The New York Times - Our Man in Boston

Current Reads • Question, Questions, Questions?

Amongst the incalculably lengthy list of authors who have not received their due (also an incalculable notion) you will find, with regularity, the name of Padgett Powell. Powell (Edisto), who teaches at the University of Florida and has collected plaudits from Ian Frazier and Barry Hannah to Saul Bellow, has a new fiction out that his publisher labels “an exuberant book” and a “wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language,” and about which Richard Ford blurbs, “If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel (and maybe they did. Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell’s.”

And what is this “bebop solo of a book?” Well, it seems the authorial conceit exhibited in The Interrogative Mood (Ecco) is that its 164 pages are composed entirely of questions—a literary feat you may or may not find engrossing. Despite the well-intentioned promoters hyper-enthusiasm for this tome, this “playful and profound book” may not be the best access point into Powell’s oeuvre, since it is a huge deviation from the lyricism exhibited in his past work. And then again its originality puts it in a class by itself.

In the Important to the Book Industry venue, Josh Emmons intones the book is:

…a fearless meditation on the sublime and the trivial, a hydra-headed reflection of life as it is experienced and of thought as it is felt. With echoes of the Tao Te Ching, “My Funny Valentine,” Pascal’s “Pensées,” “Green Eggs and Ham,” Annie Dillard’s “This Is the Life” and countless other quests for conviction that secretly understand and depend on the futility of such quests, it is wondrous strange.

True enough. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 6, 2009

» Read an excerpt from The Interrogative Mood.

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Current Reads • Taking Woodstock

OK, unlike everyone else in my generation, I was not at Woodstock. (Then and now, not exactly my idea of fun.) But as this week marks the 40th anniversary of the legendary cultural milestone, you will be carpet-bombed with endless blather and footage—unless you are sequestered in Guantánamo. Michael Lang, who with Artie Kornfeld produced the festival, weighs in with his bird’s-eye, present-at-the-creation point of view with The Road to Woodstock (Ecco). The New York Times, performing one of the diminishing tasks at which it excels, rounded up a panel of commentators with shrewd opining such as Morris Dickstein’s:

Woodstock the concert, Woodstock the actual 1969 event, may be remembered through a haze of nostalgia by those who were actually there, now approaching retirement age. But the real influence on America came from Woodstock the legend, set off first by sensational press coverage, then the 1970 movie by Michael Wadleigh, then by frequent anniversaries like the one coming up this week.

By the way, plans for a 40th anniversary concert have reportedly been tabled. —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 17, 2009

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Current Reads • Performance Anxiety

Alex Rodriguez stopped being interesting to me about the time he went from the Seattle Mariners—where he played with Junior Griffey—to Texas, where he was handed 200 million dollars to play baseball. Come to think of it, major-league baseball became much less interesting to me at about the same time, but that’s another matter.

Selena Roberts, former New York Times and current Sports Illustrated writer, has apparently maintained a fascination with A-Rod (also referred to by his detractors as “A-Fraud” for his admitted use of performance-enhancing substances) and has cobbled together A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (Harper) from her exposé of Rodriguez’s use of performance enhancers to capture, as her publicist hyperbolizes, “baseball’s greatest player as a tragic figure in pinstripes.” Which tragically bends the notion of tragedy, as I know it.

These kinds of books tend toward the polarities of hagiography or hatchetry that—no surprise—mirrors the win-lose scoring of sports. I did attend to the recent Manny Ramirez study (Becoming Manny: Inside the Life of Baseball’s Most Enigmatic Slugger by Jean Rhodes and Shawn Boburg), which was a thoughtful and nuanced analysis of another man-child who had been handed hundreds of millions of dollars to play baseball. In Ramirez’s case, the carping in Boston about his paycheck continued almost unabated despite the schizoid BoSox winning their first two world championships in nearly a century during his tenure.

For publicity magnets, Rodriguez has the New York media echo chamber, Madonna, and other attention stuff going for him, and Roberts’s book assumes we care about this major-league narcissist—but it might be a better book if it suggested why we should. You can thank Drew Magary for that, who collected some of the most illuminating tidbits to be found in Roberts’s tome. —Robert Birnbaum, May. 29, 2009

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Reading • The Chattering Classes

It’s really noisy out there. “Conservative bloggers jab Obama on foreign languages.” (Huh?) Christie is getting divorced. There is a new cell phone. Angelina had twins. Microsoft cut the price of the Xbox 360. Freddie, Fannie, and Bernie Mac are a mess. Brett Favre wants to un-retire. There’s a new Batman movie.

The chattering classes are bleating and ululating. Except for Lou Dobbs—he’s braying. Iraq? Iran? Afghanistan? Forget about it. Mugabe—bad. Darfur—what’s that? Luckily, American political tradition allows for a lack of attention to the upcoming election until after Labor Day. Good luck figuring it out even then.

The problem as I see it is—given the immense amount of effort it would require for aspirants to good and informed citizenship to personally ascertain and verify the shit-stream of what we still call information—is to find voices and visions that one finds reliable and useful. To indulge the still-popular fetish for full disclosure (and lists), here’s a list of those to whom I pay attention:

Frank Rich and Gail Collins in The New York Times
Tom Engelhardt and his various associates at The Nation Institute
Robert Scheer at Truthdig.com
Jon Lee Anderson and Alma Guillermoprieto at The New Yorker
Christopher Hitchens, variously at The Atlantic and Vanity Fair
Hendrick Hertzberg at The New Yorker

—Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 21, 2008

Discuss This • Tweet this • Post to Facebook • FILE UNDER: Alma Guillermoprieto, Christopher Hitchens, Frank Rich, Gail Collins, Hendrick Hertzberg, Jon Lee Anderson, Robert Scheer, The Atlantic, The Nation Institute, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tom Engelhardt, Truthdig, Vanity Fair

About Our Man in Boston

When Robert Birnbaum was an adolescent, his mother took him to the Chicago Public Library every week, and he would leave with armloads of books. Ever since he has been an avid reader—except in the cultural sinkhole era of the ’70s (think Saturday Night Fever).

Edited by Bridget Fitzgerald

Illustration by Witold Ridel

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Saturday, November 21, 2009