James Hynes

Here's another succinct summary of the Crisis in Publishing, this one from the London Review of Books, by Colin Robinson, a Brit who lost his job at New York publisher in last December's Black Wednesday. Some of it is particular to the publishing world in Britain, but there's a lot about American publishing, including a very lucid explanation of the medieval system of returns, by which publishers have agreed since the 1930s to take back unsold copies from booksellers at full price. Also some prescriptions about What Should Be Done, about which I will have more to say later, when I have the time.

Just this morning, driving down the Drag in Austin, I saw that Intellectual Property, the one remaining general interest bookstore within walking distance of the University of Texas, is closing. Turns out their last day is March 15, and right now they're selling off their complete stock at 50% off. It's not quite an independent—it's owned by Follett's, the textbook store chain—and it's not quite the loss that the closing of Shaman Drum would be, but it's another sign of doom for the old way of selling books.

When I first moved to Austin in the mid-90s, there were at least two general interest bookshops with a scholarly bent across the street from UT. One was called Europa and I was only in it once before it went out of business, and the other was the trade book department of the University Co-op, which was, as I recall, really first rate. Somewhere along the way the the Co-op decided not to sell trade books anymore, which was a real shame, and they sold or leased half of their space to Barnes and Noble, which ran a store there for a few years before it, too, went out of business. A number of professors and other folks at UT lobbied the university to help underwrite a bookstore along the Drag, and Intellectual Property was the result of a deal between UT and Follett's.

It was a pretty good store, if not a great one. For one thing, their shelving was ambitious but idiosyncratic: they had, for example, a classical studies section and a section, clear across the store, for Greek and Roman history, so that if you were looking for, say, a translation of Livy, you had to be sure to check both places. For another thing (he said shamelessly), they never stocked any of my books, despite my asking them to, twice.

But even so, it's a shame to see it go. Perhaps the Co-op will go back into the trade book business, but I doubt it. They seem perfectly content to sell Longhorn paraphernalia, electronics, and textbooks.

An Addendum, 3/1/09: In today's Austin American-Statesman, the paper's excellent books editor, Jeff Salamon, has a comprehensive history of Intellectual Property and a very shrewd and knowledgeable take on why it failed. Check it out.

It seems like most of my recent posts have had to do with yet another cataclysmic, epoch-ending moment in the world of books and literature—books themselves evanescing into pixels, John Updike evanescing into who-knows-what?—so maybe I should write about something else—another post about Bigfoot and UFOs, perhaps? King Zor, anyone?

But instead I thought I'd note yet another crisis in the book business, one that might seem rather localized and particular to one community, but which clearly speaks volumes about everything that's changing in the literary world. I've been lucky to live in three cities with a robust literary culture (i.e., places with lots of writers and writer wannabees in them) and lots of great bookstores. One is the place I live now, Austin, Texas; another is Iowa City, Iowa, where I went to the Writers' Workshop, and where you can't throw a stick down Iowa Avenue without hitting a novelist, a short story writer, or a poet. But the main one, the one closest to my heart, the place I still think of as my hometown, even though I wasn't born there, didn't get there until I was 18, and haven't lived there for nearly 15 years, is Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I won't go into my long history with books and bookshops in Ann Arbor—that would take a book in itself, and who reads books anymore, let alone books about books and bookselling?—but suffice it to say, I've a long, rather intimate history with two Ann Arbor literary institutions. One is Borders Books, which I first knew as a funky independent bookshop with creaking wooden floors during my freshman year at the University of Michigan, and where I went to work, the day after I graduated from college in 1977, back when the store was still a great independent. Lots more to say about my life at Borders, what it has turned into since, and what might become of it, but some other time.

The other great institution was, and still is, for now, Shaman Drum Bookstore on State Street, one of the great literary and scholarly bookshops in North America, founded and run by one of the great American booksellers, Karl Pohrt. There was a time, back in the early 1990s, when I had come back to Ann Arbor after my time in Iowa to teach at Michigan, that I used to drop into the store nearly every day. One of my best friends in the world, the poet Keith Taylor, used to be the manager there. When the store expanded during the 90s, the new space was designed by another good friend, the Ann Arbor architect Margaret Wong. And the store was, and, for now, still is, one of the most author-friendly places to give a reading that I know of; the best readings I've ever had were before a Shaman Drum audience.

Anyway, right now, the store is on the ropes, and is not likely to survive. Rather than explain the situation myself, I'll direct you to this eloquent and heartbreaking open letter from Karl Pohrt himself.

I don't quite know what to say about all this, or even what to think. As I said in a couple of posts ago, the new world of the book and of literature is actually kind of thrilling, and there's a lot I find appealing about, say, the utopian project of making the entire corpus of human knowledge available, free, to everybody, everywhere. But, as Karl points out in his letter, in every major cultural and economic shift, there is collateral damage, and for every cool new thing you can do online with or for or about books, it seems that the price is the death of another great local, indepedent, idiosyncratic bookshop like Shaman Drum. It also seems beside the point to wonder if what we're gaining is worth what we're losing, because it seems like the New Way of Doing Things is an unstoppable juggernaut, and what does it matter what grizzled old guys like Karl and Keith and me think?

John Updike

March 18, 1932 — January 27, 2009

"An adult human being consists of sedimentary layers. We shed more skins than we can count, and we are born each day to a merciful forgetfulness. We forget most of our past but embody all of it."

Here's a very interesting article in Time by Lev Grossman, about the future of publishing and of literature. Reading it, I felt alternately grumpy, scared, and exhilerated. Grumpy, because I'm a middleaged guy who doesn't handle change well; there's a reason there are so many cats in my books, mainly because I'm so much like a cat myself. I like my comforts and my routine and my little patch of sunlight, and I get snarly and petulant about any changes.

And I'm scared, because I'm a midlist author with a new book coming out in a publishing environment that's changing daily. It's not quite as big a change, say, as the comet that killed the dinosaurs—though maybe it is, and if I follow that metaphor through, I have to wonder if I'm a dinosaur myself (albeit a small one), or one of the early mammals, a scurrying, furry little critter (see above about cats) engineered to survive and even thrive in the new world after the comet.

And I'm exhilarated, because the wild, wide-open new world of writing that Grossman predicts sounds kinda thrilling. Not particularly lucrative, though, but when was it ever?

It doesn't take much to make a midlist writer happy—you don't actually have to have read one of my books, just say you're heard of me, and pick up the tab—so imagine my unholy glee when my friend Alan Hardy sent me the latest installment of the Guardian's series 1,000 Books Everyone Must Read. Today they're doing comic novels, and my book The Lecturer's Tale made the list. I'm here, right between Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England (which I've read) and Christopher Isherwood's Mr. Norris Changes Trains (which I haven't).

It's a tiny little thing, of course, and probably won't sell me many (or any) copies. But it makes me stupidly happy. Like I say, I'm easy to please.

My friend Roger Boylan has sent me a very cool link, to a gallery of nearly 60 classic photographs of UFOs from the Daily Telegraph, dating back (no kidding) to a photo taken in New Hampshire in 1870. Most of them, though, are grainy, blurry, unsteady snapshots from the 1940s through the 1960s, most of them in black and white, and if you misspent your childhood like I did, reading grubby little paperbacks about UFOs, you've probably seen most of them before.

I still want to believe, of course, but I have to say, looking at them after all these years, a lot of these old favorites look pretty fake to me now; more than one of them looks like somebody flung a hubcap or a straw hat or a pie plate into the air while somebody else snapped a picture with a Brownie or a Polaroid. Then, smirking like mad, no doubt, they mailed it to their local newspaper, which probably published it under the unironic, pre-Onion headline, "Area Man Photographs Flying Disc." This one, which turned up in most of the UFO books of my childhood, looks to me now like a clumsy double exposure.

The main response these pictures provoke in me now, in fact, is nostalgia, for that row of paperbacks by Frank Edwards, John G. Fuller, and others whose names I don't remember any longer that occupied the bottom shelf of the bookcase over my bed, where I could reach them without having to lift my head from the pillow. I plowed through most of them more than once, provoking a good deal of eye-rolling from my very skeptical father and some flat-out disdain from my mother, who once told me I couldn't buy any more UFO books until I'd read Huckleberry Finn. Of course, I kept buying them anyway, and didn't end up reading Huck Finn until I was in my late 20s. More fool me, I know. I should (as always) have listened to my mother.

And I don't know what it is with the big British dailies this week, but yesterday I got a similar nostalgic thrill from this gallery of photos of the Loch Ness Monster in the Guardian. In this case, the nostalgia dates from later in my life, in 1982, to be exact, during my first trip to Scotland. I had just broken up with my first serious girlfriend, and like every other backpacker who ever lived, I was trying to walk it off in the remoter parts of the UK. In Inverness, I rented a bicycle from my youth hostel and cycled about ten miles down the side of Loch Ness on a cold, damp, overcast November day. Minus the monster, which of course I didn't see, the road alongside Loch Ness is pretty dreary, just a two-lane blacktop with a dank pine forest rising pretty much straight up a steep hillside on one side of the road, and the underachieving waves of the loch feebly slapping the stones of the shore on the other. If that wasn't depressing enough, the bike was too small for me and I was out of shape, so that by time I finally gave up and turned around, I was sore, damp, sweaty, and pissed off—and still had ten miles to go before I got back to the dank, overlit, and underheated youth hostel (where the warden, whose accent made him virtually incomprehensible, was always trying to pick a fight with me over Reagan and the Trident missile). The one virtue of the experience was that it finally transformed my sorrow and self-pity over my ex into a purgative anger, so that by time I pumped uphill into Inverness again near sundown (which is about 3 in the afternoon that time of year), it was her fault I was wet and cold, her fault my knees ached, and her fault that I cycled 20 fucking miles in the fucking rain on a fucking kiddie bike and didn't even see the fucking monster.  

Which is also probably just as well. The most famous photo in the Guardian collection, the so-called "Surgeon's Photo," which was long considered the canonical photo of Nessie, has since been definitively revealed to be a hoax; it's a toy submarine with a lizardy neck and head stuck on.

Yet I still get a pleasant chill up my spine, even knowing it's a fake, probably because it's so blurry and grainy and crude. The same goes for all those smudgy photos of UFOs: the photo that would convince all the skeptics would have to be crystal clear and detailed and taken in front of a small army of witnesses. It's the dodgy nature of the photos—their clumsiness, their uncertain provenance, their risibility—that makes them so appealingly mysterious. I don't think a clear, hi-def photo or video of a UFO or Nessie would have anything like the power of these pictures, which are like something glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, or something from a dream. I suspect they still move people because they aren't convincing; you have to invest them with faith in the mysterious to make them work, and after you do that, of course, it doesn't matter how silly they look: they're lodged forever in that part of your subconscious that still jumps at things half seen in the dark.

I also suspect that apart from the Fox Mulders of the world and the guys on UFO Hunters, most of us don't want the mystery of UFOs or Loch Ness or Sasquatch cleared up; they're too much fun to look at on the web, or read about as a kid, or watch half-awake from the couch on the History Channel. The day the Zeta Reticulans actually land on the White House lawn, or a plesiosaur washes up in Inverness, or a Sasquatch wanders out of the Cascades and gets hit by a semi on Interstate 5, that day, all the fun will go out of them, and the world will be a little less mysterious, and hence, a little less interesting.

My lizard brain this morning is still pretty hysterical, but it's a happy kind of hysterical. I was up until 1:30 am last night, but set my alarm for 6 this morning so I could go out and get a New York Times before they were all gone. In the end, I woke up at 5, listened to the radio for a bit while I lounged in bed, then went out at 5:30 in search of a Times. I bought the only two copies they had at my local Walgreens—one for me and one for my wife, who asked me to get her one, too—then I went over to Randall's, my local 24-hour supermarket, and bought one there, too, to wrap in plastic and keep in the closet with my copy of the Times from September 12, 2001.

It's windy and overcast in Austin this morning, which is actually a lot like the weather in Michigan 28 years ago, the day after Ronald Reagan was elected. I still remember very distinctly my feeling of disbelief that day as I walked the streets of Ann Arbor in the chill, November gloom, just thinking over and over again, "Ronald Reagan just got elected president. How did that happen?" I really felt that I was sleeping through some kind of weird, slow-motion nightmare, and that any moment I'd wake up and it would turn out that Carter was still president and Reagan was still just a B-list actor. Today, under a similarly gloomy sky, I feel the mirror image of that disbelief—something giddier and happier, but no less surreal. My brother Mike in LA just sent me an e-mail that said "Pinch me," and that sort of sums up how I feel, too. This is too good to be true, right? Please let me know I'm not actually dreaming.

I took the day off work so I could enjoy this. But right now, I'm going back to bed.

Today is Election Day, and I'm suffering from metaphor overload. My nerves are shredded. I'm as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I'm vibrating with anxiety like a tuning fork. My forebrain, and the poll numbers at Real Clear Politics, are telling me I shouldn't worry so much, but my shrill, hysterical, paranoid lizard brain is screaming constantly at a pitch only dogs can hear. I can't even claim to be unique: you can read all about my condition in the New York Times.

If I were calmer, I might take to heart John Marks' passionate defense of the spirit of Kum Ba Yah over at No Depression. But I'm not, so I can't. No today, anyway. All the caffeine I've had this morning doesn't help (I float through every morning on a sea of Diet Coke). And the fact that I watch Jon Stewart and Colbert right before I go to bed every night. And the fact that I've bookmarked not one, not two, not three, but four electoral maps, which I try not to look at more than once an hour.

I'm not completely out of control, though. In the evenings (before Stewart and Colbert, anyway) I've been trying to avoid watching the cable news channels, and have pretty successfully given myself a couple hours of respite by reading non-election-related stuff. I just got the new NYRB collection of Daphne Du Maurier's macabre fiction, Don't Look Now, selected and introduced by Patrick McGrath, and have been reading a couple stories a night with great pleasure. The title story didn't get to me the way I hoped it would, but that's mainly because it's a plot-driven story, and having seen the Nicholas Roeg film version already two or three times, the story has nothing new to offer. Du Maurier's story "The Birds," however, is a different matter. I've always loved Hitchcock's film version, but until two nights ago, I had never read the original, and was astonished and pleased to find that it's even better than the film—grittier and much, much darker. Hitchcock took only the basic conceit of the story and invented his own story (a middle-class psychodrama, basically), while Du Maurier's version features a rural working-class family living under siege from flocks of murderous birds. It's more elemental and scarier, not to mention more purely apocalyptic. The story is set in Cornwall, where Du Maurier lived much of her life, and her evocation of the sea and the stark landscape make the story a much more evocative and moodier experience that the film.

The other book I'm reading to distract myself from, um, current events, is David Michaelis' superb biography of Charles Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts. I've been wanting to read this book ever since the first reviews came out, and I just bought the paperback edition over the weekend. It turns out to be even more resonant than I thought it would be: Schulz was only a few years younger than my father (he was born in 1922, and my dad was born in 1918), and as I read about his life in the upper Midwest, in St. Paul, Minnesota, I can't help but think of my dad's childhood and young manhood in Michigan, in a small farming community just west of Lansing. There's not a point by point comparison between the lives of Schulz and my father, but Michaelis' evocation of Schulz's mix of keen intelligence, deep feeling, and ironclad Midwestern reticence ("Keep it to yourself," is the Midwesterner's motto) strikes a very deep chord in me, and brings the memory of my late father back to me very vividly. The struggles and complexities of men of that generation hit me especially hard as I sit spang dab in the middle of my own middle-age, and ponder just how much, and how little, things have changed from my father's generation.

And a third thing that caught my eye this morning, and briefly wooed me away from the electoral map: this article in today's Washington Post, about an English actor named Robert Lloyd Parry who's doing a one-man show as the great English ghost story writer, M. R. James, performing a couple of James' classic ghost stories by candlelight. Sounds wonderful. Wish I could go see it tonight, but instead I'll be enjoying the macabre thrills of Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.

Happy Election Day! Calm down! Go vote!

Well, maybe not terror, exactly. Another dose of melancholia, is more like it. Since I've got the list-making bug this Halloween, here's another one. I thought I'd do a quick top ten of some of my favorite pieces of Halloween mood music, but looking over the mix CDs I've compiled since I learned how to do mix CDs (not that long ago, actually), I see that most of them are pretty chestnut-heavy: you got your Night on Bald Mountain, you got got your Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (aka, the Theme from the Phantom of the Opera), you got your music from Psycho.

So instead, I'm making a list of Halloween waltzes—not all of which are waltzes, and most of which aren't particularly scary, but all of which have (at least to my ear) a certain gothicky melancholy to them. Or to put it rather more accurately, it's a list of minor key waltzes, heavy on the Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Or to put it more grandiosely, it's a list of waltzes that contain a hint of death and/or hysteria, on top of the usual three-quarter-time eros. Which may not seem as seasonal to you as it does to me, but think about it: if Halloween isn't about eros and death, then what is it about? Here they are, in no particular order:

1) "Waltz II," from the Jazz Suite No. 2, by Dmitri Shostakovich. You might recognize this as the music from the closing credits of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which was a pretty creepy movie, if not a flat-out horror film. If you know Shostakovich only from his loud, rather bombastic symphonies (as I did for a long time), his jazz suites (available on this terrific Naxos CD) are a real revelation, full of lovely, sly little melodies. He even orchestrated a version of, I kid you not, "Tea for Two."

2) "Gourmet Valse Tartare," by Klaus Badelt, from the soundtrack to Ridley Scott's Hannibal. This is a deliberately scary piece of music, for a film I never even watched all the way to the end. It's sort of a savage reimagining of "The Blue Danube" as the tafelmusik for a dinner party at Hannibal Lecter's. Badelt is a frequent musical collaborator with Hans Zimmer, who wrote most of the music for Hannibal.

3) "The Banker's Waltz," by Mr. Zimmer himself, from the soundtrack to Matchstick Men, which is not even remotely a scary movie. And the waltz isn't really creepy, but it is minor key and so lovely I'm including it anyway. It's my second favorite waltz, in fact.

4) "Happiness," by Sergey Prokofiev, from his ballet Cinderella. This, in case you were wondering, is my favorite waltz. Again, not overtly creepy, but it has a hint of hysteria to it that I've always loved. If you like the jokey-macabre music of Danny Elfman (as I do), then you'll love Prokofiev's waltzes. (It's no diminution of Mr. Elfman's considerable talents to say his orchestral music owes a lot to Prokofiev.) It's not likely anyone will ever make a movie out of my novella "Casting the Runes" from Publish and Perish, but in the imaginary movie version in my head, the entire film is scored with Prokofiev waltzes, and this one plays over the closing credits. There's a terrific Chandos CD of Prokofiev waltzes (CHAN 7076) if you like this sort of thing, performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Neeme Jarvi.

5) "Waltz Moderato," from the soundtrack to The Devil and Daniel Webster, by Bernard Herrmann. You didn't think that just because I'm leaving out Psycho that I wasn't going to include any Herrmann, did you? This is one of the most ghostly pieces of music I've ever heard.

6) "Danse Macabre," by Camille Saint-Saens. Here's a bona fide Halloween chestnut. So sue me.

7) "New Year's Eve Ball," by Prokofiev, from War and Peace. Another sweeping, erotic, melancholy waltz. He actually wrote a "Mephisto Waltz," but I don't think it's gloomy enough, so I'm not including it. Except that I just did. Damn.

8) "Dance of the Witches," by John Williams, from The Witches of Eastwick. This one isn't even a waltz, but it is a dance, so close enough, right? A great piece of macabre music.

9) "Vampire Hunters," by Wojciech Kilar, from the soundtrack to Coppola's Dracula. Again, not a waltz, but a scary, minor key march. It's either that, or I'm wedging in another Prokofiev march, and I'm aiming for variety here, rather than consistency. Which is the hobgoblin (ooh, scary!) of little minds.

10) "Prologue from Vampire Circus," by David Whitaker. This is the longest piece on the list, at nine minutes, and it only has a little bit of waltz in it. But it's one of my favorite pieces of scary music, from my favorite ever Hammer film, Vampire Circus. This is also probably the hardest piece on this list to find; I have it from a Silva compilation called Horror! Monsters, Witches & Vampires (STD 5013). The film's hard to find, too, an early 70s effort with no Christopher Lee and no Peter Cushing, but lots of blood and a fair amount of nudity. Low-budget, lurid, and slapdash in the Hammer manner, it's only borderline coherent, but much of it has the feel of a nightmare, and it contains scenes and situations that even now, in the debased age of Saw and Hostel, are genuinely shocking. I'd go on, but that's another list.

Once again, Happy Halloween!