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Do you sometimes worry that you've run out of new ways to misuse office resources? Do you already only call your trans-Atlantic sweetie from your work line? Do you already bring in your iPod, laptop, telephone, and digital camera to charge on the power strip under your desk? Do you already fedex yourself home every afternoon?

Well, don't despair! Instead, subscribe to The New-York Ghost, the Free Weekly Newsletter You Print Out at Work! Four or so pages, arriving in your e-mail box every Thursday, ready to be printed on your employer's dime!

Curated, proprieted, kiss-of-lifed, tuckpointed, and zookept by Ed from the Dizzies, the New-York Ghost (along with its hitherto reclusive editor) was profiled in the New-York Times over the Thanksgiving weekend, which surely led to an avalanche of subscription requests. You've thus missed your chance to get in on the ground floor, or even the mezzanine--in fact, were this a Ponzi scheme, I'd suggest you hold on to your wallet and keep moving, mister--but as there is no limit to the number of electrons that can be devoted to the New-York Ghost, there can still be a copy waiting for you if you want one!

By not subscribing before now, you have, however, missed the first installment of my Brief Lives of the Hip-Hop Stars (in the manner of, and with apologies to, my beloved John Aubrey), which appeared in the November 6th issue. But never fear! If you subscribe now, you'll surely be in time for installment two--and meanwhile, here is installment one, appearing for the first time on the Internets:

Levi Stahl's "Brief Lives of the Hip-Hop Stars"

Ol' Dirty Bastard

Though strictly speaking neither old, dirty, nor a bastard, young Russell Jones took that name when he began rapping with cousins and friends as part of the Wu-Tang Clan; his later change of moniker to Big Baby Jesus was similarly unrelated to facts of his size, age, or divinity. However suspect ODB's personal nomenclature, he was always sound on such disparate (and sadly little-bruit'd) topics as penguins and space aliens. He fathered thirteen children, and he once saved a little girl who was not one of them from being run over by a speeding car—an act of heroism for which he made sincere attempts to avoid being publicly lauded.

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For a free subscription or sample, write to newyorkghostATgmailDOTcom, with a non-spam-sounding subject line and your e-mail address in the body of the message as well.

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Taking up a challenge

{I like Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.}

Ed at the Dizzies has thrown down a challenge, based on a bit from Roland Barthes about likes and dislikes. So, with the full understanding that, to steal a line from the financial services industry, past likes and dislikes do not guarantee future &etc., etc., etc. . . .


{I like anniveraries.}

I like

Rocketlass, baseball, distance running, Anthony Powell, cooking, gin martinis, Wodehouse, well-written history, Don Knotts, Jimmy Edmonds, J'onn J'onzz--the Martian Manhunter, film noir, crime novels, pizza, my bicycle, vintage suits, penguins, Chicago, New York, London, Murakami, public transit, steaming bowls of chunky vegetable soup, fake-meat bratwursts, sudden downpours on city streets, Barbara Pym, birds, Emmylou Harris, Melville, singing along at the top of my range to Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club, Johnny Mercer songs, chili, James Kochalka, Iris Murdoch, Spider-man, Peter O'Toole, Yi Yi, Dickens, Borges, The Rules of the Game, peanut butter and jelly, Tolstoy, Chicago's lakefront bike path, the Pre-Raphaelites, vegetarian biscuits and gravy, Watership Down, Ben Grimm, Evelyn Waugh, Wrigley Field, the whole month of October, Pedro Martinez, Jack Benny, Sinatra, Wendell Berry, horchata, the word "quondam", the King James version, thunderstorms, Thomas Hardy, Luc Sante, swearing, my job, Calvino, Plato, bunny rabbits, mornings, fedoras, Tivo, Stevie Wonder, Nick Lowe, having guests, Proust, playing catch, Sherlock Holmes, Ian McShane, writing letters, receiving letters, Maborosi, Edward Lear, books as objects.

{I do not like the Giambi Zombie.}

I do not like

Telephones, pre-packaged food, gardening, The Old Man and the Sea, Sting, the Olympics, The Corrections, the Yankees, the Green Goblin, Bush, Cheney, sophistry, cars, anise, absinthe, tattered used books, The Science of Sleep, non-gin martinis, the fact that Idaho and Illinois have the same number of senators, Finnegans Wake, prog rock, smoky bars, mass-market paperbacks, The Fortress of Solitude, that moment in novels when the characters decamp to Mexico, Ravelstein, Billy Joel, unreliability, the movie of The Chocolate War, the Punisher, the concept of an afterlife, every Wilco album after Being There, Aristotle, The Plot against America, advertising, On the Road, The Royal Tenenbaums, Babel Tower, basil, commercial radio, sleeping late.

{I do not like Rudy Giuliani.}

Since this is an unusual sort of post, I'll also take it as an occasion to point out that I've Been Reading Lately is likely to be a bit quieter than usual this month. With lots of deadlines at work, the end of marathon training, and our annual baseball open house, October is by far my busiest month. Last October I dealt with that by posting irregularly. This October I aim to post regularly, but the posts are likely to be less substantial--much more, "Hey, check this out!" and much less, "Here's what I learned when I checked this out!" Regardless, I hope there'll be some stuff here that you'll enjoy, and everything should be back to normal soon after the last out of the World Series.

Sharpies and frauds

A couple of weeks ago I proclaimed that Richard Aleas's Songs of Innocence (2007) is the best novel that Hard Case Crime has published. The next day my friend Ed from the Dizzies sent me a note saying, essentially, "Really? Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game and The Girl with the Long Green Heart would be hard to top." Uh-oh. There were, after all, five Hard Case Crime books that my subscription hadn't brought me--the Block novels among them. And it wasn't too long ago that Hard Case published a third Block novel, one that reminded me just how much I like his work. Perhaps I should have hedged.

Properly challenged, I ordered the pair from my local bookstore. And Ed's right about at least one thing: they're really good. Both novels feature a grifter looking for a score and falling for a woman (need I note the ensuing disastrous consequences?). But despite their superficial similarities, they're distinctly different in tone, and reading them back-to-back is like watching a master play variations on a theme.

The Girl with the Long Green Heart (1965) tells the story of Johnny Hayden, a retired con artist who is lured back for a sharply designed long con. (You can guess what separates a long con from a short con, but if you want more detail, two great sources are David Mauer's The Big Con and J. R. "The Yellow Kid" Weil's Con Man.) A con novel exists largely so us outsiders can watch a con come together, and Block delivers the goods: there's worthless land in Canada, a mooch who can be induced to smell unearned (and possibly illicit) profit, and a lovely lady to pull it all together. There are deeds to be forged, dummy letters to be mailed from various cities throughout the country, a storefront land office to be furnished and staffed--wheels within wheels, and everything has to work perfectly for the con to succeed, which is what we're rooting for the whole time, morality be damned. Block doesn't excuse our choosing the side of the cheats, but he makes it easier both by making the mark a boor and by reminding us:

There's an old maxim that you cannot swindle a completely honest man. I'm not sure this is entirely true--it would be hard to test it empirically, because I don't think I have ever met an entirely honest man.

Yet even as we're watching the pieces fall into place, we know the plan will fail somehow. You can't write a crime novel about a con that goes off flawlessly--as much fun as these schemes are to read about, it's not the anticipated complications but the dangerous surprises that create the tension and provide the drama. In this case, despite Johnny Hayden's disbelief in pure honesty, too much trust is what opens the door to disaster. To run a con, you've got to trust your partners--and sins of omission, however minor in themselves, can bring the whole game crashing down. And as good as the set-up is in The Girl with the Long Green Heart, the crash is just as impressive.

Grifter's Game (1961) opens as a similar sort of grifter, Joe Marlin, is trying to stay a few steps ahead of unpaid bills:

The lobby was air-conditioned and the carpet was the kind you sink down into and disappear in without leaving a trace. The bellhops moved silently and instantly and efficiently. The elevators started silently and stopped as silently, and the pretty girls who jockeyed them up and down did not chew gum until they were finished working for the day. The ceilings were high and the chandeliers that drooped from them were ornate.

And the manager's voice was pitched very low, his tone apologetic. But this didn't change what he had to say. He wanted the same thing they want in every stinking dive from Hackensack to Hong Kong. He wanted money.

To dodge the bill, Marlin flees to Atlantic City, where he quickly and unexpectedly finds himself a in possession of a big block of heroin--and lovely lady who wants her drug dealing husband dead. From there, events proceed roughly as you might expect. Marlin concocts a satisfyingly multi-layered plan for knocking off the woman's husband, complications ensue, and, almost to the end, Grifter's Game follows through on our expectations: there's love, money, and double crosses, all adding up to a solid, if unspectacular, crime novel.

Then the last ten pages change everything, with an ending that might be the most stunning I've read in a crime novel. Rather than wrap the book up conventionally, Block takes a real chance, and the close of the novel left me gape-mouthed. In writing about Richard Aleas's Songs of Innocence, I mentioned how unflinching Aleas was about the consequences of his book's events, how by playing everything straight he built up to a shocking ending; Block handles Grifter's Game the same way, to similarly powerful effect. The ending is brutal, astonishing, and totally unexpected--yet at the same time it feels completely right.

After all that, have I answered Ed's question? Is Songs of Innocence better than Grifter's Game? Maybe? Probably?

All I know is that even being neck-and-neck with Lawrence Block is something to be proud of--and that if you like crime novels, you might as well read both and make your own decision. Regardless of which you prefer, I don't think you'll regret it.

Some passing thoughts on a passing state, that of ecstatic joy

I've had Van Morrison on the brain lately, because I've spent the past few weeks listening to him a lot and because earlier this week Ed at the Dizzies pointed out a blog where Van fan Patrick Maginty is writing about Van's 36 albums, from his least- to his most-favorite. Ed also sent me to this cartoon (which is now my second-favorite music cartoon--my favorite is here), which relates cartoonist Mr. Saturnhead's dream that his great new job was to buy 44 Van Morrison albums--none of which exist in reality. The titles of the few that he displays in the comic are hilarious dead ringers for actual Van titles. Now I'm kind of surprised that I never tried imagining unmade Van albums in my days of being a superfan--when the password for my first e-mail account was G.Ivan1945. Trying to hit just the right note of lyricism verging on pretentiousness would have been a fun exercise.

As I waited for the train this morning, I was listening to Van's "So Quiet in Here". A gorgeous, unexpectedly cool summer day was just getting underway, and I started thinking about how good Van is at writing about sheer joy; he's the only person I know who would write a song called "Days Like This" that is about good days. To my mind he's rivaled in pop music only by maybe Prince and Stevie Wonder (oh, and I suppose Little Richard) in writing happy songs--which is harder than it would seem. The opening of Anna Karenina may have become a cliche, but at the base of Tolstoy's statement about happy families is a real truth. Joy so often occurs in the absence of conflict, while art thrives on the creation, depiction, and resolution of conflict. To write about the ecstatic state outside the confines of mystical religion is difficult, and Van Morrison, over forty years, has frequently made it look easy.

My commuting companion the past few days has been Tolstoy's short early novel, The Cossacks (1863), and as I settled back into it this morning, it occurred to me that Tolstoy, too, is one of the great depictors of surpassing joy in art. The thought came to me as I read the following scene, in which Olenin, a young Russian nobleman who has traded his dissipated Moscow life for service in the Caucasus, achieves a near mystical state of joy on a hunting trip deep in the forest:

This cloud of insects went so well with this wild, insanely lavish vegetation, with the forest's countless animals and birds, the dark verdure, the hot, aromatic air, the rivulets of murky water seeping out of the Terek and gurgling somewhere beneath overhanging leaves, that Olenin found pleasant what he had previously found unbearable. He walked around the place where they had seen the stag the day before and, not finding anything, decided to rest a little. The sun stood high above the forest, and whenever he came upon a path or clearing, it relentlessly cast its harsh rays on his head and back. The seven pheasants hanging from his belt weighed him down painfully. He looked for the track the stag had left the day before, crawled beneath the bush into the thicket where its lair was, and lay down. He looked at the dark foliage around him, at the damp spot where the animal had lain, at yesterday's dung, the stag's knee marks, the torn-up clump of black earth, and at his own footprints from the day before. He felt cool and comfortable. He thought of nothing, desired nothing. Suddenly he was gripped by such a strange feeling of groundless joy and love for everything that, in a habit he had from childhood, he began crossing himself and expressing his thankfulness.

Often in Tolstoy, the happiest states are triggered by physical conditions--think of Levin in Anna Karenina bursting with joy despite aching in every muscle after a day of reaping with his kulaks. But whereas Van Morrison is writing pop songs, which at their best create and sustain a single mood for their duration, Tolstoy's writing novels, so he almost always takes the next step. These states, he reminds us--though as they happen may feel as if they are, in their essence, eternal--are often followed closely by states of lost purpose, self-reproach, or despair. Levin believes he's found his way forward in life, but the reader knows that his joy is temporary, that the life of a kulak will not satisfy him. Or, in a different vein, there's Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky, whose exuberant, overflowing love of life (and its representatives, other people) is almost impossible to dampen--yet dampened it is, time and again, when Stepan Arkadyevitch is made aware of the deeply felt pain he's caused others, primarily his wife, Dolly, through his ceaseless carousing. He may not ever quite understand why his actions have that effect--and he's sure to thoughtlessly, accidentally inflict the same pain sometime in the future--but when the undeniable reality of a crying Dolly is before his eyes, even he plunges, at least for a while, into a sort of despair.

That understanding of the continuum--or would pendulum be better?--between joy and despair is crucial to Tolstoy's art, and it also helps explain, I think, the brutal asceticism of his later life.

The sense one gets from reading about Tolstoy the man, with his works serving as a backdrop, is that he didn't trust (or maybe even feared) strong emotion; a religiously based asceticism forces a tamping down of the emotions while simultaneously allowing one to attribute a religious or mystical cause to the emotions one does feel. That Tolstoy's asceticism was cruel to his family, that it further damaged an already fractious marriage, that it was on its face absurd in the context of his wealth--none of that mattered when set against the sense of control and purpose it delivered.

Van Morrison, I think, though of course the lesser artist (who isn't a lesser artist than Tolstoy?), has the better solution--I can't imagine anyone suggesting that the chubby lover of late-night wine and craic has any ascetic tendencies. Instead, he leavens his ecstasies with a near-Buddhist argument against the self, an effort to feel oneself to be, at one's heights, a connected, minuscule part of a larger, significant whole. Instead of a closing of the self, as Tolstoy chose, it's viewed as the ultimate opening of the self, an embrace of the universe that, at base, is little different from what Tolstoy ascribes to Olenin in the forest. Tolstoy could write about those states, but he couldn't live within them; maybe Van Morrison can't, either--most likely none of us can--but that's at least where he's aiming. I don't know Van, so I can't say for sure that he's happy--but I'd be willing to wager that he has been happier than Tolstoy.

Keeping up the fight, or more notes on organizing books

1 Soon after my post last week on the fight against entropy, Ed at the Dizzies, inspired by Jenny at bookshelves of doom, threw down a challenge: tell a coherent story through the titles on a stack of books. The best entry I've seen remains this one from artist Nina Katchadourian, who originated the whole concept, which she calls the Sorted Book Project:

You can see more of Katchadourian's Sorted Books, as well as other works, at her site. Ed has collected a half dozen or so entries for his contest this week, which you can see at the Dizzies.

And here's mine:

In case you can't see the books, they are:

Little Girl Lost, by Richard Aleas; The Good Son, by Craig Nova; The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, by Iris Murdoch; The Pledge, by Friedrich Durrenmatt; The Chill, by Ross Macdonald; Boredom and Contempt by Alberto Moravia; The Thirty Years War, by C. V. Wedgwood; The Pistol, by James Jones; The Murder Room, by P. D. James; The Confession, by Domenic Stansberry; Can You Forgive Her?, by Anthony Trollope; The Trial, by Franz Kafka; Kiss Her Goodbye, by Allan Guthrie; The Executioner's Song, by Norman Mailer; and The Afterlife, by Penelope Fitzgerald

2 I thought of another possible organizational system that I didn't touch on the other day: books could be arranged by country. I fear, however, that my collection would replicate nearly all the inaccuracies of the Mercator Projection--though in at least one area I'd do better than Mercator: my utter lack of books by Greenlanders would mean that it would finally appear smaller than Africa. Iceland, on the other hand . . .

3 Speaking of photos of books, Stacey's photo of our Wodehouse books got picked up by The Winged Elephant, the Overlook Pres blog. Because I'm a fan of a couple of Overlook authors, I keep their blog in my reader, and when I opened that post I thought, "Weird. That looks like Stacey's photo." Their headline?

Look How Nice Our Books Look on Your Bookshelves?

Overlook's Wodehouse hardcovers are beautifully designed and produced, so I'm glad we got to help out their marketing staff by providing an example. There are few better gifts than the gift of Wodehouse, and there's no better Wodehouse than the Overlook editions.

Happily ever after?, part one

I’ve never seen The Sopranos, but from the inescapable coverage of last weekend’s final episode I get a sense that the show ended, not with a big denouement in which loose ends were tied and story lines wrapped up, but instead with openness, ambiguity, and a sense that tomorrow would be another day for the characters, even if we wouldn’t be around to see it. [People who’ve actually seen the episode: am I right?]

It seems that a lot of viewers, maybe even most, didn’t like that. They felt cheated, felt that their seven years of devotion had earned them the right to expect some clarity and certainty—maybe even closure—which is understandable. All stories lead us to expect an ending, but lengthy sagas tend to raise those expectations even higher: by their very scope they seem to implicitly promise to draw out for us life's hidden patterns--to organize and explain what appears to us every day as life's messiness. Perhaps better than any other fiction, long-form works meld our desire to understand characters and our desire to know what happens next; in the best of them, the two impulses eventually become indistinguishable. To keep our attention on both points over time saga creators toss countless balls into the air, and our natural impulse is to expect to eventually see each one safely caught again. We've been given something so great and capacious throughout the story that, as an enthralling saga nears its end, we hope for--even demand--something even bigger and greater as a proper send-off.

Yet at the same time if there is any fictional genre that should resist the temptation to tie things up neatly, to explain, or to deliver an anticipated payoff, it's this one. What is a saga or serial narrative after all but an acknowledgment that life doesn't fit in convenient packages, and that to understand it we must study at it at length and over time? What is it but an acknowledgment that every story we start to tell, if we're honest about it, begins immediately to spiral--if not out of our control, then at least to the very limits of it? More characters must be introduced to help us understand those we've seen, but with each new character is introduced a new story, whose end points, to the extent that they can be defined, are not necessarily the same as those of any of the other stories we're following.

Within a truly expansive and open saga, all that holds these multiple tracks of story and character together is a shared sense of the unstoppable forward motion of time. Given all that, there's nothing more artificial to the form than a final act that wraps up the story, distributing rewards and meting out punishments. More in keeping with the sense of real life that many long-form narratives are trying to convey would be something like what it seems the creators of The Sopranos have done: a pan away rather than a closing curtain--an insinuation, at least, that these lives will go on even after the cameras are gone.

As I've written about briefly already, a similar sense of frustration seems to have afflicted at least some readers of John Crowley's Aegypt sequence. They argue that after raising high expectations by suggesting in the early volumes that Pierce Moffett really might discover some long-lost occult wisdom with which to transform the world, in Endless Things Crowley essentially reneges on his promises. Instead of discovering secret wisdom, Pierce stops questing and settles down to live a quiet life as a husband and father, as close to content as he'll ever be. I've written already about why I think that ending, though unexpected, fits with Crowley's overall design and is the right one for the book--but even as I disagree with the disgruntled readers, I don't really blame them for wanting more. If a saga by its nature sets up grand expectations, then one in which the author hints broadly about hidden sources of secret wisdom would seem to promise even more of a payoff. By ending the story as he does, Crowley is essentially telling readers that Aegypt is, if they look closely, not the book they thought it was--it's a different (and, I would argue, deeper) one, offering not answers to mysteries but a reminder of why those mysteries, and the stories humans have invented to explain them, seem important in the first place. His frustration of our intentions is intentional (and, to be fair, reasonably well foreshadowed), but I could imagine it being deeply maddening nonetheless.

More tomorrow, including thoughts on how this applies to Anthony Powell and A Dance to the Music of Time (which, thanks to a suggestion from Ed (of The Dizzies), is where this all started).