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The LBC Read This! Jamestown.
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The LBC Read This! Jamestown.
While we're figuring out what the online presence of our mothership Counterpoint will look like, I'm going to avail of this blog to alert folks to certain activities in Counterpointville—Exhibit A being an excellent interview on the Amazon books blog with Peter Charles Melman.
Frankly, I had no real desire to write a Civil War novel. For me, the spiritually redemptive arc of its protagonist was always far more intriguing. On a global level, I'll admit that one of the novel's aims was to explore the involvement of Jewish soldiery for the South during the Civil War, true. The moral ironies of why one minority--a minority into which I myself was born--might fight to maintain the enslavement of another, proved too altogether human a subject for me to ignore. Ultimately, though, I hope Landsman serves to take the Southern, Civil War-era Jew beyond the province of villain, victim, or saint, and to place him squarely where he belongs: into the realm of flaw and decency of which we're all understandably a part. I say this because to deny the grosser elements of Jewish-American history is to deny the very most human elements of Jewish-American history. That many of my characters--Jew and Gentile alike--are depraved, that they swear and sin, is testament to the frailties and moral subjectivities of every single one of us. And while it's while certainly a worn trope in fiction writing, that we're subsequently capable of redemption at all I quickly discovered to be the book's true focus.
To my mind, on of the most important new moves in the world of bricks-and-mortar indie bookseller retailing is the Page 23 program launched by Changing Hands in Tempe AZ. Here's their spiel on why they did it:
Changing Hands Bookstore spawned Page23 in 2005 in response to the NEA's "Reading at Risk" report--a study showing readership plummeting at an alarming rate (especially among those in their 20's and 30's). Our mission is to support writing that speaks to this elusive generation of readers, as well as those hungry for books outside the mainstream. We identify and promote edgy and unusual fiction, nonfiction, poetry and art books--titles that too often fly under the radar of the Sunday book pages and the big box stores. At Page23, we see ourselves as a tool for readers and booksellers alike, working to connect people with books that might otherwise go unnoticed and unread.
You might notice, if you check out the link on Page23 that their home page is a MySpace page—one of the things they're doing with that is a series of interviews and I'm pleased to report that the current one is with Lydia Millet. herewith, Lydia on our reissue of her 2002 novel, My Happy Life.
The main character in My Happy Life, a woman left to die locked in an abandoned mental institution, is pleasantly nostalgic about her considerably awful past. What made you want to devote a whole novel to her?LM: I don't know that I'd say "pleasantly nostalgic," though I get that maybe you're trying to be succinct for people who haven't read the book. That phrase makes it sound light, even, dare I say, fatuous. In fact, in her memory, everything is imbued with empathy. Everyone gets the benefit of the doubt—even inanimate objects. Pardon is extended infinitely. I wanted to write about a person like her partly because I'm so unlike her—I'm judgmental, I'm opinionated, and though I hold empathy in high esteem I feel its limits everywhere, pressing. And partly I wanted to write the book in an affective, almost philosophical gesture, one I wanted to feel for myself as well as offer to the reader. She's clearly an extreme portrait. But not for nothing, I wanted the reader to be involved in this magnanimous empathy—this refusal to objectify or distance.
Given the hue-and-cry over Tintin in the Congo, we here at Soft Skull thought some context might be in order...herewith a short excerpt from our forthcoming Tintin and the Secret of Literature by Tom McCarthy
Tintin’s political origins lie on the right, to put it mildly. The Petit Vingtième was a strict Catholic newspaper and, as Hergé himself told Numa Sadoul, ‘“Catholic” at that time meant “anti-Bolchevik”.’ It also meant anti-Semitic. The paper’s editor, the Abbé Norbert Wallez, kept a signed photograph of Mussolini on his desk. Many of the journalists who wrote for him had links to the more-or-less fascist Belgian party Rex.
This political orientation not only found its way into the strips; it was their raison d’être. Tintin’s first outing is primarily a piece of propaganda, ‘exposing’ the evils of Communism. His second, to the Congo (which appeared in book form in French in 1931 but has never been deemed acceptable for translation into English– although, much to the exasperation of European liberals, it remains hugely popular in Africa) [this was at the time of writing, Little Brown is finally publishing in the US this coming Fall], depicts Africans as good at heart but backwards and lazy, in need of European mastery. In The Cigars of the Pharaoh and The Blue Lotus, both of which appeared in the mid-thirties, we have villains who are typical enemies of the right, key players in the great global conspiracy of its imagination: freemasons, financiers and, behind it all, thinly veiled by a Greek name, the blatantly Semitic Rastapopoulos. The rightwing strain in Hergé’s work reaches its apex when, writing the original newspaper version of The Shooting Star at the height of the Nazi era, he invents a Jewish villain (the New York banker Blumenstein) and has a shopkeeper named Isaac rub his hands with glee when it seems the world will end. Why? Because, as he explains to his friend Solomon, ‘I owe 50,000 francs to my suppliers, and this way I won’t have to pay them.’
But almost as soon as this right-wing tendency gets going it becomes shadowed by a left-wing counter-tendency. In Tintin in America, which he published in book form in 1932, Hergé bitingly satirises capitalist mass-production and American racism (the English translation has been softened: what the small-town bank clerk really tells the police who turn up after a heist is: ‘We immediately lynched seven Negroes’ – not ‘hoboes’ – ‘but the culprit got away.’). In The Blue Lotus Tintin snaps the cane with which an American oil magnate has been beating a Chinese rickshaw driver, exclaiming ‘Brute! Your conduct is disgraceful, Sir!’
Mark, US-based knower of things Tintin, also offers perspective.
UPDATE: Josh Glenn, at the Boston Globe's great Brianiac blog, has yet more perspective.
In the Land of Book Sluts, when you're back from the dead, you get to be a heartthrob...