David Thayer

In order to improve the quality of this blog the research department is busy reading the Word Press information. After a meeting of the board of directors it was decided to fire the head writer, David Thayer, and go with a committee of contributors. Yes, we know his name is on the blog, but his attack on the film industry, coinciding with Roman Polanky’s triumph over Vanity Fair, was the sort of ad hominem attack the editorial board loathes. While it is true he didn’t mention Mr. Polansky in his piece, the board feels he singled out Michael Eisner whose book about summer camp brought tears to our eyes. That might have been acceptable, but the reference to I Dream of Jeannie was over the top. That’s not journalism. Our chairman wept.

Fortunately for you, dear reader, writers come cheap. We’ve interviewed several in the past few days, a task that must be compared to Roman emperors interviewing gladiators. Not that we condone the wearing of togas or forcing people to fight for their lives against incredible odds. Rest assured. We’ve hired a person who has the utmost respect for the cultural institutions as represented by Hollywood, Bollywood, ReganBooks, Movie of the Week, Jane Fonda in latter day and, of course, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone who realized the other day that he owns Simon & Schuster but cannot remember why.

Airing our soiled laundry in a public forum is of course anathema to our investment bankers, currently serving time for alleged irregularities. Our legal team will vet future entries with an eye toward preventing the sort of outburst Thayer unleashed. We also completely disagree with his central thesis that books are triumphant over television and film. Sure The Golden Bowl was good. He likes Bel Canto. But is there any comparison to the moment when the actress whose name escapes us wrinkles her nose and creates witchcraft?

Fired for blogging. How sad. This is Corporate America, thanking you for the invention of at will employment. It’s all about power, and we thank the Almighty that we have it and you don’t. Anon.

Television is dead. Film is dead. Sometime during a rerun of I Dream of Jeannie civilization heeled over and coughed up the ghosts of Mickey and Minnie. According to CBS Marketwatch and the Gilder Technology Report only books and blogs have the ability to reinvent themselves. Television’s remarkable stasis renders the medium trivial in the cultural scheme of things. The movie industry is unable to draw us into the theaters this summer, despite the fact that War of the Worlds has been remade with the kind of special effects Gene Barry could only dream about. The attacking aliens still resemble really cool vacuum cleaners with green headlights. It is ironic that Mars would invade now when real estate prices have peaked. Housing Bubble? Visible from space.

Book and blogs. What sweet revenge. This upsets the High School Power Structure where the Loud and the Lovely coalesce into iconic bliss while everyone else works at Dennys. Books are the invisible bacteria the invaders can’t defend themselves from. Entire novels are translated into screenplays, thence to film without anyone having read a single word of the original material, the adaptation, or the critical response to the opus. Nobody reads in this town. Yeah, it shows.

The wave of old media probably crested about the time anchor people began to resemble toothpaste commercial models. Books and blogs…say it three times fast. Mike Eisner went to summer camp. Read all about it.

Between Bel Canto and imaginary pitching tryouts for the Yankees I’ve been wrestling with The Historian. Until Steinbrenner calls, cries uncle, and begs, I’m a lit blogger. This is true despite the fact I recorded sixteen strikeouts in eight innings against The Sawx during a traffic jam on Tuesday. Got Ortiz three times. Call me.

Elizabeth Kostova’s sprawling novel has picked up a lot of ink, most of it ambivalent about the novel’s structure. The reviewer in the NYT correctly noted that each chapter ends in a supense pocket, not a bad idea if the narrative drive is linear, but unintentionally humorous when the author doubles back a few decades to pick up another point of view. Thus we have the equivalent of our heroine tied to the railroad tracks not once, but a dozen times. The lurking figure of Vlad takes on a Snidely Whiplash persona of thwarted villainy and cheesy tension socked between dusty pages of exhaustive scholarly research. At times the book is paced like a manual of arms in which each component part is lovingly cleaned, wiped with a baby diaper, and reassembled with a blindfold on.

The genius of The Historian is Kostova’s reinvention of the Nineteenth Century English novel. She layers the book with sub text, both descriptive and evocative, and sticks with her approach despite the anti-modern pacing. That’s pretty gutsy in the subdural hematoma aftermath of MTV. She knows that Vlad can do the heavy lifting without sketching his needs and motivations until the final section of the book. We know what he wants. Her vulnerable and scholarly ensemble of researchers plod forward, at their peril, as letters from a predecessor remind us. Kostova takes her time, sets and resets the scenes, ups the ante with each episode, and overcomes the fashion of the times with her deliberate vision.

The Jude Law dustup has spilled from the entertainment news, over the levies and sandbags, and is running through the streets of the blogosphere with considerable force. Litbloggers like Sarah Weinman have seized on the story, perhaps because lurking at the heart of the matter is a nanny. Literature of recent years is rife with nanny stories, beginning with The Nanny Diaries and culminating….apparently never. Nannies of dubious legal standing have been the downfall of political appointees, judges, kings, and, now, an actor.

“Now, glimmering on her eastern balcony…came the white leman of Tithonus old…forth of her lover’s arms reluctantly…her brow was starred with jewels manifold…set in the likeness of the beast whose tail…smites on the people and whose blood is cold.”

Jude, read your Dante. Almost as though Canto IX were written for a special edition of E.

Somewhere on my shelves John Barth’s The Sot Weed Factor stands with a red badge of courage tattooed on its spine. For thirty years the book has been the first line of post modern defense against household pests. When I lived in the South Bronx ( rents were low…life was cheap), the patter of little feet meant someone had turned the lights on in the kitchen. Here are some tips for homeowners and booklovers: Cockroaches are not impressed with Oprah books. If you try smashing a roach with a Wally Lamb novel, you’re gonna lose. In Manhattan always try an outer borough telephone book before resorting to the first editions. Check with your co-op board for possible noise rule infractions. If you’re in the Hamptons and spot a roach, call the police.

Friends in Philadelphia know their roaches are famous for sarcasm ( bring it on, they say). Best to kill these prehistoric bastards with a local author. Don’t even think about rolling The New Yorker into a ball. Most insects understand that death by higher sensiblity isn’t going to happen here. Sure, home delivery of the Sunday New York Times has taken an accidental toll, but, what are the odds? A cockroach high command meeting on your stoop? The paperboy approaches…

Anthony Burgess can be a good backup plan after you’ve discussed with the family all the important safety features of a big fat book. If you own a copy of Earthly Powers, no need for detente. Place a dish on the kitchen floor. Fill it halfway with beer. Budweiser is fine. Turn out the kitchen lights and wait until dark. While the beer settles, thumb through Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition after removing it carefully from its honored position near the Cheerios. When you see the enemy headed for the beer, don’t panic and use the Swimsuit edition as a weapon. Grab Don Delillo or, if desperate, Donald Barthelme. Who says post modernism is dead?

An agent requested the first 100 pages of Flamingo Dawn this morning. She went further, promising to read and respond within two weeks. Two weeks! That’s a blink of the eye in this business. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Biting the Apple: entries in this category have to do with writing for publication, agents, editors, mood swings, steely eyed post office workers. If this sort of thing bores you, you can skip this category altogether.

An editor who read Flamingo Dawn suggested I get in touch with people who have connections to the large houses, so that’s what I’m doing. My current agent doesn’t like the detective thriller genre. He’s a non-fiction kind of guy although he did market a novel of mine last summer. Given the time and effort required to sell a manuscript, an agent has to be highly motivated to endure the process.

I got a kick out of Tingle Alley today. Carrie Frye mentioned that The Atlantic Monthly referred to her blog as “an obscure literary blog.” While I doubt the editorial board at the Atlantic delved very deeply into the obscurity issue, Tingle Alley is one of my favorite blogs. Once I figure out how to add links to this blog, you can bet she’ll be right there, a beacon of prominence.

Toxic Horseshit: I followed a link from Sarah Weinman to Agent 007 and Miss Snark, two bloggers who say they are literary agents. What they have to say is so forgettable that I’ve forgotten the words, but the general vibe is ‘don’t waste my time submitting your work.’ That’s easy, I won’t.

Mad Max bites the dust. The editor incognito has ended his Mad Max blog. I enjoyed some of his posts, but gradually got the sense he was like mom at a frat party, respected but dampening the general enthusiasm. Still, it was fun having him in the house.

I found a great indy bookstore last week called A Book for All Seasons nestled in the Cascade Range east of Seattle. The store is in Leavenworth, Washington, a tiny village that years ago decided to go Bavarian in an effort to survive. All the homes and businesses are designed to resemble an Alpine village. Even Das Starbucks resembles a konditorei, until you’re inside the store which closely resembles Starbucks. Caution: no bathroom!

Anyway I bought Bel Canto in trade paper format. I read the opening very quickly before setting it aside to be savored rather than devoured. I’d finished William Lashner’s Past Due for review at Collected Miscellany and was reading Margaret Atwood and Denise Mina’s Garnethill in a vain attempt to avoid Polka with Ernst. Yes, they have both kinds of music at the local bierstube, Bavarian and Olde Wisconsin, but after enough beer and bratwurst you’ll want an accordion of your very own. By the way if you come to town on a Harley, it’s okay to pee in the bushes. Alpine plants are hearty.

Yeah, we’re bold in the first post. It’s one of the few HTML tags I actually understand, so I plan to use it for a while.
This is a literary blog with occasional forays into politics, art, The Rule of St. Benedict, Roman history, original fiction and poetry. Thanks to Booksquare, my hostess, I’ve been able to complete one orbit around the blogosphere. Some of you may know me from Collected Miscellany, another literary blog, where I review books and offer candid and sometimes shocking insights into the world of book publishing. I also write The Untrained Eye at Publishers Marketplace. Quite soon I’ll have links to these and other blogs mostly to do with books. I welcome comments that have nothing to do with Texas Hold em or revolutionary spatulas. Breakthroughs in spatula design, while exciting, are really too incremental. If you’ve got one that’ll toss an entire steer into the air, go ahead and comment.