I’m not done with it yet, but here is one bit I really liked:

I do think that if a book is really well written, it’s terribly difficult to see how it’s done. I think it’s part of the mystery of writing that the real great hands always conceal how they do it. And an awful lot of bad writing is due to people trying to write like great writers and not really seeing that the outer covering has nothing to do with it at all.

So true! (I know, because I’ve done plenty of the bad writing that is trying to be like great writers’ writing!)

And here, just for fun, is his recollection of an unprofitable stint in Hollywood:

Yes, I was married in 1934 and they were just preparing a film called A Yank at Oxford, and my agent thought it might be possible for me to get in on that. Well, we arrived in Hollywood, and as I’ve said before, the only interesting thing was that we did meet Scott Fitzgerald who was working on A Yank at Oxford. Otherwise, one just tagged round and saw a few people, but I never got a job there. Again, you must remember that when you’re that age you don’t know all sorts of things you learn later on. Now my plan was to work there for about a year, earn as much as possible and then come home. But now I realize this would have been very difficult to do. It’s much more likely that like Fitzgerald one would have been sucked into this really appalling machine and spent the rest of one’s life working night and day in order to maintain a hideously expensive standard of living.

What a book! I finished it that night, reading in one big gulp. The whole experience felt dreamlike and strange, and I found myself staring at the cover: a simple black and white landscape by Thomas Hart Benton of a horse racing a train. I’m still a bit under its spell.

I don’t think there’s anyone like Johnson for beautiful writing that feels somehow tossed off and vernacular. The most gorgeous sentences go past almost without you even noticing how perfect they are. The other thing – to me, his books feel so truly American. It’s the poetry they make of landscape, violence, work, and mysticism.

A long thaw had come earlier in the month. The snow was melted out of the ruts. Bare earth showed off in the woods. But now, again, the weather was freezing, and Grainier hoped he wouldn’t end up bringing in a corpse dead of the cold.

In this scene, Robert Grainier, the main character, is transporting a man who’s been shot in the shoulder by his dog (it’s a long story). It’s a brilliant miniature of absurdity and awe – kind of like “Emergency” in Jesus’s Son.

Grainier disliked the shadows, the spindly silhouettes of birch trees, and the clouds strung around the yellow half-moon. It all seemed designed to frighten the child in him. “Sir, are you dead?” he asked Peterson.

“Who? Me? Nope. Alive,” said Peterson.

I usually distrust short books, often feeling that their writers are trying to palm something off not properly formed. Or, with dread, I anticipate they will be overly poetical, though not with the rigor of actual poems. And I’ll get into it – make the investment and commitment you do with any book – only to discover there’s not much there. (Maybe this is my problem with tapas restaurants.) But reading “Train Dreams” I realized there is another category of short books – books that would be worse for being longer, books that somehow perfectly compress something huge and large as life into a small form.

But …. I loved it. It won me over first of all because it was funny. When do you expect to laugh out loud in one of his movies? You’d have to be a fool to hope for that, but Melancholia was more genuinely funny than many of the “comedies” I’ve seen. (Seriously, more laughs than “Bridesmaids.”)

I’m thinking about it so much though – and I think I love it so much – precisely because of the director’s and the movie’s own ambivalent relationship to pleasure. I read his director’s statement – it is almost as if he hates himself for making a gorgeous movie. He’s afraid of being misunderstood.

Here’s an excerpt:

It was like waking from a dream: my producer showed me a suggestion for a poster. “What is that?” I ask. ”It’s a film you’ve made!” she replies. ”I hope not,” I stammer. Trailers are shown … stills … it looks like shit. I’m shaken.

Don’t get me wrong … I’ve worked on the film for two years. With great pleasure. But perhaps I’ve deceived myself. Let myself be tempted. Not that anyone has done anything wrong … on the contrary, everybody has worked loyally and with talent toward the goal defined by me alone. But when my producer presents me with the cold facts, a shiver runs down my spine.

This is cream on cream. A woman’s film! I feel ready to reject the film like a wrongly transplanted organ.

But what was it I wanted? With a state of mind as my starting point, I desired to dive headlong into the abyss of German romanticism. Wagner in spades. That much I know. But is that not just another way of expressing defeat? Defeat to the lowest of cinematic common denominators? Romance is abused in all sorts of endlessly dull ways in mainstream products.

And then, I must admit, I have had happy love relationships with romantic cinema … to name the obvious: Visconti!

German romance that leaves you breathless. But in Visconti, there was always something to elevate matters beyond the trivial … elevate it to masterpieces!

Cream on cream. A woman’s film! (Don’t you just hate him?!) I mean, is that why the planet must crash into Earth? Because a woman’s film must not be allowed? Is it the bride in a wedding dress that makes it a woman’s film? (And then this fear is so interesting, because I would say, who is he kidding, without women LVT would have no subject!)

Well, no worries, LVT has not made a chick flick. The movie is lovely, the people are monied and good looking. But the romance is with a world-ending planet. And really, even in the first half, when this threat is not even known, all the absurdities of convention are exposed. He has, reliably, elevated matters beyond the trivial. I can’t wait to see it again.

September started with The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, a choice directly inspired by the article “Doubles” in the New Yorker, a review of a new Collins biography. (Incidentally, a search on “Wilkie Collins new yorker” for the link led me to discover the amazing I Hate the New Yorker blog, and oh my god, finally someone to obsess about this stuff with). The Moonstone is insanely entertaining, and there’s so much to bite into. There’s the way the book is broken up into sections by different narrators, so we get this sly commentary on the different characters. Sergeant Cuff, the eccentric but genius detective, spreads his DNA over an entire genre to follow (no less than TS Eliot called The Moonstone the first detective novel). And then there’s the whole treatment of “the Orient” (for the Moonstone is a mysterious Indian diamond stolen from the subcontinent) in which you can read a whole sorry/fascinating history. But aside from the interestingness of it, The Moonstone is also one of those wholly satisfying books: the good triumph, the sanctimonious are mocked, the puzzle is deliciously puzzling.

All that was a warm-up to Mat Johnson’s Pym, which is one of the best books I’ve read all year. In Pym, hapless academic Chris Jaynes, who’s obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, is refused tenure because he won’t sit on the college’s Diversity Committee. With an all-black crew, Jaynes journeys to Antarctica to discover the truth about Poe’s confounding novel, which is full of antebellum color terror and the source, as Jaynes says, of “the pathology of Whiteness.” I can’t remember reading anything so great as Jaynes summarizing the weird-ass story of Pym. (People who read this on Kindle, I am the mad highlighter!) This is my ideal book – full of ideas, smart people making bad decisions, and phrases that had me grinning like an idiot as I read it on public transportation (“snow honkies” q.e.d.). Plus, it has a plot! Things happen. A smart book with a plot! Thank you, Mat Johnson.

A recent surgery, in which a chatty dermatologist rooted around for skin cancer in my forehead, left me swollen and grumpy. It was a good time to read Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor for magical romance and adventure. I find myself a huge fan of Brimstone, and I loved all the scenes of Prague, art school, the teeth errands, and I loved Poison Kitchen, the restaurant where Karou and her friends dine on goulash. (It brought back a strange trip to Prague I once took after contracting an especially virulent flu in Moscow.) Very lovely, especially with Vicodin.

Lastly, I am now reading Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran. Ah… Here is the dead-eyed, slightly worn, drug-abusing lady detective I’ve been waiting for all my life. I’m not done yet, and there are already parts where it’s wildly great and wildly not-so-great. In fact, some parts are infuriating. I don’t care. I’m driving around New Orleans, seeing the high water marks and the collapsing shotgun houses and drinking 40s in a rented truck with Miss Claire and a bunch of street thugs. Throw in the I Ching and an inscrutable text by a master French detective and I’m sold. The first couple chapters alone, which are genre and also way beyond it, are so awesome the rest of the book can go to hell and it wouldn’t make a difference. I haven’t read Sara Gran’s other books, but have a feeling I’ll be checking out Dope and Come Closer soon.

I think the sports metaphors are justified here, not only because I’ve read through some pretty long posts about football on GRRM’s blog, but also because fandom itself is pretty much a pleasure-pain loop of triumph and disappointment. Same thing whether you’re watching sports or reading a great series.

Reading A Dance with Dragons it was hard not to feel that I was witnessing a book collapse under its own weight. With a Feast for Crows, I remember feeling nervous as the dark energy of expansion started to override the tight, nasty gravity that kept the previous three books as big as they could be without breaking apart. But this one feels like entropy, baby.

The problem may be mine. I am simply not that interested in anything that happens in Braavos, Pentos, the grass sea of the Dothraki, Astapor, Yunkai, or – sadly – Meereen. I do not work to keep the names straight, still less their geography. It’s the north, with its towering Wall and gloomy Winterfell that is the singular achievement of the saga. (It is an unhappy and rather belated realization that the name of the series is, after all, A Song of Ice and Fire – and having had our Ice, we’ve now got to pay with Fire.)

Meereen is a slog. Tyrion is on a camping trip that makes Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows seem like a jaunt to the corner store. Daenerys – always in danger of being too good – is stuck as a Ruler Who Struggles to Do the Right Thing. Beset by dangers on all sides, she’s become even more of a bore. And yes, of course Jon Snow is having to do the same thing at the Wall – I’ve just always thought he was a more fully realized character than she – despite her misfortunes and her dragons. (I’m not quite certain why, but I think it has to do with the exoticism of her setting, which has always felt a little invented, and the way she is regarded by everyone as a figurehead. In this book, she has a baker’s dozen of suitors trying to win her hand purely because of what she symbolizes. It’s hard to come into sharp relief when everyone abstracts you, including your writer.)

It is almost always easier to say something negative than positive. In this case, though, it comes from love. I don’t really mind that this book disappointed. It doesn’t matter that this book is not as “good” as the the first three – which seem matchless now in hindsight. The series has been awe-inspiring on the level of plotting, character, imagination, the vigor with which the author’s seized a whole genre and made it seem like I’d never read it before. There are still great moments here – the Others erupting from underneath the snow, the greenseer, the Stone Men. And there are the surprises – there’s the whopper at the end, but on a lesser scale, who knew that Reek would turn out to be the most interesting character of the book?

Still a fan.

I am wondering this because I am in the first flush of excitement over a new book with a passive observer narrator, and it is just lovely: observation after observation unrolling at a snail’s pace.

This is “A Question of Upbringing,” by Anthony Powell, book one in “A Dance to the Music of Time.” I downloaded it (yes, I now have a Kindle!) because Elif Batuman did and wrote about it, and I have been slavishly following her blog, because it has the right proportion of humor, curiosity, random association, and erudition, plus I appreciate her philosophical attitude toward life’s big and little travails.

I was a fan of Elif’s article about drunken dialing Agatha Christie on her Kindle (which led me to think about the underrated quality of coziness in literature), and upon learning that she had turned to Powell, I blindly followed her Kindle trail.

And I’m enjoying it wholeheartedly. I’ve downloaded several books that are much more pacey (an adjective I heard the cool editors use at a literary conference and now want to use myself as a way of appearing in-the-know), and find that I’m in no hurry to read them. Could it be I actually prefer snail’s-pace books with somewhat passive observers as the main characters? (Can’t be, I am, after all, the same person who also read Paranormalcy this month.) Should people sometimes think about writing observer characters?

But that would be … thoughtcrime! You can’t write a character who’s less assertive on the page than the secondary characters.

Or can you? This is where it would be so great to be someplace like graduate school again, where you can go away and tackle a question like this instead of – as I do – thinking about it late at night after writing a white paper on network security solutions.

An observer character is an interesting animal – someone whose drama is all interior, intellectual, and the meaningful action is all about a changing of perception. There’s definitely pleasure to be had in following someone like this around and seeing the world through his or her eyes. But I think you need to be such an assured, masterful thinker and prose stylist to pull this off that maybe it’s nearly impossible to do well. That may be why craft discussions steer writers the other way. The people who can do it know who they are.

At any rate, in my own writing journey I’m writing a character who acts and reveals herself in choice and (I hope) goes smartly through her paces as a well-rounded complex character with a satisfying “arc.”

But I still would love to see a workshop or a blog where someone says, you know what, it’s ok sometimes to write an observer character. Let’s study what makes them great.

You’d think there’d be room enough in the fiction zoo for characters like that.

Back when I was fresh out of college, I worked at a weekly newspaper in San Francisco. I started as an intern and kept hanging around until I think they finally felt embarrassed enough to give me a job. I loved this job. These were the last days of actual typesetters and, in what is surely not a coincidence, the last days of fairly cheap apartments in San Francisco. All the typesetters were artists – or cranks, really they were both. I used to go to Cafe la Boheme on 24th St. and run into one of the typesetters and hear about her latest painting, the near-deadline disasters, and all the alcohol that more senior staff members had consumed the night before.

I’m probably generalizing wildly, but I think people who have worked for newspapers have a kind of tribal identity that follows them through the rest of life. I think this is why David Simon focused Season 5 of “The Wire” around The Baltimore Sun and beat on it so hard. Newspapers get under your skin. (I feel this way and I only worked at a weekly. All I know is the Bay Guardian’s crusade against PG&E is seared onto my soul.) There’s a peculiar combination of really smart people, ambition, a curious failure to reach one’s potential, alcohol abuse, and the condition of getting screwed over by management that forms the perfect essence of newsroom – and that I think Rachman captures perfectly.

My parents still get two newspapers a day (it used to be three, back when there was such a thing as afternoon papers), and my idea of bliss is still an uninterrupted hour on Sunday morning with the New York Times.

We are slackers with only one newspaper subscription, and with the way the SF Chronicle seems to be going, I wonder how long we’ll have that. I don’t know about the newsrooms of the future – my impression is they’re actually just a bunch of Starbucks where the bloggers sit. Which brings me to another reason I appreciate The Imperfectionists: even though it’s acidly funny, there’s still this wonderfully elegiac tone for the passing of a treasured institution (done with a light touch, of course, it’s not morbid). Treasure your newsprint while you can.

I’ve tried many times to get her to give up on this essay, even to the point of thinking I should just throw this novel away altogether. I guess my fear is that people will see Proust and experience a violent lack of interest. If I didn’t love Proust the way I do, I might see this in a review or on a book jacket and probably think “what a load of pretentious horseshit.”

That aside, just mentioning him creates an almost intolerable comparison between my rather lightweight novel, consisting of hi-jinks and a few desperate jokes, and the great 20th century masterpiece that is In Search of Lost Time. In short, I think my book is doomed.

Just recently, the New York Times Book Review ran an endpaper essay about aborted novels. Some novels simply can’t be fixed and need to be abandoned, and in the article a bunch of prominent authors contributed anecdotes about the bad novels they had given up on. I read this at a vulnerable time when I really thought I had mucked things up with this book badly enough – having put all my favorite things in there only to come up with a book that would appeal to an audience of one – that I should just stop.

And I really thought about stopping, moving on. But I’ve tried to stop and kill it so many (many!) times, and each time it’s re-animated and come lurching after me, haunting my thoughts. So instead of trying to kill it, I re-read it, and read an earlier draft (which sometimes has more energy), and I decided to make another try.

I hope I am not stuck in a lifetime loop of abandoning and then retrieving this story. But if I am, I’m not sure if there’s much I can do about it. By this point it’s become a strange companion, something that, just by virtue of being in my life over so long, has taken on shape and density – almost like a person I keep running into every so often. In its own way, it’s a comforting presence. And maybe, even if I never finish or publish it, I can simply enjoy it for being there.

All of which is to say I’ve been surprised to find myself really enjoying some short stories lately. I think I’m a full-blown fan, for instance, of Tessa Hadley, who’s often in the New Yorker. Just the other week, she had a story, “Honor,” that has all the elements that usually put me in a funk for days (a dead child, emotionally cramped relationships, the past). But it’s so beautifully done, I found myself swept along.

Here is the narrator, a woman looking back on something that happened when she was a girl:

“I was dreading arriving home in the middle of a big fuss. I couldn’t bear crises: the huddles of women, their lowered voices, smoldering glances, shutting the children out and yet looping them in – tantalizing them – to the dark, sticky center.”

How I love that. Everything she writes is so beautifully simple and exact. Here is another:

“People had mixed feelings about men’s violence against their families in those days: it was disgusting, but it was also, confusedly, part of the suffering essence of maleness, like the smell of tobacco and beard growth.”

I’ve always thought my fear of short stories spoke to a kind of literary arrested development. Like the child in the quote above who couldn’t bear crises, I often feel that I can’t bear fiction that is too real, for I’m too afraid of encountering true sadness and grief. In books, the length helps, and they’re less pointed.

Actually, it was a recent attempt to write a story again that led me to my current spate of short story reading. In the course of this, through posts on Short Story Craft and Earth Goat I ended up loving two other short stories with dead children in them. I’m talking about Alice Munro’s “Dimension” and William Trevor’s “The Dressmaker’s Child,” each of which appeared in the New Yorker. They are each so artfully artless, each about the aftermath of tragedy, each about such ordinary people that they could easily bear their unbearableness into any one of our lives. But they were great. I read them and re-read them.

Maybe I’m finally growing up.

P.S. Here is a great review from the Virginia Quarterly of “Too Much Happiness,” the Alice Munro collection that includes “Dimension.” Puts it much better than I can.

I’d listened to Girl Talk’s “Unstoppable” a few years ago after reading about him in Nylon? Paper? (one of those hip one-word magazines that is good for reading once or twice and then for the next ten years you will have a vague sense of recognition as people stagger out of the back rooms of NYC night clubs and into something resembling mainstream success) and it didn’t hook me. Then again, “Unstoppable” was obviously something best listened to while surrounded by thousands of ecstatic sweaty bodies all moving as one, instead of … in my kitchen doing dishes, where most of my music listening is done these days.

But All Day is pure pleasure, an endless mashup wave that puts you in an eternal present where you’re blissed out at what’s flowing over you but still thinking – after all you’ve got to name that tune before the next samples start. The mix of hook-y old favorites plus hip hop old and new is like a pop multivitamin – in one dose all your musical needs are covered.

For instance, I love rap but I find it hard to listen to for long. And I love 80s pop, but it’s bubble gum that quickly loses its flavor. As with any nostalgic genre, you want the hits, the highlights, but all pop hits and highlights are like too many empty calories. Thus the genius of Girl Talk, which darkens and weights the effervescence of familiar tunes by Cyndi Lauper and sweetens the relentlessness of Jay-Z and 50 Cent. Likewise, when encountered in a sea of samples, self-important music like U2’s can be appreciated for the very thing that makes it insufferable on its own – its almost embarrassing sense of conviction. And then there’s the free pass the mash up gives you to listen to stuff that’s exhilirating for a few seconds but would be despair-inducing for a whole song (e.g., Gucci Mane, whose “Making Love to the Money” gives you the general idea of his oeuvre).

Maybe it’s a symptom of my shortening attention span, but many of these songs – coming from all different corners of the pop universe – start to feel as if they’ve reached their ultimate destiny, an apotheosis of sorts, as a Girl Talk sample. Everything that rises must converge, I guess (to see the complexity involved, check out the real-time sample map at mashupbreakdown.com). At 70 minutes or so, All Day is just about too much, and I come off it feeling like I’ve listened to the musical equivalent of a tilt-a-whirl, everything blurring by in a bright happy smear. Nothing to do but stagger off and stand in line to get on again.