Author Archives: bookdwarf

Wednesday Miscellany

  • Granta has a fancy new website. Oooh.
  • If you live in NYC, head over to the NYPL on May 13th for a program called Periodically Speaking: Literary Magazine Editors Introducing Emerging Writers. The Library is kind enough to host a little reception afterward, which is open to all who attend the reading. At 6 PM on Tuesday, May 13th, editors Hannah Tinti from One Story, Paul Foster Johnson from Aufgabe, and Willard Cook from Epiphany will introduce an emerging fiction writer, poet, and nonfiction writer, respectively.
  • In honor of tax day, awesome Small Beer Press has released John Kessel’s new collection of short stories…for free! That’s right, for free you can read The Baum Plan for Financial Independence. You can download it here.
  • One of my favorite sales reps has started a blog with one of his colleagues called Books on the Nightstand. They’re posting some podcasts too.
  • Speaking of podcast, Ed Champion has posted his 200th interview today. I think it’s fitting that it’s a conversation between Ed and Mark Sarvas. Two bloggers who have done great literary things in the past few years. Mark’s book Harry, Revised came out just this week.

Work Overload: Short Reviews

I’ve read a couple of good books lately and I wish I had more time to tell you all about them. Here’s brief summary:

  • Black Flies by Shannon Burke: This is the story of paramedic Ollie Cross and his first year on the job in Harlem. Expect to read about the worst of people in dark, spare language. To be a paramedic is to lose empathy. Cross and his partner cross some lines making a great read.
  • Confessions of a Former Child: A Therapist’s Memoir by Daniel Tomasulo: Another good Graywolf book, Tomasulo writes linked essays about his life. Some are better than others. I absolutely hate the expression laugh-out-loud funny for some reason, but yet I did laugh at a few of the essays, particularly the one about accidentally beheading his daughter’s Ken doll in the car window on a roadtrip. Priceless.
  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: This is one of Knopf’s big books of the Fall. Apparently it was a huge international success, another of those Scandinavian mysteries that have become so popular. Too bad the author died after turning in three manuscripts. This one gets pretty good after the first few chapters where you’re not quite sure how the stories connect. There are a lot of twists and turns, some that I couldn’t foresee. It ended so maddeningly that I was glad to learn that it’s the first book in a trilogy. I’ll definitely being reading the next one.

Guest Post: You Consume What You Are

The following is an essay written by Mr. Bookdwarf:

Rob Walker’s Buying In: The Secret Dialog Between What We Buy And Who We Are might not seem, at first, to have much in common with a book about Celine Dion. But when that book is Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste by Carl Wilson, it really does.

Buying In is about the ways that people assign meaning to consumer objects and use them to define themselves – and whether the phenomenon of consumerist identity is a good thing. Let’s Talk About Love is about Celine Dion, yes, but it’s about the ways that people assign meaning to Celine Dion, and what those meanings are, and whether any one of them is universally correct.

Celine Dion is widely disliked but also widely loved. Schmaltzy, kitschy, commercial and soulless? Beautiful, pure, and filled with love? Both? It wouldn’t hurt to have a chapter about her in “Buying In,” right next to the discussion of skateboard culture and the rise of Timberland work boots among hip-hop fans.

At different points and en route to different destinations, both books make the same point: People want to be regarded as individuals and also they want to feel like they’re part of something larger than themselves. Various kinds of consumer behavior sate those apparently contradictory needs, often at the same time. I tend to think of it as sort of a tribal behavior: I’m a skateboarder, not a preppie. I listen to Neko Case, not Celine Dion. You get the idea.

One of Wilson’s point major points is that regardless of her actual merits, Celine Dion comes in for a lot more criticism than she would otherwise, because people want to distinguish themselves from people they see as being Celine fans. He covers a lot of ground getting there: The philosophy of aesthetics and taste the evolution of contemporary pop music from 19th century music halls, the origins of pop-music criticism, the Quebecoise culture that formed the background for Celine’s rise to popularity, and more. But ultimately, he’s just trying to step back and give Celine a listen and see what it is that other people love about her. He doesn’t quite manage to like the material himself, but he at least gains some understanding for the tribe of Celine.

Meanwhile, Walker’s interest is the way marketers try to get people to buy things, and whether they have any idea why people actually are buying what they do. He, too, covers a lot of ground: BzzAgent and the Word Of Mouth Marketing association, case studies of Scion and Red Bull and skateboarder culture, the history of advertising and the belief that “kids today are immune to advertising,” which seems to have been in effect since at least the 1900s. The ongoing focus, though, is the way that buyers determine the meaning of what they buy at least as much as sellers do. He talks about how brands like Timberland and Pabst have been the beneficiaries of consumer-driven rebranding that’s turned them into consumable meaning, and how they’ve played along with it rather than resist it. And he talks about how Red Bull and Scion have latched on to existing communities to try and build themselves credibility with different groups.

There are plenty of great anecdotes and at least a couple lessons anyone in sales, marketing, or product development should learn, but he’s got one big point at the end. He says that products may symbolize individuation and community, but they don’t create them. The goal of marketing (or murketing, as Walker calls the latest devious and confusing marketing techniques) is to convince people that a product will provide those emotional needs. But it can’t.

Walker doesn’t think it’s possible or necessary for people to stop imbuing consumer objects with meaning, but he wants people to be aware of how and why they do it, and to understand that a symbolic purchase isn’t a substitute for actually having your own identity or being part of a community.

In both cases, we’ve got an examination of our unexamined consumer preferences turning out to be moral choices – and often not very good moral choices. Both books remind us to look carefully at what we consume, and whether we consume it at all, and how we position that consumption as a signal to other people.

Wednesday Miscellany

  • A rare interview with Jorie Graham.
  • One of my friends food blogs La Tartine Gourmande is mentioned in this article in the Washington Post. She’s turned her obsessive food photography into quite a career, contributing articles and recipes to the Globe on a regular basis. It’s also quite cool that many of her recipes are gluten free for the gluten intolerant.
  • Robert Fagles died last week.
  • Bookstream, a cool indie book distributor, has a new website. It’s not surprising how nice it is considering they used to employ Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, aka The Written Nerd.
  • This isn’t a link, more a quick mention of a book I finished a few days ago, Missy by Chris Hannan. I love westerns, so the fact that it features a opium addicted flash gal traveling the wagon trail from San Francisco to the silver mines in the Sierra Nevadas had me hooked. There’s lots of wordplay and fun slang plus some good characters.

Miscellany

Having trouble organizing my thoughts today. I suppose it might just be that the weather switches back and forth almost hourly it seems. One hour it’s warm, the next it’s raining and cold. Here are a few things that have kept my mind busy today:

Junot Diaz wins the Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzers were announced today. Junot Diaz picked up the Fiction award for The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Mao, one of my favorite books of last year. Newsweek has a nice interview with the author in which he discusses the burden of expectation and at the end says some accurate things about the current political climate:

With that caveat aside, we’re in the fifth year of the most expensive war in human history. We’re devouring an entire generation of our young people, both directly in the war or with the long-term consequences, and yet the country wants to get obsessed with immigration. Like this is the exact right time to have this conversation? I wonder if we’re not trying to distract ourselves. You know, I love that image from “Moby Dick,” because we’re like the ship. We’re the Pequod. We’re this nation on this ship, and we’re on this insane quest being directed by a madman. But what’s really interesting is that Captain Ahab wasn’t taking his foreign workers and making them walk the plank. He understood the value of diversity through his dream. We’re even crazier than Ahab. We’re chasing this white whale called terrorism, but our captain is saying, “You know what, I don’t think some of us really belong here. They should walk the plank.” I never thought there would be a day where the United States would be crazier than its metaphor, the Pequod. But we’re there. We’re there. Ahab is now a moderate.

Hasty Links

I’ve got to get our calendar orders done today, so no lengthy tirades about anything. Usually we meander through the calendar catalogs, spending time picking the absolute best Monet wall calendar (trust me when I say that there are many many Monet calendars out there), but due to some unforeseen circumstances, I’ve got to get them done by tomorrow. And I’m working on them alone for the first time ever. So if you come into the store and wonder who the hell ordered these lousy calendars, that’s me. Meanwhile, here’s some stuff to occupy your free moments:

  • Margaret Howe at Bookslut has put together a list of all the magazine articles available online which were nominated for the National Magazine Awards. I was very interested in Peter Hessler’s article for National Geographic on China’s rapid growth:

    But Wenzhou had the priceless capital of native instinct. Families opened tiny workshops, often with fewer than a dozen workers, and they produced simple goods. Over time, workshops blossomed into full-scale factories, and Wenzhou came to dominate certain low-tech industries. Today, one-quarter of all shoes bought in China come from Wenzhou. The city makes 70 percent of the world’s cigarette lighters. Over 90 percent of Wenzhou’s economy is private.

  • Here’s the new issue of Boldtype: #54 Sounds.
  • Robert Birnbaum speaks with well-known book designer and author Chip Kidd.
  • In honor of April being National Poetry Month, FSG has started up their poetry blog again this year.
  • Yuval Levin discovers a disturbing sales pitch in the press release of a subsidiary of Amazon.com.
  • The Tournament of Books is over. Two books enter, one book left. I love Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. On a side note, I once knew a guy who said he would marry the girl who could answer the question, “Who run Bartertown?” Surprisingly, I heard he got married last year.