The Rake Magazine

Skol, baby.

The Twins' Justin Morneau fairly dominated all-star weekend, first winning the Home Run Derby (even if Josh Hamilton broke the record for most dingers in a single round), and then, in the bottom of the 15th inning of the All-Star Game, he tagged up on a sacrifice fly to right and hustled his buns to score the winning run, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief because they could finally go to bed.

Skol.

The duration of the game was four hours, and fifty minutes. The two main developments as the innings grew later were that the New York fans' resentment against the Red Sox players lessened, and it became increasingly apparent that Joe Buck is a better salesman than play-by-play announcer. ("This National League line-up is brought to you by Taco Bell...Think outside the bun...Up first...")

If you include the time spent on announcing the All-Stars, the starting line-ups, the hall-of-famers, and the national anthem, the broadcast lasted well over six hours. I thought to myself, ‘I could've read a book.'

Though I suppose that's not so different from normal. And it's not necessarily an impulse I act on as often as I might suggest. But in this specific case, it got me thinking about some of the great novels that have been written about baseball.

I'm pretty sure, actually, that my initial interest in reading may have been helped along by Mark Harris' quartet of baseball books, narrated by Henry Wiggins, pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths: Bang the Drum Slowly, The Southpaw, A Ticket for a Seamstitch, and It Looked Like For Ever. I was a fairly prolific baseball card collector, and of course regarded Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek as heroes. Harris' novels were the first glimpses I had into the sort of dirty underside of baseball (pre-steroids, probably). His characters are always stuck in cramped trains or seedy hotel rooms, if I remember correctly. Not surprisingly, I was a lousy ballplayer, and it wasn't long before I realized that I'd have an easier time accessing the game through prose than through my (lack of) muscles.

This year, there are a few notable baseball books that have been spawned right here in Minnesota.

First off, you've got Peter Schilling's The End of Baseball (came out in April), in which a team that ‘almost was' becomes real. Set in 1944, the wily promoter Bill Veeck hustles his way into owning the Philadelphia Athletics, and in hopes of bringing home the pennant he gets rid of all the team's white players and recruits the stars of the Negro League. The cast of characters includes Walter Winchell, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Campenella, and Satchell Paige. From the Baltimore Sun: "To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, some baseball novels see things as they are and ask why; Peter Schilling Jr.'s brilliantly conceived The End of Baseball sees things that weren't and imagines what could have been. The best baseball novel so far this century."

Then, in a couple months, you can check out hometown boy Bill Meissner's Spirits in the Grass. From the flap: "In Spirits in the Grass we meet Luke Tanner, a thirty-something baseball player helping to build a new baseball field in his beloved hometown of Clearwater, Wisconsin. Luke looks forward to trying out for the local amateur team as soon as possible. His chance discovery of a small bone fragment on the field sets in motion a series of events and discoveries that will involve his neighbors, local politicians, and the nearby Native American reservation." Meissner's earlier collection, Hitting into the Wind can tide you over until then.

What else?
Of course there's Bernard Malamud's The Natural (that link goes to a 1952 review of the book), about the prodigious Roy Hobbs whose career is sidetracked first by a crazed fan, and then by disease. I heard a story that when Malamud saw the film version - starring Robert Redford - for the first time, he sat in the theater as the credits rolled, and cried because they'd ruined his book. If you read it, you'll understand why. (Hobbs is also used as an entity in some Peanuts strips.)

Then there's Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, concerning the Patriot League's Ruppert Mundys - the only homeless big-league ball team in American history. The players include Gil Gamesh, "the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire," and John Baal, the Babe Ruth of the Big House, who never hit a home run while sober.

Those are the ones that ring my bells. Or something. Here is a more comprehensive list that's worth checking out. And as always, feel free to add your own favorites below.

Just for good measure: Skol.

I live over by Kenwood Elementary School...and steal their wireless Internet signal from time to time...somewhat by accident...Anyway, they've been doing a lot of construction on the school this summer. Right now they're working on replacing the windows, I think, and there's a big yellow cherry picker that goes up and down the side of the building, and a guy who takes out the old frames and puts in the new ones and then, I imagine, eventually washes the panes.

I've been watching this for a few days now, and then read this poem by Stephen Dunn, from his Pulitzer-winning collection Different Hours, which shares the same central image. Buy it here. His work, to my mind, is filled with big themes, and tempered descriptions of them. Like all fantastic poets, he has a knack for pointing out those things we all know about, but don't necessarily notice until someone explains how amazing they are. Different Hours largely has a somber tone to it, which Dunn explains, somewhat coyly, is the result of his being an optimist (because he always expects good things to happen, he's often let down).

Better than I'm able to set a background for the poem, perhaps the poet himself, will explain a bit about his work.

The following is taken from an interview with Guernica:

Dunn: But the world is always somewhat vicious. I take that as a given, but at various times in various circumstances that fact will be no more than a shadow or an echo behind the poem. Other times it will be more manifest. I try to write myself into articulations of half-felt, half-known feelings, without program. I'm always working toward getting my world and, hopefully, the world outside of me into a version that makes sense of it. Viciousness requires the same precision as love does.

And this is from an interview with Nightsun, Frostburg State University's litmag.

Dunn: The notion of restraint and extravagance has interested me for a while, I think especially because I tend to be someone who is temperamentally restrained. The great danger for somebody like me is that he might employ restraint out of habit, as opposed to employing it to heighten effects. I think restraint matters when it is harnessing something of size, something a little uncontrollable, something wild. I use the example of Fred Astaire, who seemed to me and to everybody, always under control. He was really using his skill to regulate emotion and to keep out the extra gestures that make art feel false.
I like the poets of extravagance too. I love Whitman, I love Ginsberg's "Howl," but I'm just not that kind of expansive poet.

 

So here it is:


"Men in the Sky"

Leaves are falling as the telephone men
ascend to the tops of poles.
They are riding a magic long-armed
machine. No need anymore to climb.
To speak through wires is as natural now
as falling leaves, natural as men in the sky.
The telephone men in the cupped palm
of the long arm are reducing the static,
helping me reach far out of town.
They are beautiful in their hard orange
plumage. Finches and cardinals: mere birds
by comparison, unchangeable, nervous.
It's a shame the men must come down.
I stood next to them at the 7-Eleven
at lunch break, heard them order ham
and cheese on a hard roll, Dr. pepper.
I saw them get out of their trucks
and spit. Now the leaves graze
their shoulders suddenly more golden
for having touched them. My phone
is ringing. It's one of the telephone men,
the highest, the one with a sufficiency
of tools around his waist, calling to see
if everything's all right. Everything isn't.

For all this talk about the decline of literary reading in America, there's really been very little offered in the way of solution. As per usual, I'm probably unqualified to be writing this (caveats seem to have worked for Britt; maybe they will for me too), but I think I have an idea that might possibly save the book world: Better advertising. At the very least, it's worth a shot.

I think it's time that publishing houses – Penguin, Random House, Harcourt, et al – take seriously the notion that the American entertainment economy is saturated and competitive (duh...) and therefore that books shouldn't be competing against other books; rather books as a medium should be competing against movies as a medium, or music, or porn, or anything else that might take time away from reading.

If this is already their mindset – many of them are incorporated, after all – then they need to pull their heads out of their asses and be more effective. Where do I see advertisements for books? In the New Yorker, in the New York Times Book Review, in Harper's, in literary journals - places readers already are. And while there's something to be said for targeting your audience, in order to thrive, I would think you need to attract some new customers.

According to tradition, a potential convert to Judaism is supposed to be turned away by a rabbi – three times. If that person persists in his effort to convert after the third rejection, he is considered serious enough about the faith, finally, to be allowed in. The publishing world seems to make their barriers similarly ridiculously high; advertising, like religion, is a means to access mass amounts of people, but literary advertising seems to confine itself only to people already of the faith, so to speak. In Judaism, we bitch about intermarriage diluting and possibly annihilating the religion. Likewise, the publishing world bitches about the reallocation of words from the well-regarded print periodicals to poorly edited blogs (hi!).

 

But neither Judaism nor literature, it seems, proactively recruit fresh constituents. Is it elitism? Is reading something so holy that it shouldn't need to be marketed? Something so inherently valuable that people should flock to it of their own accord, and any need for a commercial here and there is preposterous? Yes. But then there's reality to deal with.

Right now the most vibrant literary events in Minneapolis are the Books and Bars series, Talking Volumes, Talk of the Stacks, and the existence of The Loft. (Doubtless there's some great stuff I'm leaving out, like the reading series at Spoon River ... feel free to PR and big-up yourself in the comments section below, and I'll throw in a hyperlink if you don't. I'm making a different point, though ... right ... about ... now:) As far as I know, these goings-on are funded by independent bookstores, bars, the library system, and MPR – not by Random House, Penguin, and so on.

Meanwhile, the most effective advertising for books is done, I think, by Amazon, which tells me what books I might like, based on what books I've previously bought. Again, the publishing houses aren't behind this, I don't think – rather it's simply Amazon's self-interest in promoting sales.

Furthermore, it seems publishers are incompetent with the money they actually have for marketing. Last night, best-selling author/sometimes-musician Darin Strauss was in town to promote his new novel, More Than It Hurts You. About fifteen people showed up at the Galleria Barnes & Noble to hear him speak. Maybe five of them, he estimated, bought his book -– totaling roughly $125 for penguin, minus B&N's take, minus cost of printing, etc. This, Strauss said, was a fairly typical turn-out for his current tour. He explained that the real intent of an author tour is to generate publicity, via interviews and reviews on local radio stations and in local newspapers.

But, aside from this amazing piece of writing, Strauss had nothing lined up in the Twin Cities. Neither the Strib nor the Pioneer Press has yet run a review of the book, nor did he get on the radio. I think City Pages mentioned he was coming in a blurb on their A-List.

And yet he was here, which means Penguin (his publisher) shelled out for his flight, his hotel, and a hired car to take him to his reading. That's got to be getting close to $600, if not more. There are about twenty stops on his tour. This is money that could be spent buying print or radio or television or (gasp) movie preview slots to advertise, which one hopes could generate more than five book sales.

So – and feel free to amend – a few thoughts on what publishing companies can do to help save books in the modern world, without resorting to E-Books, God willing:

- Take a big chunk of the money allotted for author tours (except in cities guaranteed to get a big audience draw) and spend it on advertising.

- In the short term, forget specific authors and books, and do a good campaign promoting books in general, with a heavy, heavy emphasis on literary novels by current authors.

- Advertise in ways that will draw new readers. (Oprah's great for having her book club, but it's a little scary that she's the pre-eminent bookseller of our times.) This may take some thought. Product placement? We're all suckers for it, anyway. So why not?

- Merchandising! On The Road - the Toilet Paper Scroll. Are you telling me you couldn't have a Holden Caulfield action figure, which actually broods? A Lolita doll? Or less perverse toys thereof?

- A rough idea: Fuck hardcovers! I'm not sure what their function is anymore, except to make people not buy books. Fairly frequently I hear someone browsing the new releases section at Magers and Quinn and hear, "Oh, I'll just wait until it's in paperback." Yeah, buddy – I bet you will. I'm not sure this testing-of-the-market to see if it justifies a paperback run is useful anymore. With the advances of immediate and on-demand publishing, why not just spend an extra nickel on a more-endurable paperback to begin with (Penguin Classics-type quality), and use the extra cash on, I don't know, more advertising.

- Community involvement. If Target can sponsor free museum days, Random House can sponsor outreach programs, too. According to me, at least.
Check this: Even B&N and Borders are struggling now in the giant commercial suction cup that is the Internet. The dominant bookstores soon might be those that people feel personal connections to. So maybe instead of paying to put shitty cardboard displays with books We've All Been Meaning To Read up front, publishers should finance Independent Bookstore Community Involvement Stuff. What about a tutoring program inside a bookstore? Kids could get help with their English homework for free and get comfy with the environment of must and dust. Booksellers and publishers would be seen as giving back to their communities (more than they already do simply by peddling great books). If the program were two days a week for two hours, you could pay one employee (if volunteers are unavailable) probably less than $10,000 a year. Would other infrastructure be needed? I'm sure English teachers would promote it to parents. Just a thought.

One last cheap tie-in to religion: Without playing the advertising game, reading looks to be going the way of Reform Judaism – something its practitioners respect, and probably hope to pass on to their children, but which is really only observed once or twice a year.

This is one of those rare mornings where The New York Times' homepage isn't dominated by a picture of Obama or McCain. So I figured I might as well bring the election back into forefront...of this blog about books...oy. The real reason I'm posting this can be found after the poem.

The following is lifted from Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, which is Hunter S. Thompson's take on the 1972 presidential election, written for Rolling Stone.

What's striking to me is how many parallels there seem to be between the 1972 cycle and this year's. The first chapters of Fear and Loathing focus intently on the youth vote, the minority vote, the need for change, and the need for hope. Spooooooooky...

Just an additional quote fro the book that I liked:
"The nut of the problem," Thompson wrote, "is that covering this presidential campaign is so fucking dull that it's just barely tolerable...and the only thing worse than going out on the campaign trail and getting hauled around in a booze-frenzy from one speech to another is having to come back to Washington and write about it."

Anyway, here's the semi-poem.

"28 newspapers"

This world is full of downers, but where is the word to describe
the feeling you get when you come back tired and crazy from a week on the road
to find twenty-eight fat newspapers on the desk:
seven Washington Posts, seven Washington Stars,
seven New York Times, six Wall Street Journals,
and one Suck...
to be read, marked, clipped, filed, correlated...
and then chopped, burned, mashed, and finally hurled out in the street
to freak the neighbors.

After two or three weeks of this madness,
you begin to feel As One
with the man who said, "No news is good news."
In twenty-eight papers, only the rarest kind of luck
will turn up more than two or three articles of any interests...
but even then the interest items are usually buried deep
around paragraph 16 on the jump (or "Cont. on...") page....

The Post will have a story about Muskie making a speech in Iowa.
The Star will say the same thing,
and the Journal will say nothing at all.
But the Times might have enough room on the jump page to include a line or so that says something like:
"When he finished his speech, Muskie burst into tears and seized his campaing manager by the side of the neck. They grappled briefly, but the struggle was kicked apart by and oriental woman who seemed to be in control."

Now that's good journalism.
Totally objective; very active and straight to the point.
But we need to know more.
Who was that woman?
Why did they fight?
Where was Muskie Taken?
What was he saying when the microphone broke?




If Colin Covert is allowed to write a 700+-word ‘review' about Gonzo:The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the documentary now showing at the Lagoon, which has less than fifty words of criticism in it (and therefore about 650 words of obvious biography and navel-gazing), then I figured I'm allowed to take a minute and post one of Thompson's poems.

And yes, I take most of my journalistic cues from Strib movie reviewer Colin Covert.

Covert writes: "Thompson burst onto the national scene at 26 with "Hell's Angels," [sic] his account of a year spent on the road with the outlaw motorcycle gang. It was vivid traditional reporting and became a bestseller, winning the young author a spot on ‘What's My Line?' But it was his invention of ‘gonzo journalism,' mixing solid factual research and epic flights of fantasy, that won him a place in pop culture history. His writing was daring and adventurous; it took big chances and made important arguments in relentlessly funny ways."

But he never tells us whether the film is effective in depicting this or not. We're told that it's a ‘celebratory documentary,' and that because of his ‘comfort in the spotlight, [Thompson] made great pictures.' But that's all.

It's really more like an essay that's occasioned by the film, except the essay has nothing to say about Thompson that even casual readers can't figure out by reading one sentence from the guy.

For those interested, here's a more comprehensive point-by-point review of the flick.

 

Part II (To see the first part of this interview, click here)

"If you don't belong to a book club," Ron Charles wrote in The Washington Post last week, "Darin Strauss's bitter and brilliant new novel is reason enough to start one." The novel - Strauss's third - marks a departure from the author's previous books, both of which were (somewhat incidentally) historical fiction. More Than It Hurts You sets us in über-modern Long Island, a place where George Clooney, Austin Powers, and "Everybody Loves Raymond" all figure into the collective consciousness (while Fitzgerald and Tolstoy hide in the shadows).

 

The book finds its thematic center in a rare disease called Munchausen by proxy, in which a mother will harm her child to get attention forherself. Playing out the drama are three principal characters: Dori Goldin, the young mother accused of Munchausen; her unknowing husband Josh; and Dr. Darlene Stokes, an African American physician who suspects foul play when Dori brings her infant into the ER.

 

As their lives tangle in the courtroom and in the press, morals are trumped by flashy headlines, and relationships become so clouded that Josh doesn't know whether to trust the doctor or his wife. Before long, More Than It Hurts You transcends its storyline, as the syndrome becomes symptomatic of something larger - America's masochistic obsession with attention in general, and the ramifications thereof.

The Rake

With all its references to pop culture, it's clear you were aiming for a contemporary feel in this novel. Another aspect that makes it feel so contemporary is its use of dialect. Was this something you knew was vital to making the book current?

Strauss

I was really conscious with the Intelligent Muhammed stuff [Darlene Stokes's father - a newly released ex-convict]. I wanted it to be authentic, but it's always risky being a white guy writing a black guy's voice. You don't want to sound like a caricature. Actually I listened to a lot of hip-hop, and I went down to where the ex-cons are dropped off. It's actually a place, where if you don't have anyone to pick you up from jail, that's where you go.

The Rake

Did your students unwittingly help out with some of the dialogue?

 

Strauss

Teaching definitely helps with keeping your ear fresh. There's one point in the hospital, in the first chapter, where Josh comes across an email, and that comes I think from emails I get from my students.

 

[The email goes like this: "what up kid im so sorry im not around for you but U will beat it lookemia is "BULLSHIT" I am here with Marisa who thinks I am SO into nice walks on the beach under the sunset lol"]

 

But a lot of the speech came from a friend of mine who'sactually in ad sales, and had the job that Josh had. I was able to watch him interact, and see how that happened. Also I read a lot of Don Delillo - I think he has modern-speak down.

 

The Rake

Is listening to your characters talk a way for you to understand them?

 

Strauss

Yeah, going back, with Chang and Eng I was thinking, ‘How am I going to make characters from men that are so different from me?' I thought their speech might be a decent way to do it. Then I found out neither spoke English, though, so that wasn't going to help me. I had the thought that I should make one speak better than the other. Because if one speaks better, that can mean something: He's more studious; he's more serious. And so on. Pretty soon character begins to emerge.

 

The Rake

A book I hope you'll riff on is Anna Karenina. You use the word ‘Happiness' in the first sentence of the More Than It Hurts You, and happiness/unhappiness is a theme that recurs throughout the novel, which seems to be a sort of tip-of-the-cap to Tolstoy.

 

Strauss

Definitely I had that book in mind. I wanted Josh to be a bit like Stepan Oblonsky - just a very likeable guy, despite his infidelities.

 

James Woods argues that Tolstoy's characters are all symbolic of one thing, all have one primary element to their natures, but then they'll often surprise themselves by going against that. I wanted to create Darlene in the same way. The way she walks gives her a false impression of weight. I tried to make her multi-dimensional by having her surprise us, like when she's trying to figure out how to tell Leo she loves him, which is not very natural for her. Heaviness is her norm, but she tries to break through it. But then she always falls back into herself. Actually I was thinking of a bunchof Tolstoy books. The flashback of Darlene's life is based on something from The Death of Ivan Ilyanich.

The Rake

You've said your method for dealing with historical fiction is to do as much writing with as little research as possible, and then when you're done to go back and make sure the facts match. Were you able to use the same tactic here, with all the hospital content?

 

Strauss

I blew it in this. With Chang and Eng, I wasn't sure if the manuscript would get published. So I think I was a little more relaxed with it- I wasn't afraid of people going over it with a fine-toothed comb, because I wasn't sure if anyone was actually going to read it or not.

 

This one I knew would get published. Doctors would read it, and I didn't want them to say, ‘No no no - this isn't how it is.' The first chapter, which is set in a hospital, took me a year to write, but then it was way too researched and jargon-heavy. It seemed like a bad episode of "ER." I ended up taking a lot out, and realized that so long as I knew what I was writing about, and had a sort of command over the material, I didn't necessarily have to add every little thing in.

 

The Rake

You are not one half of a conjoined twin, nor are you a turn-of-the-century flim-flam artist/boxer. You are, however, an assimilated Jew who grew up in Long Island, and has spent time both at Tufts and NYU, much like the characters of this book. Was this a conscious decision to align your biography with theirs?

 

Strauss

I was thinking, as long as it's set in contemporary America, I might as well set it in some place that I know. Actually it was partially so I wouldn't have to do so much research, I could save myself some time.

 

But even though I knew the setting, in a lot of ways this book was harder than Chang and Eng for me. People said it must be hard to write that one, from the perspective of a conjoined twin, but it was kind of easy. All I did was think about how I would act if I were attached to someone.

 

But it was much harder to make Dori relatable andsympathetic. In my first draft I thought I was being subtle, but then I showed it to friends, and they all said, "Oh, so she's crazy." I had to tone it down abit.

 

I wanted to examine parenthood from different angles, and Dori's was a difficult angle. How could I make her poison her kid and still be likable? It was tough to get inside her head. In any relationship there are alot of ambiguities, and that's another thing I really wanted to examine, especially through Dori and her marriage to Josh. This book is very much about how you can never know someone fully, no matter how close you think you are to them.

 

Part II (To see the first part of this interview, click here)

Darin Strauss is the author of the international bestseller Chang and Eng and the New York Times Notable Book The Real McCoy. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. The recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction writing, he lives in Brooklyn, and teaches writing at New York University.