Let's face it, book tours are weird and (sometimes) boring. On the Awl, nine authors and publicists talked about the best and the worst of the requisite book tour. Their consensus: there's something wrong with the whole setup. So step aside, dudes and dudettes. I'm not like regular authors. This is what I would do if I was on a book tour.

1.

If I was on a book tour, I would wear the same sophisticated, refined Yves St. Laurent suit to every reading. The same way I wear my Clockwork Orange costume for Halloween every year. (I probably wouldn’t stuff a sock down my pants for a book reading, though.)

2.

If I was on a book tour, I would only read the parts of my book with sex orhigh-speed car chases. Anybody can think about philosophical problems on their own. Sex and high-speed car chases, however, are best enjoyed ascommunal experiences. Also, one of my friends got lucky at a Literary Death Match event (probably one that Black Balloon publisher Elizabeth Koch ran, although she's not telling). All it took was a smile, a few literary allusions, and a round of vodka and Red Bull. That’s got to be a good sign.

3.

If I was on a book tour, I would interrupt discussions about my work to dish out Dear Sugar-style advice to the audience:

“Mr. Author, my marriage isn’t going so great. I’m reading your books like my wife told me to so that we have something to talk about when I come home from work. I don’t think it’s working. What should I do?”

“Have you tried stuffing a sock down your pants?”

4.

If I was on a book tour, I would drink a Tom Collins before I got in front of the audience (for the stage fright), and then I’d leave right after the signing for the nearest dive bar (for the non-stage fright). This one time, I met a bartender who was reading Ulysses when he wasn’t pouring shots. He was in the middle of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, and managed to concoct an industrial-grade mojito while reading aloud her words—“What do they find to gabber about all night squandering money and getting drunker and drunker couldnt they drink water”—and laughing the whole way through.

5.

If I was on a book tour, I would bribe my friends to come and be extremely attractive backup readers. They wouldn’t actually read though. They’d just stand around, being wonderful supportive friends. I’d tell them, “You can just stand up in front with me while I read about sex and high-speed car chases. You’ll probably get laid."

Come to think of it, maybe I'd stuff a sock down my pants after all. You never know what the audience is really there for.

image credit: leedsfestival.com. I would probably have a classier outfit.

Welcome our antebellum vampire overlords, infecting young adult fiction with chalky, angular cheekbones and numbing chastity! The undead are everywhere, from Twilight to Seth Grahame-Smith's New York Times bestseller (no joke) Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. I'd managed to steer clear of this post-Lestat world until Vulture highlighted an annoying paradox: fanboys have their Underoos in a knot over the “unrealistic” overhaul of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, yet they seem totally hunky-dory with the idea of Lincoln staking vampires. Here we go!

My beef isn't really about converting Grahame-Smith's tiresome mashup novel into a film. It's a made-for-summer blockbuster, akin to last year'sCowboys & Aliens (which was based off a graphic novel). In effect: pure eye-candy, with historical accuracy totally suspended in favor of dudes on horseback rustling up UFOs or America's 16th President brawling with bloodsucking plantation owners. At least in Vampire Hunter's case, Benjamin Walker (star of Tony-nominated musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) plays honest axe-wielding Abe and scream goddess Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays his wife. I'm hesitant toward director Timur Bekmambetov, whose style is like Michael Bay on pyrotechnic steroids, though he “cut his teeth” on vampires with the frenetic Night Watch—Russia's highest grossing film ever.

It's the silly collision of genres, or stitching a historical figure into the realm of fantasy, that irks me. I'm looking at you, Quirk Books, and your highly lucrative fusing of public domain classics with horror/sci-fi tropes. We can thank Grahame-Smith's mashup debut, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for launching this peculiar strain. As DreadCentral reported, P&P&Z is now an interactive iPhone- and iPad-capable eBook. However, its big-screen adaptation is in limbo, with Blake Lively, Emma Stone, Natalie Portman et alpassing on the leading role and three directors abandoning the project. I love me some zombies, but I don't need them interwoven with Austen's classic prose. Do fanboys read this shit?

Which brings me to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the archetypal mashup. What began as a grim indie comic parodying Marvel's Daredevil and preempting the mid-80s animal-based action boom (Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters, anyone?), spawned a tubuloso animated series and some far-out feature films. Thing is, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's original comic was drenched in vengeance and solitude, versus the kid-friendly, pizza-eating, wisecracking terrapins who made it mainstream—let alone Vanilla Ice's totally bogus cameo in The Secret of the Ooze. As for producer Michael Bay's remarks that the relaunched Ninja Turtles are aliens, director Jonathan Liebesman tried assuaging fan-fears: “anything we expand will tie right into the mythology, so I think fans will go apeshit when they see it.” Translation: this is a money-making franchise, and we don't dare mess that up.

Too early to predict if the turtles go mano-a-mano with Confederate zombies, but maybe that's best left for the pages? Cowabunga!

Image credit: Nerdbastards

On Monday, Ashley Judd, star of Double Indemnity Jeopardy, one of my all time favorites to watch while high and twerking my friend’s mom’s StairMaster™ in high school (see also Backdraft) wrote a searing rebuttal to the various media outlets who have been speculating about the state of her face. Their conclusions ranged the whole of human experience and beyond, from “fat” to “injectable fillers.” Darwin had it that the beautiful face of Nature was packed tightly with sharp wedges, driven inward by incessant blows. This exhausting and precarious situation is probably why we ladies had to rest on easy chairs and suffer what Florence Hartley, in her 1872Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, called "the worst species of debility": fat.

1.

“[T]he recent speculation and accusations…feel different, and my colleagues and friends encouraged me to know what was being said. Consequently, I choose to address it because the conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in ways both outrageous and subtle. The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.”

—Ashley Judd, open letter, The Daily Beast, April 9, 2012.

2.

“The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another, with greater force.”

—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859.

3.

“‘Yes! We are a self-indulgent race, this present generation. Witness our easily excited feelings; witness our late hours of rising, our sofas and easy chairs, our useless days and dissipated nights! Witness our pallid faces, our forms, sometimes attenuated and repulsive while yet in early life, age marching, not creeping, on before his time; or witness our over-fed and over-expanded forms, enfeebled by indolence, and suffering the worst species of debility—the debility of fat…. "In the education of women," writes a modern physician, "too little attention is given to subdue the imaginative faculty, and to moderate sensibility...we find imagination and sentiment predominant over the reasoning faculties, and laying the foundation of hysterical, hypochondriacal, and even maniacal diseases."’”

—Florence Hartley, “Hints on Health,” a chapter in The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness: A Complete Handbook for the Use of the Lady in Polite Society, 1872.

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the lavalamp, gaslight, candlelight, campfire, torch, sometimes even the starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The form of the column strives to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” Each week you will find here some citational constellation, offered with astonishment and without comment, that can serve as an end in itself, dinner party fodder, or an occasion for further thought or writing. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."

Image: Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus with the Head of Medusa

The Hunger Games landed the number three spot on the recently released American Library Association’s Top Ten List of Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2011. Um, hello? Complainers? My mom totally just read that book. My mom.

Maybe you think I’m being cute with the whole hunger-kitchen-mom title, perhaps playing the ol' wink-and-nod game, hinting at literary depravity and motherhood, so let me just stop all this conjecture right here and now. I am quite serious. My mom totally read The Hunger Games in the kitchen this weekend. Plus, if I were to imply any wink-and-nod business, I’d sound kind of sexist. Hell, you’re probably the sexist one.

For those zealots who might not immediately understand the implications of "my mom," let me provide a brief characterization. Elementary school teacher for over thirty years. Hates peanut butter. Also hates movies. Hates violence probably more than she hates movies. A major player on the social justice scene, pathologically invested in a Minneapolis Peace Garden.

That’s right. A peacenik school teacher with an aversion to nuts. DevouredThe Hunger Games in one sitting.

But how does my mom reading The Hunger Games have anything to do with you? When I asked her why she’d purchased the book, she said, “There are just some things you do for popular culture.” I don’t understand what this means. Some things you just have to accept without too many questions (like hating peanut butter). The day before I found The Hunger Games in the kitchen, my mother said she was going to “the labyrinth” and when I asked what “the labyrinth” was she started explaining what a labyrinth is rather than provide any concrete information about a physical place. She’s never even done drugs. Why would I think questions are useful?

Nonetheless, I think it’s safe to assume the following:

1. Rather than that idiotic No Child Left Behind bullshit of constant standardized testing, schools will start requiring demonstrations of physical prowess. Childhood obesity solved.
2. Popular culture will dictate moral standards. Oh wait, it already does.
3. The generation of nimble children raised by obese adults will inevitably take over. Our National Anthem will be replaced by Miley Cyrus humming.
4. I will find a Japanese horror film to write as a novel and make one million dollars.
5. Everyone will write a novel with the word "Game" in the title and make one million dollars.

Image: hungergamesmovie.org

Susan Sontag's As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 is out this week. This central portion ranges from when her hair was jet black to when that famous white stripe started creeping in. And because "Susan Sontag" should always be uttered in the same sentence as "cocktails," I've come up with a white-stripe cocktail with a nice purplish tinge to sip while reading her pensées.

The Sontag

2 parts Creme de Cassis (frozen for two hours beforehand)

1 part Triple Sec (kept at room temperature)

2 parts Sloe Gin (kept at room temperature)

In a pousse-cafe glass, pour in the creme de cassis, which should be already chilled to increase its density.

Hold a small spoon upside down over the cassis, with only the tip touching the cassis (as in the image below). Slowly pour the triple sec over the curve of the spoon so that it will float on top of the cassis.

Using a new, dry spoon, slowly pour the sloe gin over the triple sec in the same way to create a third layer.

Voilà! You now have a white-stripe cocktail as refined as Sontag herself. Now go read about what turns her on.

Susan Sontag image credit: Peter Hujar, Susan Sontag, 1975, time.com; spoon layering image credit: citypages.com

Sure, the internet has tons of advice on how to go about being a writer. But last week, the internet had advice I have just now acted on and can retrospectively congratulate myself for. Without meaning to, I have followed The Awl’s suggestion to move out of Brooklyn in order to write the great American novel.

I have left Brooklyn for the Midwest! I have totally done so! My reason for doing so? Not too far a cry from trying to actually write the great American novel!

My aims are slightly less grandiose; I hope to simply write, every day. Could I do this in Brooklyn? Not as easily. Most literary types are familiar with Virginia Woolf’s whole idea of a room of one’s own, and a room of my own, in Brooklyn, was certainly more than I could afford. I’ve only been in the Midwest for a week, but I know I can realistically obtain such luxurious space here. I can fantasize about—and soon make a reality—pimping my new place with such classic writerly touches as cork-lined walls and plot outlines penciled above the bed (cf. Apartment Therapy's excellent post, "Literary Style: 15 Writers' Bedrooms").

Of course, such space is not merely physical but psychological in nature. I find that, for me, the best writing gets done when I am able to achieve a particular mental state, one that scientific studies have shown can be brought on, one might even say enhanced, by the consumption of alcohol. In all truthfulness, I do perform better on Mr. Writing Machine the more oblivious I am to external stimuli. Brooklyn was a gigantic swarm of distraction and anxiety—blissful and dearly missed in some cases, but incalculably hard to retreat from.

For the past week, I’ve maintained an almost constant state of mild distraction from my immediate circumstance. It’s so easy here to loll about, I can’t even describe it without maybe sounding kind of high, or at least drunk. Which I am not...yet. Because New Scientist says only a small amount of alcohol aids in creative problem solving, and therefore I have only consumed a small amount of alcohol in preparation for this blog post. What can I say?

It’s a little too soon to tell whether I’ve made a terrible mistake or I can become a mildly alcoholic, abundantly prolific and happy-in-my-dirt-cheap-luxuriously-spacious-Midwest-apartment writer. But it looks like the internet is telling me yes, such ecstasies as a small efficiency with a single window, a bed and a desk that I can afford, plus Jameson that costs half what it did in the city, might just make all my dreams come true.

Image: ApartmentTherapy.com

Is there anything more baffling than David Lynch's latest music video?

Perhaps this edible cookbook could give it a run for its money.

Although the sudden legitimacy of fanfiction is further proof that we now live in an alternate universe.

Which is probably driving writers to drink even more, in search of "sudden insights."

If only an inspirational montage was all it took to help said writers pen the next great American novel.

Then maybe they'd find a place on this hallowed literary flowchart.

The authors included in April's must-read list have a pretty good chance at making the cut.

As for the rest of us, it's mostly just a lottery, and we should just keep our fingers crossed.

Image source

Fan fiction’s loyal partisans were probably tickled pink last week when the story broke that E.L. James’ book Fifty Shades of Grey was going to be optioned for a film.  That book, which began as an imaginative response to the Twilight trilogy called Master of the Universe, explores the hawt hawt hawt relationship between sexual naïf Anastasia and sexually domineering Christian, and will, like Twilight, probably produce a triplet of middling to poor films the rest of us can enjoy on TNT the days we call off sick.

But in these, there’ll be more sex—apparently, one reader had to pop a Viagara just to get through the book. So what makes fans want to write their favorite characters into ropes and ball gags?

Don’t blame the net: erotic fan fiction has been around at least as long as leisure suits, even if it’s blossomed in the interwebs. And sometimes it finds inspiration in strange places: I was startled to come across Caitlyn Reads 2666, an erotic novel putatively riffing on Roberto Bolaño’s grisly epic. It’s hard for me to imagine wanting to embark on a sexual odyssey after reading  “The Part About the Crimes,” but maybe I just need to think with my, uh, teeth more. And to imagine a castle. Complete with a dungeon. Mmm...dungeons.

Whatever impulse sprang these fandoms loose, assuming there’s a common one, it produces highly varied literary products. And the stuff usually isn’t even illustrated. It’s driven by narrative only. Lesser, better mortals might claim that this is rooted in essential differences between genders. Something about the male gaze, blah blah, something about female intuitions and narrativity, blah blah. See, clearly the proof is in evolutionary psychological pudding.

Fifty Shades of Grey stands apart from its estimable kin because of the monetary success it’s enjoyed. Not only has it been a number one bestseller (it had spent 18 days in that spot at Amazon as of April, 3, 2012), but the film contract it garnered is rumored to be on par with The Da Vinci Code. Some people are downright offended that E.L. James is making so much money while riding on the coattails (supposedly) of Twilight; others are celebrating the entrance of fan fiction into the serious literary world (i.e., the one that pays). As for me, I’ll give a nod to Shakespeare’s appropriations and grumble something about stickiness of creativity, especially once money enters.

Because let’s face it, it’s money that’s at stake here. We can argue about the ethics of Fifty Shades of Grey, but really, the ethics behind its creation and that of the rest of fan fiction are the same: writers appropriate other writers’ characters and put them into novel—sometimes really novel, if you catch my drift—situations. Published authors from Anne Rice to J.D. Salinger strongly disapprove; others not so much. Presumably Stephanie Meyer didn’t care about Fifty Shades, or she saw it as a way to increase attention for Twilight.

After all, that’s synergy, my little munchkins.

Image from flickr user Sarah Dawes

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of the defendants in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders, holding that “[j]ail strip searches do not require reasonable suspicion, at least so long as the arrestee is being admitted into the general jail population.” Any crime could warrant a strip search, including walking a dog without a leash, or, as in the case of Albert Florence, wrongful arrest for fines already paid. Twice. In part two of a series on exposure, we turn to Derrida’s writings on apocalypse, and consider how the end of the world—at least insofar as the world can be sustained by the moral rectitude of world powers—begins with a forcible denuding. 

1.

“The opinions in earlier proceedings, the briefs on file, and some cases of this Court refer to a “strip search.” The term is imprecise. It may refer simply to the instruction to remove clothing while an officer observes from a distance of, say, five feet or more; it may mean a visual inspection from a closer, more uncomfortable distance; it may include directing detainees to shake their heads or to run their hands through their hair to dislodge what might be hidden there; or it may involve instructions to raise arms, to display foot insteps, to expose the back of the ears, to move or spread the buttocks or genital areas, or to cough in a squatting position. In the instant case, the term does not include any touching of unclothed areas by the inspecting officer. There are no allegations that the detainees here were touched in any way as part of the searches.”

—Anthony Kennedy, Supreme Court Majority Opinion in Florence v Board of Chosen Freeholders, April 2, 2012.

2.

“…one of the ‘bleus’ ordered her to strip. When she refused, he removed all her clothes himself, and with the aid of one of his accomplices, strapped her down in the dentist’s chair….Djamila was lashed down in the chair, completely naked, while her captors exchanged obscene jokes and drank beer, which they spat over her in mouthfuls till her body was all dripping wet. Then they tried to twist the electrical terminal wires round her nipples, but the wires slipped on her beer-drenched skin, so they fastened them into place with lengths of scotch tape.”

—Gilsèle Halimi with Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha: The Story of the Torture of a Young Algerian Girl Which Shocked Liberal French Opinion, 1962.

3.

“Apokalupto, I disclose, uncover…I reveal the thing that can be a part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the genitals or what ever might be hidden, a secret, the thing to be dissembled, a thing that does not show itself or say itself, that perhaps signifies itself but cannot or must not first be handed over to its self-evidence…What seems most remarkable in all the Biblical examples I was able to remember and must forego exposing here is that the gesture of denuding or affording sight—the apocalypticmovement—is more serious here, sometimes more guilty and dangerous than what follows.”

—Jacques Derrida, “Of An Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” 1980. 

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the lavalamp, gaslight, candlelight, campfire, torch, sometimes even the starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The form of the column strives to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” Each week you will find here some citational constellation, offered with astonishment and without comment, that can serve as an end in itself, dinner party fodder, or an occasion for further thought or writing. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."

Image: Picasso, sketch of Djamila Boupacha, August 12, 1961.