This is probably more movie-related than book-related, but I read it over at The New York Times Books page, so that’s close enough.

On March 6, 2008, Tim Arango, in an article titled “Esquire Publishes a Diary That Isn’t”, reported upon a diary account written by Lisa Taddeo for the April Esquire. The article, “The Last Days of Heath Ledger”, is told in the first-person as if penned Sunset Bldv.-style¹ by the recently-deceased star of the modern cinema classics 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight’s Tale,² who sadly dispatched himself ‘pon the dull blade edge of a prescription drug overdose in January.

As Arango says, this all has the whiff of a gimmick about it, and Taddeo is, apparently, somewhat of a repeat offender in the area of what Arango terms “journalistic stunts”. Amongst other flights of journalistic fancy, she has done a faux article by the real-life baseball player Derek Jeter (“an extended meditation on sports, celebrity and mortality”); a totally fabricated cover story on an invented Hollywood “it” girl provided with the hoax-tastic appellation “Allegra Coleman”; and some fallacious profiling of R.E.M. front man and generally queer sort of duck Michael Stipe, about whom most people would, I’d venture, believe near anything.

David Granger, editor-in-chief of Esquire Magazine, is quick to deflect any charges that the piece on Ledger is exploitative, but rather says that the notion to do it was born out of curiosity about a man who, despite not being a big celebrity, nevertheless found himself on the receiving end of a weird outpouring of public grief over his mysterious and accidental death.

In any event, you can read all about it by following the link that I provided for you above. Mostly, I brought up the topic in order to quote this passage from Arango’s article:

Her article, published in the April issue, which will be on newstands next week, finds Mr. Ledger eating Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London, returning to New York and partying at the downtown nightspot Beatrice Inn, eating steak and eggs at a cafe in Little Italy and wolfing down a banana-nut muffin as his last morsel of food.

None of this is exactly true. “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” written in the first person as if it were Mr. Ledger’s own diary, is a fictionalized account of his last days in London and New York and ponders the indignities of celebrity.

All things considered, there are worse epitaphs. As is probably normal when confronted by somebody else’s mortality—especially somebody roughly your own age and almost, but not quite, as handsome as you are—one necessarily reflects in some measure upon his own, and I simply can’t help but wonder what the diary of my last days would read like.

Just substitute “ate Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London” with “stopped at Wendy’s for the $1.19 small chili—was surprised and a little bit sad that it was no longer $0.99—and ate it alone in front of CNN”, and “returned to New York City and partied at Beatrice Inn” with “returned to my Fayetteville apartment and watched Transformers on DVD followed by the special features on disc two—regretted that I didn’t have time to watch Michael Bay’s director’s commentary before I had to return the discs to the library”, and there you have it.³

Okay, well it isn’t the stuff of Esquire Magazine, but it ain’t bad.

Busy. No time for idle chatter. You’ll have to get by on a rewarmed gruel constituted of a month-old article from The New York Times that I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate into a fully-realized post at the time, and still haven’t—I just enjoyed the article.

Like most people, I was made to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in high school. I remember that it led to ample discussion, though I can’t quite recall how it was received amongst my classmates. I liked it well enough to want to keep a copy of it in my personal library—a copy that I would actually look at from time to time—though I think that my enjoyment of it probably derived more from the skilled use of language and the mood that Fitzgerald is able to sustain than from an identification with the themes that it embodies.

A colleague, who once upon a time taught high school English, just told me that in her opinion, Gatsby is a book that “can only really be understood from the perspective of the time in which it was written.” That was, by the way, her immediate reaction upon my totally random question about her feelings regarding The Great Gatsby. The great thing about working in a library is that nobody thinks you’re weird when you ambush them with a literature-related non sequitur.

In her view, the halcyon days of the 1920s United States were so vastly out of sync with anything that came either before or after that those years necessarily exist in their own sort of chronal twilight zone, where the rules and values for living are peculiar. As a result, she said, the only truly identifiable element to modern readers is the notion of an “undying devotion”, which is in truth “not realistic”, but is nevertheless something to which men and women will probably always aspire to either inspire or possess—high school kids even more so, I would venture to say.

In any case, when she taught the novel, she would provide a preëmptory apology to her pupils: you won’t get it and it will probably bore you to sleep, but you have to read it, anyway.

It’s funny, because I would have supposed that anybody who has read Gatsby would probably have some kind of relationship with it—and maybe my colleague’s statements don’t invalidate that. It’s the sort of book from which you’re almost obliged to take something away. So back to The New York Times.

Sara Rimer did an article on February 17 dealing with the current generation’s relationship with the theme of possibility as symbolized or embodied somehow by the green light at the far end of the dock that held Gatsby’s fascination and longing in the novel. Rimer interviewed students in high school English classes at Boston Latin School and nearby Fenway School as a microcosm of young America as they reflected upon the current state of the American dream.

You can read “Gatsby’s Green Light Beckons a New Set of Strivers” here, though I want to post a few pieces that I enjoyed or found interesting.

Some educators say the best way to engage racially and ethnically diverse students in reading is with books that mirror their lives and culture. But others say that while a variety of literary voices is important, “Gatsby” – still required reading at half the high schools in the country – resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.

“They all understand what it is to strive for something,” said Susan Moran, who is the director of the English program at Boston Latin and who has been teaching “Gatsby” for 32 years, starting at South Boston High School, “to want to be someone you’re not, to want to achieve something that’s just beyond reach, whether it’s professional success or wealth or idealized love – or a 4.0 or admission to Harvard.”

The novel had fallen into near obscurity by the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, said Charles Scribner III, whose great-grandfather signed the author with the family publishing company in 1919. It was revived in the 1950s and ’60s when Mr. Scribner’s father, Charles Scribner Jr., started publishing a paperback version and a student edition for colleges and high schools.

[...]

“I see Tom as this really mean jock,” said Vimin To, a 15-year-old Boston Latin sophomore who is in Kay Moon’s American literature class. “When he was in high school, he was king of the hill. He had it all. He was higher than everyone, even the teachers.”

As for Daisy, in Vimin’s view: “She’s turned into an empty person. Like Paris Hilton.”

Vimin’s father works in a restaurant – “not very glamorous,” Vimin said – and came to the United States as a refugee from Vietnam. Vimin relates to the story of Gatsby’s rise from the backwoods of North Dakota to New York. “It’s a very inspirational tale, especially when you’re from a background such as Mr. Gatsby,” he said.

[...]

“I think this American dream is an interpretation of a white poor man’s dream,” Nicole Doñe, 17, whose family is from the Dominican Republic, said during a lively class discussion. “For me the American dream is working hard for something you want. It’s not about having money. My dream is to get an education that I can’t get in the Dominican Republic, to live comfortably.”

Several of her classmates disagreed. “The American dream has a lot to do with money,” said Harkeem Steed, 17, who compared Gatsby to his hero, Jay-Z.

[...]

“The culture sells the American dream so hard and so relentlessly, but they’re wary, and they should be,” she continued. “One reason students appreciate the book is that there is a level of honesty that they value. They need these honest stories to perhaps balance what is otherwise presented as this shining possibility for everyone.”

During a recent discussion with several other students in Ms. Moon’s class, Will Murphy, 16, whose father works two jobs as a firefighter and an E.M.T., was relating Gatsby’s accumulation of enormous wealth to his own chances of hitting it big in today’s economy. “Getting rich seems so far out of the picture,” said Will, who has a part-time job scooping ice cream. “Everybody thinks about it, but the older you get, the less possible it seems.”

[...]

As a sophomore working to meet the school’s demands, Shauna sometimes feels as if her mother’s green light is her. “She puts all her hopes in me,” said Shauna, who talks about becoming a thoracic surgeon. “I have all this weight and responsibility. Sometimes I can’t live up to it.”

[...]

Jinzhao Wang, meanwhile, has been reflecting more deeply about the meaning of the green light. “I’m not an American citizen, so when I apply to college I will be competing with all the top students in Asia,” said Jinzhao, whose parents are teachers and who lives in the Allston neighborhood, across the river from Cambridge and the red brick buildings of Harvard. “I have to set an even higher standard.”

Here, too, she had found inspiration in “Gatsby.” “The Dutch settlers went all the way across the ocean to this new land – America,” Jinzhao said, referring to Nick’s bittersweet reflections that end the book. “America appears to the Dutch settlers as Daisy appears to Gatsby. Gatsby’s hopes and dreams are American ideals. His effort is the real ideal of the American dream.”

Almost makes me want to read The Great Gatsby again. Almost.

Consider this a thematic follow-up to my earlier discussion of the book Gaming the Vote, in which we addressed the niche movement to revamp our voting practices by phasing out single winner plurality voting.

Obama surges in book sales [read story]
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer
Fri Feb 29, 3:02 PM ET

NEW YORK – Maybe it’s the prose, or the charisma, or the novelty. But if voter excitement were measured by book sales, then Sen. Barack Obama would be the clear front-runner.

Sales have exploded in 2008 for the works of Obama, the Illinois Democrat who has steadily climbed in the polls all year. Sales have stayed flat for the works of Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who quickly and surprisingly became his party’s presumptive nominee after he seemed finished last summer.

[...]

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of industry sales, combined sales for Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope” were averaging more than 35,000 a week in late February, more than triple the pace of early January, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was still favored to be the Democrat nominee.

“Dreams From My Father,” a memoir, first came out in 1995; “The Audacity of Hope,” a political book, in 2006.

Meanwhile, McCain’s sudden prominence has had no discernible impact on “Faith of My Fathers,” a highly praised, best-selling memoir released in 1999, and on “Hard Call,” a book about character in public life first released last August and out in paperback with a printing of 50,000. [...]

Weekly sales for Clinton’s memoir, “Living History,” have also averaged 1,000 or less throughout 2008. The book was a near-instant million seller when published in 2003.

Thankfully, nobody is seriously proposing to gauge voter preference in this way, otherwise Stephen Colbert [check catalog] would surely own the Democratic front-runner position¹ instead of a failed candidacy (his Presidential aspirations were painfully dashed in South Carolina last November). So clearly, the entire notion is thoroughly farcical.

Measuring voter preference according to a candidate’s Yahoo! Buzz index, however…well, it’s only a matter of time. Those who resist will be the first against the wall when the Yahoo! Revolution happens.

A customer was in the building yesterday inquiring about some autobiographical stuff that the author Jeffrey Archer [check catalog] wrote concerning his term in prison. Archer did a two-year stint between 2001 and 2003 for perjury and perverting the course of justice (four-year sentence, but paroled at half-time). Don’t ask me to explain it. Something to do with a faked alibi and a romantic tryst with a call girl. There was also some convoluted business about the laxity of his imprisonment that got Archer and some others into a further spot of bother, but frankly, it is all a bit difficult to unravel and I haven’t got the attention span for it.

In any event, this customer query reminded me that I’m currently sort of vexed with Jeffrey Archer after reading a Publishers Weekly Q&A with him in the January 21, 2008 issue. His new book, A Prisoner of Birth, is, apparently, an homage to Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo [check catalog], so when PW asked him to discuss any new impressions he gained from rereading Dumas’s classic (while in the slammer, which was probably nothing like the Château d’If), Archer said:

When I read the story a second time, I realized the whole secret rested on (a) Dantes’s escape from jail, and (b) having escaped, aware that in a cave on Monte Cristo was a treasure trove unequaled in the world. Such a convenient ploy may have been acceptable in 1844, but surely not today, so I was aware that it would be necessary to have an original escape and an original way of becoming wealthy before one could set about writing the opening paragraph. The process took about three months of intense thought before I came up with a solution to both problems.

Let me first say that I think Archer has expressed himself ambiguously here, and I am not certain that I fully take his meaning. Ambiguity notwithstanding…I don’t know…that bit bothered me.

Maybe there’s some point of truth in it, but you could just as easily reduce any adventure novel to two or three whimsical plot points on which the rest of the story’s fabric hangs (and I’m not even sure I can get behind Archer’s implied assertion that “a” and “b”, as he pulls them out, are terribly arbitrary). Aren’t plot contrivances sort of intrinsic to the structure of an adventure book?

I suppose I simply disagree that Dumas’s story would be dismissed on the quaintness of its narrative vagaries if it were written today. What Archer perceives as a quality of triteness, I would argue is simply familiarity. There is probably little doubt that Monte Cristo is outlandish, but isn’t that simply the nature of the beast with this sort of book. At least Dumas deals in some rather weighty themes, such as greed, vengeance, and redemption.

I recently mentioned in an off-hand way (check the footnotes) an Associated Press interview with John Grisham [check catalog] in which the author pointedly insisted that he considers himself, above all else, an entertainer, having no delusions about or desires for the merit of his work in the literary long view.

From anybody else this might have read as defensive, but Grisham is no hack, so however our grandchildren choose to remember or not his oeuvre, I can’t really offer up anything to this but a “fair enough.” Grisham really has nothing to prove at this point, and if he doesn’t care to take an interest in his legacy in literature, that’s his business.

Why am I pulling this stale nugget of pop literary gossip down from the top shelf and dusting it off again when it was hardly content-rich enough to justify a footnote the first time around? That’s a good question, and sure, I’ll field this one.

While performing my collection development responsibilities this afternoon, I was struck by an amusing coincidence of sorts in Publishers Weekly. Totally unconnected with the Grisham interview, but it nevertheless seemed to drop with the force of an old-fashioned, wild West-style calling out.

Michael Chabon [check catalog] offers a counterpoint, or something like it—albeit unintentionally—to John Grisham in Chabon’s forthcoming book of essays, Maps and Legends: Essays on Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands. This comes from the Publishers Weekly review:

You would hardly think, reading Chabon’s new book of essays, that he won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about comics. [viz., The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay] Rather, he is bitter and defensive about his love for genre fiction such as mysteries and comic books. Serious writers, he says, cannot venture into these genres without losing credibility. “No self-respecting literary genius… would ever describe him- or herself as primarily an ‘entertainer,’ ” Chabon writes. “An entertainer is a man in a sequined dinner jacket, singing ‘She’s a Lady’ to a hall filled with women rubber-banding their underwear up onto the stage.”

And a pall of silence descends over the room.

Chabon casts himself as one of the few brave souls willing to face ridicule [...] “I write from the place I live: in exile.”

That was a negative review, by the by. The PW reviewer called Maps and Legends a “tirade”.

In any case, I would absolutely love to get Grisham’s take on that. I imagine he’d say, unflustered and in his characteristic folksy drawl, that he never purported to be a “literary genius.” And that is an oddly loaded phrase by Chabon, to be sure. Out of context, it’s especially difficult to truly comprehend exactly what he’s getting at.

And I want this to be a matter of record, with you all as my witnesses: I will leave an open invitation on the table for both Michael Chabon and John Grisham to debate on this very blog the topic of writing as a form of entertainment. Heck—if I thought they had the stones for it, I’d even let them square off post for post as official contributors.¹

But maybe they’re just too chicken. Yeah…they’re probably too chicken.

Prove me wrong, guys. Prove me wrong!

It was bound to come to this sooner or later: a bit of content filler until I’ve had an opportunity to put together a more substantial post.

A readers’ advisory scenario: a customer at this library once asked if I could suggest mystery novels for him to read on the condition that they not beat around the bush. “If the first page begins with a description of what some character looks like,” he told me, “I know that I’m not going to be interested in it.” Fair enough. I’ll leave it to you to ponder how you might have responded to his readers’ advisory request.

This was probably a year ago, though it’s fresh in my mind because I recently repeated this anecdote for my Monday night book club, Book Talk @ Night. Believe me, it’s not as though I trot this old chestnut out at every dinner party I attend, but it seemed apropos since our January book was The Maltese Falcon [check catalog], which, by the way, begins with something like a full page description of Samuel Spade and his dangerous yet inscrutable Mephistophelean characteristic, formed of a collection of “v”-shaped patterns. It’s one of the more memorable opening passages of any book I’ve read, actually, though you can probably assume that this wasn’t one of the books that I recommended to that particular library customer.

Why am I talking about this? Well, I’ve nearly forgotten myself. Oh yeah—Oprah! Back to that in a second.

Some time back, before I lived in Fayetteville, I attended a panel discussion of mystery authors as part of a local literary festival. At this point, the only author whom I can remember being there was the prolific Donald Westlake [check catalog], who also writes under the pseudonyms Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt, Edwin West, and a few others. Interesting guy. I can’t remember if it was Westlake or one of the other members of the panel who basically said that a good mystery should always start with a corpse.

It probably wasn’t Westlake, just to be sure. The point is: he was there. So basically, there was no point to mentioning that.

Anyway, as to the corpse rule of thumb, there’s something to be said for that, and generalized, I think you can apply that philosophy in some form to most fiction, though I’m willing to tolerate a certain amount of character development, scene setting, and so forth before the author reveals to me the reason that I am ultimately going to want to read his or her book until the end.

Back to Oprah. Ken Follett’s novel The Pillars of the Earth [check catalog] is a book that I’d had the notion to read for some time, since it’s the sort of thing that people will recommend to me, and it would be nice to be able to say, “Okay, yes—I’ve read it already.” Once Oprah selected it for her book club, it was only a matter of time before I’d have to look into it. Not because I necessarily hold Oprah up as an unfaltering judge of quality literature, but rather, because I know that many people do, and part of my job is to know what people are talking about in the world of reading.

My hold request on the title triggered last week.

My first surprise: this book is gigantic. 973 pages. It’s almost unfathomable given everything else in my life that I could complete this book in the two week checkout period I’m likely to have before I’ve got to give it up to the next person with a hold request…though I was willing to give it a shot.

My second surprise: 100 pages in and I’ve got no idea what the point of this novel is. As a slice of Medieval life, I suppose that it’s compelling in its way, but I’ve got limited time for these sorts of things and darn it—at some point, I just want to know why I’m reading.

I think I’ve been spoiled by reading too much genre fiction. I like genre fiction. You know who the protagonist is. You know who the antagonist is. You know what the central crisis is that needs to be resolved. In short, you’ve got a direction and a destination. And I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

But I welcome all opinions to the contrary. If you would like to agree with me, that’s fine, as well. Better, really.