I and a few other of the usual suspects get a mention in today’s New York Times. Reporter Sarah Boxer writes about literary bloggers who “review the reviews” in the major book sections of our nation’s newspapers.

In the immortal words of Flann O’Brien, they got me all wrong in that pub. Here’s the passage about Golden Rule Jones:

Most book-review reviews are summary, to say the least. Their main purpose, it seems, is to get noticed and linked to by more popular blogs. This, for example, was Golden Rule Jones’s assessment of The Chicago Tribune’s book coverage on Sunday: “What I liked: Good numbers; timely, worthwhile selections. What I didn’t like: Reviews are a little skimpy.”

One of those old fashioned sticklers for the truth — remember them? — would feel compelled to mention that my assessment ran on for another 861 words. (See for yourself here.) Longer, just for comparison, than any of the reviews that ran in the Trib that week.

As a sometime writer, I can sympathize with Boxer. I often think of my old instructor in poetic meter and form, Richard Tillinghast. When evaluating our clumsy efforts at alcaics, villanelles, or Catullan hendecasyllabics, Tillinghast eschewed the usual letter grades in favor of his own special acronyms. Most of my efforts merited an “NB” or an “NTB,” which stood for “not bad” or “not too bad,” respectively. Did others get a “B,” a “TB,” or even a “G”? I’ll never know; it’s funny to imagine they did.

My favorite notation, however, was “BBRS.” That stood for “betrayed by rhyme scheme.” As you might guess, BBRS appeared in the margin wherever you chose a word simply because of the way it sounded, regardless of the meaning or effect you were pursuing before you reached that point.

In the intervening decades I’ve discovered that the principle of BBRS applies not only to poetry, but to writing of all kinds. Sometimes a half-truth just sounds better. It fits the stress patterns of the piece. It’s punchier. And it’s completely undetectable to most readers. Half the time the matter is so trivial that who really cares?

But you gotta resist.

Kelly Jane Torrance points us to an article in Folio reporting that the Atlantic Monthly will no longer publish fiction as of August 2005. It apparently plans a “newsstand only fiction issue,” whatever that means.

She also links to an article she wrote last year on the death of the short story. I liked the following passage, which mirrors my own recent thoughts upon reading Larry Heinemann’s forgotten masterpiece Close Quarters, excerpts from which first appeared in Playboy:

“What kind of man reads Playboy?” an ad for the magazine once asked. The answer was a man who liked to read. Alongside airbrushed nubiles, one found fiction by Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Màrquez, and Italo Calvino. Could the “readers” of Maxim even pronounce such names?

I just updated my events list to include a few new items (see highlights in bold at right), to which I was tipped off by this week’s Reader. In the course of doing so, I discovered that the Left of Center Bookstore now has a website (hurrah), so I added that to the “more events” list (to your left). Just by chance, this week’s issue of TimeOut Chicago has a nice profile of Arlene Levy, LOC’s owner.

Incidentally, Joeff Davis has posted some pictures from Christopher Hitchens’s recent appearance at LOC. If anyone has excerpts from Brian Nemtusak’s article in the March 3 Reader (”My Liquid Dinner with Hitch”), please share.

I don’t expect to be blogging this afternoon, since I’ll be out and about, visiting museums, having dinner with friends, and trying, as every year, to avoid thinking about my Irish great-grandmother’s bewildered response to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln: “What was he doing in a theater on Good Friday?”

Wendi Kaufman, aka the Happy Booker, has Alan Cheuse as a guest today. It’s interesting to hear who Cheuse is reading or planning to read right now: Allende, Littell, Ghosh, Capote, Steinbeck, Scott Wolven, Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and a bio of the painter Mark Gertler.

This reminds of the interesting piece Julie Salamon did on Gregory Rabassa and Clarice Lispector in the New York Times a couple weeks back. Rabassa, who has a memoir coming out next week, said of Lispector: “I was flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” But I was more interested in Salamon’s discussion of the crônica. It almost sounds like the Brazilian counterpart of the European feuilleton, except with a diary aspect:

She could also be very funny, most pointedly in her “crônicas,” newspaper columns (literally “chronicles”) that she published in the Saturday edition of a national daily newspaper, O Jornal do Brasil, from August 1967 until December 1973. (A fine sampling is available in English in “Selected Crônicas,” published by New Directions and translated by Giovanni Pontiero.) This genre is a Brazilian specialty, a newspaper column that allows poets and writers wide latitude. They can write a kind of diary one week, an essay the next, a story or simply a random thought. Think of them as literary blogs, but on newsprint.Lispector began writing crônicas to make money, but also thrived in this idiosyncratic form, which gave rise to profound reflection as well as amusing riffs on social convention and family relations. “When mothers of Russian descent start to kiss their children, instead of being content with one kiss they want to give them 40,” she wrote. “I tried to explain this to one of my sons but he told me I was just looking for an excuse to justify all those kisses.”

These newspaper columns frequently offered their readers a more potent brew, as jolting as Brazilian coffee. Lispector’s imagery could be intense, mystical and often violent, seeming sometimes like the brilliant ravings of a madwoman. One of her shortest crônicas, at least as reprinted in the book, was called “A Challenge for the Psychoanalysts.” The entire story went like this: “I dreamed that a fish was taking its clothes off and remained naked.”

Thinking about my trip to Northern Michigan, I was reminded that I have another tale from last summer. It’s not about bookshops and it doesn’t really have a particular point, but here it is anyway. Maybe it has an underlying meaning unknown to me, like the woman’s story in the Times.

Last June, I had a business conference in The Hague and added an extra day to my itinerary with the idea I might go to Dublin. (The extra day was the 16th.) But when I woke up in my hotel room that morning, I decided that I just couldn’t face Dublin on Bloomsday plus 100. Perhaps it was the spirit of James Joyce whispering in my ear.

A week before, knowing I might decide to skip Dublin, I had looked into trains to Paris and figured I could probably get down there, see a little bit of the city, have dinner with a friend, sleep in a hotel by the train station, then reboard bright and early so I would arrive at Amsterdam-Schiphol in time for my 2 p.m. flight back to the States. Since I wanted to do this cheaply, I did an online search and found an inexpensive hotel near the Gare de Nord, checking a few online reviews to make sure the hotel wasn’t too terrible.

Early the next morning, bag over my shoulder, I took a tram from the hotel in the Hague to Central Station, and got on a train to Paris.

Sitting on the train I thumbed through my little red Paris par Arrondissement, looking for the Quai Francois-Mauriac, where a friend happened to be staying. No such street. How can that be? Later I discovered that my mapbook predated the construction of national library (the BNF), which remade large parts of the neighborhood on the left bank of the Seine below Pont d’Austerlitz. I felt a little like Melville’s Redburn, trying to navigate modern day Liverpool with his father’s old guidebook. Except in this case I was my own father. You’ll find that happens as you get older.

(At this point let me recommend Multimap.com, Europe’s equivalent of Mapquest.)

I arrived in Paris about noon and, after standing in line to buy my return ticket, walked two blocks over to the Hotel De Bruxelles et du Nord. I paid 60 euros for a room. Clean, secure, perfectly acceptable for a guy traveling by himself. Not picturesque but rather “pocketesque,” as Redburn would say.

As I left the hotel the manager yelled “key!” I forgot that about Paris. I gave him my key. If a Frenchman doesn’t smile, it means he likes you.

The forecast called for rain, but it was a beautiful, sunny day. I walked down the Boulevards Magenta, de Tour, and Beaumarchais until I reached the Rue de Rivoli, where I bought an apple at a little farmer’s market. Realizing I was near the Ile St-Louis, at the Place de Bastille I turned down Henry IV and walked across a corner of the Ile on my way over to the left bank.

Since this is turning into a mere litany of Paris street names, I’ll simply say that as soon as I arrived on the left bank, I followed the quais all the way down to Mauriac.

The journey took me through a university area (shady streets, students coming in and out) and then past the welcoming portals of the BNF. What a place. Reminded me of a Guy Billout drawing.

I arrived at the apartment building and no one answered the bell. I sat in the grass and read a newspaper. A few minutes later I heard a noise, saw the building door slam shut, and saw my friend disappearing into the lobby.

We went up to the top of the building, drank beer, and looked out on the library grounds. It was too hot up there, so we came inside for a while and talked. I browsed the bookshelves in the apartment and I found a copy of Tardi’s illustrated version of Celine’s Voyage au bout de la nuit. I had never seen it before. I checked to see if my favorite scene was depicted and there it was: a tiny drawing of the hero, pushing his trolley of auto parts, from the chapter based on Celine’s experiences as an employee at Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant.

We decided to walk north along the Seine. At one point we had to walk single-file atop a wall bordering a highway on-ramp. At a little concrete plaza we sat down, gazed out on the river, and talked about the upcoming election in the US. A few other people were sitting around too. In the center of the plaza, a man and women were solemnly practicing the tango.

(This is the crazy kind of thing you see in Paris. I remember a New Year’s Eve back in the early 1980s, sometime after midnight, sitting in a cafe with friends. Across the room, a lovely woman in her 20s, bored or drunk or both, was playfully pressing her face against the cafe window. People outside would stop, see her scrunched-up face against the glass, and laugh. She kept at it. Finally a boy of about fifteen passing by on the sidewalk spotted her and headed straight for the window. With a big smile on his face, he leaned up to the glass and gave it a kiss. Laughter, applause.)

After a while we walked back to have dinner at one of the restaurants along the river. There are a several old barges (peniches) on the Seine that now serve as nightclubs, with live music, dancing, etc. A few of them dock near the BNF, and in the same area a few outdoor restaurants are down along the river too. We had steak and frites and a bottle of wine sitting in one of the outdoor cafes.

When we finished, about 11 p.m., I reversed my afternoon path through the city, but crossing instead at the Pont d’Austerlitz and otherwise varying it a little so I could see a few more blocks of Paris. (If you’re keeping track, you’ll notice I’ve crossed the Seine three times from two different directions, just like the taxicab in “Babylon Revisited.”)

It occurred to me that I had never been to Paris in the summertime before. In the Marais neighborhood, the streets were crowded and the restaurants and bars were fairly overflowing with customers. I walked by the Musee des Arts et Metiers, which figures so prominently in Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and where my wife once turned to me, gestured to an exhibit, and said, “Did you know Cyrus McCormick invented the cotton gin?” (She was joking.)

Halfway to the hotel, I was stopped by a French couple in their early 20s who asked for directions. A passerby heard our discussion and came up to me after the couple walked off. Late 30s, dressed in a business suit and carrying a briefcase, he looked like the guy on the cover of Toussaint’s Monsieur. With a serious look on his face, he said: “I just want to tell you: don’t listen to what the newspapers say. We love Americans.” What can you say to something like that? I thanked him, and he continued on down the street without another word.

I made it to the Gare du Nord on time the next morning, boarded my train, arrived at Schiphol with time to spare, and was home the same day.

Taking a cue from Ed’s used bookstore horror story, Scott provides his. Here’s one of mine, word for word, no “humor” added. The place is the Red Fox Inn Bookstore in Horton Bay, Michigan. The time is last summer. I’m browsing the shelves when the proprietor approaches me:

PROP: Have you read Hemingway?

ME: I’ve read some.

PROP: Take a look at this. [Hands me a memoir by someone who knew Hemingway.]

ME: [Looking at the book.] I’m going to take a look at some of the Hemingway sites around here. I may be back.

PROP: Here, this is a map of the sites in the area. Only five dollars. ME: [Quickly looking at the map, then handing it back.] Thanks.

In the new Bookforum, Bruce Bawer offers a rare remembrance of Guy Davenport that’s almost worthy of the subject:

For Davenport’s erudition was staggering, his range of knowledge seemingly unrivaled. No matter what he was writing about — Socrates, Joyce, Kafka, Ruskin, Ives, Balthus, Defoe, Santayana, Montaigne, Tchelitchew, Gaudier-Brzeska, table manners, prehistory, the Civil War, Pentecostal snake handlers — he not only appeared to know the subject inside out but seemed to have thought it through with such deep and singular imagination as to make it entirely and excitingly his own. Moreover, he wrote with extraordinary elegance, his prose a model of classical directness, rhythm, vigor, and specificity.

* * *

Davenport was a model of intellectual independence, adopting nobody’s theories and toeing nobody’s line (when he wrote that Lévi-Strauss was too original of mind “to be the exponent of a master or a school,” he might have been referring to himself). Long a contributor to National Review, he mocked academic groupthink — and thwacked the New York Review of Books for having “done more to discourage good writing in the United States than the Litkontrol branch of the Politburo has in the Soviet Union.” But he also railed against conservative orthodoxies, reviling religious fundamentalism and decrying capitalism’s obliteration of American communities.

I’ve always envied Sarah Weinman, you know. No, not for the obvious reasons. I envy Sarah for the simple fact that she can occasionally interrupt her coverage of crime and mystery fiction to comment on real-world crimes. This got me thinking, only half-jokingly: What kinds of stories in the daily news could a blogger covering literary fiction comment on in the same way?

I thought I had “cracked the case” early on when I read a story in the New York Times Travel section in which the writer described how she decided on the spur of the moment one day to fly to Paris, check into a hotel, and stay for several days eating expensive food and (I would guess) punishing the locals with her execrable French. To make her escape from New York, she gives her husband some song-and-dance and then, to top it off, lies to her small child about having a sick friend.

And I thought, yes, it’s obvious: the unreliable narrator. Someone who tells a story that means the opposite of what they seem to believe it means. Later readings of the works of Augusten Burroughs only strengthened my conviction.

But eventually I realized it was too easy, and maybe too superficial. I wanted to read a story I felt intuitively was right for the genre of “true lit,” even if I couldn’t explain why.

Stop reading here if you have a weak stomach.

Another story I flagged appeared last March in the Times. In “A Flyby Diagnosis On the M14,” Abigail Zuger wrote about the moral dilemma that confronts doctors when they observe symptoms of disease in people on the street:

There is the skinny man on the subway train with the pale yellow cast to his skin, and a belly straining his shirt buttons. He needs evaluation for a transplant in short order: his liver is gasping its last. The vegetable clerk in the supermarket clearly has an AIDS-related skin cancer snaking across his face. It is not too late for him to save himself, but he has to do something fast.

A woman in the cereal aisle is built like a lemon, fat in the middle and skinny at either end, with a slight mustache, middle-age acne, and a shopping cart overflowing with pastry. She probably has polycystic ovary syndrome, an endocrinologic aberrancy that has left her infertile and diabetic. Madam, your grocery selection is dangerous.

A tall teenager is smoking a cigarette outside his office building — a handsome guy, until he turns and reveals the small, circular bald spots scattered over the back of his head. If they are flat, he probably has an autoimmune disease; steroids might help. These actually look slightly raised, though — could it be a kind of tuberous sclerosis? The question will never be answered: he glares at the stranger staring at his head, stamps out his butt and heads back inside.

The toddler in a passing stroller has a pinched, wide-eyed face out of a textbook: fetal alcohol syndrome from a boozing mother. Should someone stop that stroller and do something? And the huge man at the back of the bus snoring and waking and snoring again, and then, suddenly, not breathing at all? Sleep apnea. Sir, you could use a doctor.

They all could use a doctor. What is a passing doctor to do?

She goes on to explain why doctors can’t (or won’t) simply rush up to everyone who appears ill and begin to advise them. Worrisome, huh? Also somewhat sickening. But as I read this I also thought that there was something about the doctor’s story that reminded me of the best serious fiction I read. I’m not sure I can even explain it.

This was, as I say, last March. If you’ve read Ian McEwan’s new novel Saturday, or the excerpt that ran in the New Yorker in December under the title “Diagnosis,” you know where I’m going. In the book, McEwan’s surgeon-hero avoids a beating by doing a Zuger-like on-the-spot diagnosis on one of his attackers.

Strange, huh?