Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The Rick Warren Affair

A quick note:

I agree with Richard Cohen's column in today's Washington Post (12/23/08) that Obama's failure to cancel his invitation to Rick Warren to deliver the benediction at the Inauguration constitutes a moral failure. The reason people don't think it's such a big deal and want gays to "get over it" is that they think anti-gay slurs are more acceptable than anti-Jewish slurs or anti-black slurs or anti-almost anything slurs. Just to be clear, Rick Warren has repeated the age-old canard of comparing gays to pedophiles. If our future president wants to thank Warren for having him at his church, Obama could invite the portly evangelical to visit him for tea and sumptuous spread of doughnuts in the White House or he could visit Warren's church once more as president or better yet send him a note on pretty stationary. But he should not and must not defile the Inauguration ceremony, which as Rachel Maddow noted belongs to all Americans and not Obama personally, by honoring the unchristian pastor in this way.

I'm particularly disturbed by this choice because I am one of many gay Americans who voted with their money, time, voices, and feet for this man we so passionately believed was the correct choice in November (and in my case also during the primary season), only to see that in December Obama has displayed a striking and unfortunate tendency to reward his enemies better than his friends. (To those keeping score, number of Republicans in his cabinet: 2, number of gays: 0). Now I'm starting to wonder, maybe Hillary Clinton was the best choice after all.

To be continued...

Monday, December 22, 2008

Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Other Writers' Books

Given the current state of publishing, the unofficial writer's commandment of only saying nice things about other people's books would seem more important than ever. Yet it's also a bit false to the truth of one's reading experience. For every book I read with excitement (which this year includes Someday This Pain May be Useful to You by Peter Cameron, several novels by Margaret Atwood, The Slave by isaac Bashevis Singer) there are at least ten more that were just so-so, or even dreadful.

My private benchmark for fiction is my limited bookshelf space. After moving from one cramped New York apartment to another several times, I realized quickly there was no point in keeping books that for whatever reason didn't mean something to me. So now as I read, I keep a pile of books to give away. Some of the books that make that pile aren't necessarily bad. In fact, a few might be fairly good, like Being Dead by Jim Crace, which I found well-written, sort of interesting, just a little glib, a bit too facile for my taste. I can't justify a place for it on my shelf between two gay writers named Cooper (Dennis and Bernard), each with dazzlingly original styles, and John Dalton's novel Heaven Lake, a fascinating trip to China.

Other books that weren't awful, but didn't make the cut: two Narnia books by C. S. Lewis, which I bought at a used bookstore after seeing the film version of Prince Caspian motivated me to reread the entire series. Lewis is a terrific writer and a lot of fun, though a bit creepy to read when you realize the religious propaganda going on in the background. All in all, good, but not necessary rereading like L. Frank Baum's Oz series or Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Prairie books.

I'm also shedding Le Divorce by Diane Johnson, a book with some scattered wit and a completely preposterous plot that was inexplicably nominated for a National Book Award. Speaking of award-winners, Johnson's in good company with the turgid Pulitzer-prize-honored Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I'm not quite sure what it is that people like about this book. It's flat, lifeless, written in the clean prose of a high school English textbook on composition. "But that's just the point!" exclaim the book's defenders. "It's a masterpiece of tone!" That's right, it's supposed to be boring. (Not that I'm against flat, dry affect, which works so well in the novels Stoner by John Williams, or Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell)

On the flipside, there's My Holocaust by Tova Reich, which suffers from the opposite problem. It's got too much going on. The book's characters are so cartoonish they might as well speak in balloons, kind of like the illustrations in Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, which also made my pile for being a one-note joke that got old after the first hundred pages.

Why take the time to speak ill of one's fellow writers, especially when so few people are buying books? First of all, it should not be bad form to say you didn't like or love another person's book. It's a necessary part of our cultural dialogue. Secondly, if we want to resuscitate the book business, encouraging people to buy any book that gets a good review or wins a prize is not the way to do it. Just as we passionately recommend the books we love, occasionally it's worth a little of our time to steer readers away from books we don't think can do them much good. Generally, I try to avoid negative critique (except when it comes to Republican politicians or so-called holy men like Rick Warren who espouse noxious opinions more worthy of Pontius Pilate than Christ). But every once in a while, a little venting helps to keep us honest.

Thursday, December 04, 2008

How to Survive the Economic Crisis

While we're all worried about our 401k's (if we have them) and the future of our jobs (if we have them), there's little we can do to affect the economic downturn. However, we can take steps to protect ourselves, specifically, by spending less on frivolous expenses, such as entertainment. Now's a good time to stop shelling out ten bucks a pop to go to movies, to cancel our netflix memberships, to stop downloading music from iTunes, to play the video games we already have instead of buying new ones, etc., etc., etc.

However, just as it's a mistake to stop investing for retirement when the stock market is low, it's also a mistake to stop reading and buying books to save money when times are tight. Now more than ever, we ought to turn to literature for inspiration and salvation. Watching a dumb action movie only leaves you worn out and numb. Listening to some pop song by the likes of Beyonce only reminds you of the difference between her lifestyle and yours. Reading a great work of literature, however, can make you smarter and entertain you at the same time. Supporting the publishing industry at this time can also help to ensure the continuity of our national culture and intellectual life.

Below, I've made a list of book recommendations that seem appropriate for our current recessionary conditions:

1. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. You think you've got it bad because you can only afford one new manicure a month instead of two? Read this guy's story and you'll never feel bad about yourself again!

2. Babbit by Sinclair Lewis. Money's not everything, you know, as this razor-sharp satire of the American bourgeoisie makes loud and clear.

3. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. In this novel, Atwood imagines the following nightmare scenario: America run by an oligarchy of right-wing religious whack-jobs. A bit like the Bush administration, only permanent and with no checks on its power. Thankfully, in real life, we had the good sense this time around to elect Barack Obama to fix what ails our country.

4. The Assistant by Bernard Malamud. This story of a hard luck grocer struggling to get by reminds us that as human beings, we can't escape suffering in our lives, but that suffering has the potential to enlarge and ennoble our spirits.

5. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. You know things are pretty tough when all you've got left to sell is yourself. These are fierce, sometimes brutal stories of sex and desperation.

6. Waiting by Ha Jin. As we wait for this economic downturn to pass, read this story about a guy who waits decades to marry, or even to have sex with the woman he loves. Now there's patience for you.

Other ideas? Let's hear them!

Friday, October 03, 2008

Reading Sarah Palin

For now, let's set aside the question of whether she's qualified to be president. What I'm concerned about is whether any candidate for public office ought to be allowed to get away with such atrocious grammar and syntax.

There was once a time in American life, both public and private, when the ability to speak clearly and coherently was considered a valuable asset, even a necessity. But in today's parlance of "OMG!" "BFF!" and the blood-curdling ":)," anything goes. It doesn't matter how you express yourself, it seems, as long as you, well, you know, kind of get across the sort of general idea of what you're trying to say, you know what I mean. Don't you?

But as George Orwell argued so persuasively in his essay "Politics and the English Language," how you say what you say is inextricably with what you mean. If you can't express your thoughts clearly, it's a sign that either A) you're not thinking or B) you don't want your listener to know what you're thinking.

In Sarah Palin's case, both interpretations are true simultaneously. Any human being with even the most rudimentary sensitivity to language who listens to her addle-headed patter ought to be able to detect the complete vacuity behind her words. Yes, I know, that big ole meanie Katie Couric made cute little Sarah all confused with all that grown-up talk. How spectacularly unfair. And John McCain's macho Washington insider handlers just wouldn't "let Sarah be Sarah." Yes, that's why in response to a question about which newspapers specifically Sarah reads, the good governor replied that she read any of them.

Last night in her vice-presidential debate, commentators commended Ms. Palin on her ability to form sentences. Nice work. I'm happy for her. But the question we need to ask is not whether she can form sentences, but what are the quality of those sentences, in terms of language used, the arrangement of that language, and finally the meaning behind that language. Yes, language was present last night, but what that language means in terms of specific policy, is anyone's guess. Which was exactly the point.

But goshdarnit, wasn't she a cutie-patootie!

Monday, September 15, 2008

David Foster Wallace

Of the seven deadly sins, envy is probably the most common to writers. It's a condition that becomes particularly acute when one of us (usually young and cute) is anointed as the Next Big Thing in American Letters. Some recent examples: Jonathan Safran Foer, Curtis Sittenfeld, Marissa Pessl, Nell Freudenberger, the list goes on.

I don't remember much of this kind of griping, however, when David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest was released in the mid-nineties. Certainly there were a lot of jokes about the book's heft, as well as critical debate about just how successful the book was as a whole (as there would be about every one of Wallace's books). Yet there was no denying the guy's talent line by line. There was certainly no denying his intelligence.

And of course, the humor. There have been many postmodern writers who've exploded their prose with pictures, quizzes, footnotes, and any manner of non-traditional stylistic devices. But few did it with such charm and acute comic timing as Wallace, who in the end, may not have produced as seminal a work as the masterpieces of his idol, Thomas Pynchon, yet whose writing was a hell of a lot more fun to read.

Only a week ago, I was teaching an excerpt from Wallace's well-known essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a satire of cruise ship culture, which embodied the best of Wallace's strengths (as enumerated above) as well as the worst of his weaknesses (chief among them, an almost pathological inability to restrain himself). In fact, reading Wallace's work is like being on a cruise: you can get pleasured to death. Or to use another metaphor I'm sure Wallace would have appreciated, immersing yourself in Wallace's work is like entering the Orgasmatron that nearly did in Jane Fonda in Barbarella. (Okay, I'll stop myself here. I could go on, but I'm not David Foster Wallace.)

I never met Wallace personally, but I've read him and heard him speak twice, and I couldn't help falling in love with the guy. I know I'm not alone in that sentiment. He described our culture with a unique blend of devastating evisceration and disarming sweetness, as seen in his brilliant device in Infinite Jest of renaming years after consumer products, notably "The Year of the Depend Undergarment." Any other writer might have chosen a whole other array of products. Yet the choice of that diaper was exactly what made Wallace Wallace: absurd, mocking to the point of snickering, yet also somehow tender and sad. Wallace's voice, of which we are now so cruelly robbed, made you sit up and pay attention, made you think, made you laugh, and above all made you want to give him a hug and tell him, it's okay, there's still hope. Yes, American life has become increasingly coarse and ugly and dumb. But there's still love, and where there's love, there's still hope.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Joel Ivan Hamburger

I wanted to mark the recent death of my father, Joel Ivan Hamburger, who was 79 this year. But I don't know how. There are all kinds of rites and rituals that are possible, but none of them seem equal to the real and true experience of my late father and the facts of his going out of this world.

Perhaps the strangest part of it is the experience of death itself. It makes me think of being in New York during September 11th. While I was going through it, the truth and reality of the actual event kept me so grounded in the present, in every second of what was happening. And then immediately afterward, the memorialization of the event gilded the lily, transformed it from an experience to a narrative.

Lately I've been recounting the narrative of my father's death over and over, and each time I get more frustrated. "But this wasn't how it was," I want to say. The story is so puny next to the pain and sorrow of what I went through in life.

The first time I fell in love, I remember hearing a love song on the radio and thinking, "Oh, that's what they were talking about!" So too, with this, I now have a new understanding of what death means to the living who are left. It makes me hate war more than ever. It's horrific enough when someone dies of natural causes, but to plunge someone through this experience to make a political point is barbaric.

I also have a new appreciation for writers who can capture this rare, awful experience in their work. Lately I've been reading the poetry of Jeffrey Harrison, specifically his book Incomplete Knowledge, which delicately yet powerfully evokes the deaths of several friends and his brother. Perhaps poetry more than fiction is more suited to portraying the host of jumbled, jagged, and sometimes contradictory emotions called up by loss.

We'll see.

Thursday, August 07, 2008

The Truth about Short Stories

I was at a farewell party for an author-friend of mine, a short story writer who's leaving New York. While talking with his editor, the subject of short stories came up. "I love short stories," she said. "Everyone I know reads short stories. Why don't short stories sell?"

It's a refrain I've heard repeated all too often, not just recently, but ever since I came to New York and began meeting people who worked in publishing. Short stories don't sell. If you're going to try to write fiction, which is a silly idea to start with, at least try to write a novel. No one wants to read stories.

And in the meantime, some of the most notable books that have come out in the same period of time include Junot Diaz's Drown, Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, Adam Haslett's You are not a Stranger Here, Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, several books by Alice Munro. The list goes on.

But short stories don't sell.

It's possible that the above are the exception to the rule. But I don't think so. I think the trouble publishers are having selling short stories is the same trouble they're having selling any type of fiction. Novels, novellas, story collections, no matter what the form, fiction itself isn't selling, with a few notable exceptions like Harry Potter or a few pop fiction sensations that you see at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Anyone who has looked at the numbers of copies sold by even some of our most prestigious authors knows that fiction is in a crisis in terms of sales.

As a friend of mine put it, "Fiction is the new poetry."

Why is this happening? The usual villains come to mind: the Internet and cell phones and DVD's for using up people's time that they might be spending in quiet reflection, the necessary state for reading. But I think there's more to it than that. We're living at a time when for some reason people do not want to stop and think and look and listen. Maybe it's the way we've been educated or coddled as consumers, but people are afraid to cut themselves off from the world and take a stance as a thoughtful observer rather than a commenting participant. Maybe that explains why even though the number of books sold keeps falling, the number of masters programs in creative writing keeps rising. We all want to be the star. But do we have what it takes to be a member of the audience?

Friday, July 04, 2008

Recent Raves

I recently received a Barnes and Noble gift card for my birthday, so I went to a local branch to find the book Someday This Pain May Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron. After searching all through the new fiction releases and not finding it, I went to ask for it at the information desk. The store did have the book, under "YA" or Young Adult fiction.

It's a bit incomprehensible to me that a writer of Cameron's stature should have his latest release shelved under "YA" rather than general fiction just because the narrator who's just out of high school. It's a bit like putting The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, a book with a juvenile narrator, with the kiddie books.

But in fact, Cameron's publisher has put out the book through its YA division, and perhaps they feel that in today's shaky marketplace for fiction, this is the best economic strategy. A bit shortsighted in my opinion, because Someday This Pain May Be Useful to You is not only Peter Cameron's strongest book, but also one of the most compelling reads in contemporary fiction.

At the book's center is James Sveck, a shockingly self-aware and intelligent high school graduate who feels simultaneously above and left out of the mainstream world. With a minimum of fuss and a maximum of acute sensitivity for language, Cameron captures this young man's heartbreaking alienation with humor and depth. The result is the kind of book that disappoints in only one respect: it ends.

This is prime entertainment, not for kiddies, but for sentient and serious readers of literature. Miss this book at your own peril.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

A Saintly Weekend

Just got back from a weekend festival of Queer Lit in New Orleans called Saints and Sinners. It's my third time there, and each time I come back with some new lens on literature, my own work, and myself.

A few impressions that stand out:

1. Sitting in Stephen McCauley's master class on character, in which he gave us some great exercises to flesh out a character you don't know well. Two of my favorites: A) describe your character's feet. and B) imagine yourself walking down a street and encountering your character. What's your impression?

2. Hearing Dorothy Allison full-throated no-holds-barred memories of her career and her fiery prescriptions of what needs to be done to the Bush administration.

3. Participating on a panel with novelists Brian Antoni and Paul Lisicky, who taught me about the importance of sticking it out as a writer, even when things look grim.

4. Having dinner with novelist Gary Zebrun, who told me not to let the current doldrums of the publishing business get me down, and encouraged me to believe in myself and above all to keep writing. "I tried to quit writing for eight years," he told me. "Those were eight of the most miserable years of my life."

Now back in New York, I'm sitting at my computer and ready to attack my work with a new verve. Thanks, Saints and Sinners!

Thursday, May 01, 2008

PEN World Voices

This weekend, I'll be blogging for the PEN World Voices Festival, featuring panels of writers from around the world. You can check out my comments and others by other writers on the PEN website, www.pen.org.

Here's my first post:

One of the most amusing moments for me during a panel called "Rewriting Family" was when the Hungarian-Romanian writer Gyorgy Dragoman announced, "As a writer, you have to get rid of your family." Dutch writer P. F. Thomese agreed, chiming in, "Yes, I agree, you have to destroy your family. You can't think, 'What would my mother think of that?' If that influences you, you'd never write anything of any meaning."

Maybe I should be ashamed to admit that in my own career, I have thought, "What would my father think of that?" and it has influenced me. As a young writer in my teens, my father played a very important role in my literary life. Whenever I needed a villain, he was always there for me. And so whenever he read my work, my father's response was usually along the lines of, "Why do I always have to be
the bad guy?"

As I sat down to write my first novel, I took my father's words to heart. Why is it that fathers are so often the villains in literature? In fact, during the discussion last night, Thomese brought this up when he said that his becoming a father taught him that he wasn't the center of the universe anymore. "Which was a huge discovery," he said, "since writers like to be the center of the universe." This is why, in Thomese's opinion, you see so many sons as heroes of novels while fathers play the role of villain.

While working on my novel Faith for Beginners, I decided I would defy the cliche and write a really nice dad. I made the father character in the book, Mr. Michaelson, vulnerable, caring, even slightly innocent in his concern for those around him. None of these are attributes anyone would ascribe to my father.

When he read the book, a few months before it was published, my father called me up and demanded to know what the hell I thought I was doing. "Why am I always the bad guy in your writing?" he wanted to know.

Go figure.

Israeli writer Yael Hadaya said that the only person in her family she'd never write about is her brother, "because I'm scared of him. He's the only one in our family who can defend himself. My father is dead. My kids are helpless because they're little, and my mother can't read my work without falling asleep, so she's never read anything I wrote."

The truth is, however, that no character is exactly the same as its real-life model. "When you write about your family," said Hedaya, "you're not really writing about them. It's like a collage of various pieces, but it can't be exactly the same. So you're not really writing your family, you're disguising your family. But I have to write about them. I have to write about my child. I can't just write about another child. This is my child."

The trouble with writers and families, according to Thomese, is that in families, you can never be honest with each other, but in writing you always have to be honest, which leads to a natural conflict. And as D'Erasmo pointed out, in a way that's what makes for the juicy tension in writing about families, that the reader always knows there are secrets that haven't been aired.

The Hungarian-Romainian writer Dragoman brought up a funny story about family secrets related to his recent novel The White King. For his novel, he'd made up some family secrets for the characters, who bore some loose resemblances to his own family. After the book came out, his mother told him as long as he was making up secrets about people, she would tell him the real family secrets she'd kept buried for years. And in this way, fictional lies about family ended up revealing truths Dragoman would never have discovered otherwise.

The title of the panel is "Rewriting Family," and each of these writers has re-written the notion of family in their work or lives in some way. Moderator D'Erasmo's last novel A Seahorse Year features a same-sex couple whose child has gone missing. Hedaya is a single mother by choice who's currently raising three kids. For Dragoman, family was not an arena of rebellion or conflict, but actually the "last line of defense" in a totalitarian society, the one place where he could feel safe. Dutch writer Thomese, who is married to an Indonesian, switched gears from bitterly satiric fiction to a wrenching personal memoir about the death of his child.

"I had to write it," said Thomese. "Because my child was dead and if I didn't write it, I would be left with nothing."

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Barack Obama: Guilty of Literary Crimes?

This election season has been a confusing one on many levels. I started out warily in support of Hillary Clinton because I was impressed by her strong performance in the early debates and the thoroughness of her knowledge of government. After Barack Obama's moving victory speech in Iowa, however, I started wondering if I was backing the wrong candidate. And then after watching the Clintons go after Obama with their Nixonian campaign tactics in South Carolina, I decided to make a change and now I'm firmly in Obama's camp.

In the end, the choice of Obama or Clinton probably doesn't matter a whole lot in terms of policy, since when they're elected, they'll probably do (or fail to do) many of the same things. As a gay voter, I haven't really had much choice in presidential elections, since the Republicans keep nominating candidates who are determined to offend me. Remember Bob Dole returning a check from the Log Cabin Republicans? Remember George Bush and gay marriage?

The issue that has been more difficult for me is the charge of plagiarism leveled by the Clinton campaign against Obama, who the other weekend used a few lines from another politician's speech without attribution. I doubt that the Clinton campaign has made this charge out of their concern for intellectual property rights, but it is a charge that is no less serious for the spirit of opportunism from which it has been offered.

Even Senator Obama has admitted he should have attributed the lines he stole (let's call this crime by its proper name) to their author, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. The question for me, though, is how serious is this crime? Petty larceny or high misdemeanor? How much is too much when it comes to using another author's words? And is that standard different for a speech than it is for a literary text?

Let's be fair here. Neither Obama nor Patrick attributed the lines "I have a dream" or "We hold these truths to be self-evident" to their original authors, nor did anyone suggest they needed to. Also, the bits of Patrick's speech that were original to him, "Just words?" were fairly short. I think what offended people was not so much the words being repeated, but the idea behind those words being repeated minus a simple, "As Deval Patrick said..." But then, don't politicians borrow and steal ideas from each other all the time? "No new taxes." "Universal health insurance." Has there ever been a political campaign where Republicans and Democrats respectively don't endorse these positions? Have I just committed plagiarism by using those words here on this blog?

Furthermore, we live in a culture in which "sampling" is all the rage, in music, in film. It's a kind of homage to use another person's work in your own, even without attribution. And often the work being "sampled" isn't very common at all. How many times have you heard a pop song from the 1970s and were shocked to hear a riff that you thought had been created for a hip-hop hit of the 1990's or our own decade? How does hearing those riffs in their original context make you feel when you recognize them? Thrilled or cheated?

I hate plagiarism and have little tolerance for plagiarists. The trouble is, I have a hard time defining what that term means these days. Right now I'm working on an essay about a novel written about Berlin in the 1990's. I and others have recently tried to find the author, J. S. Marcus, who hasn't published another book in over a decade, but without success. The situation reminded me of Christopher Isherwood looking for the real life model for Sally Bowles, who'd also disappeared. At the end of Berlin Stories, what is probably the definitive work on that city, Isherwood says, "When you read this, Sally--if you ever do--please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay, to yourself, and to our friendship. And send me another postcard."

And so I closed my essay with the following lines as a double homage, to link Marcus with Isherwood: "When you read this essay, J. S. Marcus—if you ever do—please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay. And write another book for us."

I did not add, awkwardly, "As Christopher Isherwood wrote at the end of 'Sally Bowles.'" My hope is that those who know the book (Marcus would be among them) will get the reference on their own, and would rightly sneer at the idea of wink-wink-nudge-nudging the reader to remind him or her of the source. It also strikes me that the lines themselves are not distinctive enough to warrant much concern about re-using. It isn't as if I had begun a novel about India or New York City with "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking... Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed," as Isherwood does at the beginning of 'A Berlin Diary.' Now that would be a problem, not only because the lines are so unique but also because I would be using them in a context that does not suggest its source, that in fact suggests that I, Aaron Hamburger, inspired by India or New York, so brilliantly thought up these lines all by my very self.

We all learned in grade school about the evils of plagiarism. What we did not learn is the difference between plagiarism and (to use a hot critical buzzword) "intertextuality," between copying and "sampling." Somewhere there is a line, but I think we have to draw it anew with each and every piece of writing we compose. My opinion is that Senator Obama just crossed that line by a step, maybe two. As for my essay, I think I'm well within safe boundaries, but I'm glad to hear if someone out there disagrees.

Friday, February 08, 2008

Stuff I Recommend

This past month, I've been consumed with finishing this draft of my novel, but I have found time for a few other diversions. Like...

LADY ORACLE by Margaret Atwood. I've read two other books by Atwood, The Blind Assassin, which I loved, and Surfacing, which I couldn't get through. This book is like neither of those. It's the story of a Canadian poet/romantic novelist who while trying to erase herself tells her life story. What makes this novel such a hoot, however, isn't so much the story, which is a lot of fun, but the vibrance of Atwood's narrative voice. This is one novel in which every sentence, even every word counts, and tickles the reader with pleasure.

SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME NOT by Leslea Newman. One of the things I like about Newman, whom I had the pleasure of meeting while teaching with her for the Stonecoast MFA Program in Maine, is the way she claims the lesbian experience as a universal experience. When she write about a crush on a fellow passenger in "Flight of Fancy," she's not just letting you know what it is for a woman to desire another woman, but also for a person to desire another person in general. When she writes about a breast cancer scare in "Keeping a Breast," she uses a second person point of view that implicates the reader, whether male, female, straight, gay, or anything else, in the story of a woman confronting mortality. Reading these stories, you wonder why it's been assumed for so long that the straight white male experience is any more "universal" than any other.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD, film. I don't usually publicize movies on my blog since they get enough play in our culture already, but this one is special. The film's main character, Daniel Plainview, is as rich as any character I've come across in many works of contemporary fiction. It helps that Daniel Day-Lewis gives a rich performance that captures all of Plainview's profound virtues and flaws. At the end of this absorbing movie, I wasn't sure whether his character was more victim or villain, but I was so fascinated by his story that I didn't mind thinking it over for a good long while.