Rarely Likable

About $29 total from Amazon UK

This arrived today:

I probably won't get to really dig into it until later, though. In the meantime, if you don't know who the murderer in the title is? Start here.

TypePad Virtual Book Tour: Dear Catastrophe Waitress

Welcome to the second stop of TypePad's Virtual Book Tour, featuring Brendan Halpin's new novel, Dear Catastrophe Waitress! While my local bookstore has it smack in the middle of the New Arrivals table, you can also get a copy by trying out TypePad. Give that banner up there a tap for the details.

(If you missed the previous stops on the tour, you'll want to drop by here to see what it's all about. You'll also want to listen to the podcast interview. Then, be sure to check out the first stop, Syntax of Things -- home of the Underrated Writers' Project, ShoStoWriMo, and now the Obligatory Deathmatch Interview Question.)

Brendan was kind enough to answer all of my questions -- no matter how long-winded or embarrassing or scatterbrained...

I was struck by the fact that one of your two main characters is British. It seems to me that most pop culture aficionado fiction writers, when they deal with cultures that aren't their own, don't play them nearly that close! Of course, right after I thought that, I noticed that you indicate in your bio that you've lived in Edinburgh and Taipei. Has that experience influenced your writing and  if so, how?

I'm not sure.  I mean, I think a lot of this stuff happens on a subconscious level. I don't even remember making the decision to have Philippa's song happen in the UK; it just sort of happened.  I mean, since I lived there, I hope I was able to make it a credible setting--I think I had a decent memory of how the music industry works over there and stuff like that.  I think the best thing that living in different countries did for me as a person, and I suppose this spills over in to my writing, was that it gave me an appreciation for other people's points of view.  Just that there are people living happily in other cultures who don't assume the same things you assume, who don't take for granted things you take for granted.  I think getting this knowledge really hammered home to you like this helps you be a better fiction writer.  Because at least for me, the biggest challenge is creating characters who aren't me. So I think being immersed in different points of view helps with that. At least I hope so.

What was the first album you ever bought?

When I was in first grade, I was obsessed with "Crocodile Rock", so I made my parents buy me Elton John's Greatest Hits.  I suppose the first album I actually bought with my own money was probably a Billy Joel album.  I think it was probably 52nd Street.  Ugh.  I can't believe I admitted that.

The book makes it seem like two infamous but fictional songs "Two Minute Man" and "Phillippa Cheats," really exist. How did you go about writing them? How was it the same or different from writing the novel itself? Would you ever consider going into the songwriting industry -- and even if you wouldn't, if you could write a hit song for any musician or group, alive or dead, who would you choose?

I don't really remember writing them as a separate thing--it was just that when it was time for the lyrics to come up in the text, there they were.  I don't want to sound too precious, but I think the songs are probably complete somewhere in my brain, and I only bothered to transcribe parts of them because I'm lazy.  I don't know if I could ever be a songwriter.  I don't think I have the creativity on the musical side, but maybe I could be a lyricist.  The thing is that the publishing industry, as much as it's changing and consolidating and everything, is still pretty friendly to the artists, and I don't think that's true of the music industry.  But yeah, I'd love to be able to hold up a Ramones album and point to a song and say "I wrote that one." 

I have a feeling I've left something out, but I count six Brendan Halpin books in four years. That's pretty prolific. What part of the writing process comes easiest/hardest? Which part do you enjoy the most/least?

The easiest, most fun part for me is writing first drafts.  I usually discover the plots of my stories as I'm writing them, so I just have a lot of fun watching the characters develop and the story unfold.  It's so much fun that it doesn't feel like work at all.  Of course, revising is a lot less fun, because then you have to tinker with it and confront your mistakes and sometimes find a way to make a change you don't even think you should be making.  But even revising is fun compared to copy editing.  This is the only part that is drudgery for me.  I'm fine with all the punctuation stuff, but I'm just so lazy about continuity stuff. I just write the story and don't pay a lot of attention to stuff like the timeline.  I know some people will be distracted by this stuff and it has to be fixed, but it's just such a pain for me to go back and fix all these notes from the copy editors:  "If he's 19 in 1990, he really can't be 21 in 1995," stuff like that.  You have to get that right, but I don't have a good mind for stuff like that.

******

That's it from the middle-of-nowhere stop on the tour...point your van toward the legendary venue  After the MFA for Thursday's installment. In the meantime, however, enjoy a childhood memory:

Then We Came to the End

Ramblings ahoy!

(Amazon)
(official website)
(Powell's interview)
(some reviews)
(in which Joshua Ferris makes traffic to this very site go, well, crazy)

True confession time: I read all the reviews, and I went in ready to hate this book.

I like a good office farce or parody, see: Office Space, The Office in all its permutations, Dilbert. But I really think that sort of thing falters more easily when it goes to long form, see: The Company, The Futurist. (Of course, now that I've said it aloud, I've thought of an exception -- James Hynes' Kings of Infinite Space.) When I cracked this book open, knowing that it was about an nameless advertising agency in the throes of dotcom-disaster-domino-effect, I was skeptical.

And everyone, including good ol' Nick Hornby right there on the front cover, said Then We Came to the End was funny. Funny, funny, funny, even a "darkly funny" or two. (What isn't darkly funny in America at this point?)

As I read, I came to the conclusion that calling the novel funny would be like someone asking me "What was it like working for a basically rudderless dotcom for five years?" and me replying "Oh, it was really funny."  Of course, there were funny things. But I'd also tell you about the sad things, the scary things, the stupid things, the boring things, and the strange things. And Joshua Ferris does, too.

The first half of the book is told in first person plural. Reading that ahead of reading the book also made me cringe at the thought of impending twee. But Ferris makes it work very well. He provides excellent reasoning for the choice in the Powell's interview linked above. But even without knowing that, the end result of the novel's voice is a corporate terrarium -- a world independent of all else, utterly dependent on itself, in which denizens can be plucked away at any time. I told a friend (who also worked at the rudderless dotcom, not coincidentally) that it reads exactly as if you're sitting in someone's cube and shooting the shit for hours on end. "Which is what we did," he replied. "Duh."

Don't worry, though, there's a plot. And the book report theme is this: What happens when something that's become your world suddenly isn't? That's not always funny, you know. It happens again and again in Then We Came to the End, in wildly different ways -- some of which I saw coming, some of which I didn't. The book ends with a reunion -- though the terrarium has expelled all of its inhabitants, all have moved on...and you realize that the setting which was so vivid and so important to the beginning of the book isn't anything more than a memory at the end.

I don't think of Then We Came to the End as a book about an office. I think of it as a book about a very specific time and place in American corporate culture. Employees were encouraged to be casual, friendly, brilliant, incestuous, antagonistic, open-hearted, trusting and then, well, the end came, sometimes overnight. We (there's that first person plural twee!) can almost go back to the way things were before the coffee bar, but not quite. Not ever.

A book that was simply "funny" wouldn't have made me think about any of that.

Research and Joycean News

Carol Shloss v. Estate of James Joyce (i.e., Stephen Joyce, his grandson) has been settled. Shloss' biography of Lucia Joyce, To Dance in the Wake, not only can be reprinted, it can include material that Stephen Joyce previously did not allow for inclusion. It looks like they're planning to also put the deleted source material on a website for the book: http://www.lucia-the-authors-cut.info/  It's not live as of this writing, though.

Here's last year's New Yorker article about Stephen Joyce, and the case.

Booky McBooksnfanfic.

Special ex-888 bulletin: Metropolitan Diary on thin ice!

Something Awful oversimplifies book covers.

Claire Zulkey points out embarrassing celebrity books (via Rake). It was all fun and games until I got to this page, which brought back memories of a dramatic reading from that very book in 1989. I hadn't thought about it in years.

For the record, I'd like to see a lot more posts like Gwenda's today. Wasn't even remotely boring.

In defense of Bill Bryson.

Tod Goldberg + Dave Navarro + Carmen Electra + Dagget = Awesome three times!

Just some fangirl stuff

All sorts of background information on 30 year old book/brand new movie Bridge to Terabithia in this article. (Do not read if you have somehow managed to avoid spoilers since 1977.) This is persuasive enough to make me consider seeing the movie, and I was prepared to take a pass six weeks ago.

Possible first steps toward The Dark Tower on the silver screen: The Talks Begin. Who they're with isn't a surprise. And Reuters, you cheeky headline monkeys. (If a DT movie or seven interests you, then you probably already know about this.)

Rhian on the awesome that is Harriet M. Welsch.

Any finally...If Neil is happy, so am I.

Good shite!

I don't know if it's fear of the apocalypse finally kicking in or what, but I've been sick since Thursday and have been obsessed with taking my temperature.  Even with regular Tylenol dosings, I can't get it below 100. Just checked now, and it's 100.5.  Don't worry, though...I went to the doctor this morning, she agreed with me that it is a raging sinus infection, and prescribed me some industrial strength antibiotics. How does that happen so quickly? One minute you're nonchalantly hawking up stuff, the next you're curled up in bed trying not to think about The Stand.

Anyway, I discovered that Paula Spencer is an excellent book for reading under those circumstances.  A sequel to The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, it's about ten years on and Paula's been sober for four months. Her kids have grown up and had varied levels of success in the world. Ireland has also changed dramatically in the last decade -- for the record, probably more so than any other country in the EU. This comes up throughout the book, in subtle and not subtle ways. Paula herself, however, is all about small victories. Like getting a 30 euro a week promotion, like opening a bank account, like becoming a fan of the White Stripes, like buying her son a computer, like helping one daughter and being helped by another, and like staying sober. James Hynes says it better than I ever could.

I think I've told this story before, but since it's relevant here: I saw Roddy Doyle read at Barnes & Noble in Union Square about ten years ago, when A Star Called Henry was a work in progress. (I was surprised that he's a bit of a mumbler since I think he's been a teacher and written for the stage, but anyway...) After he read, they opened the floor for Q&A. He picked me, and I asked "Do you miss your characters when you're finished writing their stories, or are you glad to be done with them?"

He said that it depended on the character, and he gave two examples on either end of the spectrum. He was absolutely done with Paddy Clarke in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. But he still missed...Paula Spencer. So there we go, I guess.

If I can get my temperature down to 99 tomorrow, I might reward myself by tracking down my copy of The Barrytown Trilogy. More than once, I've wondered what the Rabbittes are up to these days...

It's not 1978 anymore...

Free iPod version of Choose Your Own Adventure #1 until 1/25/07.  Retail value, $9.95. I guess if the Children of Today have iPods, they've also got ten bucks to throw around for CYOA audiobooks.

Qwertynomore

All the cool kids are linking the Richard Powers piece from yesterday in which he reveals that he uses voice recognition software exclusively to write stories, so I'll link it too. I find it interesting that he mentions the tablet PC all the time, but (as far as I've seen) he never says what software he uses.

I took an informal typing test while I was on vacation -- okay, it was from a "SpongeBob Squarepants Teaches Typing" CD. I hadn't taken one in at least ten years, I never learned how to type properly, and I figured I was about the same as I was then -- 60 to 70 words per minute. According to the experts in Bikini Bottom, these days I type about 90-95 words per minute. Four fingers on my left hand, two on my right.

Anyway, I can't help thinking that voice recognition software would make it too easy for me to fall back into my own diction. (And, to mention it a third time, but refer to a dog in a way that my character wouldn't.)  That said, there is something seductive about the idea of stripping obstacles between mind and story.  Very seductive.

Book hookups

Went out last night and Paula Spencer was on the New Hardcover table. It's a sequel to The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, and it interested me not just because I usually like Roddy Doyle books, but also because this is the first novel he's written that has to take this into account.

I also got this, and started it last night -- mostly because I know I blow through Roddy Doyle books and want to savor that a bit, but also because it's related to something I'm working on. It's been extraordinarily difficult to find accounts of how credit card and identity thieves actually live their lives from day to day, so I'm hoping this book doesn't let me down.