Ephemeral Firmament

Fortnightly Firmament #3: Best Last Songs on the Record

Has the last song on a record ever been the best song on the record? The answer is yes, but just barely. You might think that in the heyday of LP construction more bands would have wanted to close strong, like a Broadway musical (or one of their own concerts), with a memorable finale that brought the album to a rousing finish and made you want to flip the record over (or rewind it) and play it again. But a while back I started realizing how many dud closers there are, even on great records: for every "Free Bird" and "Love Train," there are a dozen "Lady in My Life"s and "West of the Fields." It's clear that most bands (or producers or label execs) thought of an album lineup more like a baseball one, which you frontload for maximum efficiency, than a novel or a concert, which you might also orchestrate for a powerful final effect. I don't quite understand why. Don't you want to leave them wanting more?

Not everyone has shirked that opportunity, though, and in honor of the ongoing death of the album, I'd like to suggest ten final cuts that carry the weight they should. They may not all be the best songs on their respective records (though most of them are), but they all bring it on home in style, summing things up, or, even better, raising the stakes or shifting the tone just when you think you're done. As always, my ten are limited by my own idiosyncrasies (and record collection), and further suggestions are welcomed (if not necessarily agreed with).

1. "A Day in the Life," The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Ah, it's annoying to put this titan at the top, but what can you do? This is it: the template, the outlier, the exception that proves the rule. Easily the best song on, in theory if not in fact, the Greatest Record of All Time, "A Day in the Life" provides a rare hybrid of the Lennon-McCartney yin-yang as well as the archetypal chaotic-freakout ending, although it's just a tease before the second half of the song and the endless final chord, which harbors a vibrating chaos of its own. Unsurprisingly, the Fabs had a strong enough sense of the dramatic moment (or just had such a deep catalogue) that they came through with great finales more often then not, from "Tomorrow Never Knows" to "Her Majesty" to "Get Back," the last and best song on their last record.
2. "Built Too Long, (Parts 1, 2 and 3)," Built to Spill, Ultimate Alternative Wavers. Nine-plus minutes of chaotic-freakout ending, with the fattest, furriest licks this side of "Shake Your Rump," this is the final pinnacle of a record that is never out of my all-time top five. It took a bold band of Idahoans to throw in a Chuck D./Flavor Flav "Bring that beat back" sample at the end of their debut record, but it is fully earned. Not every one agrees, however: the only time I ever had the pleasure of coming across this one on the radio (back when KEXP was still KCMU), I was at first too blissed out to notice that my future wife, in the just-parked car with me, was being driven into a furious agony by the assault on her ears. She left the car and I stayed for all nine minutes; somehow we still got married.
3. "After Hours," Velvet Underground, Velvet Underground. The Velvets went to both extremes with their endings, from the endless drone of "Sister Ray" to this sweet and sad lullaby, which Lou Reed brilliantly gave to Mo Tucker to sing. "Looking gray in the rain as they stand disarrayed" may be the loveliest phrase in recorded music, and "After Hours" is the finest example of the sweet ditty finale, with other examples like "Her Majesty," "I'm in Love with a Girl" on Big Star's Radio City, and "My Little Corner of the World," on Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. (As true VU acolytes, Yo La tends to alternate their finales between 10-plus-minute freakouts and little Georgia Hubley numbers like this one.)
4. "Shattered," Rolling Stones, Some Girls. What is there to say? It's "Shattered," the great NYC song (hmm, second straight great NYC song on this list) at the end of a great NYC record.
5. "Fight the Power," Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet. The perfect match of beat and delivery, though I considered docking it a little because it had already appeared, as the opening cut, on the Do the Right Thing soundtrack. It may have seemed a bit of an afterthought to still be shouting "1989!" when Black Planet came out in 1990, but still, it's hard to match the feeling when you near the end of the record, having almost forgotten what's still in store, and you hear the revs and then the beats that kick off the most thrilling track of them all.
6. "Wall of Death," Richard and Linda Thompson, Shoot Out the Lights. Thematically and musically closes this haunted record. A favorite of mine for years, but what elevates it for me, really, are just two little bits of picking (at 1:48 and 2:40 on the album, though they aren't as noticeable in the live version linked above) that somehow give this otherwise-dirgey song the headlong momentum the Thompsons are singing about.
7. "Superfly," Curtis Mayfield, Superfly. It takes confidence to hold out until the end of the soundtrack to bring out the title song (is that when it appears in the movie too?), especially one this fabulous. "Freddie's Dead" and "Pusherman" may get respect for their storytelling, but they can't match the way that baseline strums in as the title song begins.
8. "I Had a Dream," The Long Ryders, Native Sons. I was a bit of a wide-eyed Long Ryders fan back when every road led from R.E.M., and I remember trying to talk up Native Sons to my friend Josh, who--light years more sophisticated about music than I--thought the Ryders were a little silly. But he did confess that when he and an equally sophisticated pal from his band got to the moment at the end of the record when someone from the band declares "That was tight" after the revved-up jam that closes "I Had a Dream," they had to admit that, much as they wanted to make fun of them, it was indeed tight. And dammit, 25 years later, it still is. (The video linked above and embedded below, which does include those final three words, is an embarrassing and incomprehensible '80s timepiece, but I have to say, unlike almost every other public figure from that decade, the band's haircuts hold up pretty well!)
9. "Both Sides Now," Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Will the Circle Be Unbroken. I really do want everyone to get along. I get awfully sentimental when this little instrumental comes on at the end of disc two of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, just after the rousing group version of the title number. Lovely in its own right, it also hits the record's anti-Townshend 1972 themes of cross-generational reconciliation right on the nose, with a traditional setting of Joni Mitchell's anthem of hippie ambivalence, played by Randy Scruggs, teenage son of the bluegrass legend Earl. (The link is to one of the many YouTube covers, not Mr. Scruggs himself.)
10. "Bonnie and Clyde," Luna, Penthouse. The tenth spot should really go to "Her Majesty" (and the brilliant Abbey Road medley it closes), but I've said enough about the Beatles, and I want to give a nod to the lightly populated genre of the unlisted final track, which includes the superb examples of London Calling's "Train in Vain" (which, irresistible though it is, always seemed too much of a little pop song to fit on that snarling record) and "Superman" from Lifes Rich Pageant, as well as this Gainsbourg cover duet with Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier (that's not her in the live video linked above) that's a perfect fit for Dean Wareham's drowsily jaded worldliness.

Here are those Ryders, by the way, in all their period finery:

BEA Sure Goes Fast When You're Not There

For the first time in what seems like forever but is more like six or seven years, I didn't join the thousands discussing and demonstrating the death and life of books at BookExpo America this week. I don't miss the stress of preparing, but I do miss the camaraderie and the city and especially the last few years of interviewing as many fascinating people as I could fit into my schedule. One interview I would have loved to take this year: Jeffrey Eugenides, for The Marriage Plot (coming in October), although based on his statement at the big author breakfast--that there are no galleys yet because he was still tweaking the book until the day before--I'm not sure I would have had anything to read beforehand. But The Millions does have an "exclusive" look at the opening paragraph of the novel, which is of course catnip to any book nerd, like me, currently in the middle of a thoroughly thought-out home-shelf reorganization:

There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters.

I'm afraid the best I can do, 3,000 miles from the Javits Center, is shamelessly mine the archives again, to bring you one of my favorite BEA interviews, last year's talk with William Gibson on Zero History, the final entry in his loose recent trilogy set in the more or less now (which he called, at least to me, the "Bigend Books"). Gibson, you won't be surprised to hear, is just a treat to talk to: in his Virginia-to-Vancouver drawl he thoughtfully takes your questions in places you didn't expect. (And, as I mentioned in my BEA roundup last year, he also shared, off-camera, his admiration for the pantsuit tailoring of my previous interviewee that morning, Condoleezza Rice.)

We talked long enough that I split the interview up into four pieces for posting on Amazon. Listen as you like below, but here are a few choice quotes, all of which are already in my commonplace book. From section one, in response to a question about whether he seems himself as an author as more like the passive Milgrim or the string-pulling Hubertus Bigend (two of the characters from the trilogy):

Hubertus's mode of operating actually in many ways resembles my authorial mode, in that he advances his business through allowing more or less random individuals to pursue their own courses. If he sees someone interesting, even passingly interesting, he'll hire them and set them some almost random task. He keeps doing this, and every tenth one produces something of value.

And here, from the third section, on why he loves Twitter (he's very active at @GreatDismal):

The Greatest Book Cover of All Time Is in My House Now

Look what just arrived in the mail! For someone who hasn't actually read his books, I certainly have had a thing for David Peace the last year or two. I think it started with hearing about this book, but suddenly I was seeing his name everywhere and he sounded like one of the most interesting writers going, from his historical thrillers set in Tokyo (Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City) to his Red Riding Quartet (1974, 1977, 1980, 1983--oh good lord how I love a book titled with a number, and how I especially love a book titled with a year!) to GB84 (another swoony title), and of course to the deliriously attractive item to the right. And then there's the British TV trilogization of the Red Riding books, which none other than David Thomson called "better than The Godfather." (There's also a movie version of The Damned United, which is damned from the get-go for me because it spells out "United"--see below. Also, it stars Michael Sheen, who seems to be on an odd mission to play every contemporary British figure, mostly Tony Blair--like Zelig, but with Woody Allen playing all the other roles.)

"Peace" has become the first place I look in the fiction shelves in a bookstore, and despite all those appealing titles, the thing I am really looking for is The Damned Utd, more particularly this edition of The Damned Utd. Here's my problem: not having read The Damned Utd is causing a substantial logjam in my cultural consumption. I'm fairly desperate to watch the Red Riding TV trilogy, but first I want to read the Red Riding books (and I have 1974 sitting on my shelf, beckoning me). But I really can't read those books until I read The Damned Utd, because it is more or less the most appealing book I can imagine, in large part because it is wrapped by the Greatest Book Cover of All Time.

Really? The Greatest? Oh, let me count the ways:

• The title. The sort-of internal rhyme of "Damned" and "United," the incongruity of a football club being cursed by God (or his representatives), and, absolutely, the abbreviation "Utd," which just further compresses and mystifies the already compressed and mystifying poetry of it.
• The blacked-out eyes. Why are they blacked out? These are famous men, right? What did they do wrong? Or are they innocents given a fig leaf of anonymity as an apologetic gesture for being dragged into this terrible drama? I don't know! It's, at least, a perfect visual metaphor for the liberties taken with real people by historical fiction, but somehow it evokes so much more. (Or is it just a reference to this AC/DC album cover?)
• The gentlemen themselves. The brutal, grim players in their period warmups and working-class hairdos, bearing no resemblance to the pretty-boy millionaire footballers of our day, led by a man whose dapper style sets himself in a class apart and almost out of time.
• The review blurbs. A humdrum cover element, no doubt, but how can a quote like this, from a source as venerable as The Times, fail to whet the appetite: "Probably the best novel ever written about sport"?
• The fascination of another culture's pop culture. The other review quote, from the Observer, reads "The book that brought the legend back to life." To which my own reaction is, "What legend?" No doubt for a UK reader, especially of my own age or thereabouts, just dropping the names "Leeds United" (the Utd in question) and "Brian Clough" (the fellow in the suit, I assume) evokes the same sort of swarm of associations that saying "New York Yankees" and "Billy Martin" does for me. Would I be equally fascinated by a novel called The Damned Yanks, with Martin, Graig Nettles, Roy White, and Reggie Jackson walking across the cover with blacked-out eyes? Ah, hell, I'd probably buy that book too. Nevertheless, as someone who has burned out a little on the big American sports and has turned to soccer for the freshness (to me) of its endlessly complicated and passionate parallel history, I love the idea of reading about a legend I didn't even know was a legend.

So why, after all this, did I not have a copy of my own of The Damned Utd until today? Well, it's pretty hard to find in the States--it has yet to be picked up by a U.S. publisher, I believe. I could have ordered a copy on Amazon via a third-party seller, but I don't know, I wanted an absolutely new edition of the Greatest Cover Ever. Or I could have ordered from Amazon.co.uk, but maybe I'm just lazy or cheap or still don't actually believe you can get things from another continent, or maybe I just preferred the anticipation to the actual thing. But when I stopped by the Amazon page the other day and saw a single copy of the UK paperback listed as being in stock, somewhere in Amazon's U.S. warehouses, destiny was calling to me, and I could no longer resist. (Now that my copy has been shipped to me, the listing says "Temporarily Out of Stock"--I'm not sure how that one copy found its way into the inventory, but I'm glad it did.)

And now, how can the actual book possibly live up to all that build-up? I can't imagine it can, but rather than have it sit around making my mouth water, as I often do, I'm going to read this one right away, as soon as I finish Tess. I'll report back.

Eyeless in Prague: Schocken's New Kafka Covers

I was delighted this weekend to come across Jacket Mechanical, the blog of Peter Mendelsund, a book designer at Knopf and their family of imprints. I've been an admirer of his work ever since I started paying attention not only to book covers, which I've been doing forever, but to the designers too, which I really only started doing when we ran our somewhat contentious Best Book Cover of 2009 competition at Amazon and Omnivoracious. Mendelsund was the only designer with three (very different) covers nominated, and he gave us a thoughtful interview about his nontraditional background (he was a concert pianist who had never even thought much about book design before he started doing it himself) and his theories and designs, especially the immediately iconic covers he did for Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. (Side note: the thicket of blond hair on the cover of The Girl Who Played with Fire? His daughter Violet's, snapped on a visit to the office.)

I was led to the blog for his discussion of the design elements (largely invisible to Amazon customers) of Glen Duncan's upcoming The Last Werewolf, which I remember being struck by in my last Random House list presentation. (And also see his recent interview with the NYer's Book Bench about his design for Knopf's new post-Larsson blockbuster, The Snowman.) But I was quickly drawn instead to a recent (I think--there are no posting dates in his minimalist blog design) post about his redesign of the flagship Kafka line at Schocken, the imprint that's now part of Knopf and that did so much to introduce Kafka to American readers in the mid-20th century. (I remember one side thrill of going into the Knopf offices this time last year--equal to meeting Nora Ephron and Sonny Mehta there--was going into a conference room and seeing a shelf lined with the Schocken Kafkas.)

The redesigns are elegant and striking, and I love the use of color and the way he's adapted Kafka's sprightly handwriting for the book's titles and even for the new Schocken logo. But here's my quibble: the central design element of the series is eyes: solo, paired, and in groups. I agree that eyes are almost freakishly evocative, and Mendelsund has done wonders with them before, e.g. for Laurie Sheck's A Monster's Notes, but they don't evoke my idea of Kafka. I say this from my gut memory of a lifetime of reading him, and so I might be missing contrary examples from his writing, but to me Kafka is much more about bodies than eyes. I think of his characters less as subjects of Orwell-style panopticon observation than as blind moles wrestling with each other in the dark, or, as in "The Burrow," digging alone underground. Even in "In the Penal Colony," the horrible writing of the machine is done not on the prisoner's body, but in it: it's not designed to be read, but felt. And it seems worth noting that in Kafka's own doodles, which have been used as cover elements before, the bodies usually don't have eyes at all: they express by posture rather than vision.

Everyone has their own Kafka, but to my mind making the eye the central image for his work ropes him into a Big Brother tradition that he's related to but not a part of. The horror for a Kafka figure is often not that everything he does is seen, but rather that nothing is (but is somehow known nevertheless).

P.S. It's a little tricky linking to the new editions on Amazon, since they appear to be using the same ISBNs as the previous ones. Some Schocken paperbacks (e.g. The Trial) still have the old cover as of this writing, and some (e.g. The Complete Stories) have the new one, and I'm not sure which one you'd get from the warehouse if you ordered. In his post Mendelsund says they are coming out in June and July, so if you want one yourself, you might instead want to check with your friendly neighborhood bookshop :).

P.P.S. Mendelsund also posts a great memo from Hannah Arendt (working as an editor at Schocken at the time) to Salman Schocken, about how hard it is to get any of the male publishers to work with her (shades of The Castle!). That correspondence sounds worthy of its own post some day.

Enchantment Can Really Happen When Your Muse Is Freddy Mercury

For a long time, ever since I took over a little closet/office upstairs in our house, I had an idle plan to raise there a trio of Soviet-style banners with the faces of my literary heroes at the time: Kafka, Kleist, and Nathanael West. (The current icons, I guess, though the original three have hardly been overturned, would be Hughes, Hazzard, and Spark.) And then that idea sort of morphed into flags of three non-literary figures I admire from the '70s, who would, the thinking went, inspire me to stretch myself into capacities I don't generally assume I possess: Jimmy Connors (chip-on-his-shoulder perseverance), Bob Fosse (self-destroying commitment--at least as portrayed by Roy Scheider!--to art I don't find all that appealing), and Freddy Mercury (glorious flamboyance, natch).

I'm not the only person for whom Mr. Mercury has served as a muse. In response to my diary entry about dancing around the kitchen to "Flash," my friend Dallas Crow sent along a poem he published in Cairn, called "Frank O'Hara in Iowa, 1980." It starts "In their bedrooms teen boys prance / a la Freddy Mercury" and it ends "you only see some of what you see," and it's fantastic. He's just posted it on his blog as well, so I would have something to link to.

And Dallas's poem reminded me of God Save My Queen, in which Daniel Nester wrote a poem for each song on Queen's first ten records, and pulled it off. I reviewed it for the Stranger back in '04, and here's part of what I said (in comparing it to a long poem about All About Eve that I didn't like as much):

For Nester, the slippage between art and life comes from the fan's perspective, in which your love for the art is what seems to bring that art into being. As confessional as Phoebe is, it never captures the intense identification of a drag queen or a kid in his bedroom the way that Nester does in "Bohemian Rhapsody," when he describes his adolescent ceremony of laying out all the Queen records in order on his floor, 45s neatly stacked on top of each album: "I would then stand in front of this, drinking a wine cooler, as if I were Noah in / the Ten Commandments movie, congratulating myself, clasping my arms behind / my back, as if this was my ark, my own creation." A decade or so later, he's still doing the same thing, lining up all the songs in order and making them his own, refusing to trade in that earnest teen yearning for a more ironic stance. As he writes, in response to the hipster derision that he imagines greeting an amateurish, wonderful drag show (no doubt similar to the contempt faced by any lifelong Queen fan): "Let's say, finally, that enchantment can really happen."

Meanwhile, this has nothing to do with Queen, but I just have to say I was so thoroughly pleased to read today's Paris Review Daily post--about old pop music, there's your connection--by the admirable John Jeremiah Sullivan, in which he calls a song I've loved for a long time but have never heard anyone else talk about "the song I hope to keep if the people in charge of the survival pod say you can keep only one." The song is "I'm Going to Run to Jesus for Refuge," by Charles Barnett, as recorded by Alan Lomax in the 50s and included on one of my all-time favorite records (likely to appear on a future Firmament, as well as this old one), Velvet Voices, volume 8 of the Southern Journey series of Lomax recordings. The song speaks for itself, but I just want to mention that the overturned washtub Barnett apparently is percussing sounds just like the furnace at my childhood home would sound like when you knocked it.

Diary of a Complacent Voluptuary: The Deleted Scenes

If by some chance you came here by some route other than my Paris Review Culture Diary (which is hard to imagine), you should know that last week I had the privilege of keeping a record of the culture I consumed for the excellent Paris Review Daily blog, the results of which appear this week in two parts.

"Diary of a Complacent Voluptuary": that's what I thought when I reread my entries just after sending them off to Thessaly, the proprietor of the blog, on Monday. (I also thought, hey, Complacent Voluptuary: that's a pretty good name for a blog. Too bad I'm already committed to the Firmament.) But really, that's what I did all week, just idly consume and reflect upon these tidbits of culture, like so many bon-bons? I guess that's what the format leads you to, but it looks even more frivolous when placed next to yesterday's interview on the blog with Chris Adrian, who not only is a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology but is driven to write (by all accounts excellent) novels by the pain he sees his patients and families go through. And I write, 'cause why? Nothing so articulable or defensible, but I guess out of the faith that I'll get to a place that means as much to me. Or that I'll get some laughs.

Nevertheless, those diary entries are indeed more or less how I spent last week, though you'll notice from the time stamps that there are plenty of gaps between entries, which I spent, among other things, eating bad pizza and good pizza; sleeping (too little) at night and nodding off (too often and too publicly) during the day; trying to make pretend people do pretend things 97 years ago; calling Little Leaguers out at first; folding laundry and washing dishes; drinking Manhattans (or, rather, one giant Manhattan--thanks, Dave) with old colleagues; reading stuff online that wasn't interesting enough to write about; reading funny emails from friends that were too insider-y to write about; and, of course, writing up my day's activities for the diary.

There were also a few entries that I ended up cutting to meet the diary's suggested length. The diary benefited from the tightening, but what's the point of having a blog of your own if you can't spill whatever mess you please all over it? So here are the deleted scenes, as it were, from the final cut (which, as any DVD watcher knows, are never quite as good as the undeleted ones):

DAY ONE

8:30 A.M. Now that I don't, in theory, spend all day (and much of the night) online anymore, I try to cram email and the Web into the corners of the day, e.g. over my breakfast, which used to be magazine time. Today, after flurries of email freakout from my scattered hometown friends about the University of Maryland basketball coaching vacancy, I have just enough time to watch Kristen Wiig as Michele Bachmann--"America, I challenge you to a staring contest, and it begins ... now"--steal the show in the SNL GOP debate clip from this weekend, before walking my son to school.

11:30 A.M. Catch up with Malcolm Gladwell's NYer review of Ugly Beauty, Ruth Brandon's dual biography of Helena Rubinstein and Eugene Schueller, the founder of L'Oreal. I know nothing about these people or their business, but I'm drawn in. Why aren't there more dual biographies, to loosen the straightjacket of the traditional single life? I think (not for the first time) about pitching a triple bio of my own on obsessive, mop-headed competitors from the '70s: Bobby Fischer, Pete Maravich, and Jimmy Connors.

DAY TWO

9:50 A.M. Read (via Mark Athitakis, a favorite source for well-curated literary links) a Rumpus interview with Edward P. Jones, whose reluctant stories about himself are as much as source of wonder as his fiction. He lives so intensely within his own head and his senses of the past and of the streets of Washington, D.C., and he could care less about the literary life of publicity and competition. Of most practical interest: the way he talks about working out his stories in his head for years before he puts them on paper (if he ever does). I work (so far at least) in an entirely different way: my characters hardly exist until they speak and act on the page (and even then...).

2:47 P.M. My former colleague and dear friend Brad emails some advance page spreads from the front matter for his upcoming book, Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, including a photographic dedication page to his dad that may be the most endearing I've seen since Franny and Zooey. I've been in the book business for a while, but this is the first I've really seen of the pre-publication process for a book from the author's side. One of many reasons to look forward to the final product is a rumored drink recipe called the "Tipsy Nissley."

DAY FOUR

12:45 A.M. On the recommendation of my architect/printmaker sister, who listens to a lot more podcasts than I do while she works, I stream Bill Simmons's recent chat with ex-BYU/Celtics player Michael Smith. Good stuff on everything from Mormonism to Simmons's freakish recall of Celts games from 20 years ago (Smith: "I can't believe you remember all this stuff about us!") to Smith's legendary status (who knew?) as perhaps the greatest HORSE player of all time, and how pissed off Larry Bird was when he got beat by Smith as a rookie. I'm proud, though, that I am able to turn this 77-minute (!) interview off halfway through and go to bed.

DAY SEVEN

9:30 A.M. I don't sit down with the Sunday Times. Having grown up with a full-on crush on my hometown Washington Post, I would never have expected this, but I haven't taken a paper at home for almost 20 years, which dates back even before the news started to come in through my data implants. But this spring I tried to make the Pavlovian response to the new NYT paywall and subscribe to the Sunday print edition, only to find that the algorithm back at Times HQ has determined that my zip code is only eligible for Weekend Only, not Sunday Only delivery. Back to the laptop...

8:30 P.M. Back in the Jukebox. I try to dig up some background on Silas Leachman, who has another version of "All Goin' Out and Nothin' Comin' In" in the Jukebox, and who the archive says was a "Chicago politician" who "specialized in what were called 'coon songs.'" (What a career combination.) To be honest, to my untutored ears in turn-of-the-century ethnicity his attempted black accent sounds more Irish or Yiddish (as if you could pin any of those down exactly anyway), but that's part of what's so crazy about these records, like the guy who trills his R's while carefully enunciating the "dems" of a black dialect song. I can't find much more on Leachman, but I do end up at a smart music-history blog called Locust St. that looks like it petered out last year and has no apparent information about the writer. Who is this mysterious person? (Further investigation reveals at least that the writer is Chris O'Leary and that he (or she) is now fully immersed in the land of David Bowie at Pushing Ahead of the Dame). 

P.S. I keep wanting to credit my sister Elinor for the photo above, but in truth I was the photographer, by the usual definition at least. But the camera, as well as the forearm tendons, are hers. As a few patient folks are very familiar with by now, the viewfinder of her Hasselblad is pretty much my favorite photographic subject (or medium) on the planet.

Fortnightly Firmament #2: Best Subtitles

Ah, this is a list I've been waiting to put together for years. It's been said, and usually not kindly, that we live in the Age of the Subtitle. (Bill Morris recently had a good piece, with a good title, on the Millions: "Are Run-On Subtitles Literature's New Flop Sweat?"). Subtitles seem to be growing longer and more explanatory every day, a trend that I think began before the current regime of Search Engine Optimization but that has only been heightened by it. It's as if publishers want to cram the widest readership into the subtitle they can, by listing possible interest groups (and search terms) and claiming the biggest storyline conceivable, usually in the form of "How ... Changed the World." (The classic example of the latter is the chef d'ouevre of the master of the single-topic history, Mark Kurlansky: Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, but the one that's always amused me the most was Simon Garfield's Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World.) It's become refreshing when a publisher has enough faith in the title to let it live alone, like Sebastian Junger's recent War. Perhaps if your subject really changed the world, you don't need to say it.

As others with some historical perspective have pointed out, this is nothing new, though. In the Wild West of 18th century publishing, endless and grandiose subtitles were the rule, viz. the original title page of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un‐inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.

But if the subtitle is most often a site of excess rather than elegance, there are exceptions, and I've been keeping a mental list for a while of my favorites, which pack enough wit or weirdness or narrative verve into a few words that in many of these cases I've been driven to read (or at least buy) the book based on the subtitle alone. (Like all my ephemera, this list is a work in progress, based mostly on my own shelves, and I'll be happy to add to it over time when you (whoever "you" turns out to be) or I spot good candidates.)

1. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan. The bodily and biological and the mystically religious meet in this poetic celebration of the humblest but most subtitleable (see below) of subjects. Logan's other recent subtitle (Oak: The Frame of Civilization) has a pretty good ring to it, too, but it flirts dangerously with "Changed the World" sentiments.
2. Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back by Thomas Geoghegan. One of my favorite memoirs, whose wry outlook is thoroughly captured by its title and subtitle, which have the added benefit of being the best Chicago Manual of Style capitalization test case I've ever seen, including such tricky items as "Are," "On" (only capitalized at the beginning or end of a title!), "to Be," "When," "on," and the further bonus of an "It's"/"Its" demonstration.
3. Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me by Craig Seligman. I absolutely bought this one for the subtitle, and the premise it promised (a lively and personal comparison between two figures I'd never put together in my head, although they make a natural and striking pair), and it lived up to my hopes.
4. Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football by David Winner. This one has almost too much going for it: a great subtitle, a hilarious cover (in the original UK edition), my favorite soccer team, and a brainy take on a physical game. So much that, although I bought a copy years ago, I've been afraid to actually read it and find it doesn't fulfill expectations (though I've heard from reliable sources that it does).
5. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk. Another "genius," and another confluence of elements that make this book irresistible (though again as yet unread by me): the great subtitle, which has such a funny echo in the author's last name and in the cover illustration, in which Wittgenstein looks adorably beset by the glow of the world.
6. Regretsy: Where DIY Meets WTF by April Winchell. Ha! This one just makes me laugh, as does the title, as does the site they both come from.
7. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery. What is it about dirt that attracts such excellent subtitles (and, by all accounts, such good books)? The lowly (but vital) subject, I imagine, along with the Anglo-Saxon punch of the word, which mix well with an elevated, Latinate subtitle. Speaking of elevated, I can't pass by without a shout-out to Motley Crue's The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band. 
8. How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, for Example by Marshall Sahlins. The subtitle promises a relaxed and confident argument that wears the challenge thrown by the scare quotes in the title lightly, although from the pages I've dipped into, the book itself, a response to a critic by a major anthropologist, reads a little more caustically, like an extended New York Review of Books letter to the editor.
9. Wigfield: The Can-Do Town That Just May Not by Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, and Stephen Colbert. A one-of-a-kind put-on from the Strangers with Candy folks.
10. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante. "Lures and Snares": it sounds like a Pavement song. Why wouldn't you want to be caught?

Is it at all surprising that a high number of these are considered "cult classics" of some kind or another? The same attention and imagination that puts a little English on an afterthought like a subtitle is also likely to create a book that will last among some discerning set.

Some runners-up: I more or less disallowed any subtitle that begins with "How" or "Why," but a pretty good one within that category is Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. The last one knocked off the list above was Robert Richardson's Emerson: The Mind on Fire, which, though it's not quite witty, is passionate enough that it's always made me want to read it; his William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism evokes a similar intellectual drama, if not as pithily. Some of the New Journalists got across their personalities and/or ambitions in their subtitles: I prefer Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga to the better-known Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of America, and I appreciate the sentiment of Mailer's The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, but it's working a little too hard. From my grad-school shelf, Jameson's Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is an era-defining classic (despite my distaste for the smug hopefulness of "late capitalism"), and I have a lot of affection for Deleuze and Guattari's little Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, but maybe that's because it's the only one of their books I could really understand.

There are more and better to be found beyond my limited shelves, no doubt, and my subtitle radar will only be more finely tuned now that I know what it takes to make the list.

Interview Archives: Steve Martin on An Object of Beauty

While linking to my Steve Martin interview in my previous post, I ended up listening to the whole thing again for the first time since I posted it on Amazon last fall, and thought I'd post it here as well. For a long time my memory of the interview was overshadowed by the cringey memory of a time-zone screwup on my part (the first and I hope last time that's happened to me), which led to a series of increasingly urgent messages on my phone from a publicist, a sales rep, and Mr. Martin himself. All involved were very gracious about my error and we were able to talk later that day, and now that I listen again, I think the interview turned out pretty well (and not only because I managed to work in a discussion of Cruel Shoes):

 

As you can tell, he plays it pretty serious when he wants to (as the infamous 92nd St Y audience found out, to their displeasure). It's funny to me that of the two remarkably durable '70s icons I interviewed that month, Martin and Jimmy Carter, it was Carter who was the goofier and funnier of the two (at least once we got to talking about Hamilton Jordan).

Or maybe the reason for a Steve Martin post is so I could embed this, which I link to in my Paris Review Culture Diary this week, and which I could watch a hundred times more just for the pleasure of seeing him say "Uumellmahaye" again and again:

 

An Original (of a Certain Type): The American Painter Emma Dial

I was sure that I had read someone, in reviewing Steve Martin's art-world novel, An Object of Beauty, compare it unfavorably to Samantha Peale's art-world novel from the previous year, The American Painter Emma Dial, but the web scrapers are unable to confirm that for me. But if you've read one of the novels, it's hard not to think of it when you read the other: both are set in today's money-saturated art world, and both were written by insiders (Martin's an active and well-connected collector, and Peale worked for Jeff Koons for several years). They both have some of the trappings of satire but reveal quite a bit of affection for that world as well, and they are both about ambitious and desirable young women trying to make their way through a male-dominated art business (and in each book the woman's ownership of a valuable painting with a personal connection plays a central role in the plot).

I came to them backwards: I set Emma Dial aside with interest in 2009 (and also gave it to my sister, who is experienced, like Emma, in both art and assisting), but I didn't get to it until this spring, while I read An Object of Beauty last fall (so I could interview Mr. Martin). And I enjoyed An Object of Beauty, within the genre limits it set pretty sturdily for itself. But Emma Dial, though it follows a few genre codes of its own, knocked about for me within that space in a more interesting and more surprising way.

Hadrian the Second: Jacket Afterthoughts

I nearly extended my Memoirs of Hadrian post last night even further (and kept myself up another hour or two) to digress on the covers the book has had, but, with uncharacteristic restraint, I decided to save that for a separate, second post. When I wrote about Hadrian for Omni, I used the cover of the US edition, but for the Firm (is that really going to be the nickname I use for this place? We'll see how long it takes before I don't feel like an idiot writing it) I featured the Penguin UK edition, in part because it's the closest to the one I own (another version of the UK edition), and in part because I like it about a thousand times more. (I've put the three covers next to each other above: US, Amazon UK, my UK.)

I don't really have anything strongly against the US cover--the marble bust is at least set in a sort of intimately paternal profile that is consistent with the character inside. But if you go, say, to Shelfari's page for the book and look at the always-enjoyable feature where they show you all the covers they have for various editions of the book, you'll see what a familiar (and dry) choice it is to use the old marble-bust gambit. None of those covers carry the strange tension of the UK edition, with its fractured and distressed version of an image that already carries a compelling emotional ambiguity (it's unclear if the figure's eyes are shut and head is turned in death, pleasure, or submission), and none gives you the sense they should of what a strange and singular book you have in your hands.

There's an interesting further element to that UK edition: on the back cover the photo is credited to Jeff Cottenden, with a tiny thumbnail of the image repeated (at a size where you can just barely see that the original was not broken up the way the cover version is). Following the Cottenden trail leads you to his own site, where I can't find this particular image but I do see many others that show an interest in what he calls "period" enactments, and to a quite un-caustic celebration of his many book covers at Caustic Cover Critic, including a few more period pieces for UK Penguin Classics, such as one for Goodbye to All That, which has a lovely and sad Guy Maddin feel.

One side question I can't figure out, at least from my basement in the Pacific Northwest: which is the current Penguin UK edition? Since Amazon features the one in the middle above, I assumed it was current, but the one on the right is the one you'll find on Penguin's own site (along with others in a similar type style, although there are plenty in the middle format as well). I like the immediacy of the larger, centered type in my edition (or perhaps I like it just 'cause it's mine), so I hope that's where Penguin has turned now. The only personal evidence I can add that the one on the right was the one on sale in Paris a year ago...