Ephemeral Firmament

Nineteenth-Century Novelists: I Have Found Your Plot Machine

To be honest, I first picked up this little book off a display table because of its striking resemblance to the cover designs of the even littler Cloverfield Press limited editions my sister designed and printed not long ago (see samples below, including the Miranda July booklet that's now selling for $200+ on Amazon). The resemblance is striking, no? Just sayin'. But I should also say that if there is a nonrandom connection between the two, it speaks well of both parties, since a) they are all lovely covers, striking not only because of their similarity, b) imitation--->flattery, etc., and c) the Wakefield Press series of which The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy is part looks really promising.

The reason I not only picked up The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy but took it home with me is that when I flipped through its pages it made me laugh again and again. It is, to begin with, exactly what it says it is in its fabulous title: a taxonomy of these two roles central to society's exchanges, by Charles Fourier, the pre-Marx French utopian socialist best remembered from your economics classes (by me at least) as the guy who thought the seas would turn into lemonade.

What makes you laugh about these hierarchies, though, is not their preposterousness but their relentlessly clear-headed qualities of observation. They aren't the formulations of a fantasist, but a novelist: a nineteenth-century realist novelist, to be specific, for what would the nineteenth-century novel be without the two subjects of adultery and financial failure? Fourier lists eighty different species of cuckolds and thirty-six of bankrupts, and each description reads like a novel (or at least a Maupassant story) in miniature. For example:

19. The Auxiliary or Coadjutor Cuckold is a man who rarely makes an appearance in the household and only shows up to spread joy, reproach his wife's fear-stricken lovers for not laughing and drinking, and urges them to forget their squabbles and live like good republicans and share and share alike. He is an aid to commerce: horns are roses for him.

55. The Pretentious, or Self-Satisfied, Conceited Cuckold is a man who believes his wife to be so honored to have him as a husband that she would not even dream of paying heed to any suitors, whom he looks upon as victims unworthy of consideration. They gain ground all the more easily: the security in which he lives makes a husband easygoing and negligent on matters of surveillance, and eventually favors the secret affair within the household.

and

16. The Transcendant Bankruptcy calls for a wide-ranging plan, immense and rapid growth, a trading syndicate utilizing thirty or forty sales assistants, numerous ships, colossal reations with every country, and then a sudden collapse, a terrible fall whose repercussions echo throughout the four corners of the world and leave behind such a tangled mess that businessmen will be skimming profits off its repercussions for ten years after. It is an operation in which mercantile genius reveals itself in all its glory. It must offer a loss of at least three-quarters, for everything needs to be lavishly drawn in this vast tableau.

Honestly, if you're a novelist (particularly a nineteenth-century one), I urge you to pick up a copy of The Hierarchies for purely practical reasons: it's a reference far more fecund than a whole stack of those Writers Digest fakebooks, and, of course, more entertaining. I've only glanced through the little book so far, and I'm hardly doing Fourier's philosophy justice with this amused cherry-picking (these funny sketches were in the service of extensive and wryly revolutionary ideas about sex and commerce), but at the least, if you are in the market for amused cherry-picking, you really could not ask for more.

P.S. As promised, here are few from the Cloverfield vaults:

Is It the Great (or At Least Goofily Good) Unacknowledged DeLillo Novel?

It's been a bit since I've posted, since I've been working on some things I hope you'll see soon in other spaces, but another item arrived in the mail that I had to share. It used to be I'd get excited about galleys of big books that arrived months ahead of pub date; now a big day for me is when some semi-obscure out-of-print book with a great backstory I've ordered shows up in the mail, and this week's was a good one: Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League, by Cleo Birdwell. Enjoy the front and back covers:

You may know the story behind this goof of a "memoir": it was written by none other than the great brooding Bronxian himself, Don DeLillo (in collaboration with a former ad-agency colleague named Sue Buck), and disowned by its author, who had it removed from his list of published works and apparently has never officially acknowledged his paternity. I had always been fascinated by the idea of the book, and when I was recently reminded of it by my fellow bibliophile Dallas (who also turned me on to No Big Deal), I realized there was no reason I couldn't get a copy for myself, if only for the pleasure of filing it in the "D"s next to Americana.

I haven't had a chance to read much yet, but here's how it starts:

If a man's name sounds right whether you say it forward or backward, it means he went to Yale.

Sanders Meade, class of '67, was the Rangers' general manager when I made my first appearance under the smoky lights. Sanders's job was to wear plaid double-knit pants and a leisure-suit jacket with his shirt open at the top and the shirt collar worn outside the jacket. That's all you have to know about him, excepting his surprising prowess the time we hopped into bed during the snows in southern Ontario. I couldn't tell you why I wanted Sanders. He was the absolute antithesis.

Oh, I can't tell you how it lightens my heart to see DeLillo, who increasingly seems to be carrying the weight of history and consciousness on his slim, aging back, messing around like this!

A few years back Gerald Howard (once DeLillo's editor) told what appears to be the most complete story of its publication out there, and it's a good one: rejected by Knopf when DeLillo submitted it under his own name, he published it as "Cleo" with another publisher and after a spirited publicity stunt involving the lady on the back cover above it became "by far" his top-selling novel until White Noise five years later (in which, by the way, the cultural-id-channelling character Murray Jay Suskind, first introduced in Amazons, memorably reappears).

Is it just a novelty I can stick on my shelf and laugh about? I think it's more than that. Dallas, in a 1998 article in Notes in Contemporary Literature (sorry--it's not online, so you'll have to look it up in your library unless you can get Dallas to send you a xerox too) that may well have been the most thorough discussion of its authorship until Howard's, argued it "should be considered a legitimate part of his oeuvre," and I certainly agree. Published between Running Dog and The Names, just before DeLillo hit his midcareer peak with White Noise, Libra, and Underworld, it seems a crucial element in his development, and only more so (don't you agree, Dr. Freud?) because DeLillo has tried so hard to suppress it from his identity. I rather expect that when that first, mammoth biography of the man comes out in 2035 or so, the Amazons interlude is going to be given its own chapter.

I've always been struck by the moment in his career DeLillo describes in his Paris Review interview, when he was writing The Names (soon after, one assumes, finishing Amazons), and, inspired in part by the "clear light of the Aegean Islands" and the gravity of the "letters carved on stones all over Athens," he approached his writing with a new, "deeper level of seriousness." "Some of the work I did in the 1970s," he says, "was off-the-cuff, not powerfully motivated. I think I forced my way into a couple of books that weren’t begging to be written, or maybe I was writing too fast." Since Amazons was the last book he had written at that point, and the one that he has since disowned, you can't help but think it's at least part of what he had in mind, the sort of unmotivated, unserious goof that he wanted to leave behind.

I've always looked at that moment as a powerful and important one, since he did go on soon after to write the wonderful (and yes, deeply serious) books (Libra is my favorite) that made him such an exciting force in our literature. But thinking of the austere, portentious novelist he's become since (I confess that I'm making that judgment mostly second-hand, since after the terrible Cosmopolis I've lost my heart for keeping up with him), seeing a joyously inventive book like Amazons (well, maybe it wasn't joyous for him--in fact, it sounds like it wasn't) is a refreshing reminder of a loose and playful side to DeLillo that he has, for better or worse, outgrown. I've already explained here that I'm not an author completist, so it may not surprise you (though it still surprises me) that I've never actually gone back and read any pre-Names DeLillo, the books like Americana, End Zone, and Great Jones Street that he has since distanced himself from (calling them "hasty" and "shaggy") almost as much as he has from Amazons. But now I want to: whether I start with Amazons or go even further back, I think they could be a tonic. And they might be for him too. 

Turing's Cathedral at Town Hall

Thanks to a call from my friend John, I got out of the house Monday night to hear someone talk, something I did all the time a decade ago, before a) I had kids, and b) I was lucky enough to have a job where a lot of those people came to talk to us around a Starbucks table or into a microphone I was holding. I don't have that job anymore (I do still have kids), and what I miss perhaps most about it is getting to listen to those fascinating people when they come to town. But it took going out and seeing a smart author speak to make me realize how much I missed it.

George Dyson was the one talking, at Town Hall (a former cathedral of sorts itself, its great vault having been built by the Christian Scientists almost a hundred years ago). I only knew the most superficial things about him (mainly whom he is related to), but his story (dropping out of high school to live in a tree house and build kayaks and then returning to the family business in a way by becoming a self-taught historian of science and technology) and his new book (Turing's Cathedral, on the development of the computer) both seemed promising. I still only know slightly less superficial things about him and his work now, but a few seem worth noting here.

First is his book, and very first is its cover. I'm sometimes skeptical of book covers that merely hinge on a witty idea, but this one is both witty and, well, as profound as a book cover can be. It doesn't all come across that well online, but the cover is designed to look like an old punchcard, with--are they called chads in this context too?--real holes in the dust cover, and the holes peek through to the image on the cover board itself, the face of Alan Turing. But the aspect I love is the way the punches also, to me at least, evoke the cathedral of the title--or if not a classic Gothic cathedral then a starker medieval fortress, with slits for windows distributed across a stone face. I'm not even sure what that connection specifically means: perhaps just a sense, cutting across history, of the mystery and impersonal beauty of human ambition.

It was hardly a surprise to hear that the cover is by Peter Mendelsund, the celebrated young Knopf and Pantheon designer who was one of those fascinating people I got to interview back at Amazon (though not in person).

And the book itself I came away with a hunger to read. My friend John said it sounded like the equivalent on the computer side of Richard Rhodes's Making of the Atomic Bomb (another book I'd love to finally get to): in both cases there is a thoroughly dramatic story of breathtaking scientific breakthroughs being engineered into practical, world-changing applications by outsized personalities, in large part under the urgency of world war. And of course there was a lot of overlap between the two projects (and those who worked on them), though the weight of the computing story falls more heavily after the war.

What fascinated John (a developer himself) was the way that artificial intelligence seemed nearly invented from scratch by these thinkers, and what fascinated me was the idea, which Dyson raised, that the path our computers took (which I don't know enough about to even define) was just one of many possible ones, and that what looked like parallel dead ends to that path may yet have potential as future breakthroughs.

And what I enjoyed about the evening was a sort of familial sense about it all. Dyson obviously comes from a family of scientists and technologists (he grew up at the Institute for Advanced Study, where much of his story is set), and since he's lived in the Seattle area for decades he knew a lot of people at the reading, but in a larger sense there was a feeling in the room, based both on the heads I saw nodding at various points in his story and on the questions (often really statements with question marks) at the end, that many of the people there had personal connections to various aspects of his story: to the technology, or to the people themselves. And that sense echoed Dyson's approach to the subject, which seems as interested in the personal stories of the scientists (and engineers and secretaries) who worked on these breakthroughs as in the technology itself. It was a reminder that the story of technology is as human a story as any.

I also appreciated, when so much of what I read (and write) is both produced and consumed in bite-sized morsels, hearing from someone who has been devoted to a project for years and years (he said he turned in the book about six years past his publisher's original deadline). The Town Hall site has a video of a similar talk Dyson gave at Google a few years back, while still in the middle of his giant project, a meandering slide-show tour through the images of his book:

Best Book Cover of 2011: Spencer Tracy by James Curtis (by Carol Devine Carson)

One of the idle pastimes of my past few years, when I had what seemed like all the new releases passing through my hands, was keeping a list of my favorite book covers of the year. Sometimes I made something official out of that, most extravagantly with the Best Covers of the Year contest we ran in 2009, the response to which clarified to me that not everyone agrees about what makes a good book cover.

This year I wasn't so immersed in new books, and though a few--Townie, Debt, Hark! A Vagrant--did express the essence of their art by making me want to buy and/or read the book they represented, my Best Book Covers of 2011 list consists of just one book, the one that kept popping out from the stacks and shelves in my happy bookstore pillaging for gifts over the past few weeks. I didn't actually buy it for anyone, and I'm not sure I care enough about the subject (though I do care a little) to buy its 1000 pages for myself, but it's the one that kept jumping into my hands nevertheless: Spencer Tracy, James Curtis's new biography.

I don't really want to make any too-grand claims for it, since it owes so much to an already-iconic image (the more inscrutable of the two shots of Tracy in Irving Penn's famous series of "corner portraits"). But there's something about the way the designer Carol Devine Carson (the longtime art director at design-friendly Knopf) elevates this striking photograph further with a pure white frame and the small, elegant type of the title and author, which seems to float modestly but intensely below the photograph. The overall effect succeeds in filling this old, stolid star, overshadowed now in our memory by his alliance with Hepburn, with a glamor and mystery of his own, and the book itself seems to levitate out of any stack it sits in.

 

OMG! Look What I Just Got in the Mail!!!!

I think I'm even more excited about getting this than I would have been in 1977.

Author Photo Quiz: Answer Key

And here's the list of authors in order, for the photo quiz I just posted, along with the books the photos were taken from:

Author Photo Quiz: Unscramble the Names

If you want to guess the authors in the previous post with the help of a list of the names to choose from, or if you want a hint after trying to guess them cold, you'll find them in scrambled order below, after the jump:

More Favorite Author Photos, Which I Guess Is a Quiz

Of course in skimming through my house full of shelves last week for the most recent Firmament, I came up with more than ten favorite author photos, and so here I'd like to present 19 more whose scans I didn't want just to end up sitting neglected on my hard drive. And rather than chatter semi-endlessly about them, I'm presenting them without explanation, for the pleasure of their images alone, and their juxtaposition. And why not make a quiz out of it, for the three or four people who stop by here?

Here's how I'll do it: I'll post the composite photo here, and then do two more follow-up posts, so the answers aren't spoiled for those who want to play, and so those who do want to play can have two ways to do so. The first follow-up post will give the 19 names, but out of order, for those who'd like a head start in identifying the authors. And the second post will list the authors in correct order as an answer key. (I'll also list the books the photos are from, but you only have to get the author to be correct, at least according to my rules.) If you want to try to guess the authors cold, then jump straight to the answer key after you guess, but if you want some hints, stop by the middle post and try to unscramble the names.

Please post how you did. I'm guessing some of these will be easy, some middling, and some virtually impossible unless you have exactly the same book collection I do. But here they are, in their motley glory:

Fortnightly Firmament #9: Favorite Author Photos

The author photo is a maligned and poorly used art form. Considered a false distraction from the purity of the words within (especially when the author is a hottie) or consigned to a tiny thumbnail afterthought on an inner book flap (if it appears at all), it's often thought a piece of vain and trashy commerce, best left to be exploited by 25-year-old flavors of the month and aging, airbrushed blockbuster franchises.

But treating the author photo as a bit of pro forma fluff ignores the theatrical possibilities--and even requirements--of authorship. Think of how hard it is to separate our 20th-century literary greats (even more so than the commercial hacks--who remembers what Arthur Hailey looked like?) from their iconic images: Baldwin's giant, weary eyes, Beckett's hawklike brow and crest, Djuna Barnes's boyishly dolled-up profile. They (or their promoters) hardly neglected the importance of constructing such a public image, and their art hasn't suffered from its propagation.

Most author photos, though, seem infected by reluctance and (false) modesty, so here I'd like to celebrate some author images that are as memorable as the books they help present--or that, better yet, help make those books more memorable. I stuck as best I could to true author photos, from book flaps or back covers, and ignored photos that were used as front covers, an entirely different genre of art. It's an idiosyncratic selection, limited by my own taste like all Firmaments, but also by my book collection (most of which are paperbacks with no author photo, further limiting the field). I spent an hour or two skimming through every shelf in my house to cull my nominees, but it turned out the ones that made this list were already memorable enough for me that, except for a few I was pleased to be reminded of, they were the ones in my head before I started my more systematic search.

I've led with John Hodgman's photo above not as one of the official top ten--his new book, That Is All, has only been in my house a few days, not long enough to become a "favorite"--but more as a patron saint of the author photo, since That Is All includes not one but three exquisite portraits of Mr. Hodgman in character as The Deranged Millionaire, including the one above, hidden on the inside of the book jacket despite being the best of the three.

Here are my favorites:

 

1. Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, from The Smartest Guys in the Room. My favorite photo on the list is also the smallest, just a little two-shot above the author bio on the back flap of their book, the definitive account of the Enron collapse by journalists who helped make it happen. (McLean, reporting in Fortune, was one of the first to publicly question its finances.) Even in these few pixels you get a sense of their partnership, with McLean elbowing her way into a majority of the photo and Elkind not appearing to mind at all. And the look on McLean's face says what every investigative reporter dreams of saying: "Yup, I gotcha." And she did.

 

 

2. Amy Sedaris, from I Like You. Probably the greatest back cover in modern publishing (except maybe the late Tim Hetherington's incredible photo on the back of War). I've sung its praises before, but I am still unable to look at this picture, from one artist to another of course--right back atcha, Amy--without collapsing in the laughter of love and admiration for her sheer commitment to character. If Cindy Sherman's on the walls of MoMA, Amy Sedaris should be right next to her.

 

3. Ian Frazier, from Dating Your Mom. Right behind Sedaris in the ranks of deadpan greatness is "Sandy" Frazier. His author photos have become more earnest over the years, but time cannot eclipse this early brilliance, from his first collection of New Yorker casuals (which I just discovered Frazier modeled after his friend George Trow's snapshot poses [for more on Trow see below]). Side note: his almost goofily solemn back-flap photo for Great Plains (see right) is particularly special to my sister, an even bigger Frazier fan than I, if that's possible. After summer spent in Tucumcari, New Mexico, many years ago, perhaps the most exciting news she had to report was that she had seen the photo studio where the Great Plains author shot was taken!

 

 

Arthur Hailey, Whom You Don't Remember, Looked Like Joe Biden

Fun fact, from my Michigan reading, though it has nothing to do with Michigan except that it's from the time when Malcolm X was known as "Detroit Red": in Harlem in the early '40s, Malcolm worked at Jimmy's Chicken Shack alongside a dishwasher known as "Chicago Red," who later became Redd Foxx. Talk about awesome people hanging out together. (I saw this in Manning Marable's new biography, but I went back to the autobiography and found I had already read it there, years ago, and forgotten.)

Even more fun fact--an impossibly fun and useful fact, considering what an important role the formerly famous British-Canadian blockbuster author of Hotel, Airport, and other airport novels now plays in our culture, is that Arthur Hailey (not to be confused with Alex Haley, re: my first fun fact) looked an awful lot like Joe Biden, at least in this author photo from the back of the copy of Wheels (his Detroit auto industry potboiler) I have checked out from the library.

That is a fact your life is better for knowing.