David Thayer

I’m a Moliere fan from way back. I think he would’ve gotten a big kick out of blogging, poking fun at imperial pretenses and liturgical gravitas, or the recombinant variety so common today. I think Moliere would have intuitively grasped the legacy of Spiro T. Agnew, the man who uttered the phrase nattering nabobs of negativism while facing jail time for graft, collusion, bid-rigging, jerrymandering, pandering, slandering and bursts of alliteration. Agnew was too old be a neocon, but the instincts were there. He was thoroughly outraged by the cultural flamboyance of bare naked women and their gutless, bearded hippy boyfriends. He understood money, though, and the divine right of public servants to grab all they can and squeeze. The streets of Maryland were paved with gold, or, hell, they could have been.

Moliere liked to beard the lion of affronted royalty, both of this earth and God’s Own. He typifies the naughty boy of letters bringing consternation to the elite. The latter will always close ranks against the former, chipping away at dissent and uproar with the odd beheading or rapid introduction of draconian laws. No problem. For the masses a bit of comedie della arta, broad strokes indeed, a sleight of hand to confuse the legates of decency sprinkled throughout the audience. Of course, his real life nemesis, Madame de Rambouillet, was the subject, or object, of his satire Les Precieuses Ridicules or Prententious Ladies, a play that tickled the royal funnybone of Louis Quatorze. When he died, Moliere was denied the sacraments of the Church, but did manage to come to rest in consecrated ground. As for Madame de Rambouillet, she’s four hundred and fifty seven years old and lives quietly near Givenchy.

Sometime ago, okay, last May, your correspondent grabbed second place in the hard-boiled category of the Nevermores sponsored by Partners N Crime bookstore in Greenwich Village. Be strongly cautioned that the entry you are about to read was considered bad enough that only one other entry was considered worse. That entry claimed first prize.

Stumptown Chump

Jimmy Kurtz swaggered into the Starbucks on Hawthorne, placed his order, scoped the joint. Losers with laptops, a pair of Unis from Southeast Precinct. The cops eyeballed Jimmy. He knew them. They’d all worked together at Stumptown Security, before it all went wrong, before three hundred bucks worth of radial tires had vanished into the night along with his future, his girl, the keys to his Camaro. “Double chocolate no foam hazelnut latte.” The cops laughed. “That ain’t mine,” Jimmy said. He left three dollars on the counter, winked at the barrista, avoided the Multnomah County library guy…he owed seventy five cents…hit the streets hard like bad news hit his doorstep back at Stumptown. Circled the block, cops were gone, winked at the dame behind the counter, picked up his latte, dodged the library guy, said, “sucker,” loud enough for everyone to hear. Yeah, it was payback time.

Note the Bruenesque exchange between Jimmy and the library guy. Note the spelling of barrista. Maybe using the name Kurtz was over the top. Stuffing that many cliches into an opening paragraph is not as easy as it looks. I still haven’t spent my twenty five dollar gift certificate. I think SJ Rozan and George Pelicanos are past Nevermore winners. Look how they turned out.

Monday’s NYT has a review of the cover art of Jay McInerny’s forthcoming novel The Good Life. The cover was designed by Chip Kidd and features dishes covered with concrete dust in the foreground with faint images of the twin towers in flames in the background. The article deals with the issue of invoking images of 9-11-01 in fiction, mentioning Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as an example of dealing with the Trade Center attacks as metaphor or reality. Here is the problem: images are not words. For many people the attack on the towers remains fixed in our consciousness in pictures. The event and its horror entered our collective experience with a visual wallop. Then there was sound: people close to the tip of Manhattan heard the roar, smelled the dust, the heat, and felt shock and despair.

What is the substantial task of a novelist who evokes 9-11 through cover art? It seems to me that the effort of dealing with contemporary tragedy in fiction begins and ends with intent. Can a writer introduce anything new to the emotional matrix 9-11 invokes? Or is the author trying to manipulate the pre-existing array of feelings they know exist? This is dangerous ground, literally and figuratively; readers of fiction expect to be manipulated to some extent, generally through surprise. Scenes that end in an unexpected way are most memorable. We know how the scene of 9-11 ends.

Whatever Jay McInerny has in mind for us with The Good Life, it had better have a moral substance equal or greater than the reflexive horror left imbedded by the attacks. Novelists have to be held to a higher standard than journalists if fiction is to have any relevance in the Information Age.

It began with a memory. A word of advice from an unidentified editor. “Retool your novel into a mystery…that will resolve your plot problems.” Marilyn Stasio was in the audience wondering to herself where such advice might lead. The answer? ‘Babe books.’ According to Stasio’s article ‘A Girl’s Guide to KIlling’ a new subgenre of mystery chick lit is loosed upon the land.

Slim stories. Joke titles. Juicy cover art. A vast merger has occurred at the junction of romance and mystery, cute, fun, sexy, now. There’s no dating in crime fiction, no shopping bags unless carrying the severed head of a philandering heel or nosey neighbor, or studio chief caught in flagrante. Stasio offers as evidence not one, but fourteen examples of the genre’s output. Fourteen.

“Even if you ignore the basically deplorable level of writing…these novels scrupulously follow the basic chick-lit conventions.” Stasio doesn’t exactly grab us by the ears nor does she do the authors in the group much of a favor by leading with Janet Evanovich whose work is decaying faster than rumors of a Republican sex scandal. Still, a two pager in the Sunday Times to unveil any writer’s collective or individual efforts might have been devoted to writing that Stasio admired rather than detested.

Dennis Lynd passed away while in San Francisco to visit his critically injured daughter. Condolences to his wife, Gayle Lynd, and best wishes to Gayle and daughter, who was hit by a truck.

Quite a wrap to the week. Target has selected readers of the New Yorker as a demographic of choice. I think of people in penthouses on Park Avenue, doormen named Raoul, people who garage their Mercedes in spaces without oil leaks. Will they shop at Target? Wall Street wants to know. Main Street needs an answer. I went to a Target near Fremont, California several years ago. My first visit. I had a rolled up copy of the New Yorker in my back pocket, left it with Security. The guard was named Raoul. He thought the cartoons sucked.

Instructions on shopping at Target. Leave PH, press L for lobby. Raoul will bring the car around while your personal shopper, Mandy, checks the weather forecast. Your driver, Phil, sez New Jersey is across the river. Roll your eyes. The Target in Parsippany awaits. Cross the GW while thumbing through the New Yorker. Wave to Jonathan Safran Foer in the next lane. He’s returning from Jersey. Laugh softly at cartoon. Mandy is working the cell, lining up info. She reports that it’s Christmas In July!

The bubble jet is printing out an S&P report on Target. Your friend Ernesto has interests in New Jersey. Real estate trusts. He’s in the south of France. Phil glides into a parking lot the size of JFK’s International Terminal. A woman in red ‘mini-van’ gives Phil the finger. He parks in front of the store.

Mandy looks frightened. You nod. She dashes inside. Massive doors hiss. Before the tinted window closes, you catch a glimpse of a fat guy wearing a Mets teeshirt scratching his crotch. Was this journey ill-advised? No wait, there’s Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. They’re neighbors. Phil waves.

Mandy emerges after what seems like hours. Phil loads the packages in the trunk. Mandy slams the door, something you’ve asked her not to do many times before. Her eyes are wide, her hair matted to her forehead. She reports shopping on a massive scale, wild stories about screaming children, fat guys scratching, endless checkout lines. Phil pulls away from the curb. You settle back against the supple leather seats. Christmas in July. You’ve shopped at Target.

The folks at the Literary Saloon have had to update their Compleat Review list of bloggers who blog lit. Sad to say this blog did not make either of their compendiums. I’ll never hear the end of this from the forty third earl and The Archduke. Not enough bookish material, way too many asides, diatribes, retractions, confessions, manifestos and just plain personal stuff that no one cares about. This post is about Juan Peron. See what I mean?

Steady Peronistas, I was kidding. What do Juan Peron and I have in common? We’ve never been the principal subject of an Andre Lloyd Webber musical. If Evita had been Juan box office would have shrunk to the size of a chick pea. Madonna in a mustache, the crooning Fascist.

This leads naturally and I think effortlessly into a discussion of John Twelve Hawks and The Traveler. Lit bloggers have been bashing Doubleday for the Twelve Hawks debut, for the sleight of hand marketing of an author from Off The Grid. Let’s step back. A major publisher throws a debut novelist a wing ding and they get hammered for it. Okay, the book wasn’t great. Maybe the snipers were on target with the preposterous elements of the campaign, but ironies abound. We’re neck deep in stories about novelists who get no support from their publishers. This was not a literary novel. That’s true. Many literary novels barely register sales, hardly ripple the waters. That may be because they are unreadable, lacking opacity or possessing it, or both. Nothing rips the fabric of civility faster than the high brow, low brow divide. Call me Oprah, call me low brow, but I think throwing money at any novelist is worth a cocktail or two.

Remember being shocked by the Hindenburg Disaster? No? The blimp caught fire on approach to an airfield in New Jersey, an event captured on film. The grainy newsreel had a voice over narration highlighted by the phrase, “oh, the humanity.” The shocking part for people back then was the film itself, a visual record of a tragedy. The bulk of information then was distributed in newspapers and on radio. Orson Welles scared the crap out of everyone with his 1939 Mercury Theater of the Air presentation, War of the Worlds. People panicked, ran screaming into the streets. This also occurred in New Jersey, just a few short years before my father arrived in the Garden State for basic training at Fort Dix. He was an MP and spent a large part of the war wrangling Afrika Corps prisoners, smoking Luckies, and sticking his head into newspapers. JP always read the papers, the Philly papers, the New York papers. He took four thousand German POWs on a train ride through Texas. The Germans used old newspapers to make maps, maps he confiscated. Desperate for a good read, he examined three month old copies of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Army Intelligence took everyone’s newspapers away. JP channeled Duke Ellington before the radio was seized.

Thoroughly disoriented, the German POWs arrived in Upstate New York. They were held in a fort built for the French and Indian War, whose outcome is a little blurry. American Intelligence delivered newspapers with most of the articles snipped out. JP was three months behind the news for the duration, not even sure who won the pennant in 1945. It wasn’t the Phillies. After the war, he read the paper first thing every morning, always in search of the late breaking news in the morning editions. He was determined never to be in the dark again after four years of censorship.

This just in: sinister envelope arrives from NYC. Name of Literary Agency neatly printed on back. Casually, I open the envelope. I use a weedwhacker for speed.

Great gobs of gopher guts, it’s a request! I know it is not cool to react with utter astonishment. The mouse family from under the porch has moved into the living room, and you know what? I don’t care.