The Elegant Variation

UPDATE

Our neighborhood is now out of danger.  The Fire Department confirms no evacuations will be necessary.  Thanks to the many who wrote in with kind wishes.  Please continue to extend those wishes to those have suffered real losses this week.

SCENES FROM A SUNDAY

Now that we've turned in the latest review we've been working on, we can turn our attention to some pleasure reading.  We also checked out Alan Bennett's delightful The Uncommon Reader, which we enjoyed every bit as much as Maud Newton,  and we're finishing up Shalom Auslander's absolutely hilarious memoir, Foreskin's Lament, after which we'll eagerly take up the two things we are most excited about.  (We didn't even know the Carey was coming!)

Meanwhile, under the heading "Porn for Bibliophiles," we thought we'd include a photo of our birthday present below.  We have coveted one of these Levengers book carts for ages, and Mrs. TEV finally came through for us, enlisting aid from the extended TEV family:

Finally, to all those who wonder why it takes so long for an email reply, a giveaway shipment, a mention of a book, below is the pile of outgoing titles that are en route to Goodwill today.  This represents one month (September) of non-keepers.  Sometimes, it's a title we've simply no interest in.  Sometimes, we've received the finished book and are discarding the galleys.  Either way, we keep more than we send off, so let this put our miserable existence in some perspective ...

HARRY, REVISED - AN UPDATE

I get lots of questions about where things are with my novel Harry, Revised, and since people do seem endlessly interested to hear about the process of these things, I thought I'd take a moment and give you a Harry-at-the-Halfway update.

When this all began, I was warned by older, wiser writers that although the lead time seemed long, the months would race by. I can report that they are absolutely right. Although the book is still half a year away, I'm already experiencing mild palpitations at all that still needs to be done. So perhaps it's more salutary to focus on the parts that are already "in the can":

Revisions: The revision process was gentle, indeed. My editor, Colin Dickerman, gave the manuscript a close, thoughtful read and, feeling the book was already very clean, offered a handful of thoughts, only one of which might count as "major-ish." After I had a chance to digest his notes, we had one meeting in New York in June during BEA to discuss how to attack the revisions and then I was off to the races. I'm told the process isn't always so smooth but I've gone through revisions in Hollywood so many times that I've learned to remove ego from the equation in these settings. I also believe that, although one must be true to one's vision, one must also have everyone involved with the book fully on board. My M.O. has always been that if I can incorporate notes addressing concerns from an agent, editor or producer while remaining true to the essence of what I'm after and without sacrificing or violating any of my intentions, then I'm obligated to work out those changes. (Colin, to his credit, was quick to point out that "This is, ultimately, Mark's book, and the decisions are his to make." As it happens, Colin's Big Note deepened the work immeasurably, taking it to a higher level. I'd have been an idiot not to take it.) I turned the revisions back in August and, after one light line-edit pass, the book went "into production."

Blurbs: When a book goes "into production," all kinds of exciting things happen, I learned. Designers start working on covers. Type is set for galleys. Suddenly, it all feels very real. Which is when the hunt for blurbs begins. I'm a pretty forward guy but there is nothing quite as uncomfortable as asking for blurbs. (In my case, because I am a first-timer, we're hoping for blurbs for the galleys and catalog, so in addition to imposing on people, there's a dimension of "please drop everything" that just adds salt in the wound.) Fortunately the writers I approached have been universally graceful about it – they've all had to ask, after all – and I suspect it's a rite of passage for us all. (I've already been reminded to be similarly gracious when I am inevitably approached.) I need to be discreet for now about blurb status but I can say there's one I'm hugely excited about, which includes the words "remarkable" and "debut" ...

Catalog copy: Another thing that occurs as the book goes into production is that publicity and marketing come into the picture. I've already seen and approved the catalog copy for book, which draws heavily on Miles Doyle's beautiful summary of the book that Bloomsbury issued with the acquisition announcement. (This was, incidentally, the first time that I saw my book's ISBN, which was one of those weird, heart-stopping milestones.) I'm oddly excited to see the catalog, probably because I receive so many of these every week. The news of the catalog deadline set off a subsequent rush to come up with an official author photo.

Photos: Next to asking for blurbs, there's nothing I like less than having my photo taken. But it was time to have something professionally done and the catalog deadline was looming, so after some research I chose Sara Corwin, an L.A. photographer who took Laila Lalami's lovely headshot. In Laila's case, Sara had much better material to work with but she managed to make me comfortable enough for a nice pair of photos, which you can see now on my "official" website.

The Big Surprise: I've been meaning to blog about Kevin Smokler's new venture Book Tour.com (about which more anon), which tracks authors' reading schedules and connects writers with audiences, so I decided to go and set up an account for myself so I could try it out firsthand. There was a slot to insert the ISBN, and when the page went live, I noticed that in the "Author's Books" section, under my title, it included a "Buy this book at Amazon" link. Curious, I clicked the link to find that Harry, Revised is already listed and available for pre-order.

You have to understand that I'm the sort of person eternally waiting for the other shoe to drop. Wondering all along when Bloomsbury would change its mind, back out. But when I saw this, I thought – "Jesus. It's for real." It's coming, and it stands as a firm rebuke to all those who think of bloggers as little more than resentful wannabees. (I have promised myself, by the way, to pay zero attention to Amazon rankings since we all know they are virtually meaningless.)

What's next: Much still to come. I'm waiting to see the cover art. Then the galleys will arrive. (I've been advised by my agent that galleys can only go to people actually in a position to advance my interests. So sorry, MOTEV, no galley for you.) The Frankfurt Book Fair is approaching, where we hope to find some international takers for Harry. My personal website needs a complete overhaul. And I've just been informed that I will have the copyedit tomorrow. (When my agent explained the copyediting process to me, he said "From this point on, you will no longer work on this book in any computer." It's all to be done by hand until publication. Which is something else I didn't know but might have guessed.)

It's all terribly exciting stuff, time consuming, too, and you discover your capacity for endlessly worrying the small stuff. (I can only hope all my emails about selecting the final photo never see the light of day.) You also get to work with smart, passionate and literate people which, for me at least, never gets old.

The best advice I've received, however – and this has come from every single writer I have spoken to – is, amid the excitement and preparation and work, the most important thing to do is to get busy on the second novel. Which is exactly what I've done. And what I'm off to do now.

ESSAY IN THE THREEPENNY REVIEW

"Six Characters in Search of a Novel," our essay on Tom Stoppard's only novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, is finally out in the Fall issue of the Threepenny Review.  The essay is not available online (though other selected offerings are), and it opens like this:

In 1972, Tom Stoppard told The Sunday Times, "I believed my reputation would be made by the novel. I believed the play would be of little consequence." The novel in question - Stoppard's first and only - was Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon, while the play was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the pair debuting within a week of each other in August 1966.

It's tempting to imagine an alternative, Bizzaro Stoppard canon, in which Hapgood is rendered as a LeCarre thriller by way of Evelyn Waugh; The Real Thing as the kind of elegant comedy of manners done so well by Muriel Spark; culminating in the thousand-page, sprawling Russian epic that would become The Coast of Utopia. However, an appraisal of Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon (now available, with a new introduction by the author, in a timely reissue from Grove Press) suggests that Stoppard was, at least in 1966, a poor judge of his own gifts, and we can be grateful that his prediction did not come to pass. We're much better off with a dramatist of the first rank, than the minor novelist on display in his debut.

We hope you'll order or pick up a copy.  It's the first time we've been able to go on a bit longer (1500 words) and we're proud of the result.  Better still, subscribe to this excellent publication.  We have for years.

WEDNESDAY MORNING PAPERS DIDN'T COME or WHY FRANCE WILL NEVER AGAIN BE A WORLD POWER

One of the things I do with the waning days of summer is indulge in my silly obsessions.

The latest has to do with my quixotic attempts to obtain a few loaves of a particular kind of French bread I love.  It's called Harry's brioche tranchée, which is basically sliced, toaster-ready brioche.  I need to be clear - this is not a fine bread product.  It's no Poilane, not by a longshot.  Frankly, it's scarcely a notch above Wonder Bread but I have a sentimental attachment to the stuff.  Whenever I go to Paris, or friends go, or Parisian friends visit, several loaves of Harry make the transatlantic crossing.  Of course, they always emerge squished and misshapen from my suitcase but that only seems to add to the charm.  There's nothing quite lilke a pot of French press coffee and a slice of Harry's with raspberry jam.

I'm usually good about rationing it out so that I'm not too far from a trip when the last of it goes.  But it's gone and the next trip is probably at Christmas.  So - as I have before - I hopped on the internet to see if there was any way I could buy some of the stuff online and have it shipped.  I found a few French grocery sites where it was for sale but not for international shipment.  In the end, I found an email address for the corporate HQ and sent off a polite note, expressing a willingness to pay any overseas shipping and handling charges the order might incur.  And I waited, hopefully.

Foolish, foolish boy.  After all, this is France.

The response came yesterday from a Customer Service representative who shall remain nameless.  The entire reply read:

"I am sorry.  It is impossible."

Now, anyone who has spent any time around the French can imagine the inflection there - "C'est impossible!"  As though I was asking that the Eiffel Tower be picked up and moved three feet to the left.  Now, tell the gang at Poilane that "it is impossible" to ship a loaf of bread across the ocean - something they're very happy to do (via Fedex, no less) if you're willing to fork over forty bucks.  Which I am, and have been.

Now, anyone who knows me knows that I'm scarcely a flag-waving jingoist, and in fact I'm quite the Francophile.  But do you honestly think that if that folks at Wonder Bread somehow determined there was a buying audience in France, that an international e-commerce website wouldn't have gone up yesterday?   By all means, mes cheres amis, complain about the influx of American culture.  And lament the day that France's cultural influence declined.  But just remember - ce n'est pas impossible; vous êtes paresseux.

I bet you Sarkozy could get me some Harrys ...

AMAZON AND ANIMAL CRUELTY

Most of you are no doubt aware of the whole Michael Vick controversy.  What you might not know is that, apparently, Amazon is the only online retailer that continues to offer animal fighting magazines and videos for sale.  According to an email from the Humane Society, the sale of these materials constitute a felony under the recently-enacted Animal Fighting Prohibition Enforcement Act. 

You can read more about the situation here.  We've written to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to advise him to reconsider this pretty shameful decision.  We hope you will, too.  Given the current awareness of this problem courtesy of the neanderthal Vick, it's hard to imagine he would need any more persuading, but apparently he does.  We're scarcely animal rights nuts but this line of decency doesn't seem awfully hard to apprehend.

ON REVISIONS

Revisions are finished.  At last.  If you're waiting for an answer to an email, for a book to be mailed or, pretty much, anything else, there's a chance that life can gradually begin to resume its normal contours.

I'm exhausted, pleased and relieved.  Now it's back to one of those windows of waiting for reactions.  In the meantime, I found myself turning, as I have many times before, to F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby.  The tales of his revisions are legendary - right down to massive rewriting on the page proofs (which modern publishing contracts, I note, promise to charge back to the novelist). 

I have a second-hand, yellowing edition of Scibners's The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963) which I often return to and aimlessly poke through.  This time I was looking specifically for letters that had to do with the revision process, and I came across this letter to Max Perkins, dated February 18, 1925, when Fitzgerald was staying in Capri:

After six weeks of uninterrupted work the proof is finished and the last of it goes to you this afternoon.  On the whole it's been very successful labor.

(1) I've brought Gatsby to life.
(2) I've accounted for his money.
(3) I've fixed up the two weak chapters (VI and VII).
(4) I've improved his first party.
(5) I've broken up his long narrative in Chapter VII.

It was strangely heartening to see his list.  Now, I'm not suggesting for a nanosecond that I've written a Gatsby but I had my own problems to solve in this draft, and now I've a similar list of things accomplished to show for my efforts.  The process is universal, indeed.  Still, most writers never stop worrying and noticing flaws, and in a 1925 letter to Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald can't resist lamenting what he'd missed:

The worst fault in it, I think the BIG FAULT: I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe.  However, the lack is astutely concealed by the retrospect of Gatsby's past and by blankets of excellent prose that  no one has noticed it - tho everyone has felt the lack and called it by another name.

Wilson, however, didn't seem as worried as Fitzgerald.  In an anonymous 1926 essay entitled "The All-Star Literary Vaudeville" (available in the Library of America's excellent forthcoming Edmund Wilson collection) which entertainingly surveys the whole landscape of 1920s American fiction, Wilson - after indicating general disdain for the contemporary American novel - considers Fitzgerald an exception:

Scott Fitzgerald, possessing from the first, not merely cleverness, but something of inspired imagination and poetic literary brilliance, has not until recently given the impression of precisely knowing what he was about; but with The Great Gatsby and some of his recent short stories, he seems to be entering upon a development in the course of which he may come to equal in mastery of his material those novelists whom he began by surpassing by vividness in investing it with glamor.

Unfortunately, by 1940, in another letter to Perkins, Fitzgerald was fretting about what would become of his mastepiece.

Would the 25-cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye - or is the book unpopular?  Has it had its chance?  Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers - I can maybe pick one - make it a favorite with classrooms, profs, lovers of English prose - anybody?  But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much!

Within months, Fitzgerald would be dead in Los Angeles.  His notes for The Last Tycoon were edited by Wilson for publication the following year.

VIVE LE TOUR!

It's July and you know what the means - it's Tour de France time around Chez TEV.  Despite the doping scandals (and, really, if baseball tested as rigorously as cycling, it was be no less plagued by controversy), we're going to be following events closely in the weeks ahead.  We recommend VeloNews for their live coverage, and the Tour de France 2007 blog for blogging impressions. 

Additionally, while the real thing unfolds, we'll be participating once again in the "Indoor Tour de France," hosted by our cycling coach Gary Kobat.  Thirteen days of indoor cycling designed to match stages of the Tour.  Not for the faint of heart, as Gary likes to say.

We're off to follow the prologue, with Kloden already looking very hard to beat for the win ... Go Levi!

SOMETHING NEW

The Beatles have been much on my mind lately, prompted by a pair of recent developments, the first being John Colapinto's New Yorker profile of Paul McCartney, timed to coincide with the release of his 21st solo album, Memory Almost Full.

Colapinto has come in for his share of knocks recently. Some were fair – his hyperventilating, thin-skinned responses to some fairly benign criticism made him look ridiculous, petty and unprofessional. Some were off the mark, however – specifically those that chided him for revealing nothing new about his famous subject. My feeling is that such criticisms ignore the nature of these kinds of New Yorker pieces – pieces meant for general audiences, not intended to satisfy Beatles experts. (Perhaps Colapinto's critics would prefer Seymour Hersh to have done the profile.) They seem, instead, intended to give a sense of what it's like to spend time in the presence of its subject. A subject so thoroughly scrutinized and interviewed that even the best journalist is unlikely to learn anything new – a challenge which, to be fair, Colapinto doesn't seem to have quite prepared himself for. (Although it's interesting to me that his audio post on what it was like being around McCartney was much more engaging than most of the piece. It's a shame that spirit didn't inform more of the profile.)

However, it's wrong to say that the piece revealed nothing new about McCartney. It revealed one point that was of great interest, to me, at any rate. In the profile, Colapinto describes McCartney refusing a mother's request to pose for a picture with two young boys:

Eventually the woman went away, and McCartney said, "Everyone's got a camera. Everyone's got a phone, man. It's not just the paparazzi – which I've had two of this morning. And I've had two requests from the public as well, to take a photo with them. And I don't want to take a photo with every single person in the world – especially when I'm having a private moment."

To understand why I found this point so interesting, you have to go back to April 1981. I'm a 16-year-old on my first solo trip to London for a week. (Different times.) I'm also a rabid Beatles fan who played Paul in a Beatles sound-alike band (photo at right from a 1984 gig), so I spend most of the trip checking out London's (and later Liverpool's) Beatles sites. After visits to the Cavern, Abbey Road, Penny Lane and the rest, I find myself at the Soho Square office of McCartney's MPL (McCartney Productions Limited).

Standing across the street, photographing the building, I can see the top of a head in the second floor conference room window and that's all I need to know that Macca is in the building. I find the nearest lamppost and shimmy up as far as I can for a better view, holding on with one hand, Kodak Instamatic Pocket 20 in the other. I snap a few shots, slide down the post – to find two Bobbies waiting for me.

Now, this is only five months after John Lennon has been murdered, so the police are naturally uncomfortable about anyone getting too close to the remaining Beatles. They're in the process of patting me down when McCartney comes down and steps out the front door.

"Oh, he's all right," he says. "I know him. You can leave him."

I'm stunned and speechless and all I can manage to do is stick my camera into the hands of one of the Bobbies and stand beside Paul. Paul chuckles and says, "Oh, they can't do that." But the officers are clearly every bit as thrilled as I am and say they're happy to. The photo they took appears below. No jokes about the hair, please.

(The autograph is there because I had the chance to interview him three years later when he came through New York on a press junket. When it was over, I gave him the photo and said, "You might not remember this but I nearly got arrested climbing up a lamppost outside your office." He lit up at the memory, smiling as he took the photo and signed it. "Ahh, that was you. Ya drip." There are few moments in my life that compare with being affectionately called a "drip" by Sir Paul McCartney.)

It's worth noting that McCartney was holding something in his right hand so, when he took leave of me, we shook hands my right to his left – and all I could think walking away was "I just shook the hand that wrote 'Hey Jude' ... "

So, you can see why the notion that he no longer likes to stand in photos surprised me and must surely constitute new information. And I admit, I can't help but wonder if the real reason for his reluctance is as simple as vanity – he wears his age roughly and my gut says he doesn't want a plethora of 65-year-old McCartney jpegs filling up the internet.

I said there were two things that had prompted my Beatles reverie. The other one also addresses the question of what's new that can still be said about them, and also speaks to the difference between the general reader and the Extreme Beatles Fan.

Last year, the New York Times ran this story on the runaway success of Recording the Beatles, a self-published detailed look at all the Beatles' recording equipment and techniques. I knew as soon as I read it that I had to have it but the book was out of stock already and a second printing was in the works. Last week, I finally got aroud to forking out the $100 and the book arrived with a resplendent thud a few days later. It's a gorgeous, absorbing package and I've been consumed since it arrived.

The 537-page book is beautifully designed and assembled with the highest of production values – and it weighs a ton. The authors, Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan have tracked down every piece of equipment in Abbey Road, from mixers to outboard gear to speakers and have provided archival quality photographic documentation and detailed technical descriptions. For the Beatles fan who can't live without really understanding the role of the Fairchild 660 limiter, this is $100 well spent.

 

But the most absorbing part of the book is the "production" chapter, which details how the records themselves were made. Analyses of different takes and mixing methods – what was double-tracked or mixed down to allow for an open track (in the case of "Help," opened up solely to allow George repeated attempts to record that tricky guitar run); the role that ADT (Artificial Double Tracking) played in the recordings; how many of the versions we know were edited together from multiple takes. I especially like the "A Closer Look" sidebars which delve into specific songs in detail. ("A Hard Day's Night" is below – forgive the poor scan but the book is too unwieldy to scan easily.  It's really here to whet your appetites.)

It's an endlessly fascinating read, and I'm planning to track down Brian Kehew – a Los Angeles resident – for a future 3MI interview. Until then, it's enough to make me want to pull my old 1963 Hofner 500/1 bass out of closet, and see how much I can remember.

ANYWAY, FOR THAT STUFF, YOU NEED TO HIT TIMES SELECT

We're not sure what amuses us more - the notion that Times readers, true to the demographic reports, are more interested in immigration than sex; or the notion that anyone at all would turn to the Times to fill their internet sex needs.  Either way, we're amused.  (And yes, we know we should be working.)