TINGLE ALLEY

3/30/2007

“Something smells fishy,” she said. “Like murder.”

Filed under: Little Thoughts Flitting — caaf @ 3:36 pm

Inspired by Stanley Fish’s recent op-ed column for the Times, Tingle Alley is hard at work on a new mystery (you are strongly urged to read here for context). Right now I’m concentrating on the first sentence because a good one, as Fish notes, is a “sure-fire” test of a mystery’s worth. Per Fish, this first sentence should avoid any funny stuff, anything that smacks of pretension, and metaphor (he doesn’t explicitly say “no metaphor” but you do get a sense that figurative language is a turnoff). What you should aim for instead, says Fish, is “compression, information and what I call the ‘angle of lean.’” Also: No international settings, please; we like our thrills & killings stateside.

Got it? Here’s what I’ve got so far with a few notes:
• “Knock knock.”
A nice lean piece of dialogue, so lean the reader might even be moved to read the novel’s second sentence, which goes: “Who’s there?” And then not to give away the entire plot, but the third sentence is: “Murder.”

• Ensconced in his favorite booth at the Waffle House, Poirot twirled his mustache and said, “Ever since becoming a naturalized American citizen this has been my favorite place to catch breakfast — and contemplate murder most foul.”
See, he’s American now, and he only solves American murders! Concern: Is “ensconced” too poncy a verb for a first sentence?

• At the exact moment Joel Shifty realized he wanted to commit murder cymbals crashed together, a funny coincidence that happened because Shifty was only 13 years old and seated in band practice.
Too much?

3/29/2007

Things worth getting dressed for: March 30th events

Filed under: Events — caaf @ 1:51 pm

Tomorrow night:
• In Asheville, Mary Oliver is speaking at UNCA. Tickets are $15. Details here.

My book club is making a field trip of this event, and we’re reading Oliver’s essay collection Long Life as our selection this month. (Last month was my pick, Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows).

• In New York, Maud Newton hosts a conversation on “Branding and Freedom in the Market Economy” between Calvin Baker* and Colson Whitehead. Details here.

This should be a great talk. It’s centered on the writers’ most recent novels, Baker’s Dominion and Whitehead’s Apex Hides The Hurt (note that Powell’s is offering a 30% discount on both books).

For those who can’t attend, Maud has promised to record the conversation.

* Baker is an old friend of mine and I saw a lot of him last fall when I was in New York. One anecdote is recorded here. I will refrain from sharing others, except for one strong memory of sitting with Calvin at a bar late one night and each of us talking on our own distinct track. His, roughly summarized, was “Bolaño Bolaño Bolaño!” and mine was a weirdly passionate & intense disquisition of how Gaitskill had been robbed of the National Book Award for Veronica, a resentment I hadn’t realized I was harboring until that moment.

Paris & Proust & pajamas

Filed under: Reader's Diary — caaf @ 11:52 am

Piles of deadlines here, but I have instead devoted the morning to a) trying to get my friend Hortense on the horn for a gossip; and b) attempting to set some sort of land record for how many pretentious activities a person can get up to while still wearing her pajamas. To wit:

• I finally tracked down the print issue of The New Yorker containing the Dana Goodyear poetry article that David Orr responded to (savaged?) in the Book Review. You can read Goodyear’s article online.

• We’re going to Paris in a few weeks, and I’ve been thinking about finally summitting Remembrance of Things Past as an accompaniment to the trip. This has led to an inner twitter about whether to read the Moncrieff translation (advantages: it’s a classic, many seem to consider it rich & definitive, and I already own the first volume; concerns: worry that the style may be overly elaborate and the text Moncrieff used for his translation is said to contain some inaccuracies*) or the new Penguin translations that start off with Lydia Davis’ translation of In Search of Lost Time (advantage: said to be fresher, more direct rendering of Proust’s prose; concerns: will the prose be too thin?, would have to get copy). If you know me personally you know that part of how I manifest excitement about a trip is feverish research & equivocation pre-departure focused on what I will wear/read/eat so the Proust question has occupied an undue amount of brain space all week. This morning I decided to go nuts and order the Davis, so I’ll have both at the ready and can thus equivocate right up till we leave for the airport.

On the trip, I’m also bringing the second movement to Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. I read the first movement when we were in Europe last month and it was a very satisfying trip book.

* Or something like that.

3/28/2007

Writer porn: Superior office chairs

Filed under: Writers & Writing — caaf @ 3:41 pm

I’ve been liking the Guardian’s writers’ rooms series. It’s a gratifying little feature that could only be improved if they also included a few pics of the writers’ bathrooms, kitchens and (where applicable) their gardens and landscaping.

I’ve been bugged the past couple months by some back pain brought on — and this is just a hypothesis — by spending too much time in a Pier I Imports canvas deck chair. As occupational hazards go, it’s hardly black lung; still, it’s no fun to have one’s lover recoil as one comes lurching and shuffling forward for a tender embrace under the bells of Notre Dame. So, while I enjoyed Hilary Mantel’s obvious relish for her flat’s location in a former asylum (and who can blame her; I’m only surprised that the clock tower she describes isn’t infested with writers) and A.S. Byatt’s snail shells, I was particularly interested in the writing chairs in David Lodge’s and Sarah Water’s offices. They’re just so … ergonomic looking. Also, if the writing thing didn’t work out, one could always tilt back the chair and open up an orthodontics practice.

Quammen inquiry

Filed under: Publishers Brunch — caaf @ 2:13 pm

Dear National Geographic Society:

Wondering what happened to David Quammen’s The Long Follow: J. Michael Fay’s Epic Trek Across the Last Great Forests of Central Africa? Its pub date is listed on Amazon as Nov. 21, 2006. Yet Nov. 21 came, went, and now I’m growing concerned, although not yet concerned enough to head to Bozeman and ask Quammen if I could borrow a draft copy (or just look at his outline or something, which I imagine goes something like: Chapter 1. Laud the unblemished beauty & unique ecology of this amazing place; Chapters 2-14. Describe the many threats that have placed this beauty on the brink of utter & irretrievable DESTRUCTION).

Please advise.

- CAAF

p.s. Love the maps. Keep ‘em coming.

3/27/2007

Herbert the Not So Well Known

Filed under: Little Thoughts Flitting — caaf @ 10:11 am

The other day Mr. Tingle and I were discussing the feasibility of his taking over the writing of my novel for me — a solid solution, I say — and he came up with the following idea: He will write the story of his father’s life using the text of Jude the Obscure as a base. On the first pass he will simply change the character names. On the second pass, he will replace some details of phrasing with synonyms as well as alter the novel’s setting from Wessex to a small tobacco town in North Carolina. Each subsequent pass will introduce increasingly substantive changes until the book is, as they say, as good as new.

Mr. Tingle’s father passed away decades ago, when Mr. Tingle was only 17, so I never met him. He was by all accounts a brilliant, troubled man. His given names were Herbert Hoover; he was the last of eight children, the rest of whom had rather inventive names, so you get the sense that his mother’s energies were faltering, and, in fact, his older siblings seem to have had the charge of him. He was spoiled and allowed to drop out of school after two days. He was an autodidact, though, a guitar prodigy, and a Communist (yes, they do exist in the South). One of Mr. Tingle’s chief memories of his father is of him reading Marx on the porch. He fixed TVs and appliances for his living.

POST CODA: Mr. Tingle requests that you do not steal his idea for his book. No word on how Hardy feels.

Of Bolaño & Cortázar

Filed under: The Critical Response — caaf @ 8:31 am

In The New Yorker, Daniel Zalewski pays tribute to Roberto Bolaño and his “most heartbreaking creation,” The Savage Detectives. A translation by Natasha Wimmer is coming out soon from Farrar Straus.

Zalewksi writes that “[f]or Bolaño, Cortázar’s moody novel “Hopscotch” was the Beginning and the End, precisely because it has neither a beginning nor an end.” A welcome note after Benjamin Kunkel’s highhanded dismissal of Cortázar’s novel in Salon’s literary guide to Argentina (Kunkel observed: “”Hopscotch” (1966) has not aged gracefully: With its rhapsodic conversations, allegedly jazzlike prose and bohemian cast of characters, it seems like the work of a sort of superior Kerouac.”).

3/23/2007

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information recommends …

Filed under: Schwarmerei — caaf @ 10:19 am

Browse the online bookstore of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the subject of Lawrence Weschler’s excellent book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder.

It’s a wonderful selection of books. I’m esp. interested in The Carniverous Syndrome in 3D (you had me at “carniverous”), but there’s not a one that doesn’t look interesting.

Discovered via the Cinetrix, who recently visited the museum.

Who you calling Harry Houdini?

Filed under: Schwarmerei — caaf @ 9:49 am

Harry Houdini exhibit

Geeky magician-loving writers everywhere, take note:

Eighty-one years after Houdini died on Halloween 1926, his great-nephew wants to exhume the magician’s body to determine if enemies poisoned him for debunking their bogus claims of contact with the dead.

“His death shocked the entire nation, if not the world. Now, maybe it’s time to take a second look,” George Hardeen said.

Houdini’s family scheduled a news conference for Friday to give details on the plans. Hardeen said a team of top forensic investigators would conduct new tests on Houdini’s body.

The generally accepted version of Houdini’s death held that the 52-year-old suffered a ruptured appendix from a punch in the stomach, leading to peritonitis. But no autopsy was performed.

When the death certificate was filed on Nov. 20, 1926, Houdini’s body – brought by train from Detroit to New York – had already been buried, along with any evidence of a possible death plot.

The photo above was taken outside the Houdini exhibit at the Outagamie Museum in Appleton, Wisconsin, Houdini’s unlikely hometown. Houdini’s father was the town’s first rabbi.

Discursive aside: I was back in Appleton over New Year’s and was slightly disoriented by the museum’s location in this building. Help me out, Milwaukee & Menasha, but didn’t this used to be the Castle (i.e., the little shopping gallery & fancy place to have afternoon cider-and-strudel. Little Chute confirmed it is the same building, but she had a couple cocktails in her at the time and, frankly, I’m struggling to believe a business with that kind of strudel monopoly could ever go under)?

The museum is small but good. Or maybe good because small. The Houdini exhibit was colorful & well-done & from the hands-on school of curating (“Have a friend lace you in this straitjacket, lock the manacles around your ankles, then place you in the mummy sarcophagus against the far wall. See if you can escape before your party leaves the museum!” etc.) Here is something I wrote down from a panel entitled “Houdini Jumps Into Icy River”:

Houdini created a mythology that made him seem superhuman. One of his most outrageous stories centered on a manacled bridge jump into the Detroit River in November 1906. Years later, he lied and said he cut a hole in ice below the bridge. He further exaggerated by saying he could not find his way back to the opening after having jumped through the hole.

The unbelievable tale ends with Houdini staying alive by breathing air between the layer of water and ice until he finally made his way to safety. The jump happened, but the river was not frozen over.

Photo by Lowell Allen.

Friday reading: American Gothic

Filed under: The Fevered Brow — caaf @ 9:09 am

Stories found in Charles Crow’s American Gothic: An Anthology, 1787-1916*, price tag $54.95 (table of contents included as Sample Pages here):
• Herman Melville’s “The Bell Tower”
• Stephen Crane’s “The Monster”
• Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby”

RELATED:
• Toni Schlesinger on American Gothic interior design, “After spending enough time with American Gothic—a week—it came to mind that modern life and its minimalism is actually a denial of life, with its smooth surfaces and synthetic veneers (natural materials bring with them the continuing realization that life has a beginning and an end). Looking at American Gothic, one cannot help but think of beginnings and endings, of embracing the inevitable, of heaven (if one believes in it) and where one might be going, or not.”

(Warning: The last is probably a short-lived link; via Jenny D.)

* For all I know Crow’s a self-given name; but if not, kudos to fate for bestowing it on a future academic with a specialty in American Gothic.

3/13/2007

[Brackets]

Filed under: The Fevered Brow — caaf @ 12:16 pm

[So a long story short, my excuse for ignoring this site goes like this: Work work, Europe (Bonn-Antwerp!-Bruges), book book. But now I come to you with the burning literary questions of the day:

• Can you fricking believe Duke got a 6 seed? When I moved to Asheville, a little over a decade ago, I looked on ACC rivalries as an eccentric custom of the natives: Quaint and a little baroque. Then I realized I really, really hate Duke basketball. I hate their bullying entitled fans. I hate the assistant man-boys in their sports jackets lined up in a row next to Coach K (only Quin Snyder has escaped!). I hate the grinding inevitability of their wins. I hate Duke. So, go Virginia Commonwealth!

• Meanwhile, the brave, scrappy Wolfpack have to face the Drexel Dragons in the first round of the NIT today, which is unfortunate as Drexel will be playing with a grande-sized chip on its shoulder. Should the Dragons ever fall behind, I imagine Jim Boeheim will bound onto the floor to assist with a couple baskets.

• Who do you have in your Final Four? I have Carolina, Kansas, Wisconsin and Melinda Doolittle.

End bracket discussion.]

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