The Devil

We’re a little behind the times here at the Missouri Review Blogging Center, because this whole controversy took place a couple of weeks ago and has already been forgotten by everyone. But, I’m hoping that having given it a little time to settle might help in seeing if I changed my mind about the argument regarding Salman Rushdie’s presence at India’s premier literary festival, the Jaipur Literary Festival earlier this year. 

Now, I’m an Indian of a certain age who grew up reading Rushdie, and especially his magnum opus, Midnight’s Children. All artsy kids who have few friends and no romantic prospects in India kind of have to. For those of you who haven’t read the book, I recommend it highly. Perhaps not as highly as the Booker Committee, who keep inventing new awards to give it (Booker of Bookers, Booker of the Last 30 Years, Booker of the Last 40 Years, Booker of Bearded Authors etc.), but it’s a fairly substantial work, and even if you don’t like it, it’s an important book because of Rushdie’s use of the English language, his insertion of vernacular phrases, references, names, and puns, that all come together to create a particularly Indian-English that shows us that literature and language need not be restricted to just one nation or people, but can adapt anywhere. It’s double jeopardy: a book that screams out India’s post-colonial angst while delighting in the language that those angst-inducing colonizers left us. In other words, not to push it too far (since he’s still alive and we should only be sincerely and totally nice to dead people), it’s India’s version of Huck Finn or Moby Dick—a novel that does more than just capture a story, it explores how a people are.

The sad thing is that Midnight isn’t Rushdie’s most famous book. This one is. And it’s not the most famous because it’s his best work—as a matter of fact it probably doesn’t rank in the top 3. It’s famous because the Ayatollah put a fatwa on Rushdie for the book, and because Rushdie spent the next decade under constant Secret Service protection, moved from safe-house to safe-house, his life as he knew it completely upended.

Given what we know of Ayatollahs, one would assume that Salman Rushdie, his book, and the completely misinterpreted and taken-out-of-context passages would still be Enemy #1—religious fanatics, one might have noticed, have long memories. The only purpose of the Ayatollah’s continued anger at Rushdie would be because it reminds us that literature can still be taken seriously, that it’s our strongest resistance against authoritarianism and narrow-mindedness. It’ll make us feel better about never being rich (or even moderately well-off), because as writers we have our morals. Even if those morals lead to crazy people promising to kill us because there’s a bounty on our head.

Probably how Rushdie felt

The 10-year outrage, the constant calls for assassination, the daily threats on his life were put away in 1998 when the Iranians decided they wanted to restart diplomatic relations with Britain, which shows you how seriously those clowns took the whole thing anyway.* But, on the plus side, Rushdie could go back to being a writer. No longer would he have to worry about  offending political sensitivities. The job of the writer is to speak out against injustice, or at least examine how it functions, and without threats to his life Rushdie could return to fulfilling his duties to his profession, could go back to attempting to understand how people work.

This is probably from a different protest, but we have a lot of spare protesters in India

Here’s the thing: Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay, writer of what’s been declared the as-close-to-consensus-as-possible “Great Indian Novel” (this one is not), officially the best novel written in the Commonwealth in the last half-century, the writer who put Anglo-Indian writers on the world’s literary map, cannot have his homeland read his most famous work because Satanic Verses is still banned in India. I’ll repeat that: 14 years after the Ayatollah said “well, no harm, no foul,” the Indian government has still not lifted the ban on Satanic Verses. Which puts the Indian government somewhere to the right of the Ayatollah on religious expression. Let’s put it another way: they could have re-enacted the entire Trojan War in the meanwhile. That’s how slow the Indian bureaucracy is.

Of course, most normal people had entirely forgotten about this, because, well who pays attention to crazy people 25 years after they’ve been crazy? You’d think no one. So, the literary festival in Jaipur invited Rushdie. Then, India’s largest Islamic seminary objected. That would be the Darul Uloom, Deoband. They demanded Rushdie not be allowed in. Rushdie, being a push-over, told them he was coming anyway. Problem solved, right? “Courageous Author Tells Off Protestors.”

Nope.

They invented a death threat.

They also promised that “rivers of blood would flow” if Rushdie showed up. Which is not only an unnecessary threat, but also worded entirely in cliches. These people need writers to show them the possibilities of narrative and language. What happened next, you ask? Well, obviously, everyone freaked out. Imagine if you were going to have to wade through rivers of flowing blood to go to AWP? I’m not even willing to handle the line at the open bars. Clearly someone would stop the madness and talk sense into somebody.

William Dalrymple, who is a brilliant writer with several good books and was organizing the festival, didn’t think Rushdie should show up, an attitude he later explained. Rushdie didn’t show up. Other writers got mad about this—notably Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar. Their plan was to protest this theocratic turn in India’s attitude towards governing by reading aloud from Satanic Verses when it was their turn to speak. Because the book is still banned in India, they had to download it off the Internet. And then when they read aloud, they were threatened with arrest. For the crime of reading out loud from a book.

(By the way, the protest—at the festival itself—was not about Rushdie even being there. It was about a video-link interview in which he would get to speak. Let me make that clear: He was not in the country. He was in a different country. A country in a different continent. He was Skyping in. Basically what we do when we don’t want to get out of our pajamas and go to a meeting.)

After being threatened with arrest, the four authors were forced to flee Jaipur and then India. The same night. Because what they did was apparently a crime. Hari Kunzru, who is notably bad-tempered, nevertheless wrote this scary account of the events. The organizers then attempted to explain themselves here and here.

One of these guys hates being told he's wrong

The man in charge of these protests, Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani (pictured above), told the protesters that dying during this protest (at a freakin’ literary festival) would make them martyrs. If one follows his train of logic, one must believe that it’s worth dying over a 15-minute Skype interview.

Police, of course, being as good at their job as they are, demanded tapes of the authors reading out aloud from Satanic Verses. 

There are a million things wrong with this whole saga. Primary among them, of course, is the forcible state-sponsored editing of the individual artist. There is also, in what has become a worrying trend, a refusal to countenance any viewpoint that differs from one. This leads to what has been a lengthy Indian struggle of refusing to look carefully at the ugliness present within itself. The attitude is, “We’re perfect. If you say we’re not, we will kill you. Or at least burn an effigy, and a couple of public buses while we’re at it.” This is not an isolated incident either. While I’m fairly miffed at the good Maulana, there’s a pattern of this behavior, a pattern that is growing in  a complaint about a Shivaji biography that led to the Oxford University Press having to apologize, a protest about a Gandhi book, a protest against Taslima Nasrin (ostensibly because she happens to be a woman). Please look at the dates attached to these news stories, as well as the geographical variety in these protests.

Things got so bad, Rushdie had to go back to Med School

Because what the Rushdie fiasco is doing is basically proving that for all of India’s bluster, for all the 10% GDP growth and the rapidly-increasing middle-class, for all the skyscrapers planned and the millions of dollars spent on making the capital city’s airport “world class,” for all the half billion dollar houses built, there’s still the world’s largest slum in direct view of the world’s most expensive house. And instead of attempting to get rid of that mind-numbing poverty, we will protest Slumdog Millionaire. Not because it is a bad movie, but because it “shows India in a poor light.” The Rushdie Affair (dare I say it, Rushdie-gate) only emphasizes that when it comes to self-examination, the Indian government’s attitude is— “if we don’t let anyone talk about it, it’ll go away.”

But we as a country cannot claim to stay true to the principles that govern us if we do not even allow artists the freedom to express themselves, the freedom to question and critique, the freedom to point out when the emperors have lost their clothes. Our most celebrated contemporary painter was driven out of the country for painting Hindu goddesses and had to die in England.

This is not about religion, or religious sentiment, or a demand for unrestricted free speech. What is shameful about these events is that a country touting itself for its economic growth, for its large-scale democracy, for its new-found social mobility, is attempting to silence any opinion that threatens to upset the status quo. It is shameful because those who shout the loudest are stopping a billion people from examining what is still wrong and attempting to fix it. And if we do not allow our faults to be picked out, our feelings to be hurt, our complacency to be disturbed, then we will continue to move towards untenable gender ratios as we continue to systematically eliminate our female populace. We will continue to boast 400 million people unable to feed themselves even a 1000 calories a day. We will have 600 million people with no access to clean water or sanitation.

A long time ago, I had a professor who told me, “writers know what’s wrong while it’s happening. Historians find out twenty years later. And the poor politicians never figure it out at all.” If our leaders do not defend our rights, do not assuage our hurts, do not heal our schisms, then it is writers like Rushdie, Kunzru, and Amitava Kumar to whom we must look. For a country that refuses to deal with what is worst about itself is doomed to lose what are their greatest strengths. We must allow our writers and artists to speak, we must allow them to disagree, we must gaze into the ugliness that is around us and we must not flinch. For otherwise we are merely a country that has suddenly discovered it has muscles and insists on flexing them constantly, at everybody. We must let Rushdie speak—even if we disagree with him—because he will tell us something no one else seems to be willing to.

Only Madonna gets me.

*You might have guessed: I’m trying to get banned in at least two continents before I turn 30. Controversy = Monster Advance On As Yet Unwritten Novel!

*Hey, guess who showed up to the same festival in 2007 without bodyguards and just hung out? It was Salman Rushdie. I guess people weren’t paying attention. It’s easier when you don’t really have to believe what you’re saying.

*I’d like to point out that a lot of the links in this post were lifted from the Complete Review’s coverage of the event (which, as it that website’s wont, was excellent. Principled, comprehensive, and smart. I really like that website. You guys should check it out).

The Missouri Review is excited to be attending AWP’s Conference in Chicago in just a few short weeks. We are doing our best to prepare for the Windy City, but could use some help. With Oprah out of the picture, I have little to contribute to a Chicagoan presence. Our resident Cubs fan also seems to have come to terms with what little value his fandom holds. There is one famed Chicago attribute that the TMR staff seems confident enough to take on: gourmet hot dogs. In honor of these mystery meat masterpieces and in an attempt to improve our AWP readiness, @Missouri_Review is holding its first Twitter contest.

We are asking our Twitter followers to send us your literary-themed hot dog recipes. Entries should include a name for your hot dog, a list of ingredients, and reference literature in some way, all under 140 characters. Let us know that you’ve entered by including the hashtag #TMRchicago at the end of your tweet. Vegetarian and vegan tofu dog entries will also be accepted. Judging will be primarily based on the giggling and stomach rumbling of our editors and staff. Your tweet entry might look something like this:

The winner will receive a handmade literary-hot-dog-themed craft, assembled by The Missouri Review office staff. To increase your chances of winning a (better?) prize, consider entering TMR’s other contests: Our Non-Contest or our 5th Annual Audio Contest. We look forward to eating your tweets!

This year, for TMR’s 5th annual Audio Competition, we’ve decided to try an experiment. Ok, so it’s a little crazy, and we don’t really know what to expect: we’ve decided to leave the contest entry fee up to the entrants; if you decide to submit work to our Audio Contest, you choose what you feel is a fair reading fee. Your entry fee, regardless of what you pay, still gets you a one-year digital subscription to The Missouri Review.

In the past, we have always charged a $20 entry fee—an entry fee that’s fairly standard for literary-journal-run competitions these days. And while we feel that this fee is reasonable (it includes a one-year subscription to The Missouri Review, for which we normally charge $23), we also understand that the cost may be prohibitive for some very talented people—particularly in this difficult economy.

Before I give the false impression that our contest is now free to enter, however, let me be up-front about the fees associated with a literary competition and why they exist in the first place. Literary journals as big as The Missouri Review are quite expensive to run: among other things, we pay the salaries for our full- and part-time editorial staff; the salaries for the office staff; the costs of equipment, technology, and supplies; expenses for advertising and promotional events; the printing and distribution of the journal; and contributor payments (we are one of the few lit journals that pays its contributors).  Some of this money comes from grants and some from generous donors, but subscription fees and contest entry fees are another important source that we rely on to meet our costs. When writers pay to enter a journal’s contest, they are acting as patrons of the literary arts, providing the journal with some of the important funding it needs to continue to exist–and ultimately supporting themselves and others in the field.

Of course, there are also costs associated with running a contest: advertising, prize money, staff hours, etc. After receiving as many as several hundred entries, a contest like our Audio Competition might just barely break even; there are years, in fact, when TMR hasn’t broken even on the Audio Contest. Which is why making the entry fee “pay-by-donation” is a bit of a risk. But it’s a risk that we feel is one worth taking: We would like you to be able to enter our Audio Contest regardless of your ability to pay. If you feel that you can afford the standard $20 or even a little beyond that, know that we very much appreciate your support. But if $5 or $10 is all that you can pay at this point in time, we will still be grateful for your donation and happy to consider your work. And rest assured that the entries are blind; the amount that each entrant pays will not be recorded anywhere in connection with his/her payment.

Please spread the word and help make our experiment a success!

Recently I came up blank when potential baby names were discussed among my peers, but with that daunting reality a far possibility, I found myself thinking about the more immediate choices my fiction friends make when they invent a character and choose its name. Had it occurred to them that naming a character Molly would contribute to some universal Molly narrative? Is there a purposeful distinction between a Brittany and a Britney? Do they consider articles like these or are the implications of Freakonomics moot in fictional story? Are the names associated with time period, ethnicity, class, and gender so engrained that the integration of an appropriate name in a narrative is natural and subtle? I have never made it very far trying to write fiction.

I recognize that consideration for a character’s name varies in importance. Lolita and Romeo are so loaded with an established identity that their use in a story is likely to be a purposeful evocation of those other Lolitas and Romeos. Most of my fiction friends said that character names just come to them and that their only stipulation is that they never use names that they like. This one rule seemed to be the only middle ground between a shoulder shrug concerning a character’s name and using a name like Lolita. When we started discussing possible real life baby names there were rules about the sound and syllables of a name, associations with acquaintances by certain names that could make us groan, and the unspoken desire that our kids would stand out just a little bit on their school roster.

For people who have once or twice referred to their stories and plays as their “babies,” I thought the contrasting name consideration was interesting. Of course I expected that naming a real baby would be more arduous than a fictional character because babies tend to be that way. I like the contrast of inventing an identity for a character with a name that an author doesn’t really like with my own obsession to find a Molly identity in fictional characters. I remember the first time I considered a name for my future offspring. In first grade, after reading the story of a mouse named Chrysanthemum who is teased for her name, I chose it for my future daughter. The beginning of my naming insecurities may be traced back to this moment where I thought I had achieved the perfect balance of distinctiveness and pseudo-celebrity. Chrysanthemum would never have to tack on the the first initial of her last name in class and she could tell everyone she was named after a book. My parents revealed that the mouse in the story was named for a flower and suddenly the teasing seemed justified.

I have never been allowed to name a human baby, but when I do I will obsess over the literary, lyrical, high school nemeses, and nineteenth-century verbs associated with it (Molly once meant “to do women’s work”). I will wonder if it is possible to name a baby after a literary character without invoking a tragic existence or at least requiring that they live out the namesake’s narrative. I would be disappointed in a Walden who couldn’t tear himself away from video games or a Flannery who isn’t even a little bit interested in amputation. I will want a baby that grows up to invent its own identity, but still feels like some bedtime stories were written about them and Little Richard is singing that loudly for them.

In October, some of them started a five-item challenge. They pledged to purchase only five new wardrobe items until the end of the year, which has forced them to choose each item with an eye toward versatility and quality. They can’t buy six fifty-dollar blazers, but they can use all the money they would have spent to buy one really nice blazer. One blogger takes this sort of minimalism to an extreme. Her whole wardrobe consists of maybe twenty-five items. Recently, she spent five months shopping for a black sweater. Her closet is two feet wide. The idea is seductive in the way all extremes are: Live in a 200-square-foot bungalow! Grow all your own food and learn how to hand-mill grains! Write a whole novel in November! Yes, yes, and yes. Sign me up please.

I have spare time to lurk on the fashion board because I recently passed the oral component of the comprehensive exam for the PhD. The exam covered 120 books, many of which are still on my office floor because they won’t fit in my three bookcases. Looking at them arrayed below me I wonder: Is there an analogous minimizing project I could undertake for my books? And if so, would it be worthwhile? When I finished reducing my library to only the essentials, would I feel lighter, more efficient? Would I be a better or more prolific writer if the room in which I wrote were not so packed with the achievements of others? I don’t think I would. The books are there when I want to be inspired, to catch a certain voice, or to reread a favorite scene. They are only a burden when I have to box them up and take them across the city or country, which I’ve done twelve times in the past ten years. The moves are just far enough apart that I forget how painful my back gets hoisting those boxes.

Further, what organizing principle would I use for the cull? I’d keep the books I love, certainly, but I wouldn’t want to keep only those books. I’d also hold onto the ones that madden and frustrate me (I’m looking at you, The Public Burning and The Man Who Loved Children). And the ones I’ve annotated heavily. And the ones I might want to teach someday. The general rule for clothing is if you haven’t worn an item in the past year, you should get rid of it. The same can’t be said of books, which don’t go out of fashion in the same way. The relative value of a fishtail hemline ebbs and flows, but Moby Dick will always deserve a place on the shelf. There’s no yay, nay, or meh about that.

Have any of you ever done a major cull of your library? If so, what was your organizing principle? Are there any books you’ve gotten rid of that you wish you could have back?

Put simply: more often than not, book to film adaptions are bad.  If you don’t believe me, rent The Scarlet Letter starring Demi Moore.  For further proof see almost any film based on a Stephen King book, although I will always have a special place in my heart for the awesomely bad Maximum Overdrive with Emilio Estevez, or any other movie featuring killer electronics for that matter.

Earlier this year I read two books that had already been turned into films, The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveler’s Wife.  Both were good books with terribly disappointing film adaptions.  The Time Traveler’s Wife film tried to pack way too much of the book’s plot into the less than two hour running time.  I did appreciate the director’s obvious desire to include as much from the book as possible but, come on man, you have to make the film work on its own. The Lovely Bones had the potential to be a really powerful film had Peter Jackson not pushed the plot and characterization of the movie to the side to make way for his love affair with visual effects.

The film version of The Lovely Bones was packed with capable actors and had the benefit of source material that had already proven to be emotionally impactful and commercially successful but the heart breaking story about a family overcoming the murder of their daughter/sister through the years following her death seemed to take a back seat to the visual elements of the scenes in heaven.  This was completely flipped from the book version where heaven was far from the focus of the book.  This is a perfect example of the problem with book-to-film adaptions.  Instead of maintaining the integrity of the book and thus the emotional connection to the characters, someone obviously thought the imagery of heaven would sell more tickets than a story about overcoming the worst thing that could happen to a family.

I wanted to avoid the mentioning of Twilight anywhere in this blog entry but, for some reason, I feel the need to point out that the inspiration for this topic had nothing to do with Twilight.  That would be a blog about bad books turned into bad movies.

I was recently reading about a possible film adaption of one of my favorite books, Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk, and my brain went into overdrive about how many ways Hollywood could ruin my precious memories of this novel.  There are so many ways it could go wrong and if you’ve ever read this novel you know how potentially difficult it could be to film, short of any major changes.

The problem is if you’re going to adapt a book to film everything has to be perfect from the script down to the casting if you’re going to make fans of the book happy.  And, for the love of all that is holy, please keep Kristen Stewart far away from this movie if it does ever get made.

The purpose, appeal, and literary place of creative nonfiction has always seemed obvious to me. I was naïve of any controversy surrounding the genre until I started identifying as a nonfiction writer in college. It had never occurred to be me that people would ask me whose biography I was working on or if CNF was one of those phrases, “You know, like ‘Jumbo Shrimp?’” I tried writing John Dillinger’s biography once after watching a History Channel special when I was nine, but it hasn’t been picked up and no, “Creative Nonfiction” is not an oxymoron. It just turns out that I sometimes (always) find David Sedaris’ human experience more relatable than Jane Austen’s imagined one. I want to hear the way my dad tells stories at the dinner table about the fraternity fire that occurred while he was a student at Baker University, not read a news report. The individual style, form, and content that art teachers ask me to draw in self-portraits, I can express better in writing. I have been caught unprepared to answer the question “What is creative nonfiction? Is that a thing?” I have relied on analogies too, but I’m tired of comparing my craft to other mediums and especially redhead stepchildren.

One of the main issues the general population has with CNF is the idea that it’s not imagined, but also not an objective truth. CNF allows for a range of narrative possibilities to be reflected by varying perspectives. It’s baffling to me that there’s any uncertainty over how that truth spectrum exists through an artistic medium. It’s hard for me to grasp because it seems like this spectrum of what we accept and won’t accept as truth in art already exits and is already understood. It seems universally acceptable to dress a suburban family in head to toe denim, arrange them into a strange dog-pile, force smiles, call that photo a family portrait and place it on a mantle as a sort of representation of the subjects. It’s universally agreed upon that it’s unacceptable to dress a man in a spacesuit, construct a studio set to look like Mars, ask him to take a step, plant a flag, then print this photo in a newspaper and call it a representation of truth or history. There’s middle ground between the falsity of what we present and the falsity of perception. This is where artists and redheads fall. This is where a jazz musician is allowed to take liberties in a performance, where a painter manipulates color, where a filmmaker manipulates time, and where a writer connects experiences through their own filter. A perceived truth is being presented, but not under any claims of objectivity.

Art is not real or truth. It can only act as a representative of subjective reality. In between manipulation and blatant falsities is interpretation and memory. To remember my grandfather’s funeral as grey is accurate to my experience whether the rest of Wintersville, Ohio could attest to the color outside of the Lutheran church that day or not. Creative nonfiction is kind of like painting, music, fashion, photography, cooking, film, etc. It’s about making distinctions, selections, filtering experiences, and individual expression. Creative nonfiction is also unlike any other medium. It is a scientific study of memory, sentimentality, sensation, interpretation, and narrative. For as long as it took photography to stop being compared to paintings and film to moving photographs, I’ll wait for CNF to stop being compared to jumbo shrimp.

In the meantime, I’ll try to think of some useful analogies for explaining the blurred genre lines that all writers face. Here’s a good one; It’s like if Lorrie Moore wrote a short story about a nearly autobiographical experience in the pediatric oncology ward with her baby boy, but not exactly. Oh, wait.

Earlier this year a group of independent bookstores in St. Louis forgot about looking at each other as competitors in the same market and banded together to support each other. They’re called the St. Louis Independent Bookstore Alliance, and they’re promoting shopping indie with some pretty interesting tricks, including an all-day bookstore tour that treats little shops like Subterranean Books (on the Delmar Loop) and Left Bank Books (in the Central West End) like they were the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. (And there’s a free Mexican buffet!)

This kind of alliance is rare, but not unheard-of; what’s unusual is seeing it pop up somewhere like St. Louis. We all know the book industry has been sagging (see: Borders), but what’s surprising is that there are probably actually more indie bookstores in the US this year than last year, if we can use membership figures from the American Booksellers Association (which only includes indies) as a guide. But the business realities facing new bookstores are very different from what used stores have to deal with.

On one hand, the death of Borders should make numbers look a little better for a shop like Subterranean, which deals almost exclusively in new books and carefully curates its selection. On the other, Subterranean must feel the pinch from Amazon – and it is a steep pinch, not only for booksellers but for Missouri’s economy, according to Subterranean owner Kelly von Plonski. The used booksellers I spoke with don’t typically feel threatened by E-readers – the know they’re offering a niche product that can’t be replicated by anything else – and can actually use Amazon to bring in extra revenue, but must often live with the reality of miniscule profits. More than one used bookseller has told me they might as well be working at a non-profit – but there’s nothing else they’d rather be doing.

The cool thing about events like this, bookstore cruises and literary speed-dating (that’s right), is that they’re basically pushing the previous social boundaries of reading (A: book clubs and B: talking about books at the bar with your friends) to a new level. But at the same time, they’re creating something like a farmer’s market for books – something you can participate in with the feeling you’re helping support something smart and healthy and local, a force for good in the face of big box stores. “My daughter belongs to the slow food movement,” one woman on the book cruise told me. “This is the slow book movement.”

Julie Shapiro is Artistic Director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival, and has been with the project since its inception in 2000. Previous to that, she spent years behind record store counters across the country before ending up in North Carolina, where she worked at the the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, helped launch an experimental music/film festival, Transmissions, and produced Storylines Southeast – a survey of seminal literature from the region. These days, Shapiro teaches radio documentary in Chicago and beyond, keeps a blog about sound, and occasionally finds the time to produce stories for the public radio airwaves, including APM’s The Story and the BBC.

TMR will begin accepting submissions for the Audio Competition in December. The postmark deadline is March 15, 2012. For guidelines, categories, and more, see our Audio Competition page.

Because I am a twenty-seven year old PhD. student in English and eminently pompous, I often spend my nights lying awake, worrying primarily about the fate of the novel in modern culture. Well, I suppose that’s not entirely true. The fate of the novel is only fifth on the list of things I worry about at night. Here are the first four: 1) Why does no one love me? 2) Why does no one pay me enough money? 3) Why do I still have homework? 4) How can I make my fantasy football team better than it is? (Which is not very good)

But mostly I worry about money and the fate of the novel, and as a graduate student I worry about my inability to purchase novels at full price given my crippling lack of funds. Looking back over the last several years I can think of remarkably few books that I purchased in hardcover–usually I wait for the paperback & then I wait for someone to give me a gift card to Amazon (gasp! ugh! traitor!) so I can buy used copies from the million used-book-sellers online. I frequent the local, non-chain bookstore from time to time (downtown Columbia has a great one where TMR blogger Davis Dunavin is often found), but sadly I buy used books there as well and then castigate myself for not checking it out of the library. But sometimes I get excited enough (usually by an author’s previous work or by the subject matter) and I wait for a new book to release and I decide I’m going to buy a hardcover copy as soon as I can because I’m that excited to read it and I refuse entirely to wait the nine months for it to come out in paperback. Then, when it releases, I go look at it a couple of times in a bookstore, I read a few pages, I leave, I smoke a cigarette, I get a soda, I return, I read a few more pages, I hide behind a shelf so the employees won’t throw me out, and then I buy the book new. Which, to be frank, is one of the best things in my life (reference question 1 that keeps me awake at night). Because a new book is exciting, and the pages smell good, and it fits right in your hand, and you’re excited about it, and there’s something terrifically reassuring about reading a brand new hardcover book. And if you’ve been waiting for the book–sometimes for a while–it’s even more exciting, because anticipation and pleasure are correlated (Flaubert said something about this), and I become a more generous reader, but also–because the book is new and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about it and I’ve bought it pretty much reputation unknown–it’s fresh and awakens the sense of wonder that literature is supposed to engender in me. If I could I’d always buy books new instead of stealing books from friends, the library, various professors who leave their office unlocked etc.

Can you really refuse to buy this man's book?

Getting back to my point (even though I don’t have one), what I want to say is that, while I love books, I rarely buy them as soon as they release, and for me to do so they must excite me in some deep way, some soul-turning, buttock-clenching way that makes it absolutely impossible for me to not have it immediately. And while a lot of books do that, few make my buttocks clench to the tune of 25+ dollars. In the last few years I can think of just four (Bolano’s 2666, Lethem’s Chronic City, Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games) that have convinced me that my life would be an untenable prospect without them.

Recently I’ve been counting down the days till Murakami got to release 1Q84 (which happened yesterday and I have a copy in the mail), and Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot hit the market. Now that both are on their way to me, I’m wondering what publishing event I should get super-excited about. Which is really the purpose of this blog–so you can tell me what I should get excited about buying next. Because it really is all about me.