If you’ve never encountered Infinite Jest in meat world, it’s a 1000+ page, unwieldy trade paperback. There are several hundred pages of endnotes, which requires you to constantly flip back and forth. (Flip may be too gentle of a word…it’s more like rolling a baby whale back and forth between your hands.) Part of the Infinite Jest experience is supposed to be physically engaging with a massive volume. It isn’t a book that you are likely to want to take on an airplane, it’s hard to read in bed or while eating dinner, especially if you have little hobbit hands like I do.

As Dave Eggers says in the introduction, it demands your full attention.

One longtime member of my book group didn’t participate in Infinite Jest because chronic pain issues rendered her sadly incapable of holding the book open and sitting with it for any length of time. Another member, though, read it as an ebook.

When you read Infinite Jest as an ebook, all you have to do is just tap the footnote. No second bookmark. No sighing and wondering if the joke at the back of the book is going to be worth the effort of rolling the baby whale. Infinite Jest as a physical book forces you to confront, and feel shamed by, your own laziness. As an ebook, it doesn’t.

I wonder what David Foster Wallace would’ve thought about that.

This came up again last night in our discussion of another long book: The Woman in White. Due to an oh-shit-my-book-group-is-coming-up moment I had last week, I actually downloaded The Woman in White from the library, something I rarely do. There was a glitch, and the little page meter that tells you how far along in the book you are didn’t show up — so at any given time I had only an inkling of where I was in this 700+ page book.  It’s a weird experience not knowing if you are on page 70 or 456.

But it was actually okay. At the end of “Doubles: Wilkie Collins’ Shadow Selves,” Jonathan Rosen writes:

That’s how I encountered Collins — reading The Woman in White on my iPhone after years of resisting the recommendations of bug-eyed Collins fans. Without the hurdle of a fat, mulchy hardcover, or the wartime microprint of a paperback classic, I fell into a novel that I’d assumed was by one of Dickens’s backup singers….Soon, Armadale was whispering onto my Kindle, without my even noticing that the book was nearly eight hundred pages long.

–New Yorker, 7/25/2011 [archives available to subscribers only. Check with your library!]

I’ve left my job at Loganberry Books. It was sad to leave: bookselling is more like what you thought you were in for when you decided to go to library school. But I’ve decided to devote more time to writing, freelance work, and taking classes. I’ve got a novel in the drawer awaiting a second draft, and I’ve got a new one in progress. Plus, I’m working on a TV pilot with a friend. I’ve never tried anything like this before, unless you count the reams of Doctor Who fan fiction I wrote in junior high.

The Cleveland Review is moving in a new direction as well. After two years of publishing original fiction, poetry, and artwork, we’ve decided to move to an all book review format. As a bookseller, I saw so many new books about the Rust Belt. Mark Binelli’s Detroit City is the Place to Be was a hot seller at Christmas, and Ted McClelland’s Nothin’ But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland is coming down the pike this spring, so I wanted to go back to what I started with Rust Belt Reader and collect, document, and review the canon as it already exists. With any luck, there will even be some author interviews!

Last but not least, we are considering another long distance move, this time to Minneapolis. I’m really excited about Minneapolis and think that seeing the Midwest from a different vantage point would add a new dimension to my work. Plus, there’s the adventure: I’m still the same person who, at 21, packed everything I owned into a Geo Metro and drove off to a place I’d never been.

At least I’ve been to Minneapolis!

Istanbul.

David Foster Wallace as Midwestern writer. In his review of the new DFW biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, Craig Fehrman writes:

The midwest influenced [Wallace] on a more abstract level, in his philosophical and artistic orientation toward the larger world. [Biographer D.T.] Max might have explored these ideas. Instead, he chooses to alternate between dismissing and sentimentalizing the midwest—two gestures that, in the end, amount to the same thing.

Fun fact: Wallace wrote Infinite Jest in Syracuse, so part of me wants to claim it for Rust Belt fiction.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad. Here’s something that takes guts: being the only metal band in Iraq. Also, being the guy who decides to do the documentary on the only metal band in Iraq. (Available on Netflix streaming.)

Grant Hart shirt for sale on eBay. The Hüsker Dü Database posted this on Facebook last night: someone is apparently selling the shirt Grant wore on the Joan Rivers Show. All I can say is I hope that look is not going to come back in style anytime soon. Also I am not going to lie to you: I had a shirt remarkably like that and I wore it through college.

Wiener dog races at the Oktoberfest. I think this is officially the only annual event I look forward to in Cleveland anymore. Risqué t-shirts seen: My Wiener Likes to Bang (dachshund + drum kit), Why Go To Work When You Can Stay At Home and Play With Your Wiener, Wiener Envy. I stayed through 30+ heats, and all I can say is Schnitzel was robbed!

Massive maple syrup theft in Quebec. The boss was just telling me how I have to read Louise Penny, and so I started daydreaming about how to get Detective Dachshund – star of the cozy mystery series I will write when my career in literary fiction has tanked – up to French Canada. I think I’ve got it, Watson!

Agatha Donkar’s photos of Grant Hart. These are for the upcoming Every Everything documentary, which you can still help fund. (Donkar is a Chapel Hill-based music photographer who, I was tickled to find out, also has an MLIS.)

Here is the trailer for the film:

There is a bookstore here in Cleveland named after a Replacements song, and sometimes I daydream about moving to Pittsburgh and starting a rival bookstore there called Every Everything Books. Except, you know, it’d be a friendly rivalry because two independent bookstores competing against each other would be like Brainy and Hefty Smurf arguing while Gargamel is on the rampage.

American Juggalo. If you are going to write literary fiction I think you should always keep tabs on the person you could have become if one or two things in your childhood had been slightly different. Which is why I read Good Housekeeping and leap out of bed to watch Juggalo documentaries.

First I rummaged my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night and time from my childhood, and shaped my stories from these….

So from the age of twenty-four to thirty-six hardly a day passed when I didn’t stroll myself across a recollection of my grandparents’ northern Illinois grass, hoping to come across some old half-burnt firecracker, a rusted toy, or a fragment of letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I become to remind him of his past, his life, his people, and his drenching sorrows.

It became a game that I took to with immense gusto: to see how much I could remember about dandelions themselves, or picking wild grapes with my father and brother… –From “Just This Side of Byzantium: Dandelion Wine,” in Zen in the Art of Writing

If I play the game myself, I come up with:

Sweet peas straining against a chain link fence, dragging the plastic wading pool out of the detached garage and filling it with a hose, the painted concrete donkey on the front porch of the house at the corner (the donkey is still there; a painted concrete Mexican now accompanies him). Sitting out on the enclosed porch watching the Price is Right with my grandmother, making bacon sandwiches for my mom, who worked in the dental wax shop attached to my grandparents’ house, the buzz of the ice maker. The sliding wood paneled door behind which lay a treasure trove of acetate nightgowns and fox stoles for playing dress up. The porcelain ballerina figurines in the curio cabinet. The long mirror at the end of the hallway. A shelf of taxidermied baby alligators. The Wurlitzer that dominated the living room like a church organ in a cathedral. The foot pedal of that Wurlitzer, which looked to me like a ramp into some dark, alien world.

What do you remember about your grandparents’ house?

I am reading from the list of Nobel Prize Winners in Literature this summer.

Like her friend Lola, the unnamed narrator in The Land of Green Plums flees her rural hometown in a German-speaking province of Romania, hoping to find a less restrictive environment in the city, hoping to be rid of sheep and melons and the superstitions of their peasant ancestors. What she finds, however, is the endless persecution by Ceausescu’s Securitate (Ceausescu is never mentioned by name, only as “the dictator.”)

After Lola is found hanged in their dormitory closet, the narrator finds herself in the town square, watching the slaughterhouse workers with whom Lola had been consorting in exchange for kidneys and tripe:

I watched Lola’s men as they came off the early shift in the factories. They were peasants, fetched here from their villages. They, too, had said to themselves, no more sheep, no more melons. Like fools, they had gone chasing after the soot of the city, following the thick pipes that crept across the field to the edge of every village.

A book you should read.

I’m having a book discussion this month on Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. Both books have been described as John Steinbeck’s love letter to Monterey, which is obvious from the first paragraph of Cannery Row:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.

I like a book with a strong sense of place: places mean things to people, and they mean different things to different people. Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday document a culture that was gone within half a generation. There’s no doubt that here in the Rust Belt, our culture is also changing, and I’d like to see more writers capture the 1970s, the 1980s, now. So on the bus the other day I wrote a silly trifle about Cleveland in the style of the opening paragraph of Cannery Row:

Cleveland is a bug smear on your windshield, an itch, a newsprint smudge on your thumb. Cleveland is the furtive look of a shy fat girl over her shoulder when she hears a snicker: is my skirt bunched up? Can they see my panties? It is the sweat stain of the steelworker, the prisoner,  the young woman in tweed jodhpurs as she pedals harder, harder to get to her destination before the bike lane ends. It is the dust in the construction worker’s lungs and the dust on the toddler’s fingers as he pulls his breakfast from a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. It is the look in the eyes of the grandmother as she feeds a dollar into the slot machine. It is driving while black, going into a bank while black, eating at food trucks while black, reading poetry while black.  It is the empty pale imprint where the copper pipes used to be, the caw of the pigeon as she wrestles a hambone from the seagull’s mighty beak. It is the word “could,” the word “might,” the word “should,” all dangling together as of from a Christmas tree, or a pair of shoes from a telephone pole. It is a quality of viscousness, the urge to pick up that pill found on the bus floor and swallow it just to see what happens. Cleveland is a chaplet of queen anne’s lace and chicory: Cleveland spreads his gnarled ashy hands and offers you a plate of raccoon meat: take, eat of my body. And a goblet of mulberry wine: come, drink of my blood. Ashes to ashes, rust to rust…. Through the confessional window one man sees the king of quitters, and another sees the savior of us all. Both are looking at the same man.

I would like to thank Esti Brennan for suggesting this book.

Everyone in America, I’ve long thought, everyone who’s able, should travel overland the full distance of their own country at least once every ten years. Or at least everyone who gets caught up in their own bullshit and forgets about the rest of the world’s travails. This country’s bigness has to been seen to be appreciated, and there’s nothing like driving for eight hours and seeing nothing but empty, inhospitable terrain to knock your problems back down to size.

Likewise I think every American should read one novel of the Holocaust at least once every ten years. You might read Night in high school, you might read If Not Now, When? in college, but (particularly if you are not Jewish), memories of terrible things that happened within your own parents’ lifetime become less terrible as they recede into history. As Milan Kundera notes in the first chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “there is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off heads.” Similarly, without occasionally reminding ourselves, even Hitler becomes “lighter than feathers, frightening no one.”

Shortly after his arrival at Auschwitz, Georg Koves, the fourteen-year-old protagonist of Imre Kertesz’s Fateless, muses:

There is no new prisoner, I think, who is not a little bewildered at first by his situation….

One thing I now greatly regretted: At home I had once taken down a book from the shelf, a hidden book that had been collecting dust there for who knows how long. Its author was a prisoner. I didn’t finish reading it because I couldn’t follow his train of thought, and also because the characters had tremendously long and impossible-to-remember names, and, finally, because I wasn’t the least bit interested in and, to be quite honest, was somewhat disgusted by the lives of the prisoners. And so I was now unprepared in my time of need.

What’s most disturbing about Fateless is not Georg’s unemotional narrative, it’s not his continuous qualification of the atrocities of the Nazis, it’s not the horror that you could be bored in a concentration camp or even be nostalgic for it once you are out. It’s the suggestion that you are reading this book as preparation for the day that you are unlucky enough to be dragged off the bus and imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit.

Further reading: Imre Kertesz, Nobel Lecture, 2002.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

Perhaps because of how it echoed the intro to The Ray Bradbury Theater, which I watched obsessively as a kid:

The truth is, though, that I’ve stuffed myself so full of essays, films, novels, and Mad Men that I couldn’t possibly run out of ideas for the next ten years, and maybe it’s time for me to live by this quote for a while instead:

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

…we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it… Now it’s “So what does this get me?”

As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans.

This was just starting to be a problem, I think, when I was in high school, in the first half of the 90s. On the occasions when I pop my nose out of my books and into the wider culture, I gather it’s gotten a lot worse, what with volunteer and community service requirements. As a teenager I thought community service was just as much bullshit as having PE count toward your GPA, because what you ended up with was a bunch of suck-ups burnishing their gold stars while furtively looking over their shoulder to make sure an important adult was watching.

There was a girl in my US History class in 11th grade who was always bullishly taking charge of discussions, even though she didn’t have anything to say. She did it because the teacher graded us on participation. Although I understand that he did this because yammering away at a room full of glassy eyed zombies for twenty five years would be pretty soul-sucking, I’ll always think that forced participation does more harm than good, just like forced community service.

This girl is by all superficial accounts more successful than me now, if you count working in the financial industry as successful, which I guess everyone does. I resented the teacher for assuming that I wasn’t paying attention because I didn’t immediately reformulate exactly what he had just said into a question or comment. I resented him for not understanding that I was turning these things over in my head, trying to make sense of them. This was exactly half of my lifetime ago, and I still haven’t made sense of McCarthyism or why anyone thought slavery was a good idea.

I came across Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking the other day at work. Here’s a bit from the jacket flap:

Quiet shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so. Taking the reader on a journey from Dale Carnegie’s birthplace to Harvard Business School, from a Tony Robbins seminar to an evangelical megachurch, Susan Cain charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal in the twentieth century and explores its far-reaching effects. She talks to Asian-American students who feel alienated from the brash, backslapping atmosphere of American schools. She questions the dominant values of American business culture, where forced collaboration can stand in the way of innovation, and where the leadership potential of introverts is often overlooked.

I could’ve used this book when I was seventeen, listening to those US History lessons regurgitated for “participation points,” inwardly raging SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.