You’ve gotta love Jonathan Franzen (The Discomfort Zone, 2006). At least he doesn’t pick fights with small-timers. The New York Observer reports that he called Michiko Kakutani “the stupidest person in New York City.” It must have been something she wrote:

In that review, Ms. Kakutani wrote: “there is something oddly preening about [Franzen’s] self-inventory of sins, as though he actually reveled in being so disagreeable.” Also: “Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about [Franzen’s unhappy marriage] or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen’s mind remains something of a mystery.”

In related news, another feuding writer-reviewer duo, Rick Moody and Dale Peck, have reconciled. Peck, you may recall, famously called Moody “the worst writer of his generation.” And there’s video, too.

On Galleycat, Emily Gould asks whether they’re being sincere:

This is cute and all, but there’s a chummy, clubby aspect of the ‘reconciliation’ that bothers me. Does Peck really take back everything he ever said about, say,’The Black Veil?’ Does he still care fervently about literature and how it’s marketed, or is he just spending his free time swimming around in a vault full of money a la Scrooge McDuck now that his sci-fi project with the dude from Heroes sold for $3 million?

Hey, if a cream pie doesn’t demonstrate sincerity, I don’t know what does!

Also in the New York Times (”In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop,” by Matt Richtel), a report on bloggers who are dying on (or near) the job. I know the feeling: tightness in the chest, shortness of breath….

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

I really don’t mean to make light of this. Fortunately, the demands of book blogging aren’t anything like those of tech bloggers. But I’m sure many of us can relate to the feeling that, in this wired world, it can be hard to turn work off. So let’s all take this as a wake-up call, so we don’t end up like this guy:

"I haven’t died yet," said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. "At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen."

"This is not sustainable," he said.

And now, I’m going out for some fresh air. Just as soon as I finish blogging and updating Booklist Online.

(Thanks, Donna!)

Fans of mystery, sf, and romance know well the second-class status that’s routinely conferred on genre fiction. The big reviews and big awards go to literary fiction; meanwhile, genre fans are checking out, buying, and reading books in numbers that even National Book Award winners dream about. Writers like Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy, and even Philip Roth are helping to bridge the divide, but meanwhile, genre discrimination continues.

I just finished writing “Another Look at” Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon for Booklist’s Mystery Issue (coming May 1), and my Vintage paperback carries on its cover two of the most jaw-droppingly astonishing quotes:

“Dashiell Hammett is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer.” –The Boston Globe

“The Maltese Falcon is not only probably the best detective story we have ever read, it is an exceedingly well written novel.” –The Times Literary Supplement (London)

Granted, these blurbs are almost certainly contemporary to the novel, and we have come a long way since then.

But.

But. But. But.

How can anyone, in any era, have written such things? Did other writers also master the detective novel while somehow remaining poor writers? Were other terrific detective stories somehow badly written?

Over at Book Group Buzz, Neil Hollands recently did a nice post called “Conquering Genrephobia.” Check it out.

At dinner with some Booklisters on Tuesday night, we enjoyed a discussion of words and phrases (”interesting,” “well-written”) that shouldn’t appear in book reviews. The topic must be in the zeitgeist. Joyce Saricks, who was at the table, forwarded me this post from Paper Cuts: “Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing.” Their picks are poignant, compelling, intriguing, eschew, craft, muse, and lyrical.

I agree that those are overused and should be avoided, but I don’t think they fit the criterion we were discussing on Tuesday: don’t use words or phrases that don’t mean anything. Interesting makes no sense if the review doesn’t explain why the book is interesting, and if the review makes the case for the book’s interestingness, then the word is no longer needed. Well written? Well, if an author didn’t have a basic command of the English language, then it’s doubtful we’d be reviewing the book in the first place. And if the reviewer is trying to say something about the literary quality of the prose, then a more lyrical word should be used. (Just not lyrical.)

Everybody has personal pet peeves, of course–I dislike limn, yet a number of my colleagues use it to good effect. And we all overuse certain words, but given the number of books that Booklisters must review–and the rate at which we must review them–we’re all going to be guilty of the occasional poignant lapse.

Are there any words you’d like to see stricken from book reviews?

I like lots of librarians, but my favorite librarian doesn’t actually exist. (Which certainly makes it less politically awkward than if I were to choose a favorite librarian who did exist.) Welcome back again, Israel Armstrong.

“We’re librarians actually,” said Israel.

“Come again?”

“Librarians.”

Israel thought that Barry’s face coloured slightly at the mention of the word “librarian” and that perhaps he twitched nervously inside his cheap suit with its expensive-looking lining. But then twitching nervously in the presence of a librarian wasn’t an uncommon response–librarians, like ministers of religion, and poets, and people with serious mental health disorders, can make people nervous. Librarians possess a kind of occult power, an aura. They could silence people with just a glance. At least, they did in Israel’s fantasies. In Israel’s fantasies, librarians were mild-mannered superheroes, with extrasensory perceptions and shape-shifting capacities and a highly developed sense of responsibility who demanded respect from everyone they met. In reality, Israel couldn’t silence even Mrs. Onions on her mobile phone when she was disturbing other readers on the van.

Ian Sansom’s first Mobile Library Mystery, The Case of the Missing Books, was wonderful. The second one, Mr. Dixon Disappears, didn’t work as well. The third one, The Book Stops Here (which will be published in August), made me laugh almost as much as the first.

Quadruple-threat Dan Kraus (editor/writer/filmmaker/champion pastry chef) alerted me to a simple hack that allows me to embed video in this here WordPress blog. So I’m going to go ahead and do that–and what better test case than a video shot and edited by multiple-hyphenate Dan Kraus?

Hey, it works!

After a few problematic or outright fake memoirs whose nuances left me somewhat sympathetic to the authors, it’s kind of a relief to come across one that’s simply wrong, any way I look at it. From the New York Times (”Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction,” by Motoko Rich):

In "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members.

Who dropped the dime? Seltzer’s big sister, who saw an article in the paper and called the book’s publisher, Riverhead. Seltzer confessed, though she claims she was lying for altruistic reasons:

"For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to," Ms. Seltzer said. "I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing - I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it."

Yes, I often find that the best way to bring attention to someone else’s plight is to claim their problem as my own.

Seriously, although a number of people have proposed solutions to the problem of memoirs, how many more faked and flawed memoirs will have to be exposed before publishers come to some consensus about how the category is to be treated?

I still think the simplest thing is to assume that memoirs, like our memories, are flawed. And perhaps they should be shelved with fiction–any memoirs wanting to earn their stripes as nonfiction should offer footnotes or endnotes.

But, in any event, any time someone wants to publish a memoir about the tough times they’ve endured, the publishers owe it to everyone involved to make a half-dozen phone calls to verify the basic facts of the book. This one could have been caught pretty easily.

Update: The Booklist review of Love and Consequences. Starred. So maybe it still works as a novel.

Nicholson Baker, a print guy if there ever was one (Double Fold, 2001), falls in love with something that only lives on servers (”The Charms of Wikipedia,” TNYRB).

Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals - up to a point - the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context. If Wikipedia were rendered entirely chaotic and obscene, there would be no joy in, for example, replacing some of the article on Archimedes with this:

Archimedes is dead.

He died.

Other people will also die.

All hail chickens.

The Power Rangers say “Hi”

The End.

The electronic world, it turns out, abets his love of all things archival.

I signed up for the Article Rescue Squadron, having seen it mentioned in Broughton’s manual: the ARS is a small group that opposes “extremist deletion.” And I found out about a project called WPPDP (for “WikiProject Proposed Deletion Patrolling”) in which people look over the PROD lists for articles that shouldn’t be made to vanish. Since about 1,500 articles are deleted a day, this kind of work can easily become life-consuming, but some editors (for instance a patient librarian whose username is DGG) seem to be able to do it steadily week in and week out and stay sane. I, on the other hand, was swept right out to the Isles of Shoals. I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me - for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an “inclusionist.”

I’m reading Thomas Kohnstamm’s Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics & Professional Hedonism (Three Rivers). Kohnstamm, bitten early by the travel bug, has an early-life crisis (at the time the book takes place, he’s still in his twenties), walks away from his job, and flies to Brazil to write for the Lonely Planet guidebook.

The book’s emphasis on Kohnstamm’s wild ‘n’ crazy adventures made me think of Glasgow Phillips’ Royal Nonesuch: or, What Will I Do When I Grow Up? And also Dan Dunn’s Nobody Likes a Quitter (and Other Reasons to Avoid Rehab): The Loaded Life of an Outlaw Booze Writer…and also Tom Sykes’ What Did I Do Last Night?

Besides their seeming prediliction for titles in the form of questions, what do these books have in common? Well, they’re all writing in the shadow of Hunter S. Thompson, of course. The jacket copy on Kohnstamm’s book invokes the name of the gonzo great, and Dunn, apparently, was even a protege of Thompson. But making such comparisons is dangerous. In part because, if you measure your worth by feats of consumption, there’s actual danger in trying to be the “best.” But more because Thompson’s gift wasn’t his herculean intake of mind-altering substances, it was his mind itself. And, before he himself became a parody of himself [Ed: that reads like Nigel Tufnel channeling Austin Powers, dunnit?], the gonzo style allowed him a way to capture the weirdness at the heart of some of his stories–and it was new, a refreshing antidote to the style of journalism practiced by his contemporaries.

Also, he was insanely funny.

Writers who go gonzo without Thompson’s humor and savagely penetrating intellect run the risk of coming off like boring drunks. Or at least like self-absorbed, self-indulgent navel-gazers who think it’s funny to do journalism–or any job–poorly.

Having gotten all that off my chest, I think Kohnstamm’s book is actually the best of the lot. Roughly speaking, there are three elements in it: his early-life crisis and the pull of wanderlust; his drinking, drugging, and fornicating; and his expose of the business of writing travel guides. He plays the HST card on his first hand, during a booze-and-coke-fueled pub crawl with a character referred only to as “the Doctor,” but his sharp, funny writing and self-deprecation save the day. To wit:

There is nothing tough about writing–the act of writing is about as burly as operating a cash register…. 

But it’s his thoughts on travel writing that keep me turning pages: the Lonely Planet’s journey from backpacker tip sheet to middle-class faux-hobo itinerary; the loneliness that can ensue when it’s your job to write seriously about what everyone else does for fun; the impossible assignment of writing about travel that you can’t yourself afford. (In one brilliant scene, he gets thrown out of a hotel that he’s researching because he looks like he can’t afford to stay there.)

I’ve never done any travel writing, but I have had a few experiences that resonate. I’ve written reviews of restaurants where the assigning publication wouldn’t cover the cost of a decent meal. And I contributed to a Chicago guidebook once–a great learning experience, but the pay probably didn’t cover the cost of my shoe leather.

So if booze is fuel for the journey, then so be it. But writers need to be careful not to get stuck at the bottom of the glass.

Or should that be “how-to-read books”? In the Independent, D. J. Taylor’s review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works mentions the “very considerable critical sub-genre: the literary user’s manual.” Which includes:

How to Read a Novel, by John Sutherland (2006)

How Novels Work, by John Mullan (2006)

Fifty-Two Ways to Read a Poem, by Ruth Padel (2002)

Aspects of the Novel, by E. M. Forster (1927)

Not to mention:

Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose (2006)

Reading Comics, by Douglas Wolk (2007)

On the how-to-review-a-book front, would-be reviewers should take note of Taylor’s first paragraph, which certainly made me want to read the rest of his review:

Whatever one may think about James Wood’s constant ejaculations, his ceremonious name-dropping (”W G Sebald once said to me…”) and his lecture-hall mannerisms - more of these in a moment - he really is an A-grade exponent of what university syllabi used to call “practical criticism”. Some of the best bits of this brief but luminous primer - and they are very good indeed - come when Wood strips the engine of some fabled fictional juggernaut down to its component parts with the aim of establishing just how a piece of prose works to bring off its effects, the way in which, as he puts it, a novel “teaches us how to read its narrator”.