The Year of the Lawrence

New York magazine asked me to name a couple of my favorite books of the year—I gave some more love to Lawrence Block's A Drop of the Hard Stuff and Lawrence Douglas's The Vices. (Wait...didn't Lawrence Weschler have a book out this year, too?)

I love the artwork!

(I wrote more about LB for Time and more about LD—and his alter ego, Lars Arffssen—for Bookforum.)

Dack Rambo

I'm a fan of these new afterwords/introductions that Lawrence Block is appending to his old books as they get released in e-reader form. From his postscript to Deadly Honeymoon (1967):

The film did get made, and was released rather tentatively in 1973, with the title Nightmare Honeymoon. It starred Dack Rambo and Rebecca Dianna Smith, with Pat Hingle as the crime boss, and it was set in New Orleans, and, let us come right out and say it, it stank on ice.

Forty drafts

He wouldn’t go on to the second paragraph until the first paragraph was perfect, and sometimes he’d do 40 drafts of them. And so on, and each paragraph he polished as he went along to an astonishing degree. He wrote one short story a year, and sent it to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, got $1.98 for it and was happy. Strange.
—Lawrence Block on Stanley Ellin (to Ethan Iverson, on his blog, Do the Math)

(Via Rob)

Disambiguations™ for May 10, 2011

I. My first review for Time is up—a look at Lawrence Block's great new Scudder novel, A Drop of the Hard Stuff. (It really is as good as I say—a perfect place to start reading Block.) Thanks to Jessica Winter! Here is a tidbit:

By Scudder's previous outing in 2005, he'd become sober and downright uxorious: a better person but a diluted presence, even as the crimes remained nasty. Everybody Dies, Hope to Die, All the Flowers Are Dying — the titles of the past three Scudders themselves telegraphed exhaustion. Slipping out of the series' chronology, A Drop of the Hard Stuff reads like it's been jolted by factory-fresh defibrillator pads, as Scudder recalls his first, nerve-rattling year of sobriety. Here, his devotion to Alcoholics Anonymous not only shades in his character but also sets up the case. Following AA's Twelve Steps, Jack Ellery, a fellow recovering alcoholic and former felon, put together a list of people he'd hurt while drinking (Step 8) and attempted to make amends with them (Step 9). Ellery turns up dead, a bullet to the mouth, and Scudder figures that someone on the list wanted him to keep quiet about his lowlife past.

II. Congratulations to Adam Levin, who won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award last night, for his humongous debut novel, The Instructions. (I chaired the reading committee this year—thanks to all the readers!)

III. I make Page Six! Well, not really...Click to read the Sloane Crosley theory of humor. (I think it's true.)

IV. There's more to come...

From Lawrence Block's newsletter

3. Speaking of backlist, and of old books I’d like to see reissued, there’s one I can’t find. I wrote a plaintive essay about it, and the good people at Little, Brown posted it on their new Mulholland Books website. I thought someone might recognize it, but so far nobody has. My guess at this point is that Lancer never got around to publishing it, and it’s as lost to world literature as all those wonderful lines Coleridge would have added to “Kublai Khan” if that wretched man from Porlock hadn’t turned up on his doorstep.

On second thought, I’m not sure Sinner Man belongs in the same newsletter with Samuel Taylor C., let alone the same paragraph. But if you recognize the book, please get in touch, lest my first crime novel forever blush unseen and waste its flagrance on the desert air.

A new 'Outfit' — The Eyes of Mao — Cubicle Opera

I. A welcome distraction: Three Richard Stark novels, just out from U. Chicago Press. Without planning to, I started with the third one, The Outfit—maybe not a good idea, but the first chapter grabbed me and has not yet let go! You will read this so fast you won't need a bookmark. (Note to self: Save that line for future review?)

Bonus: Part of The Outfit takes place in Buffalo; the wife of the Outfit head lives here. (Did Westlake know Queen City native Lawrence Block already, back in the early ’60s?)

Dzyd Levi (who works for the press) directs me to an interview he and a colleague conducted with Westlake (who wrote the Stark books pseudonymously). Sample gem:

I’ve always been a catholic reader, but also a bit of a sponge, taking on characteristics of what I’m reading, if I’m not careful. If I read too much Anthony Powell, my sentences gradually become longer and longer and less and less gainly.

(Only Westlake I've read previously: God Save the Mark.)

II. Dzyd Rachel has another ponder-worthy piece up at the Poetry Foundation, this time on Mao's verse. Sample goodie:

Although Mao dismissed intellectuals as dumb and disloyal—only those whose feet are “smeared with cow-dung,” he announced, are capable of true art—he could never quite wean himself from the joys of his scholarly existence. He was always neurotic and insecure about his own intellectual abilities, even in comparing himself to his own secretaries. According to one of Mao’s biographers, Jung Chang, Mao slept on a large bed partially covered in piles of books a half foot high, so that when he woke up he could immediately roll over and begin reading. When his vision faltered in old age, he ordered the construction of two factories to print books with characters large enough for his eyes.

III. Nice PD review in Philadelphia City Paper! "This absence of novelized work makes a book that restricts itself to the 9-to-5, like Ed Park's cubicle opera Personal Days shine all the more. Park points out that those dead, stressed hours make up a separate reality..."

IV. Speaking of work novels and Stark, I'll link again to Levi's post on how the Stark novels are work books...There's a scene toward the end of The Outfit that's amazing not because of its violence (as are many of the brutal scenes herein) but because we could be listening to a consultant filling the boss in regarding sloppy management: "The organization is getting too highly organized."

V. More PD news, from our correspondent on the Continent, Dzyd Christine:

No PD sightings in Europe so far (I thought it would be fun to send you one, but alas), but when chatting with the ladies at Shakespeare's in Paris yesterday I asked if they had it, and they said they used to have a few, but if it was good they'd order more. I assured them it is, and they did (!). Very sweet.

Monday grab-bag, or My new sweet style

...what if I wrote my next novel like this?...Actually the followup to Personal Days has been written, by the inimitable Deb Olin Unferth. It's called Vacation....If I were a saxophonist who played on the street for money, I'd learn "Careless Whisper"...The place name "Multnomah County" gives me the heebie-jeebies...Heffernan: "In his vertiginous free time, he crash-diets, cheats at kickboxing and persuades people to give him money"...Finally finished watching a movie—My Blueberry Nights—is it just me or does some of it feel quite Blockian? Some of the dialogue (esp. between Jude Law and Norah Jones)? And the AA stuff...I'm on the fence about it over all, well, no, let's say I liked it...why not...I used to be a film critic!...The soundtrack should've had Prefab Sprout's "Blueberry Pies"—the lyrics are even almost appropriate: "So if I come begging with take me back eyes/All you have to tell me/All you have to tell me are blueberry, blueberry pies"....WHATEVER!!!......Speaking of food: Korean food....Also in the NYT, a Q&A with American Teen director Nanette Burstein, talking about "her own intense high school experience two decades ago in Buffalo"...ummm....yes...she and yr correspondent were classmates!...Did someone say Buffalo? Yes: The Stubblemeister did, with a tip for Dizzyheads....

Weekend Table-Talk for May 23–25, 2008

I. That title is to fool myself into not blogging this weekend!

II. Via Sarah, an article on fellow Buffalo native Lawrence Block—author of the Scudder and Rhodenbarr (and Keller and Chip Harrison!) novels (among others), screenwriter for Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights, and one of many good reasons to read the Hard Case Crime line.

III. The Morning News hails The New-York Ghost for "Online Excellence"?!:

"By offering each issue through email only, what the Ghost has managed to do—unlike many of its web compatriots—is turn the expectation of content into the thrill of finding a new issue in your inbox."

IV. The Daily Mail says of Personal Days: “Having a character called ‘K’ acknowledges the Kafkaesque nature of the book–but it’s a lot more fun than Franz ever was.”

V. I gotta go return a library book!



UPDATE (Via Weekend Stubble): Contra Heinlein!

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Thursday, August 16

1. Via Weekend Stubble, a fun project by Keith Phipps over at the Onion's AV Club, in which he reads through a box of old paperbacks.

2. New Ghost later today...

3. Via Slate/Magnum, an eye-opening portfolio of photos of Korea in commemoration of 8/15/1945, marking the end of Japan's colonization of the peninsula.

4. Dizzyhead Benno on Resurrecting the Champ at L Magazine. I like the perverse praising of Hartnett's "averageness of intelligence and talent."

5. Levi has the lowdown on two of the three amazing Lawrence Block books (Grifter's Game and The Girl With the Long Green Heart) brought out by Hard Case Crime. Side note: I've Been Reading is one of the best written literary blogs out there, and I don't say this just because his tastes match mine (Block, Borges, Powell) in a lot of cases.

6. In Portland, I went to Powell's (and went to Powell's...and went to Powell's). Among the books bought: This one!

8. Dizzyhead Jen sends this ouroboros by Ryan McGinness:



9. And I will mysteriously add my own (c. 1996):