Kevin Allman

The first lines club

The 100 Best First Lines From Novels, from the editors of the American Book Review.

There are few surprises in the top 10, which includes:

1.  "Call me Ishmael." (Herman Melville, Moby-Dick)

2.  "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice)

6.  "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)

8.  "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." (George Orwell, 1984)

9.  "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...." (Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

But I can't figure out how they came up with some of the rest. Who, for instance, would pick #34: "In a sense, I am Jacob Horner" (John Barth, The End of the Road)? These are much better:

39.  "They shoot the white girl first." (Toni Morrison, Paradise)

51. "Elmer Gantry was drunk." (Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry)

62.  "Once upon a time, there  was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person." (Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups)

64.  "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)

83.  "'When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, 'she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.'" (Katherine Dunn, Geek Love)

Oddly, the list completely omits one classic opening line:

"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy." (Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster)

Now that's an opener.

And then there's one of my personal favorites, Florence King's first line for her only serious novel, When Sisterhood Was in Flower:

"Call me Isabel."

"The best novels you've never read"

New York magazine surveyed the members of the National Book Critics Circle (of which I'm one, though I didn't participate) and asked them to "pick the best under-the-radar book of the past ten years or so."

The result is my new library list.

Sure, there are a few familiar names (Martin Amis), but for the most part, I've never heard of any of these books or their authors. Top of my new library list: Judy Budnitz' Nice Big American Baby and Maggie Robbins' Suzy Zeus Gets Organized.

Poppy Z. Brite: retiring?

Poppy Z. Brite -- one of New Orleans' most interesting writers -- may be hanging it up for good, and  she's got some peppery things to say about the current state of publishing:

I've written nothing to speak of since mid-November of 2006. To go so long without writing is unusual for me, and what's even more unusual is the fact that I don't miss it. I miss spending time with my characters, but I don't feel the writing urge itself. I don't know if I am taking stock of my life or getting my house in order or retiring or what. I do know that I'm not sure I can continue working with big publishing houses. The business is filthy and cannibalistic. They build careers for a few fortunate (and frequently talented) writers and shove the rest of us through the grinder like cheap hamburger. Editors and authors alike jump from house to house. There's no continuity. Our editors are as overworked and underpaid and frequently unmotivated as we are.

There's more -- a lot more -- on her blog, including a reproduction of the letter from her editor declining her next two book proposals (well worth reading on its own). Brite comments:

Posting it here is not the most professional thing I have ever done, but I think it's worth showing what condescending, insulting dreck we put up with from people who are practically half our age, who don't know our work other than the books they themselves have edited, who have no interest in the arc or our career or the obsessions that drive us.

There's an old saying in the newspaper business -- three's a trend, meaning that if you can find three examples of something new, it's a legit topic for a trend piece. I don't have three, but I'm disturbed just to have two, and the other is Patty Friedmann, whose wonderful, hilarious new book A Little Bit Ruined is the first significant post-Katrina novel:

On Wednesday night I launched my novel A Little Bit Ruined, and before I read told the gathering of people I loved deeply, without benefit of alcohol, that I was calling it quits....Julie Smith and I drove three hours up—and three hours back—to Jackson, Mississippi, to do a signing with Ace Atkins at Lemuria Bookstore for our anthology, New Orleans Noir. Ace is a hot commodity in Mississippi, and he’d done a noon TV show in Jackson. We drew six people. It was a perfect final lesson in book marketing. A perfect capstone to a writing career.

Both of these women have published several well-regarded, critically acclaimed, reasonably-selling novels...and they can't find a way to make it work any longer, or perhaps they no longer have the stomach for it.

Three's a trend; I do believe that. So I don't want to hear about a third.

Burning books

A bookstore owner in Kansas City is burning 20,000 books in his collection...because no one wants them. He can't sell them, libraries and thrift shops have turned them down, and he has no room to store them. So up in flames they shall go...

Tom Wayne has amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero's Books.

His collection ranges from best sellers, such as Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October and Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, to obscure titles, like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910. But when he wanted to thin out the collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops; they said they were full.

So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books in protest of what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word.

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books..."After slogging through the tens of thousands of books we've slogged through, and to accumulate that many and to have people turn you away when you take them somewhere, it's just kind of a knee-jerk reaction," he said. "And it's a good excuse for fun."

Wayne said he has seen fewer customers in recent years as people more often get their information from television or the Internet. He pointed to a 2002 study by the National Endowment for the Arts, that found that less than half of adult respondents reported reading for pleasure, down from almost 57 percent in 1982.

I think this is a terrific publicity stunt, for both the bookstore and the cause of reading itself: it's shocking, dramatic, bound to get press around the world, and will certainly increase business to his shop. In fact, it seems to have already done so:

Dozens of other people took advantage of the book-burning, searching through the books waiting to go into the flames for last-minute bargains.

Mike Bechtel paid $10 for a stack of books, including an antique collection of children's literature, which he said he'd save for his 4-year-old son.

"I think, given the fact it is a protest of people not reading books, it's the best way to do it," Bechtel said. "(Wayne has) made the point that not reading a book is as good as burning it."

I wouldn't go that far. Still, it surprises me that the Kansas City Public Library wouldn't take the collection for a used-book sale. Maybe they will, now that the books are "famous"; there's nothing that can stir demand for something than telling people they can't have it.

Headline of the day (Memorial Day edition)

The poor dogs...

News bath, part 1

Years ago (like, pre-Internet, totally Paleolithic, man), Frank Zappa gave an interview to the writer Jon Winokur in which he described his daily "news bath":

I've got it down to a science: at 4:30 on Channel 34, which is the Discovery Channel, you tape Christian Science Monitor; then you switch over to CNN at 5:00 and watch Bernard Shaw make a fool of himself for a little while; then you switch to the local CBS news and hope to see Michael Tuck, who does the most outrageous things on the air. But the fun really starts at 6:30, when you go to Channel 7 to get the very beginning of Peter Jennings and ABC News to find out what their lead story is and start taping that; while the tape is running, immediately flip over to Channel 2 to see what the lead story is going to be on CBS. The way the commercials are staggered on the 6:30 news, if you start with the ABC News you can get the first big chunk before the commercials start. Then, when Jennings goes to a commercial, you immediately switch over to CBS.

You skip NBC at this point because Brokaw hardly ever has anything interesting or competitive with the stories on the other networks. You go directly to Channel 2 and pick up another three minutes of news before *they* go to a commercial. At that point you have to decide whether to give Brokaw his riff or go back to Jennings. You ping-pong back and forth like that, ending up on Channel 7 because their news goes longer than the CBS News. When that half-hour block is over you flip it to Channel 6 for the tail end of MacNeil/Lehrer. And when they're done you go back to CNN.

That had to be 20 years ago; most of those people have moved on or died. But I've always remembered the phrase "news bath," because it's so apt. Here's my morning news bath, usually taken with a cup of coffee in one hand before I take my real bath (which is, to be honest, a shower -- but a "news shower" just doesn't have that zing or that ring):

1.  Check The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times for headlines. The big three. Open any interesting-looking stories in another window for later skimming/reading.

2.  Peek at the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News. If there isn't at least one intriguing story on the front page of each of 'em, it's a bad news bath.

3.  Open the New York Post to see what they're on about now. (Silently wish that some of the more "prestigious" papers would emulate the Post's hyper-engaged, hyper-local style.)

4.  On to The Oregonian and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which have similar outdated websites produced by the same company. (Reflect on the fact that I'd read more of both if the sites weren't so illogically convoluted.) Be sure to read the front page of the O and the metro and opinion sections of the T-P, since that's where all the action is. If there's something really brewin' in New Orleans, skip over to WWL-TV, the website of the city's CBS station.

5.  Hit the online-only news sources: my customized Google News page, Jim Romenesko's gossipy, informative Medianews; morning media updates at Mediabistro; Kevin Roderick's indispensable LA Observed (a model for what every alternative paper in the country should be doing, but isn't); Today's Front Pages, scans of the actual front pages from hundreds of newspapers around the world; and the increasingly dispensable Drudge Report. And, if there's time: Eat the Press.

(Bookmarked, but not bathed in: CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, USA Today, and a few others.)

Coming up later: my daily blog bath.

Do you have a news bath? What's yours?

Facelift

Time for a newer (cleaner?) design. I'm not entirely happy with it yet, but I think it's easier on the eyes.

Yes? No?

Barbara Ehrenreich depresses me

I wanted to blog about Barbara Ehrenreich's column "Dateline Delhi" last week, but the thought of it was just too depressing, because she was -- as usual -- right. Like me, Ehrenreich was groaning at an inevitable development: a local news site in California was now outsourcing its local reportage.

The website's editor points out that he can get two Indian reporters for a mere $20,800 a year - and no, they won't be commuting from New Delhi. Since Pasadena's city council meetings can be observed on the web, the Indian reporters will be able to cover local politics from half the planet away.

That's $20,800 total, by the way -- not apiece. (Because there'd be no shortage of American journalists these days who would be amenable to a $20k/year salary. After all, you've got to put food stamps on your table.) The Indian journalists (who watch the council meetings on their computers in Mumbai and Bangalore) were scheduled to start this week.

I suspect they already have. Not that I was an expert on Pasadena Now style before I read about this, but a few of the stories on the site this evening read like press releases translated into another language and back again.

Here's a snippet of a scoop titled "Search Warrants Net Drugs, Guns, Money":

Eduardo Mendoza Solorio, 30, of Pasadena area was arrested and in connection with the one of the current cases, police say.

“We are hopeful that every lead we pursue will bring us closer to closure on the case,” says Chief of Police Bernard Melekian. “The information generated through the course of the investigation lead the service of these warrants. The service of the warrants will undoubtedly lead to more information that will help us solve this crime and prevent Mr. Solario from committing any further crimes.“

Does anyone know how to rewrite a police department press release out there in Bangalore?

An even scoopier scoop -- "Double Murder Solved":

...Elias, Perez, and Ruiz were arrested May 15, 2007, during early morning search warrants conducted by in Pasadena, Azusa and Alhambra. The three men gunned down victims Walker and Varcasia in broad daylight in front of stunned on-lookers.

The suspects will remain in custody in the Los Angeles County Jail until arraignment proceedings early next week. Bail has been set at $3 million dollars for each suspect....

For more information, please contact Lieutenant John Dewar, Detective Section.

"Conducted by in Pasadena"? "$3 million dollars"? And a double-play cliché: broad daylight and stunned onlookers. How much does a good New Delhi copy editor charge, anyway?

I don't know if this is Mumbai at work (unsurprisingly, there are no bylines on any of it). And if this is the best Pasadena can do on its own, hell, go ahead and outsource; it couldn't possibly be worse. Many of the folks in India are super-educated hard workers; that's why they're eating our lunch. (That, and the fact that they work for pennies.)

But would you really want your news written by the last guy who walked you through tech support on your Dell?

Creattive writting

Somehow I don't think I'll be applying...

New book review: Michael Connelly's The Overlook

I've got a review of Michael Connelly's latest Harry Bosch novel, The Overlook, in today's Style section of The Washington Post.

Highly recommended reading this morning: Barbara Ehrenreich's tart thoughts about the future of the newspaper business, as more and more jobs disappear and the industry gets serious (laughably serious) about outsourcing -- of all things -- political reporting and local coverage.