Thelma Catherine Ryan was born dirt-poor in Ely, NV in 1912 and orphaned young. But wasn’t she a California Girl at heart? Wanting to be an actress, she ditched the “Thelma” early on—well, who wouldn’t?—and became “Patricia.”  Act she did, starring in high-school and college productions of already-hoary comedies and even landing a bit in Becky Sharp, Rouben Mamoulian’s not-quite-successful 1935 film adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (her part is cut from the final print). Himself enamored of amateur theatricals, young Dick Nixon courted her assiduously; his famous iron-ass stubbornness was already in play, and he waited her out; finally she just gave in and married him—in the “Presidential Suite” of the Mission Inn in Riverside in 1940. The young Quaker lawyer was  capable of romantic rhetoric, and he was never lacking in low peasant cunning: certain florid love letters survive, but even in them the canny reader can see Tricky Dick figuring the angles.

She could almost certainly have done better. Pat Ryan was not without other offers.  Perhaps no other suitor could have gained her the White House, but another husband might have brought her the tranquility she never seems to have found as “the perfect political wife.” That’s surely one of the subtexts of Ann Beattie’s admirable Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (Scribner, 2011; $26). But having decided to play Mrs. Nixon, this model of Depression-era determination and grit made it the role of a lifetime, never stepping out of character, at least in public.  About the private Pat Nixon we know little, and Beattie has built this pomo hodgepodge of a book around catching Mrs. Nixon in her metafictional snare. That it can’t be done is a foregone conclusion; the fun for Beattie—and for us—is in the writer’s virtuoso attempts to channel the Sphinx-like First Lady, dead these 19 years.

I met Ann Beattie in the 80’s when she was on tour plugging the collection that would become Where You’ll Find Me, and her first question to an autograph-seeking young fan was, “Are you a writer?”  She’s a writerly writer, and she indulges her preoccupation with the production of fiction to the fullest in Mrs. Nixon, bothering very little with the known facts of Thelma Ryan Nixon’s life and speculating instead about how a writer—a Baby Boom writer, say, who grew up with images of Mrs. Nixon—might treat an elusive subject. Beattie doesn’t pretend to be a biographer.  She’s interested here in the dialogue between the Nixons that we’re not privy to, in the telling detail that the historian overlooks but that the novelist seizes on.  What did the Nixons say to one another when Ike had his heart attack and RN (as this monster of egotism referred to himself) became the de facto Leader of the Western World?  RN tells us about his own actions during this time in Six Crises, but Pat—typically–receives scarcely a mention.   What was Mrs. Nixon feeling inside the limousine during the disastrous visit to Caracas, when the vice-presidential motorcade was pelted with debris and spit?  What was the long, lonely, but finally peaceful retirement like in San Clemente, then Manhattan, and finally in New Jersey? On these Beattie speculates masterfully, treating us to disquisitions on Chekhov, de Maupassant, A.A. Milne, and Bette Davis. In some of the book’s most satisfying chapters, Beattie actually assumes the narrative voice of Pat Nixon, and the result is a delightfully unnerving prose style, part June Cleaver, part Yellow Wallpaper, wholly convincing.

I wonder if this highly inventive book will be the last book we ever see on Pat Nixon. Beattie has read exhaustively about the president, but there isn’t much out there about Mrs. Nixon alone:  Beattie openly relies more heavily on Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s schmaltzy, too-earnest Pat Nixon:  The Untold Story (1986) than on any other source.  In death as in life, RN remains a historian’s (and a psychoanalyst’s) wet dream, while Pat smiles absently from her corner of the set.  I can’t foresee a future where Mrs. Kennedy is forgotten, and I predict a whole spate of books about Mrs. Reagan when that formidable lady joins the Gipper on that big soundstage in the sky (her film career,  while negligible, surpassed  Pat Ryan’s). Betty Ford carved out her own niche in cultural history, and we won’t even mention Hillary in this context.  Sadly, Pat Nixon seems to resemble Laura Welsh Bush more than any other First Lady in modern history:  they both married badly, they both brought up the rear, and they both sat and smoked.

image via: barnesandnoble.com

The Faster Times

Here is the synopsis from Future Tense Books:

Legs Get Led Astray is a provocative collection of essays that vividly rockets the reader through one young woman’s life. Chloe Caldwell beautifully and bluntly escorts you through her childhood dreams, her first loves, her most unguarded sexual exploits, bookstore crushes, babysitting jobs, heartbroken wanderlust, and the suicide of a lost lover. Caldwell’s writing remarkably explores the genre of personal non-fiction and has been featured in The Rumpus, The Faster Times, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and is forthcoming in The Nervous Breakdown and New York Times.

For those of you unfamiliar with Chloe, she writes the “Love and Music” section here at The Faster Times, and also contributes to “Love and Death.” Here are some of her recent articles to check out:

Thoughts on Headphones

Sex & Romance & Love & Music

The Shit You Say

Over at Luna Park review, Travis Kurowski takes Bill Henderson, editor of the Pushcart Prize anthology, to task over his dismissal of online publication. Like Kurowski I really love the Pushcart Prize–it is probably my favorite yearly anthology–but it is hard to disagree that Henderson’s stance seems at best a little silly and at worst absurd. Henderson:

I have long railed against the e-book and instant Internet publication as damaging to writers. Instant anything is dangerous—great writing takes time. You should long to be as good as John Milton and Reynolds Price, not just barf into the electronic void.

The Pushcart Prize anthology is always gigantic and features a wide variety of work, but the current edition only has one piece from an online publication. A few years ago, Henderson’s stance might have been somewhat understandable. But in 2012, even the biggest print magazines have an online component. Conjunctions has had Web Conjunctions for years, The Paris Review and Tin House have both recently been publishing fantastic work on their blogs, TriQuarterly moved entirely online, etc. And that is to say nothing of the many excellent online-only publications like elimae or The Rumpus.

In addition, Henderson’s comment about “instant anything is dangerous—great writing takes time” makes little sense. It is true that one can self-publish anything instantly, and it is probably true that most online literary magazines are more hastily edited and published than most print magazines. Both of those things can be dangerous for writers. But the best online literary magazines are as carefully edited as anything in print and the wait time for slush submissions is equally long.

I do enjoy the phrase “barf into the electronic void,” but most writers will tell you that online publication brings more notice most of the time. The largest print markets, such as the New Yorker, will garner you more readers and attention. However, the vast majority of magazine editors will tell you that their online traffic far exceeds their print issue sales (that certainly holds true for the magazine I co-edit, Gigantic).

(I also feel that I should point out that I go to plenty of literary parties including “Paris Review revels and FSG launches” and there is always booze and rarely talk of Kindles. Not sure what Reynolds is talking about there.)

So, Henderson’s stance seems quite outdated for a lot of reasons. While I am on the subject though, I will say that there probably are some downsides to online publication that the online lit proselytizers overlook. And the proselytizers do exist, I know plenty of writers who claim they want to only publish online and that print magazines are irrelevant dinosaurs.

One interesting thing about online publication is that is simultaneously more ephemeral and more permanent. This weekend I was thinning the bookshelf in my childhood bedroom. One thing that I refused to part with was my McSweeney’s and NOON collections. Not all literary magazines are as beautiful as objects as those, to be sure, but I’m never going to treasure a Tumblr like I do a beautiful print magazine. The web is an unending stream that you dip your toes into and then forget. It can also be easily altered. Recently I noticed that a large literary website had shifted their content to a new system and somehow one of the pieces that they had published of mine vanished in the move. I’m not complaining about this—the other pieces of mine remain and I’m not going to bother them about one old piece—but work can be unpublished or lost online in a way that it can’t in print.

On the other hand, there is a level that the web is more permanent. When I was in undergrad, I began publishing fiction and poetry in both print and online journals. In the print journals, my pieces were read or not read and then forgotten. Someone could theoretically track them in library archive, but the pieces have been put behind me. This is not a bad thing, especially for a young writer. On the other hand, most of the online publications are still online where anyone can find them in a few seconds Googling. Indeed, many of these publications from seven or so years ago come up before more recent pieces in more popular publications. I cringe every time I meet a new person who informs me they searched for me online and “read that story of yours about the [stupid dumb thing I thought was clever a decade ago].”

Compounding this is the fact that the internet tends to exist in a kind of perpetual present. If you Google one piece from 2002 and one from 2012, there is little indication that the former was written long ago. It appears to the reader as instant in a way that tracking down a back issue of a journal does not. Is this a big problem? Probably not, but it is something to consider for emerging writers deciding where to publish.

A related question involves the publication of online work in a collection. Many writers these days seem to have their entire collection’s work available online and easily linked on their website. Does this hurt the value of a collection? Will readers be less likely to buy book X, easily read online in magazine form, over book Y that isn’t? I don’t think that this is an issue yet, but it might be in the near future.

Lastly, it is probably fair for us to acknowledge that web magazines are not necessarily as great for all types of writing. Poems, short prose, and current events/culture commentary all work great online and perhaps even have unique advantages. The web is not as good at cultivating long form work though. For one thing, it can’t pay for it. For another, it is simply a pain for many to read that much text on a computer screen and the distractions of email, Facebook, and everything else really do make it hard to stick with.

So what does all this mean? I guess that I think both print magazines and online magazines provide a lot of value for both readers and writers. They, currently at least, work well to complement each other. Writers, readers, and anthology editors shouldn’t snub either one.

The Library of America’s new anthology—Into the Blue: American Writing on Aviation and Spaceflight—flies low to the ground in telling a story that covers much territory. It’s nothing less than the history of American aviation itself, told informally and first-hand, in documents produced by direct observers and participants. Some of the documents are reportage, others are autobiography. Some of the authors are famous, others are obscure. The book moves from manned balloons to manned space-capsules. That’s a lot of history, and a lot of literature. It’s a nearly 700-page flight, during which there’s much you take for granted, and much that can catch you in a moment of wonder. It’s a lot like flying itself in that way. I recently asked some questions of Joseph Corn, professor emeritus at Stanford, who edited the collection.

Can you tell us about the origin of your interest in aviation, and how you came to edit this collection?

Like many of my generation–I am 73–I grew up during and right after the Second World War and so aviation was in my face, so to speak. At six or seven I had aircraft identification cards that allowed me to identify virtually anything in the sky, and a few years later I was building model planes. When at age ten I got my first flight, in a friend’s father’s Stinson four-place plane, I knew that I wanted to have a plane and fly when I grew up.

Things didn’t work out that way, but my interest in flight continued, becoming the subject of my UC Berkeley doctoral dissertation in history which became my first book, The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950 (1983, 2002). One of the Library of America’s advisory board had read this book and suggested to the publisher that I be asked to edit an anthology on flight, which I did.

Even in a book of this size, there are going to be some painful exclusions, by necessity–especially when the collection seeks to span a field so broad. What’s an example of something you regrettably had to exclude?

I really have no regrets, although you’re right, many strands and stories had to be excluded. I’d initially imagined that the volume would contain excerpts about all kinds of flying, but nothing about dirigibles or airships survived (we found nothing truly memorable). There is less on relatively recent commercial air travel than I originally wanted, but as most adults have lived this history, the omission isn’t a problem. Personally, given the themes of The Winged Gospel, I had wanted to have some selections that spoke to the messianic and utopian expectations many had about aviation, such as the belief that tomorrow we all would own private planes (or helicopters) and use them as we do automobiles, or that flight would bring about the equality of men and women. The published writings on such points, however, while essential to me the historian, seemed insufficiently literary or memorable to LofA veterans, so they fell to the cutting room floor, so to speak.

Banal as this superlative will sound, I can honestly tell you, without hyperbole, that this collection contains what has long been maybe my favorite paragraph of writing–certainly one of my favorite three (the opening paragraph to the excerpt from Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977)). Do you, too, have an unequivocal favorite among the pieces gathered here?

No, I don’t have an unequivocal favorite or even a single favorite; yours is an interesting choice, however. Among my favorites is the entire Elizabeth Bisgood piece which captures something new but now gone, the communal sense early passenger flight engendered; the William F. Buckley piece, which so deftly describes the foolishness of youth whether at the controls of a plane (see also Hynes from Flights of Passage); and the excerpt from Michael Collins’s great book, Carrying the Fire, especially his casual description of the extra nuts and bolts floating free in the weightless atmosphere of his Gemini capsule, signs of careless assembly that might cause a normal person to freak out but which just amuse the astronaut with the “right stuff.”

Although a lot of pieces in here were written by professional writers, a lot of them were not, even at the ghost level. Although I’ve developed my own theory on why aviator-adventurer types are such good writers, I’d be very interested to hear if you have a theory of your own.

No, I don’t have such a theory; indeed, I think aviator/astronauts are likely to be poor writers, given how their lives have often privileged techy subjects rather than poetic or humanistic. That so many great flying writers emerged from WWII is, I believe, simply the result of the size of the sample, and the fact that many did their flying while young and then later developed a literary bent. That there are two WWII ex-flyers who became professors of English at Princeton in the anthology is a coincidence only possible with WWII (Hynes and Kernan).

As impossible as a lot of the aviation feats have seemed, as improbable as they’ve certainly been, there are none that have violated the basic laws of physics. In order to advance any further in flight, it looks like violating physics is pretty much what would have to occur. If someone puts together a book similar to this in later years—say, a quarter-century from now—what kind of things do you think we’ll be reading about in the final chapters?

Having published three books about how people in the past imagined or forecast the future–often incorrectly and absurdly–I have learned never to offer prophecies myself. So on this question, I have no idea. I’d note in conclusion, however, that recent history, say the last thirty or forty years, have included little of the sort of enthusiastic futurist thinking so characteristic of earlier decades.

I’m just two weeks away from once again failing in my mission to read every single book that was published in the current year, which means that I’m not equipped, as so many apparently are, to tell you which of them were the best, ten or otherwise. But I’m confident that I know what three of them must have been, and all three were written by John Jeremiah Sullivan–and under the same title, no less.

Pulphead is a collection of essays, which means that–to state the obvious–it has an unfair advantage over other books. But even among other essay collections, it stands out. John McPhee released, in paperback, another stale and arid bag of cracking leaves that he’d left all over the New Yorker’s lawn–demonstrating, as always, that there’s no subject so interesting that John McPhee can’t go ahead and ruin it for you (and demonstrating, too, that the tenure model of employment is just as pernicious to magazines as it is to academia, if not more so). Tom Junod, the greatest magazine writer of them all–maybe the greatest writer, period–has once again refused to gather his pieces, denying us, as always, a neatly bundled grouping of his work. John Schulian released a sublime career-wide omnibus of his best sportswriting that could have–by casting a net as wide as it was long–been two of the best books of the year, instead of what it is, which is merely one of them.

Which brings us right back around to Pulphead. It’s never a happy occasion to have to praise the same damn book everyone else has been praising, every James Wood and Dwight Garner out there, as well as Greil Marcus and Larry McMurtry and who knows who else. But it’s impossible to argue with encomia that alight on a book whose orbit is this widely eccentric–a book that, in its own idiosyncratic patterns, traverses so much territory, topically, but also does so with such a defiant colloquialism, transgressive in its own idiomatic language. We’re not talking about the precious porcelains of the flash-fictionalists–the “sentence-level” (to use the current phrase) care attendant in each of its creations. Writers like Sullivan take it for granted that “sentence-level” care is to be taken, because writers like Sullivan–the phrasemakers, that is–take it for granted that sentences are, in the end, all that make a piece, even if a piece has to be made of much more in its beginning.

So he typically starts with a quest of some kind, or quests. In the very first piece of the collection, he starts with the quest–terrifically unfashionable–of producing a work deserving of awards, and, even more unfashionably still, by blatantly expressing these intentions. He’s also questing to cover a Christian-rock festival, and he does that, too, just as surely as he won the award he was after, and he does so not just by covering the Christian-rock festival, but by doubling back to revisit his own youthful study of the Scripture, and how his previous belief informs his experience of what’s covered.

In the pieces that follow, he quests after everything from the last living member of Bob Marley’s Wailers, to an eccentric 19th-century explorer and naturalist from Sullivan’s home state of Kentucky, to “The Final Comeback of Axl Rose,” to first-hand accounts of both Hurricane Katrina and the Tea Partiers, to proto-bluesmen and the ancient secrets written inside of Kentucky caves. There are two pieces of pure memoir, about his brother’s near death from electrocution and the life and death of his college mentor. The questing mind quests even in repose, and so it’s no surprise that these are two of the most adventurous and expansive pieces in the lot, even if not in the literal and superficial sense of the words. Two of the least fashionable pieces in the collection are also two of the most timely, if you can dig the contradiction. One of them was written after the death of Michael Jackson, but in a way that strives for fair-mindedness and the benefit of all doubt; the other is about The Real World and reality TV generally, but it’s also about how Sullivan actually kind of likes those shows–used to be, he was fucking obsessed by them–and when he writes about them, wouldn’t you know it if he doesn’t do so by shifting subtly from his own voice into the voice of those shows, free-indirect as a motherfucker.

So many of these pieces were written for GQ. I mean, they were written for places like Harper’s and the Paris Review and the Oxford American, too, but nearly half of the 14 of them were in GQ, and so his defiant disregard for the fashionable is only more admirable for that. The collection is also admirable for what it chooses to leave out–for what it’s decided it can do without. You may not think that kind of thing’s admirable, but in a way you’ve gotta give it to it. It leaves out terrific pieces he wrote recently on both the cult of Disney and the cult of David Foster Wallace. Those are both timely topics treated unfashionably, especially the latter, which was also published in GQ. (Sullivan also manages, somehow, in the Wallace piece to include an ironic footnote that seems fresh and unannoying. I have no idea how he did this; maybe it acquired magical properties from what may be the first ever ironic footnote to appear in relation to Wallace, in Junod’s “And the Hipster Dwarves Shall Lead Us,” which also appeared in GQ, way back in June of ‘96. This aside, you’ll notice, is parenthetical, and there are more reasons for that than one.)

So Sullivan takes his chances, with his sentences and with the subjects they serve; he does his questing and his questioning, his phrase-making and its foolishness; he runs the complete course; he kitchen-sinks better than the completists do, because his kitchen sink is so much shinier than theirs is, buffed to a more luminous polish, and with a harder substance; he selects what he collects before he collects what he selects; and, more than any other damn thing that he does, he demonstrates what happens when you make exploration rather than accumulation your animating motive. The accumulation can always happen later, in its own good time.

There is no such thing as a “correct” weight for any particular height—they are only averages. And moi, who has a perfect figure, can tell you that the idea of going on a diet is not to become so thin that when you are at a party and turn sideways, people think you left early.

- The Paris Review also has a great interview with Gary Lutz, one of America’s premiere sentence artists.

When I’m at work on a story, I never compose paragraphically. I write stand-alone sentences. I might fixate on three or four sentences a day. I’ll enlarge them to at least twenty-six-point type on the screen. I’ll futz around in their vitals, recontour their casings, and work a kind of reverse cosmetology on them to bring out any defining defects or birthmarks or swoonworthy uglinesses and whatnot. Only much later will one such sentence overcome its aloofness or diffidence and begin to make overtures to another sentence, which might be pages and pages away in the draft. The sentences eventually band together into paragraphs.

- The Millions’s great Year in Reading series continues.

- As does the htmlgiant Tournament of Bookshit.

- Electric Literature is throwing a holiday fiction contest with an interesting constraint: “A short short of 30 to 300 words, that uses each word only once. (Do not repeat any words! Not even pronouns or indefinite/definite articles.)”

- The Guardian wonders whatever happened to book illustrations:

I say surprising because very few works of fiction have any sort of graphic element at all. This has always seemed strange to me, especially considering the great effort publishers put into designing covers, choosing fonts, and so on. Illustrated fiction enjoyed a surge in popularity during the 19th century, but nowadays? I can count on two hands the books I’ve read that incorporate some design into their pages.

It is an interesting question, although the rise of literary comic books and graphic novels in recent history might have taken over most of that space, and there are probably more illustrations in recent texts than the article implies. Still, I would not be surprised to see more art get incorporated into novels as publishers look for ways to enhance the appeal of print books.

- Largehearted Boy compiles a massive list of year end book lists.

- Everyone is already talking about this article, but if you haven’t read it here is Richard Russo taking Amazon to task.

Statements like this will no doubt make us all seem, to Amazon devotees, like a bunch of privileged, holier-than-thou ingrates. Privileged I’ll grant them. But as we swapped e-mails it quickly became clear that the real source of our collective dismay was actually gratitude, not ingratitude. On my first book tour I was invited to Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago. The employees optimistically set up seven folding chairs, then occupied those chairs themselves when nobody showed up for the reading.

- Lastly, Laura Miller on the trend of TV shows adapted from novels.

For The Believer’s art issue, Cotner and Hamilton’s slideshow narrates a walk across Fire Island. A photograph of downtown Cherry Grove shows three men walking the boardwalk and front patio seating of the Cherry Grove Café; rainbow flags hang from a storefront down the way; there’s an orange hotdog-shaped balloon rising erect in the breeze. The accompanying text reads: “Downtown Cherry Grove is jubilant. Real-estate offices display million-dollar listings. Most guys wear swim trunks. We study the Cherry Lane Café’s lunch menu, and decide to move on.” A simple moment, classic summer scene. Straightforward and true.

Stranger things happen. A deer appears on the path; they follow it; it leads them to a patch of dozens of colorful lawn ornament flamingos stuck into the sand. “Our tour-guide reveals this flock of plastic flamingos, then vanishes in beachgrass.”

Hamilton’s photographs are crisp, well-framed snapshots, and this is for the best. Art photographs, even Instagram effects, take reality and skew it. This is what this looks like right here in this moment. You see what they see, not over manipulated — not one individual’s vision of the basketball court or the dogs on the dune, never alienating in that way. They are matter of fact, well-composed.

Cotner has good practice narrating walks. The slim and beguiling Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse), on which Cotner collaborated with Andy Fitch, includes ten narratives about moving through New York City on foot. The observations, in the slideshows, and the book, range from the matter of fact (“Atlantique’s marina is packed”) to the lyrical and impressionistic (“glowing accidental things”; “While his feet kick drums and his hands play guitars, he’ll blow into a harmonica or sing”). The atmosphere is captured, an afternoon on earth. Bits of dialogue are sprinkled in, small encounters with strangers the two pass on their way. Pleasantries exchanged – a man in a white Speedo tells them he’s look for a place to pee. Fire Island has no cars. An old couple and later a young mother mention how much they love to walk.

The fragments become something flowing and whole.

The same can be said for the slideshow of a walk down Bedford Ave in Brooklyn the two did for the BMW Guggenheim Lab.

We tend to tread the same paths. Apartment to subway stop. Around the block in the evening after dinner. The same sidewalks and blocks and scenes seen over and over. When it’s all familiar, it’s hard to pay attention, hard to see what’s new or strange or lovely right in front of you. In presenting us with something we so easily take for granted, breeze by, Cotner and Hamilton defamiliarize our neighborhood. They give each expedition – the stroll to the corner store for milk, the walk along the river in winter – potential, opportunity for something transformative to take place. And if it doesn’t on this particular walk, the promise that they make, unspoken, is that over time, the accumulated experience, the presence and paying attention, will transform you. The work makes an argument for presence. It makes an argument for noticing, being awake.

In a project called Poem Forest, Cotner distributed 15 lines of poetry selected from two-and-a-half millennia of nature poetry along a trail in the New York Botanical Garden. Walkers of the path were urged to recite the lines, “bring them to life,” then to take a moment to contemplate the scene. Cotner’s work encourages us “to inhabit the present more deeply.” It is, as he writes, “a reminder to keep going.”

One thing that stories in Belgian cartoonist Olivier Schrauwen’s The Man Who Grew His Beard share is that they question their own form-and they usually feature bearded men who draw-but otherwise resist association. This is, after all, Schrauwen’s first collection of stories, and much like those first collections of his fiction writing counterparts, this book contains the enthralling inconsistencies and volatility that result from an artist experimenting with and discovering a form. Like American artists Robert Goodin and Dash Shaw, Schrauwen reaches into the toolbox of the animator to reinvent the print comic. He employs the more technologically dictated concepts of animation, in which he is trained, to innovate the older form of comics, the medium which he has come to practice. His feeling for immediately sequenced moments and relationships within varying depths of field serve to create comics pages that interrogate their own form, creating a real sense of newness in his stories.

Schrauwen’s stories are not animated films on paper. Anything but. They are comics that could only exist on the page. His layouts are driven by the relation of one panel to another, existing as a unified whole rather than a sequence. Schrauwen eschews panel gutters, making his pages into single compositions, highlighting relationships of lines and colors and repetitions from one panel to the next. In his story “I Am a Handsome Man with a Broad Forehead and a Beautiful Beard,” Schrauwen’s painted pages are created to reflect the structure of a stained glass window, or even a complex family crest. Moments are found within single panels, but the pages are composed to ask the reader to look at them as a whole. Even more compelling are instances, such as in “Hair Styles,” when adjacent panels echo each other with slight variation, reminding us of the animator’s storyboard, or a film strip, but, at the same time, creating a regularity that sets a narrative rhythm only achieved by those cartoonists who are most naturally inclined to employ the basics of deconstructed comics grammar (think Ernie Bushmiller, or Ivan Brunetti’s recent work).

The variation of line, color, and graphic archetype throughout the book unsettles the reader, demanding close attention. The grasp that Schrauwen, and therefore the reader, has on any particular visual paradigm is tenuous at best, at any given moment. It’s as if his people, and places, and his very lines may slip away at any point. And the instability is not only a function of the collection as a whole, but occurs even within particular stories, or on a single page, or even within a panel. In the book’s first story, “Congo Chromo,” an absurdist episode of Belgian colonialism, the three principals, a group of white-man hunter/explorers in Africa, have body parts, heads, legs, torsos (especially torsos) that continually changes size from panel to panel, sometimes with logistical explanation, other times not. This makes their age, and visual personality, which is usually so easily established with highly abstracted cartoons, tough to identify. Our idea of these men change as the story itself is changed. This story is an appropriate pace setter for a collection that—if it suggests any thematic unity at all—is driven by the idea that not only is the creator questioning his form as he creates (as cartoonists, like the OUBAPO group, who work with constraints, do so effectively), but that each story that Schrauwen has discovered and the characters within are questioning the narrative as they experience it.

Many of Schrauwen’s featured characters either carry pens, pencils, or brushes, or they are a product of another character’s drawing tool. Formally, this approach is not unlike the meta-fictional conceits of William H. Gass and John Barth. (Don’t fear: there are no characters in this book named ‘Olivier Schrauwen,’ though the author did point out in an interview that he had a beard the entire time he was drawing these stories.) But, the meta-narrative effects on a visually concrete medium such as comics are much different than their role in prose fiction. Fiction writers use this method to reveal to us “the author’s hand,” to make us consider the story as an authored construct. Comics, as a medium, usually do that without any overt meta-narrative techniques, because artists’ drawings styles are constantly obvious and more particularly nuanced. We are much more often more actively aware and attuned to a comic artist’s style than that of a creator who works exclusively in text. We think about more about how the thing is made when we read comics. Schrauwen invites us into the process of making comics, particularly the idea of conceiving of and making images, and calling into question these processes as separate undertakings, suggesting that thinking and making are the same process. “The Imaginist,” a story in which the comics page predicts, sometimes incorrectly, the conceptions of a particular bearded man, and then corrects those ideas to suit his whims is the most obvious example of this. Most compelling, this story then goes on to address this man’s limits when he loses the power of formal invention, in his “waking life” as a quadriplegic. Another story, “The Grotto,” looks at cult who reveres a flawed “creator” who quite literally draws things that come to life, things which ultimately disappoint the creator himself, although these creations still delight his followers (perhaps, audience—or readers).

So many storytellers are lauded for creating worlds so believable that they cause readers to forget. Presumably, readers forget their own realities, and become absorbed in the author’s imagined product. Schrauwen creates new worlds in every story, and these worlds envelope us, but he never allows us to forget. He doesn’t let us forget that he’s an artist, and that we are readers, and that those are his pencil lines and paint strokes on the page we’re reading. And this reminder of the form and experience is exactly what makes his stories seem so real. They refuse to deny the process with which we all struggle if rarely acknowledge, and that is the process of continually framing and creating the world in which we live.

- Speaking of year end features, HTMLGIANT has launched a pretty hilarious “tournament of bookshit” pitting the most annoying aspects of the literary world against each other. Early rounds include “Calling yrself editor-in-chief of online jrnl vs. posting pics of other people’s books on facebook” and “flarf vs. AWP“. It is too late to enter, but you can still watch. I have “nationwide Facebook invite to local event” going all the way.

- Daniel Clowes illustrated the new New Yorker cover and it is equal parts hilarious and probably depressingly accurate.

- Flavorwire on great books to give non-reading friends this X-mas.

- Have you been checking out the awesome flash fiction series that Tin House is running on their blog? Great work from Diane Williams, Michael Kimball, Seth Fried, and many others. Today’s story is by Gwenaelle Aubry and begins:

The apartment was full of balloons, garlands and children. One last little boy was still waiting for his parents, a little boy with long, curly, very dark hair. The telephone rang. I think it was already nightfall. The police were waiting for us outside my father’s building. They didn’t leave me alone with him. One of them preceded me into the room where he lay. He never took his eyes off me, told me not to touch a thing.

- The Rumpus interviews Rumpus Book Club author Laurie Weeks.

- New Directions unearths a great author photo of Clarice Lispector, whose The Hour of the Star was just published in a new translation.

- TFT editor Adam Wilson has a story in the new Paris Review. You can read an excerpt here:

“What is this cockshit?” someone behind me said.

I turned. Felix wore camo pants and a sleeveless tee. Hair long and greasy, facial features exaggerated: comically oversize mouth and nose. Like late-career Bogart: rheumy-eyed, beyond saving.

“It’s raining,” I said.

- The most depressing book ever?

- Lastly, did you know that Salvador Dalí illustrated Alice in Wonderland in the 1960s? Check out the gorgeous and surreal images at Brain Pickings.

Don’t worry, there are no spoiler-alerts in this TFT review!

Answering this oft-posed question would subvert and demolish the immense pleasure of reading 11/22/63, Stephen King’s new epic, published sagaciously on the cusp of Zeitgist awareness that in two years’ time we will observe the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The ghost of America’s greatest homegrown philosopher, John Dewey (1859-1952), inventor of pragmatism, (and a Vermonter, I must add) obviously whispered his memorable credo into the ear of Hampden, Maine novice writer Stephen King four decades ago: “The local is the only universal.”

For his life’s work, King has hovered over, walked through, lived in, speculated about, exhaustively described, dissected, and, of course, ultimately loved, a resolutely-generic small town in Maine going by different names, but always coming to rest as the same richly-revealing place, “a burg off the main road that nobody cares about much, except for the people who live there.”

11/22/63 begins in just such a town — Lisbon Falls, Maine — where present-day high school English and Drama teacher Jake Epping is led to a dim staircase in the pantry of an outmoded diner, down which he crosses a portal that takes him into 1958, and to Derry, quintessential small town of King’s lifelong fears and fantasies. From there, by way of prelude to the larger cause, and urged on by the desperate pleas of a dying friend, Jake takes on the mission of preventing a horrific family mass murder – only to end up in Fort Worth and Dallas in the fateful years leading up to our blood-drenched national cataclysm.

Thanks to King’s prodigious imaginative and narrative gifts and — more crucially — to his lifelong hunger for a lost childhood world, we are drowning in a time of hula hoops, Lindy Hops, five-cent Cokes, jukeboxes, tailfins, back-seat necking, country stores, five and dimes and antique shops, bicycling newspaper boys, amiable dogs, good manners, smiling little old ladies, hitch-hiking, and Technicolor nostalgia.

The perverse counterpoint to this dreamy landscape comes in the hot, dry litany of names and locations with darker resonance: Dealey Plaza, the Texas School Book Depository, Parkland Memorial Hospital, and Love Field. All are revisited and described with haunted fidelity.

Assuming his new name and identity for “The Land of Ago” as George Amberson, inexperienced but doggedly-persistent gumshoe, Jake rents a couple of seedy apartments and hunkers down for three creepy, voyeuristic years with the obsessive purpose to stake out Lee Harvey and Marina Oswald, then intervene at the appropriate instant to save the future of mankind.

However, true to form, the past, “turning on a dime,” as King likes to say, throws its own obstacles across George’s path. The first is through the sweet, engaging personality of a “good-looking in an artless what you see is what you get American girl,” a willowy, witty and affectionate fellow-teacher named Sadie Dunhill with whom our hero falls hopelessly in love.

And love – as those of us familiar with Stephen King’s oeuvre already know – has a way of conquering all.

The other, more ambiguous impediment to George’s mission has to do with how the memory of the past becomes corrupted – or “compromised,” to use a current cliché – when you are actually in the past. This syndrome is hard to explain, of course, unless you have had the opportunity to occupy the past in the first place. Through a series of temporary obstructions to his momentum, George finds out the hard way that what he knowingly calls “the obdurate past” itself does not “know” its own future…the future toward which George is hurtling.

Remember, TFT Reader, no spoiler-alerts. So that’s all I’m going to say about that.

11/22/63, weighing in at 849 pages, is a lumbering juggernaut of a book. No need to be daunted by these numbers. It has all the gravitas of a Greek tragedy; we (think we) know what is destined to happen – and yet, are surprised and shocked when it actually occurs.

The tumultuous denouement of the story includes some harrowing set-pieces, as when George actually meets and locks eyes with “the man who was going to blow off the right side of Jack Kennedy’s head.” And ultimately, 11/22/63 poses far more questions than it answers. This is a novel that wants to know where the past resides, not simply what happened in it.

Stephen King regards the contextualizing of events – news as the first draft of history – with an historian’s dispassionate gaze, yet never loses sight of the fact that life is a story to be told.  And the story is told in his always-engaging and intimate fashion. He creates and nurtures the comfortable effect of seeming to speak directly to the reader, while at the same time penetrating the psyche of a quasi-fictionalized madman and dragging you along for the ride.