Odessa let go of Boobie Miles, but Buzz Bissinger held on
After the back-to-back premature deaths of Miles’ father and uncle from heart attacks, Bissinger took Miles on as “a fourth son.” (Miles, now 42, weighs more than 300 pounds, more than 100 above his old playing weight.)
Some of this was journalistic follow-up. Some was motivated by his desire to develop a relationship “outside the narrow sphere of family and work.” And some of it, Bissinger freely admits, is motivated by the guilt he feels from having achieved literary immortality partly because of Miles’ sad saga.
“I’ve been a journalist for over thirty years, and never have I seen someone treated as horribly as Boobie was. Once he got hurt, it was as if he had been kindling tossed on a bonfire, a sacrifice to the god of football,” he writes.
Bissinger feels bad about this, and he puts his money where his mouth is, literally. Over the years, he’s given Miles tens of thousands of dollars for things like rent and vocational courses. Like many parent-child relationships, this one is fraught with the question of whether Bissinger is doing good by his son or enabling his dysfunctional habits.
At times, Wolf uses the notation style to evoke barroom or car-stereo sounds: as the color commentary for a Yankees game or a Bruce Springsteen song drowns out Cincy’s beloved hip-hop, the font indicating the last of these becomes smaller and smaller, or the text of the lyrics simply cuts off. It’s an ingenious system, something like a Robert Altman film as seen through text alone.
“I’m not worried about chasing people away,” he said. “How many more people can we chase away by writing? Nobody reads. It’s not like I’m dropping an album, I’m like an M.C. and I’m like ‘Yo, I need all the beats to be polka beats.’ Okay, I might lose people, and there’s money involved. But there ain’t no money in this fucking game. If you get 2,000 readers, you’re good. You’re good. So you might as well do what your dream tells you to do and be happy that the people at the other end of the page are happy to see you.”
In a new anthology, 40 women writers reckon with indefatigable pop megalith Madonna
Editor Laura Barcella explains why:
“There’s something about her, a kinship, like an older sister figure,” Barcella said. “She feels like a family member. She helped me feel more free to express myself the way I wanted to, with her audacity and bravery and willingness to let it all hang out. The way that she would revel in her sexuality made me feel comfortable to do that if I wanted to. It brought home to me the idea that other women felt that way too. Her attempt at defining her identity—it can change, doesn’t have to be static—resonated with a lot of women and made them feel more free to do what they wanted to as well.”
The book’s essays are not all mash notes to Madge. Some of the contributors frankly hate the pop star, think she’s cheap, commodified, empty.
“Madonna can’t do much for me now except stand as an example for how not to age,” Colleen Kane writes in an essay entitled “Madonna Is Boring and Lazy.”
“True dat” - President Obama to New Yorker editor David Remnick, in an off-the-record meeting.
Has anyone played with Small Demons? It’s a new site that gathers and organizes references to music, movies, people, and objects mentioned in the text of books. You can look up all the books that refer to Albert Einstein, for example, and find the passages where he is mentioned. Or find the restaurant visited by a protagonist in a book and order his favorite dish and favorite drink (the site will tell you what they are, where you can eat them, and tell you which other literary characters have indulged in them). Anyway, a cool project, financed by Silicon types, and Richard Nash is involved. Check it out.
Selected Shorts: Nora Ephron and Nathan Englander at Symphony Space tonight!
Here’s an interview with Englander by Jason Diamond for Capital New York:
Unlike the Midwestern Gen-Xers at loose ends who populate Franzen’s work, or the eccentric immigrants in Gary Shteyngart’s fiction, Englander fits the mold as his generation’s New York Jewish storyteller, heir to Roth or Bellow, using Jewish characters and milieus in the way Updike played with WASP ones. When I mentioned this to him, he noted that he prefers a more simple designation, “It took me a long time to see that I’m just telling my stories,” he said. “Jews with pride will say you’re a Jewish writer. Then a gentile would say you’re a Jewish writer, but it’s not fucking genre fiction.”
There is no actual slideshow in this post, we simply describe the slideshow presented at Word bookstore last night. So, feel free to click.
Hierarchy of Book Publishing
The Top 100
(circa 2012)1). Brand-name authors (still)
- Stephen King (since 1974)
- John Grisham (1989)
- Patricia Cornwell (1990)
- Jodi Picoult (1992)
- Nicholas Sparks (1996)
- Jennifer Weiner (2001)
- Etc.
Brilliant guide.
The irony is that Kantor’s publisher, Little, Brown, which had originally inked a deal for The Operators, dropped Hastings’ book last summer because it feared the tome was too controversial, according to Hastings.
“The book terrified them—literally,” he said. “One email from the editor said he and the publisher were terrified after reading it. I was like, shit man, the subtitle of the book is that it’s a ‘wild and terrifying story.’ But clearly, the book made them very uncomfortable—from the language I used to the views expressed about the Pentagon. I didn’t want to compromise my vision for the book.”
