is maybe the oddest aspect of the college football business. Everyone associated with it is getting rich except the people whose labor creates the value. At this moment there are thousands of big-time college football players, many of whom are black and poor. They perform for the intense pleasure of millions of rabid college football fans, many of whom are rich and white. The world’s most enthusiastic racially integrated marketplace is waiting to happen.

But between buyer and seller sits the National Collegiate Athletic Association, to ensure that the universities it polices keep all the money for themselves — to make sure that the rich white folk do not slip so much as a free chicken sandwich under the table to the poor black kids. The poor black kids put up with it because they find it all but impossible to pursue N.F.L. careers unless they play at least three years in college. Less than one percent actually sign professional football contracts and, of those, an infinitesimal fraction ever make serious money. But their hope is eternal, and their ignorance exploitable.

10/21/2007

Sox win!

Filed under: Baseball,General — Ricky @ 9:15 pm

Just before midnight on the East Coast, the Red Sox secured their 11th ever World Series victory with a convincing victory over the Cleveland Indians. Didn’t David Ortiz look cute with his goggles on, ready to celebrate?

With the Yankees sadly eliminated early this year, I’ve felt free to root for the Red Sox throughout the Cleveland series. There’s nothing like October baseball in the Northeast.

Premium Denim and the Great Gatsby

Filed under: Books,General — Ricky @ 9:07 pm

Last weekend, by chance, I ended up at the Blues Jean Bar in the Marina. They have jeans, jeans, and more jeans. It’s rather impressive. However, I did a little research and it seems that their prices are over retail, so I doubt I would ever buy anything there. I also don’t like the fact that they keep all the jeans behind the “bar,” so you have to ask for everything. One thing I hate when shopping for clothes is interacting with the sales people.

Since last weekend I’ve given myself a minor crash course in premium denim. No, I definitely can’t distinguish the pocket design of one brand from another, but I did find a pair of jeans from AG called Great Gatsby. Being a complete sucker for all things Gatsby, I immediately wanted them. Not only did they bear the Gatsby name, but they also reminded me of another Gatsby-related piece of apparel, the Gatsby shirts from J. Peterman, which I first encountered in the Peterman catalog ten years ago when I was in high school.

However, after thinking about it, the AG jeans just seem downright stupid to me. While the Peterman shirts at least claimed to be inspired by Gatsby—the very shirt that Gatsby wore! the same sort of shirt that he would toss on the floor causing Daisy to weep!—I could never imagine Gatsby wearing AG jeans, not then and not now.

Though I can believe in the Peterman shirts, silly as they—and his whole catalog—may be, I can’t really believe that there’s anything at all Gatsbyesque about the AG jeans. It’s sort of like Moleskine notebooks, where the labels claim that Picasso and Hemingway used them. And, in fact, they actually did use similarly designed notebooks. Dave Eggers and many others actually use Moleskine notebooks themselves, which adds to their appeal. Of course, having the right tools counts for nothing if you don’t know how to use them, but their inspirational power—commercial and exploitative as it may be—also carries a degree of reality.

Weekend notes

Filed under: Baseball,Books,General — Ricky @ 8:35 pm
  • Conversational reading has a fairly sharp piece about one of my favorite literary critics, James Wood.

I don’t think Wood believes there is much value in metaphors like Flaubert’s because as a reader he doesn’t appreciate what use they have in a novel. Wood is comfortable dissecting how an author attaches character traits to realistic people, but when an author tosses in an enigmatic metaphor, Wood finds it too fuzzy, and therefore meaningless. I think, perhaps, if he were better at imagining his way into the psychology of a work, he might better understand the value of metaphors like Flaubert’s.

Esposito seems to go a little over the top to make his point, for, after all, enigmatic metaphor and social commentary doesn’t really matter much without the existing creation in the novel of one real human being.

  • Prompted in part by this New York Times article, I’ve been reading up on recent cancer research. Most articles I’ve read, are, unfortunately, unlinkable (like this one), having come from ridiculously expensive medical journals. One of the recommendations I encountered in the Times is essentially to spend more resources on soi-disant “blue sky” research. One of the places that I became aware of at the beginning of this decade that actually works on this sort of stuff is the Webb-Waring Institute, which operates free of commercial interests.
  • An era ended in New York last week with Joe Torre’s departure from the New York Yankees. The teams from 1996 through 2001 played an essential part in my sense of who I am as an individual—Mo; Jeter; Posada; waking up at obscene hours in France to listen to the 2000 Subway Series; the 2001 playoff games that started on one day and finished the next, ending in October—and I’m rather sad about the end of things for Torre. These letters to the Times sports section express that sadness better than I can right now.

J.D. Drew and the curse of potential

Filed under: Baseball,General — Ricky @ 8:07 pm

J.D. Drew may be the toast of the town in New England after his grand slam yesterday against the Indians, but New York Times and Deadspin blogger Will Leitch writes about how Drew is one of the most disliked players he has ever watched. Leitch notes that “the real reason Drew rankles us so much is that he doesn’t seem to be having much fun. He’s not loafing, exactly, but he roams the diamond with the countenance of a man finishing out the end of a prison term. For all his obvious skills, he is thought to have no passion for the game.”

Drew’s case here seems to raise two questions: one about wasted potential and another about making one’s life’s work something for which one has no passion. But does Drew really have no passion or does he just appear that way? And is that such a bad thing? And what really is the difference? Is Drew simply not a hard worker? I think the sentiment about Drew results from a combination of his not having lived up to his projected potential from the time he was drafted and his apparently blasé demeanor on the field. If the guy had driven in 100 runs this year, would the fans really be all over him? I doubt it, but then again, when you play in front of thousands and thousands of people, performance matters in both senses of the word.

The development round

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 7:45 pm

The New York Times has an editorial today about the 2001 Doha talks and the commitment to making it easier for poor countries to have access to global markets to sell their goods. However, as the Times notes:

The package for the poorest should be improved. At the very least, the duty- and quota-free access to markets in industrial countries should be extended to cover more of the poor countries’ most competitive exports, starting with textiles. Middle-income countries should also offer equivalent open access for exports from the least developed. And rich countries should tightly limit any exceptional subsidies and protections for agricultural products, like sugar and cotton, that poor countries can export.

10/20/2007

The New Yorker’s Arts Issue

Filed under: General,Music — Ricky @ 7:41 pm

Earlier this week, I had lunch with New Yorker writer Alex Ross, whose new book The Rest Is Noise is an excellent history of 20th century classical music. Ross has an article in this week’s New Yorker about how the Internet, commonly held to have had a deleterious effect on the music business, has lead to a revival in the classical music business.

What really struck me in the article is a passage Ross quotes from the blog of pianist Jeremy Denk about the experience of playing Oliver Messaien’s “Quartet for the End of Time”:

Somewhere toward the middle of the last movement, I began to feel the words that Messiaen marks in the part, I began to hear them, feel them as a “mantra”: extatique, paradisiaque. And maybe more importantly, I began to have visions while I was playing, snapshots of my own life (such that I had to remind myself to look at the notes, play the notes!): people’s eyes, mostly, expressions of love, moments of total and absolute tenderness. (This is sentimental, too personal: I know. How can you write about this piece without becoming over-emotional?) I felt that same sense of outpouring (“pouring over”) that comes when you just have to touch someone, when what you feel makes you pour out of your own body, when you are briefly no longer yourself—and at that moment I was still playing the chords, still somehow playing the damn piano. And each chord is even more beautiful than the last; they are pulsing, hypnotic, reverberant . . . each chord seemed to pile on something that was already ready to collapse, something too beautiful to be stable . . . and when your own playing boomerangs on you and begins to “move yourself,” to touch you emotionally, you have entered a very dangerous place. Luckily, the piece was almost over. . . . When I got offstage I had to breathe, hold myself in, talk myself down.

Denk does an excellent job of conveying simultaneously the the way it feels to be overwhelmingly moved by something and the very impossibility of expressing that feeling. Also in this week’s magazine is a relatively interesting piece by Sasha Frere-Jones about why indie rock is so white.

10/18/2007

Orhan Pamuk at the JCC San Francisco

Filed under: Books,General — Ricky @ 9:32 am

pamukforblog.jpg

By chance I discovered that Orhan Pamuk was reading at the JCC in San Francisco last night. Unfortunately, tickets were sold out. And yet, I decided to drive up to the city after work, anyway, to see if I might be able to score a ticket by standing outside on California Street. I happened to also be very hungry during the drive, and couldn’t help but make a sushi stop at Whole Foods before I got to the JCC. By the time I did arrive, it was 8:07 pm, and I was seven minutes late for the event and probably 15 minutes late for my chance at buying a ticket from someone going in with an extra. So, I went over to the ticket booth on a whim, and asked if they had any tickets available. And indeed they gave me one. “How much is it?” I asked, and the girl at the booth told me, “Don’t worry about it.” (Free ticket to see Orhan Pamuk! And I got sushi!)

I absolutely loved the event and am going to see him again tomorrow evening at Stanford. Some of the things I remember from his talk at the JCC, which will be broadcast on November 12 at 8 pm on KALW 91.7 FM:

  • The central work of the writer is spending a lot of time alone in a room, looking inside yourself and putting what you find on the outside.
  • Pamuk paraphrasing Adorno in response to a question about the writer’s position at the border of his culture: “Morality is to never feel at home anywhere.” The actual line from Adorno, which I looked up afterwards: “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”
  • Pamuk’s comments on always falling into depression when he reads the English translations of his work because English is the one other language he understands well enough to be critical of.

Overall, I came away from the event reminded of my love for both writing and reading, and I look forward to finishing up Pamuk’s Other Colors and then diving into Snow.

9/22/2007

I laugh more often now

Filed under: Books,General,Music — Ricky @ 7:09 pm

I attended two shows last week worth mentioned. The first was Peter Bjorn and John at the Wiltern in LA on Monday night. I missed the opening band, the Clientele, but their backing vocalist Mel Draisey joined PB&J for their performance of “Young Folks.” (I’m impressed by the fact that the Clientele quotes Jean Baudrillard on their website!) One thing I just learned about “Young Folks” is that the vocals in the album version are done entirely by the band, i.e. there’s no female singing the part that you think is sung by a female.

Overall, the band had a lot of energy, and I enjoyed the show quite a bit. Their set seemed rather short to me at only 14 songs, including most of Writer’s Block. Writer’s Block was the soundtrack to my summer, and “Young Folks” its theme song. However, it’s the song “Objects of My Affection,” that I’ve been thinking about recently. Its chorus: “. . . and the question is, was I more alive / then than I am now? / I happily have to disagree; / I laugh more often now, I cry more often now, / I am more me.”

In the song, these musings are prompted by encounters with writing and music that had been encountered before in another time. This reminded me of an article I read this summer in the New York Review of Books by Joyce Carol Oates. Her review of the “amnesiac” novels The Raw Shark Texts and Remainder includes this brilliant passage:

The amnesiac’s quest resembles the artist’s quest for inspiration: the artist must be alert to “messages” beneath the seeming disorder of the world, leaving himself open to disponibilité—availability of chance. For it is likely to be a “chance” image or encounter that will unleash a flood of memories, and allow the amnesiac to reclaim the narrative of his life.

I love the idea of the unexpected evocations, but the thing that really got me about this passage was the idea of reclaiming the narrative of one’s life, or as PB&J put it, being “more me.” It seems to me that most of my adult life has been devoted to returning to some narrative track that was set in adolescence. And nothing feels better than knowing that I’m back on it.

I also saw Arcade Fire and LCD SoundSystem play in the rain at Shoreline on Friday night. The venue seemed altogether too large for Arcade Fire; I wish I had been able to see them at someplace like the Greek in Berkeley or the Fillmore in San Francisco. However, I was delightfully surprised by LCD. One of my friends has been telling me about their song “All My Friends” for months, but I didn’t pay much attention to it or to the band, despite having picked up both of their albums. The live version of this song was absolutely amazing, soaring and wonderful. I haven’t been able to stop listening to it since the concert, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s likely the best song I’ve ever heard about the alienation and disappointment of adult life: “You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan / And the next five years trying to be with your friends again.” There’s also a decent cover out there by Franz Ferdinand.

9/19/2007

The world’s greatest gadget

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 9:45 pm

Anthony Lane has a story in this week’s New Yorker about the almost century-long fascination with and fanaticism about Leica cameras and lenses. Like Lane, I share a huge reverence for these things. I think a Leica camera may well be the best, most beautifully made object in the world. Lane writes:

Many people would disagree. Bugatti fans, for instance, would direct your attention to the Type 57 Atlantic, the only car I know that appears to have been designed by masseuses. Personally, I would consider it a privilege to die at the wheel of a Lamborghini Miura—not difficult, when you’re nudging a hundred and seventy m.p.h. and waving at passersby. But automobiles need gas, whereas the truest mechanisms run on nothing but themselves. What is required is a machine constructed with such skill that it renders every user—from the pro to the banana-fingered fumbler—more skillful as a result. We need it to refine and lubricate, rather than block or coarsen, our means of engagement with the world: we want to look not just at it, however admiringly, but through it. In that case, we need a Leica.

My dad was, among other things, a photographer and so I grew up around cameras—Mamiyas, twin lens Rolleiflexes, Canons—but didn’t use a Leica until I lived in New York four years ago, and it truly is different from any other camera I have encountered. It is, like Lane suggests, a way of seeing the world.

Lane continues:

There, if anywhere, is the Leica motto: watch and wait. If you were a predator, the moment—not just for Cartier-Bresson, but for all photographers—became that much more decisive in 1954. “Clairvoyance” means “clear sight,” and when Leica launched the M3 that year, the clarity was a coup de foudre; even now, when you look through a used M3, the world before you is brighter and crisper than seems feasible. You half expect to feel the crunch of autumn leaves beneath your feet. A Leica viewfinder resembles no other, because of the frame lines: thin white strips, parallel to each side of the frame, which show you the borders of the photograph that you are set to take—not merely the lie of the land within the shot, but also what is happening, or about to happen, just outside. This is a matter of millimetres, but to Leica fans it is sacred, because it allows them to plan and imagine a photograph as an act of storytelling—an instant grabbed at will from a continuum. If you want a slice of life, why not see the loaf?

6/5/2007

Letter to the editor in Inc. magazine

Filed under: Books,General,Save Kepler's — Ricky @ 10:48 pm

A couple months ago, Inc. magazine published the second in a series of stories about the revival of Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, CA. I responded with a blog post and a letter to the editor, which appears in the June issue of Inc. and is reprinted below.

It’s telling that Part Two of Bo Burlingham’s story about Kepler’s, a bookstore, doesn’t once mention a single author or book title [“The Plot Thickens,” March]. Burlingham also fails to include views from anyone outside of the store’s management team and its consultants. I couldn’t imagine him writing a similar story about a software company without mentioning an engineer or views from outside industry observers.

If Anne Banta and Clark Kepler want to revive the business, it’s essential to pay more attention to their primary product and how customers relate to it. Banta may know good business, but without knowing good books, her efforts will be futile.

5/27/2007

Why I no longer love Stanford Shopping Center

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 3:56 pm

I used to big a big fan of Stanford Shopping Center going the 1980s. I love the outdoor atmosphere and the selection of shops, which, though not great, is certainly better than most malls. I’m disappointed that some of my old favorite stores are no longer there: Hear Music, Phileas Fogg’s Travel Shop, EB Games, and a sports bookstore whose name I forget. But there are some new, good stores too like Rugby by Ralph Lauren.

I remember the Banana Republic there before the Gap bought it and it looked like a Jeep had crashed into the storefront. That was my favorite store when I was a kid just because of its facade. Speaking of car crashes, that’s exactly why I am no longer a fan of Stanford Shopping Center: This Sunday while I was parked near Max’s, someone hit my car’s rear bumper, valence and left fender causing easily $3,000+ in damage. This person did not leave a note. Leaving a note is something that people really should do if they hit someone else’s car while it’s parked. In fact, I remember hearing that it’s the law to do so.

Things like this have happened to me in the past, and I made sure to park all the way out along Sand Hill, next to a tree on the right and a couple empty spots on the left. I pulled into the middle of the spot and then readjusted, moving my car all the way to the right of the spot—next to the tree—so a car parking on my left wouldn’t hit mine. And yet. It happened anyway.

I called the Palo Alto police to file a police report, but they refused to send an officer because Stanford is on private property. The woman at the police department directed me to Stanford Shopping Center’s private security department.

I went to the directory in the middle of the shopping center and called the security number. The woman who answered the phone there said they would send an officer over. When the officer arrived, he said that he would not be able to issue me a report and that Stanford did not have security tapes that I could see. I didn’t expect there to be a videotape of the incident involving my car because I parked so far away. However, what disappointed me tremendously is that the security officer said that I would need have the court subpoena them if I wanted to obtain access to any sort of report on the incident. Of course, these sorts of reports are generally useful for insurance purposes, but the security service at Stanford proved to be entirely useless. I understand that these people are trying to protect Stanford, but to do so at the great expense and frustration of their customers seems to me self-destructive.

This is one of the worst customer service experiences I’ve had anywhere, especially since I now need to have two of the largest pieces on my Audi repainted, and we all know that once you get something repainted, especially on a German car, it never looks quite the same. I will probably still shop at Stanford, just not as frequently and without any enjoyment, but I certainly won’t be driving there.

If you were at Stanford Shopping Center on Sunday, May 27, 2007, and you happen to have seen the car that hit my silver 2002 Audi A4, please email me. Judging by the paint transfer, it looks like the car that hit me was white. For the other auto detailing enthusiasts out there, I did try to take out the scratches on the bumper with SSR 2.5 and a white pad on my Porter Cable, but wasn’t able to minimize the scratches at all. So, it looks like I’ll be making a trip to the body shop soon.

Here’s a picture of the damage:

stanfordscratches2.jpg

5/14/2007

Can we care about genocide?

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 9:01 pm

Nicholas Kristof has an interesting column in the Times about our inclination to care about individuals rather than groups. He uses a paper by Paul Slovic at the University of Oregon as his starting point. Slovic writes, “Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue individual victims whose needy plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become numbly indifferent to the plight of individuals who are “one of many” in a much greater problem. Why does this occur?”

According to Kristof, Slovic “argues that we cannot depend on the innate morality even of good people. Instead, he believes, we need to develop legal or political mechanisms to force our hands to confront genocide.” Kristof, however, believes that we need a public outcry that can only be promted by media emphasis on a single, suffering, sympathy-inducing Darfurian—or a Darfur puppy.

5/8/2007

Sarah Kerr on Joan Didion

Filed under: Books,General — Ricky @ 9:00 am

Sarah Kerr has a very toughtful consideration of Joan Didion’s nonfiction work in the April 26, 2007, issue of the New York Review of Books. The highlights:

The problem is something like this: A writer writes from a point of view. This point of view is partly a factual matter of physical or social positioning (either she is inside or outside, close to the problem she is writing about or out on the periphery). Further, point of view implies the more abstract positioning of an attitude toward time (does she look to the past for orientation, or the future?). The writer can never totally transcend her point of view. She would be dishonest if she tried to deny it. So how can she stay true to it, while meeting her ethical duty to hazard larger truths about the world?
. . . .
“Style is character”: at several points in her career, Didion has offered this sentence as one of her core beliefs. But what does it mean? Not that you are what you look like, or that what you look like is what counts. Style is the writer’s site of decision-making—literally, the site of actions whose integrity can be measured. It is the place where the self meets the world. And so Didion felt a need to do what for her was, by her own admission, extremely difficult: go out and meet the world.
. . . .
Because Didion’s later reporting on politics, often for this magazine, took a turn generally more critical of a reawakened American conservatism— and critical, also, of paralyzed Democratic accommodation—it’s sometimes been said that at some point in the decades after these first two books she was radicalized, or at least nudged toward something more like traditional liberalism. To argue this is to ignore how much the writing life has always been her central concern, and how much politics has always been a secondary, if all too gift-giving, subject. All along her aimed-for target has been behavior that is in error, above all behavior that resists—and therefore demands from the observing writer—irony.

My favorite line from the piece, and the one with which I identify most, comes from Didion herself in one of Kerr’s epigraphs: “to be paralyzed by a past no longer relevant.” She’s talking, in “Notes from a Native Daughter” about the fate of those in the Sacramento Valley, but also, as usual, about everyone.

The demise of book reviewing

Filed under: Books,General — Ricky @ 8:53 am

The New York Times uses the occasion of the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s eliminating the position of book review editor held by Teresa Weaver to once again cover the dichotomy between traditional newspaper coverage of books and coverage in the blogosphere. Newspaper reviews, for me, occupy a sort of middle-ground: they can never cater to niche interests the way that blogs can while they also don’t provide the sort of in-depth, well-considered review that one might find in the New York Review of Books or the New Yorker. They do, however, provide some level of volume, i.e the sheer number of books they review, and consistency, while covering a broader range of subject matter than any individual blog could.

The Times is especially fond of quoting novelist Richard Ford in the story:

Obviously, the changes at newspaper book reviews reflect the broader challenges faced by newspapers in general, as advertisement revenues decline, and readers decamp to the Internet. But some writers (and readers) question whether economics should be the only driving factor. Newspapers like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution could run book reviews “as a public service, and the fact of the matter is that they are unwilling to,” said Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.

“I think the reviewing function as it is thoroughly taken up by newspapers is vital,” he continued, “in the same way that literature itself is vital.”

4/5/2007

Cody’s Books in San Francisco closing

Filed under: Books,General,Save Kepler's — Ricky @ 10:26 pm

Cody’s Books on Stockton Street in San Francisco will be closing on April 20, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

The 22,000-square-foot store on Stockton Street, between Union Square and Market Street, will close on April 20. It will send 20 percent of its inventory to the last remaining Cody’s location, on Fourth Street in Berkeley.

Cody’s President Andrew Ross, who mortgaged his house to open the San Francisco store, said it has been losing $70,000 a month.

When Cody’s Telegraph location announced its impending closure last spring, Ross asserted than the San Francisco store was doing quite well, and on pace to be profitable. Obviously and sadly, that didn’t happen.

3/20/2007

Blacks in baseball and authors on video

Filed under: Baseball,Books,General — Ricky @ 9:42 pm

Harvey Araton, in response to a question posted by CC Sabathia, meditates on the decline of black players in Major League Baseball over the past couple decades. He writes:

The most recent tabulation, done by Richard Lapchick in 2005 for the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, put Major League Baseball’s black population at 8.5 percent, the lowest in 26 years and about half of what it was a decade earlier.

. . . .
How did this happen? Did baseball unwittingly wake up to a significant cultural shift (in particular to a burgeoning Latino market) or did it abandon the African-American community and its vital contributions to the history of the game?

Elsewhere in the Times today, Julie Bosman has an article about authors who are distributing videos to be shown at bookstores instead of going on tour. Powell’s is producing the videos and other bookstores will be showing them. The first video in the series, featuring Ian McEwan, will debut at BEA this summer.

For Mr. McEwan, the film will virtually replace his standard book tour, since he has declined to do traditional bookstore appearances to promote his new novel in the United States. The book, On Chesil Beach, will be published on June 5 by the Nan A. Talese imprint of Random House’s Doubleday division.

For years publishers and bookstores have tried to lure book buyers by featuring authors in blogs, podcasts and question-and-answer forums with readers. Mr. Weich said Powell’s did not expect to profit from the first film but hoped to attract more visitors to its Web site, powells.com, by posting the videos there.

I saw McEwan read at Printer’s Inc. in Palo Alto back in 1998 and would love to see him again. Although I attend and host a fair number of author events, I’ve always understood that it’s totally unreasonable to expect anything more than a book from an author. As William Gaddis wrote, “What is there left when he’s done with his work, what’s any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?”

The Cigarette Century

Filed under: Books,General — Ricky @ 8:51 am

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I had lunch yesterday with Harvard professor Allan Brandt, whose new history of the cigarette industry, The Cigarette Century, appears on the cover of Sunday’s Washington Post Book World. His book is eye-opening, engaging, well-told, frightening, and, above all, necessary. Recently, Brandt wrote an op-ed piece for the LA Times, in which he argues that a successful attempt to quit smoking by Barack Obama will actually be a victory for the tobacco industry because it will prove that smoking is an individual choice. They’ll say, “Well, if Barack can quit because he wants to, then you can too.” Brandt writes:

For every American like Obama who may successfully quit, there are “replacement smokers” in foreign lands. When Americans and others in Western developed nations began quitting in greater numbers in the 1970s and 1980s, the industry ramped up its efforts abroad, often with the assistance of the U.S. trade representative. Philip Morris International now sells more than four times as many cigarettes as its American sister company.

This dramatic rise in global consumption will prove disastrous in the future, especially in poorer countries. While 100 million people worldwide died of tobacco-induced diseases in the 20th century, the World Health Organization now predicts that nearly 1 billion such deaths will occur in this century.

. . . .

If Obama quits, no doubt Philip Morris will be the first to congratulate him. After all, won’t that prove that anyone can stop anytime he wants to? If only that were true. Then the global epidemic of tobacco deaths would be coming to a precipitous end instead of spiraling upward. As the tobacco executives know all too well, a new smoker is born every minute — and they are ready with a pack of Marlboros.

3/15/2007

Indies Under Fire: better than the trailer?

Filed under: Books,General,Save Kepler's — Ricky @ 3:47 pm

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A few months ago, I posted about what was, at the time, an upcoming screening of the film Indies Under Fire sponsored by Kepler’s. Based on the film’s trailer, which I watched online, I wrote that it looked to be “another sentimental, corporate-bashing look at indie bookstores that refuses to do the hard work of pointing a critical eye at indies themselves and asking why the independent bookselling business has been stagnant and so incredibly slow to innovate or pioneer new business practices over the past few decades.” I recently received a comment from a reader who thought I might not have written that had I actually seen the film.

I did attend the screening, and though the film is slightly more nuanced than I had expected, its implied argument is that Borders and the corporate booksellers led to the demise of Printer’s Inc. in Palo Alto. I grew up down the street from Printer’s Inc., and must note that it wasn’t a particularly good bookstore. When compared to the other big indie bookstores in the Bay Area–Cody’s, Kepler’s, ACWLP, Book Passage, Green Apple, etc.–Printer’s rated very low in my book.

Although the sentimental view of the indie bookstore getting killed by the heartless, bland corporate bookseller certainly appeals to people’s emotions, it seems that indie bookstores are really responsible for their own survival. Berkeley’s Nydia MacGregor wrote a paper in which she argued that the presence of chain stores has little effect on the sales of independent bookstores in the same area as long as the local community is engaged and the independent store provides them with a unique identity. She writes:

Independent booksellers link consumers with an identity that connects to a more differentiated self-concept, that fits within a narrower social group. Given the complementary nature of the relationship between these two organizational forms and the differentiated resources that they demand, branch store openings will not negatively affect the baseline survival rates of independent stores, even when they enter into the same community.

In short, the relationship that Indies Under Fire suggests between Borders and Printer’s Inc. is flat out wrong. Printer’s Inc. killed itself.

3/4/2007

Revisiting Kundera and Acocella

Filed under: Books,General — Ricky @ 10:40 pm

Today I read very positive reviews of two books about writing, which I’ve posted about in the past month. In the Sunday New York Times Book Review, Russell Banks reviews Milan Kundera’s The Curtain, while Joyce Carol Oates reviews, in one of the most unequivacally praiseful reviews I’ve read in a while, Joan Acocella’s Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints in the New York Review of Books.

Oates cites one of the better passages I encountered this week. Following Acocella’s visit to Penelope Fitzgerald in which the older writer provides nothing of much use during their interview, Acocella writes,

Why do we bother to interview artists? Why expect them, in two hours, to tell us their story, or— what we’re really looking for—a story that will dovetail with their work, explain it? The better the artist, the harder it is to produce such an accounting, for the life has been more fully transformed. Why violate their privacy, brush aside their years of work—the labor of creating stories that are not their story?

Banks, in his review, obviously loves Kundera’s work. He writes that Kundera “is one of the most erudite novelists on the planet. Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion.”

However, at the end of the review something curious happens. Banks falls into the trap of the model positive New York Times book review, getting in a last second jab. He writes,

If I have any quarrel with Kundera’s description of the history of the novel it’s that he’s not inclusive enough. He does not discuss a single female novelist, even in passing. It’s as if no Western woman has ever tried writing a serious novel in 400 years. And, in his appreciation of non-European novelists like Fuentes, García Márquez and Chamoiseau, he colonizes them, as if culturally they gazed longingly toward their European mother- and fatherlands instead of their homelands. But then, he’s not writing literary criticism; he’s writing the secret history of the novels of Milan Kundera and teaching us how to read them.

It’s as if he’s saying, “Look, everyone! The great Franco-Czech novelist is not perfect!” Well, of course, no one’s perfect, but pointing this out adds absolutely nothing to Banks’ review and cheapens what I suspect is a genuine appreciation of Kundera’s work.

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