Amazon Glitch Roundup

This has certainly turned into the internet obsession of the day, no? I wrote two posts in haste last night and called for a temporary boycott of Amazon.

More news came out today. I am grateful to the intrepid AEJ for doing updates in the comments here; in fact, I think her comments are so useful that they deserve a place in an actual post. I reprint them, in order, here:

This is an interesting wrinkle - a hacker is claiming credit for this whole thing, saying he created an exploit that takes advantage of Amazon's "Mark this as inappropriate" tag. Of course, I'd be happy to hear that this was indeed not something Amazon did itself, so I'm trying not to allow my preference for this to be true to outweigh reasonable skepticism; still, I would say it's plausible. (Both because this type of filtering would be idiotic as a business move, and Amazon isn't usually idiotic, and because there is a whiff of mischief about the whole thing - from the beginning I've thought this had to be the work of an individual, whether within Amazon or not, rather than corporate policy.)

More at Ars Technica.

This will be my last comment - sorry to keep coming back, but I've been really bothered by this so I keep looking for news and I'm just passing along stuff as I hear it... Anyway, there are now conflicting stories - see these two posts on Salon - coming out of Amazon (not surprising, since as others have noted they hardly want to admit either to being hacked or to doing this intentionally) - but the upshot is that there are apparently something close to 58,000 titles affected and they're fixing it now. Whether someone outside actually found a vulnerability and pranked them or someone in France (really? France is our scapegoat?) mistagged stuff or whatever, I think the possibility that this is a corporate policy is vanishingly small. As the Amazon spokesperson put it, "embarrassing and ham-fisted," definitely; the good news is I think it really was a coding debacle rather than a homophobic salvo. So while I'm still irked, as others have noted, that they haven't just apologized to the writers and readers affected, I'm taking some small solace in the current look of things.

Nice work, AEJ. You've convinced me to suspend judgment for a bit, especially as I agree with your suggestion that that the likelihood of this being a corporate policy is "vanishingly small." Of course, I would like to see all of this get fixed within a reasonable amount of time.

Of course, one of the annoying things here is that we are unlikely to get a thorough and accurate explanation of what actually happened--or, at least we are unlikely to get that explanation anytime soon. Until we know for sure, Gawker/Valleywag offers this handy guide to the possible causes. And if you have wondered whether there are ways to analyze this whole debacle using anthropology, allow me to recommend this post by Ted Gideonse. Ted seems to have taken a page from Obama's book, because (as you'll see in his post) he's clearly the coolest head in the room right now.

There is a good lesson from this, though: gays and their allies are finally mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore. We're coming for you next, Mormons!

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Amazon's Attitude Toward Homosexuality

[Fosco thanks his former student Laura for pointing out the following problem.]

Something is seriously amiss at Amazon. As I noted earlier, Amazon has removed many gay/lesbian books from its ranking system because they are considered "adult." While this is repulsive in and of itself, there is a further problem. Apparently, these books are being excluded from searches at the site. Otherwise, how might you explain the results of an Amazon search for the word "homosexuality"? Here is the screen shot (click to see it full-sized):

Yes, it appears that the top search result for "homosexuality" is a book that claims to be a guide to preventing homosexuality. Note, this book's Amazon sales rank is #119,767. And yet, somehow it is the top hit for a search of the term "homosexuality." Does this seem problematic to you? Yeah, me too.

Please join the Amazon boycott until this problem is resolved.

N.B., for those of you who are wondering, the only way to prevent possible homosexuality in your kids is to not have kids. For any parents who are worried about this, I highly recommend that solution.

UPDATE: As AEJ notes in the comments below, this does not seem to be a policy decision on Amazon's part. As of 4/14/09, I am rescinding my call for a boycott. Hooray! I can spend 10% of my income at Amazon again!

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How Will We Know When Judith Butler Cracks the Bestseller List?

Remember when you were a horny teenager and you went to websites like Amazon.com to look for really sexy adult content, like books on Queer Theory? Then, remember how you used to order boxes of those books, hoping your mom wouldn't open the telltale smiling box?

When I was twelve, my good friend C used to keep a dog-eared copy of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet under his mattress. Sometimes, late at night, we would read (by flashlight) sentences like the one below, barely able to keep our hands off our pubescent erections:

At the same time, however, just as it comes to seem questionable to assume that cultural constructs are peculiarly malleable ones, it is also becoming increasingly problematical to assume that grounding an identity in biology or 'essential nature' is a stable way of insulating it from social interference.

Wow, I get hot just hearing those words again.

A few years later, I used to sneak out of the house to attend late night "Queer Theory" parties with some of the more sexually-advanced students at my high school. We never had one of our teen orgies without a copy of Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe. Trust me, there is nothing that gets teens off like a careful historical study of gay marriage in the Middle Ages.

Okay, okay: why am I doing this whole facetious riff? Well, because, as the LA Times reports, Amazon.com has a quiet new policy of labeling certain books as containing "adult" content. As the LAT blog notes, an "adult" content tag removes the book from sales rankings, Amazon's bestseller lists, and "in some cases, being de-ranked also means being removed from Amazon's search results."

At first glance, this may seem reasonable enough: maybe you don't want your tween coming up with Bukake porn when she's searching for the new Jonas Brothers CD. However, the execution of this policy seems to be suspiciously homophobic. As the LAT reports:

Our research shows that these books have lost their ranking: "Running with Scissors" by Augusten Burroughs; "Rubyfruit Jungle" by Rita Mae Brown, "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel, "The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1" by Michel Foucault, "Bastard Out of Carolina" by Dorothy Allison (2005 Plume edition), "Little Birds: Erotica" by Anais Nin, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominque Bauby (1997 Knopf edition), "Maurice" by E.M. Forster (2005 W.W. Norton edition) and "Becoming a Man" by Paul Monette, which won the 1992 National Book Award.

Books that remain ranked include: "Naked" by David Sedaris; "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller; "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis; "Wifey" by Judy Blume; "The Kiss" by Kathryn Harrison; the photobooks "Playboy: Helmut Newton" and "Playboy: Six Decades of Centerfolds"; "Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs; "Incest: From 'A Journal of Love'" by Anais Nin; "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominque Bauby (2007 Vintage International edition), "Maurice" by E.M. Forster (2005 Penguin Classics edition).

Certianly [sic] many of the books that are no longer ranked are no more "adult" than many of those that are -- as the list above shows, the same book, by different publishers, might meet either fate. And Kindle editions of some books remain ranked. "Unfriendly Fire," for example, is #1 in Gay and Lesbian Nonfiction on the Kindle -- even as the hardcover of the book, which was released on March 3, does not show up at all when searched for.

For those of you who are keeping score at home, there is a suspiciously large number of gay-themed books that end up being labeled "adult"--including academic works like Foucault's History of Sexuality.

Fosco decided to pursue this line of inquiry, testing which books in his academic specialty of queer theory/gay and lesbian studies made it onto the "adult content" list. According to my research, the following important academic texts have been removed from Amazon's ranking system:

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Epistemology of the Closet and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
  
• Judith Butler: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex'
  
• Lee Edelman: No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
  
• Carla Freccero: Queer/Early/Modern (a book that may or may not be by one of Fosco's advisors).
  
• Thomas Laqueur: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
  
• Michael Warner: Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory
  
• Marjorie Garber: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life
  
• Leo Bersani: Homos
  
• John Boswell: Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe

Please note that every one of these books is an academic book, dealing with literary interpretation, historical research, or sociological analysis. Some of them are pretty difficult to read--theory-wise, that is. However, there is nothing particularly "adult" about most of these books, unless by "adult" you mean containing language that is over the head of your average teenager (or, for that matter, your average American adult). But that's not what Amazon means, is it?

I suppose it is hard to be too upset about a policy that may prevent teens from learning about obscure academic books. Even so, I would suggest that there are plenty of queer teens who could find books like those of John Boswell to be meaningful and/or useful. A rigorous history that reveals the lies that the Catholic Church tells about the Church's historical attitudes toward homosexuality? For that right teen, that kind of book could even be life-saving.

Even more upsetting is my discovery that Beth Loffreda's Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder is also included in this "adult" list. Loffreda's book is not academic: it's beautiful and sad and political. It's an extended meditation on anti-gay hate and how the Matthew Shepard murder revealed certain fault lines across our culture. It's a complicated book that refuses the easy answers. And it is certainly not "adult" or obscene--unless, of course, you consider anti-gay murder to be obscene (but that's not what Amazon means, is it?). What it is, for everyone--gay, straight, youth, adult, is a must-read. And yet, Amazon has tried to make this book harder to find. I think that is unforgivable.

Though I'm not computer scientist, it's pretty clear that Amazon's identification of a book as "adult" is based on some sort of text-based algorithm that presumably scans the titles or descriptions of books for certain "adult" words. And yes, I recognize that any algorithm of this sort will never provide a perfect discrimination between "adult" and "non-adult" books. What is equally clear, however, is that this algorithm is using words like "sexuality" and "queer" and "gay" to define a book as adult. And that is unacceptable. I'm not demanding that Amazon stop using an automated process to determine "adult" books; however, I do demand that Amazon fine-tune this algorithm to reflect the fact that gay themes are not "adult."

And so, until Amazon can demonstrate that they have improved this practice or until they stop doing this at all, I will not purchase anything from them. Nor will I provide Amazon links at this website. I would encourage you to join me in this project. (Besides, this might provide a good temporary excuse to shop at your local independent bookstore!)

UPDATE: As Jeremy notes below, Amazon is calling the whole thing a "glitch." However, as Gawker reports, there are several reasons to question the "glitch" explanation. One of them being that, before this became a PR nightmare, Amazon called the whole thing a policy decision. Oops!

UPDATE (4/14/09): It now seems pretty clear to me that this was either an honest mistake on Amazon's part or an act of malicious hacking beyond Amazon's control. Consequently, I'm going to re-embed my Amazon links on this site.

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Rounding Up Food, Because Why Not?

Even though it's the first week of a new academic quarter... And even though Fosco is still groggy from Wednesday night's Springsteen concert... "Foodie Friday" must go off without a hitch. But it may be a bit uninspired...

Forgive me for doing a "roundup" post today. However, there are some things about food that you should know:

• Fosco's delightful college roommate Jeremy is currently in Hong Kong, eating better than anyone could imagine. He has recently discovered some fascinating fruits that Fosco has never heard of. While the langsat sounds appealing (because it is a member of the soapberry family, after all), the sugar-apple sounds best to Fosco. How can you go wrong with a fruit that, as Jeremy describes it, tastes like
  

  a milky, sweet egg custard or ice cream. Eat it cold. Beware its high sugar content, and be prepared to have sticky fingers for a while even after washing.

  Beware the high sugar content? Not in this lifetime.
  
  This makes me wonder why Americans are so stuck on the same old fruits. There are only like seven fruits that appear regularly at the supermarket and in restaurants. While Fosco has nothing against the lowly apple or the stolid banana, wouldn't you like to eat more fruit that tastes like "milky, sweet egg custard"? And how can you resist eating something that is called a "soapberry"? I don't know--I guess Fosco just has a thing for Asian fruits.
  
  
• The redoubtable Maggie offers this excellent meditation on Mark Bittman's Food Matters. From her description of the book, I'm actually quite fascinated by Bittman's argument. As I understand it, he suggests a non-dogmatic way to eat healthier and more eco-consciously (while still reserving plenty of room for delicious things like meat). As Maggie glosses it:
  

  To improve your body, you have to improve your diet, which means long-lasting change, not just abstaining from sugar until your next weigh in. Bittmans' approach is interesting - essentially you bulk up on the veggies and plant matter, remaining vegan (or so) until dinner, when you can eat as you will.

  As someone who is habitually struggling with his weight, Fosco finds this idea to be pretty appealing. Imagine feeling virtuous about yourself and the planet for most of the day and then enjoying a normal meal in the evening (although as Fosco noted last week, "normal" no longer includes fast-food). I think I need to pick up this book. (Once again, Maggie tells me what to read!)
  
  
• Some San Francisco-related food news. First, the (soon-to-be-history?) Chronicle reviews Absinthe, the restaurant of "Top Chef" contestant Jamie Lauren. You remember her: she's the lesbian who always cooked scallops. Strangely enough, the Chronicle found Lauren's scallops to be completely repulsive:
  

  When the scallop dish was placed before us I thought someone had an accident and tried to reshape the presentation because the sunchoke puree was smeared and the four quarter-size grilled scallops were unevenly spaced around a pile of wilted chard, fennel and artichokes. There was a glaze over everything that reminded me of leftovers from a photo shoot. It unfortunately tasted like that too. The scallops didn't even pretend to be warm and the vegetables tasted tired.

  Yuck. Even though a few other dishes were fine, on the whole, this was not a good review. Sorry, Team Rainbow.
  
  Second, the extraordinary No Salad As A Meal has reviewed Charles Phan's new Chinese restaurant in SF. You may know that Phan is the culinary wizard behind Fosco's beloved Slanted Door. The review is kind of lukewarm about the new place, but Fosco would much prefer to focus his attention on the name of Phan's new restaurant: Heaven's Dog. Is it me, or is this a terrible name for a Chinese restaurant? (Although it is better than the name Fosco misremembered when he told this story to David: "Dog Heaven.") After all, "Heaven's Dog" sounds like nothing so much as the name of something on a Chinese menu (in China at least).
  
  
• Thanks to the BeeMaster for this tip: a Grand Rapids, Michigan minor-league baseball team is offering a 4,800 calorie burger. Yes, that's the geographical region of Fosco's early life--is it any wonder that Fosco's genes and eating habits have conspired to produce a tendency toward heaviness? But back to this burger:
  

  The 4-pound, $20 burger features five beef patties, five slices of cheese, nearly a cup of chili and liberal doses of salsa and corn chips, all on an 8-inch sesame-seed bun. That's a lot of dough!
  
  The Grand Rapids Press reports that anyone who eats the entire 4,800-calorie behemoth in one sitting will receive a special T-shirt. Saner fans can divide it up with a pizza cutter and share.

  Umm, sign me up? Sure, eating one would probably mean certain and immediate death, but... wow. Just wow.
  
  Wait until you see what it looks like:
  
  
  Of course, Mark Bittman would be appalled by this burger for several different reasons. But even recognizing that it's probably edible evil, aren't you just a little in awe of it? I mean, haven't you ever thought what it might be like to eat something like this? I just can't look away. But, does it need a warning label?

Saturday Story Hour: Foer on Heart Disease

S-A-TUR-DAY! It's Saturday Story Hour!

There is a (small) part of Fosco that resents the fantastic success of literary wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer. I mean, this kid was born in 1977 and has already written two powerful novels (Fosco particularly recommends his 9/11 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). Even more maddening, he has shown no evidence of writer's block or production anxiety or any of those other psychological impediments that haunt would-be writers of any stripe (including Fosco, alas). He seems to write effortlessly and that, in and of itself at his age, is a provocation.

His work, however, is so damn good that Fosco has a hard time remaining resentful. One of Fosco's favorite short stories is Foer's "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease," originally published in The New Yorker. The New Yorker version is available only to subscribers; however, fortuitously, the entire story appears in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003 and can be read here, courtesy of Google Book Search.

What you'll notice immediately is that this story would be very difficult to transcribe (Fosco briefly considered it). Basically, Foer's narrator in the story invents a supplementary punctuation that can be used to express ideas and emotions that are unavailable in traditional English orthography. Foer's narrator demonstrates the appropriate usage of each of these marks as he describes the conversations within his family. To me, these conversations are absolutely heartbreaking. I hope that you find this story as moving as I do.

You can purchase these books by following the links:

Thank you for your consideration.

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Saturday Story Hour: Roorbach on Love in Big Bend

This is your weekly dose of contemporary fiction. I call it "Saturday Story Hour."

This week, I'm inspired by Fosco Lives! reader Jill and her recent road trip into (what I imagine is called) the Big Bend country of Texas. Years ago, Fosco was floored by the 2002 collection of The O. Henry Prize Stories (seriously, if you can get a hold of it, it will be worth your while). One of the stories in that collection was called "Big Bend" by Bill Roorbach. At the time, Fosco had never heard of Bill Roorbach before. And, to be honest, he's never read anything by him since. Nor is "Big Bend" even the best story in that collection. However, there is just something about the story that has stuck with Fosco (going on seven years now).

When he read the story, Fosco had also never heard of Big Bend National Park. It's a huge national park that runs along the Texas-Mexico border, where the Rio Grande makes a very big bend (natch). It is extremely popular with birders, like Fosco's Aunt Merrill and Uncle Clark, because it's the home of dozens of species that are difficult to see anywhere else. And as for the terrain, the National Park Service notes:

Sometimes considered "three parks in one," Big Bend includes mountain, desert, and river environments. An hour’s drive can take you from the banks of the Rio Grande to a mountain basin nearly a mile high. Here, you can explore one of the last remaining wild corners of the United States, and experience unmatched sights, sounds, and solitude.

Roorbach's story is set in the park and he makes it sound absolutely gorgeous. After reading the story, Fosco became fascinated by Big Bend; however, sadly, he has yet to visit (he hasn't really had any good excuses to visit West Texas lately).

The hero of the story is a retired widower who has decided to work as a park employee at Big Bend for a year. He spends his days doing minor physical labor with a diverse team of other men. When we meet him, he has fallen passionately in love with a visiting birdwatcher from Chicago--a woman who is almost thirty years younger, bulky, and married. Her name is Martha Kolodny. Suddenly, Mr. Hunter (our protagonist) is confused:

Another cause of sleeplessness was Martha Kolodny of Chicago, here in blazing, gorgeous, blooming, desolate Big Bend on an amateur ornithological quest. Stubby called her "Mothra," which had been funny at first, given Ms. Kolodny's size and thorough, squawking presence, but which was funny no longer, given the startling fact of Mr. Hunter's crush on her, which had arrived unannounced after his long conversation with her just this evening, in the middle of a huge laugh from Ms. Kolodny, a huge and happy, hilarious laugh from the heart of her very handsome heart.

There is something about the line "a huge and happy, hilarious laugh from the heart of her very handsome heart" that Fosco adores. For me, at least, there is no resisting Martha Kolodny once she's described that way. She is a bringer of joy--both to Mr. Hunter and to the reader.

The other thing about this story that thrills me is the sheer optimism of it. Here are two oldish, semi-unattractive people who lead extremely sad lives in extremely sad parts of the country falling in mad passionate love like giddy teenagers. It's about a second chance at passionate love--but not in a mawkish or sentimental way. I just find it hard to be cynical about love when I'm reading this story. Not to mention that this surprisingly big, bright love is what makes this story work--it makes the images shimmer in Fosco's imagination.

And so, whether or not I ever read anything else by Bill Roorbach, there is a part of me that will always treasure this story. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

You can read it here.

You may want to order the O. Henry Prize Stories 2002 from Amazon. Or one of Bill Roorbach's books. Please follow these links:




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Coming Soon: Soleil Moon Frye's Philosophical Ontology

Fosco is completely exhausted and maybe a little ill after a weekend of working hard and playing hard. Because he has no energy today (and still some work to finish), he's going to postpone "Music Monday" until tomorrow--at which point it will become "Muesic Tuesday" or something like that.

For your Fosco Lives! pleasure today, I can offer you this brief anecdote. Yesterday (Sunday) afternoon, Fosco decided that he needed a specific academic book immediately for his paper-in-progress. The book is Basic Philosophical Writings by Emmanuel Levinas. The cover looks like this:

Because Fosco was in Daly City at Oz's place, the UCSC library was not a good option. Fosco decided that the most likely bookstore on the entire SF Peninsula to carry this book would be the Stanford bookstore in Palo Alto. Fosco called and reserved the book at said Stanford bookstore (they had it in stock!) and stopped by Palo Alto on the way to visit a friend in Santa Clara. I won't go into details about the difficulty of locating the Stanford bookstore (just know that it was hard).

Once inside the bookstore, Fosco went to retrieve the book from the Information Desk. That's where he had the following conversation:

FOSCO: You're holding a book for me?
MIDDLE-AGED LADY EMPLOYEE: What's your name?
FOSCO: [gives his name]
EMPLOYEE: [fetches book from shelf, glances at the cover.] Emmanuel Lewis?
FOSCO: [assuming that she's making a (pretty clever) joke] Something like that.
EMPLOYEE: [looks at cover again] Oh! Emmanuel Levinas! I read it wrong.
FOSCO: That's okay, I think that's funny. [starts to walk away]
EMPLOYEE: [calling out after Fosco] "Whatchu talkin bout, Willis?"

I think there are numerous lessons that we can learn from this interaction:

1. A book's cover design is key--splitting the author's name into two separate fonts that point in two separate directions is a recipe for disaster.
   
2. People tend to confuse Emmanuel Lewis and Gary Coleman (or, even worse, tend to assimilate Lewis completely to Coleman).
   
3. TV's "Webster" lacked the necessary sassy catchphrase that would have made the show memorable twenty years later.

I can already imagine the LOLtheorists pix that some of Fosco's loyal readers will submit... Todd?

Saturday Story Hour: DF Wallace on Boredom

Good Morning. Take a seat in the circle. This is "Saturday Story Hour."

Attentive readers may have noticed that Fosco has occasionally taken shots at late author David Foster Wallace. For example, when Fosco tastelessly mocked dead John Updike as America's "Most Overesteemed Writer," he couldn't resist slapping DFW around a little as well:

Updike had held the title of "Most Overesteemed Man in American Letters" since the death of Norman Mailer in 2007. Mailer had held the title for almost twenty years, with a brief hiatus from 1996-1999 when David Foster Wallace held the distinction.

Well, if you like seeing Fosco admit that he's wrong and that he's sorry... well, this will be a good post for you. (Although, of course, Fosco is not wrong about Updike. Nor Mailer.)

Yes, Fosco has begun to revise his opinion of David Foster Wallace, owing mainly to the recent "two-fer" in the New Yorker: an article about Wallace's struggles with writing and depression before his suicide last September and a short story by Wallace culled from his unfinished final novel. Both pieces are worthwhile, I think (I would read the reportage before the story, though).

The profile of Wallace and his difficulties is particularly heart-breaking, especially for someone like Fosco who deals with many of the same types of psychological issues (although, fortunately, in much less public ways). For years, Wallace battled with his antidepressants, including an especially powerful (and old) drug called Nardil. However, in the last year of his life, Wallace began to worry that Nardil was preventing him from finishing his new novel:

For some time, Wallace had come to suspect that the drug was also interfering with his creative evolution. He worried that it muted his emotions, blocking the leap he was trying to make as a writer. He thought that removing the scrim of Nardil might help him see a way out of his creative impasse. Of course, as he recognized even then, maybe the drug wasn’t the problem; maybe he simply was distant, or maybe boredom was too hard a subject. He wondered if the novel was the right medium for what he was trying to say, and worried that he had lost the passion necessary to complete it.

That summer, Wallace went off the antidepressant. He hoped to be as drug free as [one of his characters] Don Gately, and as calm. Wallace would finish [his novel] with a clean brain. He entered this new period of life with what [friend and fellow author Jonathan] Franzen calls “a sense of optimism and a sense of terrible fear.” He hoped to be a different person and a different writer. “That’s what created the tension,” Franzen recalls. “And he didn’t make it.”

I find this to be an absolutely wrenching irony--the possibility that the drug that is keeping one alive is also the cause of one's inability to do the work that one lives for. This is actually a pretty typical irony of antidepressants for many people, as some of these drugs manage to produce everyday well-being at the cost of other types of pleasure (sexual, alcohol-related, etc.); however, in Wallace's case, it seems to have been elevated to the level of tragedy.

You probably know Wallace from his blockbuster novel Infinite Jest. Fosco has never been a fan of this novel. Despite Fosco's love for Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, Fosco found Infinite Jest too self-consciously "postmodern" and alternately too ironic then earnest; beyond this, Fosco always resented how the novel became a po-mo status symbol for (almost always male) hipsters who had only read one book (if that) in the entire decade of the 1990s. And thus, in Fosco's estimation, DFW became the most overesteemed American writer for a number of years.

But while Fosco still hasn't come around on Infinite Jest, he was surprised to learn that Wallace himself had developed serious reservations about the book. These reservations, even at the time of his writing that novel, were stylistic:

The sadness over Wallace’s death was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. Wallace, at least, never felt that he had hit his target. His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.” Wallace’s desire to write “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction,” as he put it in a 1996 essay on Dostoyevsky, presented him with a number of problems. For one thing, he did not feel comfortable with any of the dominant literary styles. He could not be a realist. The approach was “too familiar and anesthetic,” he once explained. Anything comforting put him on guard. “It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive,” he said in a long 1991 interview with Larry McCaffery, an English professor at San Diego State. The default for Wallace would have been irony—the prevailing tone of his generation. But, as Wallace saw it, irony could critique but it couldn’t nourish or redeem. He told McCaffery, “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?”

So Wallace’s project required him to invent a language and a stance of his own. “I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff,” he wrote to his editor Michael Pietsch while he was working on his second novel, “Infinite Jest,” which Little, Brown published in 1996.

After Infinite Jest, Wallace became even more convinced that he had not hit on a style that could sustain his deepest concerns. As the New Yorker piece notes:

Wallace was trying to write differently, but the path was not evident to him. “I think he didn’t want to do the old tricks people expected of him,” Karen Green, his wife, says. “But he had no idea what the new tricks would be.” The problem went beyond technique. The central issue for Wallace remained, as he told McCaffery, how to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” He added, “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”

Personally, I find Wallace's ideas about the purposes of fiction to be extremely moving. It is clear that Wallace recognized that Infinite Jest, despite it's popularity, had missed the mark of providing an affirmation of life.

The question then becomes: did Wallace succeed in his final (unfinished) novel? We may have a hint soon enough, as The Pale King manuscript will be published next year. Until then, we can read this excerpt that Wallace published in the New Yorker. The story (and the novel) focuses on the experience of boredom (a deeply philosophical state) among employees at the Internal Revenue Service. To be honest, Fosco is not quite sure how he feels about this story yet. Wallace's style is definitely refined here. And he is masterful at actually evoking the condition of boredom. But what is the "payoff" of this story? I'll be curious to see what you may think of it.


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Late Night Study Break!

Fosco is up late tonight (although it's now "this morning") trying to make some sense of a very difficult Nancy text. No, not this one:

You done got told, Betch!

Saturday Story Hour: Elegant Hedgehogs

You can find your weekly dose of contemporary literature at "Saturday Story Hour."

Fosco has been doing more actual work as of late and, consequently, doing less "pleasure" reading (it goes it cycles, you know). But last week, he did manage to read Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog (or charmingly, in the original French, L'élégance du hérisson). He wants to credit Maggie at The Improvisatrice for recommending the novel in this post of awesome things. When Fosco came across the title again a few weeks ago (in this NY Times article about a publisher that is successfully selling translated literary novels from Europe), he knew he must read it. So he made the trip to his local independent bookstore (as promised) and picked up the surprisingly elegant(!) Europa edition.

The book was a bestseller in France and has garnered mainly positive reviews here in the States (although not every critic appreciates "the accessible book that flatters readers with its intellectual veneer"--ouch). Accessible or no, flattering or no, Fosco enjoyed this book a great deal (and one would think that Fosco hardly needs to be flattered with intellectual veneer). Sure, the mini-essays on philosophy occasionally seem a bit forced (although mostly they do not), but what's important in this novel are the characters and the possibilities of their relationships.

And when it comes to the characters and their lives, the novel is extremely moving. In fact, Fosco is willing to admit that the last two chapters of the novel made him cry. A lot. We're not talking about a few sniffles and moist eyes; we're talking tears streaming down his cheeks, wiping his eyes to be able to see the page in front of him. To be honest, Fosco hasn't cried like that over a book in quite a while.

Now before you run out and read it, you should know that the novel is very French. It is engaged with social class in a way that would never occur in most American novels (whether that's because of a real cultural difference or because of a denial of the role of class in the US, well, that is a good question). The novel is built, to a large extent, around the everyday codes of language and politesse that codify (and enervate) social relations in France (or, at least in this fictional stereotype of France). Also, there is much comedy focusing on two of the long-standing obsessions of the French haute bourgeoisie: socialism and psychoanalysis.

The novel is composed of two intertwined narratives: that of a widowed fiftyish concierge for a ritzy apartment building and that of a precocious twelve-year-old living in the same building. The concierge is from the lower class and has no real formal education; yet, she is an amazingly well-read autodidact who reads philosophy for fun. However, as she is worried about appearing to have ambitions above her station, she hides her keen intellect and cultivated taste behind a veneer of stereotypical concierge stupidity. The twelve-year-old also hides her extraordinary intellect--mainly from her family. She is smart enough to see through the pretensions of the adult world and despairs at the prospect of adult life. She intends to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday.

Does hilarity ensue? Not exactly. What happens is sweet, humane, and (eventually) heartbreaking. This is novel that explores the pleasures and the pains of secrecy, the tentative joys of making a new friend, and the purpose of cats. At its heart is the extremely comforting suggestion (to Fosco at least) that there is a secret fellowship of those who love beauty and who spend their lives searching for it. It is the idea of this fellowship that helps make the pain in this novel bearable for Fosco.

And while "Saturday Story Hour" typically focuses on a short story, there is nothing other than this novel that Fosco can discuss this week. And so, instead of a short story, Fosco offers you the first chapter of this remarkable novel. I hope that it leaves you wanting more.

The first chapter of The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, trans. by Alison Anderson.


1. Whosoever Sows Desire

"Marx has completely changed the way I view the world," declared the Pallières boy this morning, although ordinarily he says nary a word to me.

Antoine Pallières, prosperous heir to an old industrial dynasty, is the son of one of my eight employers. There he stood, the most recent eructation of the ruling corporate elite--a class that reproduces itself solely by means of virtuous and proper hiccups--beaming at his discovery, sharing it with me without thinking or ever dreaming for a moment that I might actually understand what he was referring to. How could the laboring classes understand Marx? Reading Marx is an arduous task, his style is lofty, the prose is subtle and the thesis complex.

And that is when I very nearly--foolishly--gave myself away.

"You ought to read The German Ideology," I told him. Little cretin in his conifer green duffle coat.

To understand Marx and understand why he is mistaken, one must read The German Ideology. It is the anthropological cornerstone on which all his exhortations for a new world would be built, and on which a sovereign certainty is established: mankind, doomed to its own ruin through desire, would do better to confine itself to its own needs. In a world where the hubris of desire has been vanquished, a new social organization can emerge, cleansed of struggle, oppression and deleterious hierarchies.

"Whosoever sows desire harvests oppression," I nearly murmured, as if only my cat were listening to me.

But Antoine Pallières, whose repulsive and embryonic whiskers have nothing the least bit feline about them, is staring at me, uncertain of my strange words. As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble. Concierges do not read The German Ideology; hence, they would certainly be incapable of quoting the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. Moreover, a concierge who reads Marx must be contemplating subversion, must have sold her soul to the devil, the trade union. That she might simply be reading Marx to elevate her mind is so incongruous a conceit that no member of the bourgeoisie could ever entertain it.

"Say hello to your mother," I murmur as I close the door in his face, hoping that the complete dissonance between my two sentences will be veiled by the might of millennial prejudice.

-------------------------------

If you should desire to purchase this novel from Amazon.com, you can do so by using this link:

A very small percentage will go to Fosco and he will appreciate it...


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How to Make a Zombie (in One Bloody Step!)

Before he came to UCSC for his PhD in Literature, Fosco did MA coursework at a depressing commuter university somewhere in the snowy Midwest. One of Fosco's professors there was a specialist in the work of prolific contemporary writer Joyce Carol Oates (aren't academic specialties sad sometimes?). This professor once admitted to Fosco that she'd only ever thrown away two books in her lifetime (this is always a fascinating confession for a bibilophile to make; Fosco himself has never thrown away a book--he even has a Book of Mormon floating around somewhere, and you know how Fosco feels about Mormons).

The two books that this book-loving professor discarded were:

• Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (which she accused, not incorrectly, of misogyny)
  
• A Joyce Carol Oates novella entitled Zombie

Naturally, Fosco took this confession as a challenge; consequently, he immediately signed up to do an in-class presentation on Zombie later in the quarter (Fosco can be kind of a dick when he wants to be). Luckily, the professor was a good sport about this.

But the joke was on Fosco: Zombie is a hella disturbing book. Fosco has mentioned before that JC Oates's fiction tends to be "ripped from the headlines." Well, Zombie is her attempt to get inside the mind of someone like Jeffry Dahmer. That mind, and consequently the entire novella, is absolutely terrifying and disgusting. The protagonist of Zombie kidnaps teenage boys and attempts to turn them into sex zombies by lobotomizing them through the eye socket with an ice pick. And if you think that Joyce Carol Oates left out the graphic parts, well, you'd be wrong. There are even drawings and diagrams in the margins of the text. Fosco gets nauseated just thinking about the book again. (Needless to say, Fosco's class presentation was, um, upsetting).

But because it's not enough that this story exists as a novella, someone had to go and write a stage play based on it. This is the recent brief NYT review of the play "Zombie," which is playing off-Broadway this spring--no doubt before beginning a run at Disney's New Amsterdam Theater in Times Square.

The Times review of "Zombie" is off-the-mark, I think. The author notes that

The banality of evil isn’t a new subject in literature or drama, but fiction rarely reveals this much this clearly.

Mr. Connington commits totally to this haunting characterization and leaves us wondering exactly what kind of people are walking the streets alongside us.

As a description of the novella, I think this is absolutely wrong. Zombie is not about "the banality of evil." Just because you cannot tell by looking at someone that he or she is a mass murderer doesn't mean that his or her evil is banal. There is a difference between the kind of evil that is performed selfishly or unthinkingly by everyday members of society (what we might call "banal" evil) and the evil that is perpetrated by homicidal maniacs like the protagonist of Zombie. The zombie-maker may think that his behavior is rational and that his desires are like those of everyone else, but his delusions of normality don't actually make him normal. This is Grade-A crazy evil in the novella, and I refuse to accept that "Zombie" is intended to teach us some lesson about the secret lives of our neighbors. This isn't American Beauty.

Instead, I see the point of Zombie (to the extent that it has anything as clumsy as a "point") to be an exercise in confronting the absolute otherness of evil. We are not meant to "imagine ourselves into" the mind of the protagonist; we are not meant to recognize ourselves in this novella. Rather, we are presented with a terrifying vision of otherness that we are only too happy to resist assimilating. I think this is an interesting project: a narrative that wants to prevent the identification of the reader. However, I don't know what the political/social consequences of such a project may be--especially in this case.

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Help Support Fosco Lives!

Now Fosco has something to ask you, the dedicated Fosco Lives! reader: the next time you buy books from Amazon.com, would you consider doing so by clicking through the ad banner at the top right? If you do so, your beloved Count Fosco will automatically receive a small percentage from your purchase.

It's easy: just click on the ad to go to the normal Amazon homepage. Any books you buy during that visit will generate a percentage to help support Fosco Lives!.

It's completely anonymous--I won't find out who you are and I won't know what you order (so you can order porn if you like--as if I would judge you negatively for buying porn!).

If you are not an Amazon shopper, that's fine--don't worry about it; but I do know that many Fosco Lives! readers order from Amazon. So, the next time you were planning on buying a book from Amazon anyway, do it through this link and everyone will be much happier! Especially me.

Saturday Story Hour: Saunders and Ghosts

Find a comfortable chair and get ready for Saturday Story Hour.

It is entirely possible that Fosco's favorite contemporary writer of short fiction is George Saunders. He has published three absolutely stellar collections and any story of his is a must-read for me. He is effortlessly funny, as well as acutely critical of our cultural preoccupations.

Most of his stories take place in worlds that are slightly-exaggerated versions of our own consumerist, entertainment-obsessed civilization. The effect is strange and familiar at the same time. It's not exactly realism--but some sort of hyper-realism or concentrated realism.

He has an affection for losers, for underdogs, and for those people who cannot quite fit into the New World Order. He's also fond of ghosts (and once, zombies)--those revenants who haunt our lives, but who aren't supposed to exist. As you might expect, the emotional territory of his stories is typically melancholic, nostalgiac, full of resignation. But he's still hilariously funny.

Today's story is one that makes Fosco cry every time he reads it (and yes, he cried re-reading it for this post). It's called "Commcomm" and it was originally published in 2005 in The New Yorker. The protagonist is a public relations hack at a soon-to-be-decommissioned military base. The plot depends on his willingness to perform an illegal action to get a better job.

But there's much more to the story than that. It's an extended meditation on "bad luck" and the miseries of living. It's about the excesses of religious fundamentalism. It's a parody of self-help. It's about guilt and memory and family. Oh, and did I mention that the narrator's parents are ghosts who must obsessively act out their violent deaths in his house every day? If it sounds crazy, it is. If it sounds bad, it isn't--it's sad, funny, and finally redemptive. Like I said, I cry when I read this story--but it's not because it's sad; rather, it's because it is ultimately so comforting and hopeful, in its eccentric way.

Despite the sadness and the hope, you should relish the black humor, though. Here is a bravura passage:

A week after his layoff, Grandpa died. Day of the wake, Dad got laid off too. Month later, we found out Jean was sick. Jean was my sister, who died at eight. Her last wish was Disneyland. But money was tight. Toward the end, Dad borrowed money from Leo, the brother he hated. But Jean was too sick to travel. So Dad had an Army friend from Barstow film all of Disney on a Super-8. The guy walked the whole place. Jean watched it and watched it. Dad was one of these auto-optimists. To hear him tell it, we’d won an incredible last-minute victory. Hadn’t we? Wasn’t it something, that we could give Jeanie such a wonderful opportunity?

But Jean had been distilled down to like pure honesty.

“I do wish I could have gone, though,” she said.

“Well, we practically did,” Dad said, looking panicked.

“No, but I wish we really did,” she said.

Dark, yes; but also funny.

I admire almost every sentence he writes. His ideas are so perfectly... odd. How can you not appreciate this passage?:

They’re standing at the kitchen window, looking out at the old ballbearing plant. All my childhood, discarded imperfect ball bearings rolled down the hill into our yard. When the plant closed, a lathe came sliding down, like a foot a day, until it hit an oak.

Or this description of a self-help cassette series:

I think of Tape 4, “Living the Now.” What is the Now Situation? How can I pull the pearl from the burning oyster? How can the “drowning boy” be saved?

Or this perfect throwaway line:

Blockbuster has a new program of identifying all videos as either Artsy or Regular.

Or, finally, this heartbreaking revelation about the metaphysics of ghostly parents:

When they stand in direct heat, it doesn’t make them warmer, just makes them vividly remember their childhoods.

This universe is not quite like ours and yet, it's exactly like ours.

If you read this story and fall in love with George Saunders, I would recommend reading one of his slightly more upbeat stories: "My Flamboyant Grandson"--an equally beautiful, but more heart-warming story (in its way).

Comments after reading either/both are welcome.


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WG Sebald: Looking at Corpses

Fosco recently read several "novels" by the late German author W.G. Sebald. Sebald's work is absolutely astonishing; he's one of the best authors I have read in years. In fact, The Rings of Saturn is now one of my favorite books of all time.

Sebald's work is hard to describe--it's kind of a hybrid between a novel and a personal essay, with lots of history thrown in. There isn't much "plot," but the stories are so ravishing and the language is so smooth that it's easy to fall under the spell of the narrative.

For your Wednesday edification, Fosco today offers an excerpt from Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. In the excerpt, Sebald offers a historical and art critical meditation on a famous Rembrandt painting, The Anatomy Lesson (seen below). As history, this is a beautiful passage; as art criticism, it's extraordinary. Hopefully, it will whet your appetite for more Sebald.


Excerpt from W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, trans. by Michael Hulse:

"In January 1632, [...] the dissection of a corpse was undertaken in public at the Waggebouw in Amsterdam--the body being that of Adriaan Adriaanszoon alias Aris Kindt, a petty thief of that city who had been hanged for his misdemeanors an hour or so earlier.

[...]

"The spectacle, presented before a paying public drawn from the upper classes, was no doubt a demonstration of the undaunted investigative zeal in the new sciences; but it also represented (though this surely would have been refuted) the archaic ritual of dismembering a corpse, of harrowing the flesh of the delinquent even beyond death, a procedure then still part of the ordained punishment. That the anatomy less in Amsterdam was about more than a thorough knowledge of the inner organs of the human body is suggested by Rembrandt's representation of the ceremonial nature of the dissection--the surgeons are in their finest attire, and Dr Tulp is wearing a hat on his head--as well as by the fact that afterwards there was a formal, and in a sense symbolic, banquet. If we stand today before the large canvas of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson in the Mauritshuis we are standing precisely where those who were present at the dissection in the Waaggebouw stood, and we believe that we see what they saw then: in the foreground, the greenish, prone body of Aris Kindt, his neck broken and his chest risen terribly in rigor mortis. And yet it is debatable whether anyone ever really saw that body, since the art of anatomy, then in its infancy, was not least a way of making the reprobate body invisible. It is somehow odd that Dr Tulp's colleagues are not looking at Kindt's body, that their gaze is directed just past it to focus on the open anatomical atlas in which the appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram, a schematic plan of the human being, such as envisaged by the enthusiastic amateur anatomist René Descartes, who was also, so it is said, present that January morning in the Waaggebouw.


[...]

"[T]he much-admired verisimilitude of Rembrandt's picture proves on closer examination to be more apparent than real. Contrary to normal practice, the anatomist shown here has not begun his dissection by opening the abdomen and removing the intestines, which are most prone to putrefaction, but has started (and this too may imply a punitive dimension to the act) by dissecting the offending hand. Now, this hand is more peculiar. It is not only grotesquely out of proportion compared with the hand closer to us, but it is also anatomically the wrong way round: the exposed tendons, which ought to be those of the left palm, given the position of the thumb, are in fact those of the back of the right hand. In other words, what we are faced with is a transposition taken from the anatomical atlas, evidently without further reflection, that turns this otherwise true-to-life painting (if one may so express it) into a crass misrepresentation at the exact point of its meaning, where the incisions are made. It seems inconceivable that we are faced here with an unfortunate blunder. Rather, I believe that there was deliberate intent behind this flaw in the composition. That unshapely hand signifies the violence that has been done to Aris Kindt. It is with him, the victim, and not the Guild that gave Rembrandt his commission, that the painter identifies. His gaze alone is free of Cartesian rigidity. He alone sees that greenish annihilated body, and he alone see the shadow in the half-open mouth and over the dead man's eyes." (12-17)



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Let's Save A Bookstore (Or Two)

From this weekend's Santa Cruz Sentinel, an article about the local independent bookstore, the Capitola Book Cafe. It's a pretty decent general interest bookstore, with occasionally interesting author events (which Fosco has attended before). And, like all independent bookstores, it's in trouble.

But the Capitola Book Cafe owners have an interesting suggestion for how we can help save independent bookstores:

Still, said the Book Cafe partners, the fate of the independent book industry is largely in the hands of consumers. A recent study pointed out that among even those consumers who thought of themselves as "loyal independent bookshop customers" only four of every 10 books they buy came from an independent bookseller.

"We're not asking that people buy 10 out of 10 books from independent bookstores," said Janet Leimeister. "But just one or two more, five out of 10, or six out of 10, would make a huge difference."

This is actually a pretty interesting idea and one that seems eminently doable. As much as Fosco spends on books (and obscure academic books, at that), there is just no way he can quit shopping Amazon. But, he may be able to shift one or two (out of ten) book purchases to independent stores like the Capitola Book Cafe. Can you?

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Saturday Story Hour: Bolaño's Fake Nazi Poetry

Good Morning: Welcome to Saturday Story Hour!

Even though it's February, we are not done with the great Roberto Bolaño! At this point, Fosco has almost worked through the translated Bolaño oeuvre, and he still adores him. Luckily, we have more works to come as Bolaño continues to be translated into English (and we have another one due this summer!).

The most recent Bolaño book that Fosco read is the faux literary encyclopeadia, Nazi Literature in the Americas. In a NY Times review last spring (enjoyably titled "The Sound and the Führer"), Stacey D'Erasmo describes the work:

Cross-referenced, complete with bibliography and a biographical list of secondary figures, “Nazi Literature” is composed of a series of sketches, the compressed life stories of writers in North and South America who never existed, but all too easily could have. Goose-stepping caricatures à la “The Producers” they are not; instead, they are frighteningly subtle, poignant and plausible.

Indeed, each biographical sketch is a fully-realized portrait of a life, completely convincing in both the general trajectory and the minute details. The sketches are also, frequently, laugh-out-loud funny.

In today's installment of "Saturday Story Hour," Fosco excerpts one of the funniest passages from the book--a passage that gives free rein to the full ingenuity of Bolaño's imagination. The three paragraphs below are from the portrait of "Pedro González Carrera." The first sentence of this portrait is "A few hagiographies of Pedro González Carrera have come down to us; all concur in affirming, and perhaps with good reason, that his work was as brilliant as his life was dull" (61). And from there, things start to become very strange...

An excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas, translated by Chris Andrews:

[González] stubbornly continued to exploit his peculiar poetic vein. The next three poems he published (not in Iron Heart, which had folded, but in the cultural supplement of a Santiago newspaper) are free of surrealist images, symbolist baggage and modernist vagaries (González, it must be said, knew almost nothing of the three schools in question). His verse had become concise, his images simple; the figures that recurred in the six previous poems have also undergone a transformation: the Merovingian warriors have become robots, the women are now dying beside putrid streams of consciousness, and the mysterious tractors plowing the fields without rhyme or reason are either secret vessels sent from Antarctica, or Miracles (with a capital letter). And now these figures were counterbalanced by a sketchy presence, that of the author himself, adrift in the vast spaces of the fatherland, observing the apparitions like a registrar of marvels, but unenlightened finally as to their causes, phenomenology or ultimate purpose.

In 1955, at the cost of great personal sacrifice and tremendous effort, González financed the publication of a chapbook containing twelve poems, printed by a press in Cauquenes, capital of the province of Maul, where he had been transferred. The little book was entitled Twelve, and the cover, which was the author's own work, is noteworthy in its own right, as it was the first of many drawings he produced to accompany his poems (the others came to light only after his death). The letters of the word Twelve on the cover, equipped with eagle talons, grip a swastika in flames, beneath which there seems to be a sea with waves, drawn in a childlike style. And under the sea, between the waves, a child can in fact be glimpsed, crying, "Mom, I'm scared!" The speech bubble is blurred. Under the child and the sea are lines and blotches, which might be volcanoes or printing defects.

The twelve new poems add new figures and landscapes to the repertoire developed in the previous nine. The robots, the streams of consciousness and the ships are supplemented with Destiny and Will, personified by two stowaways in the holds of a ship, as well as The Disease Machine, The Language Machine, The Memory Machine (which has been damaged since the beginning of time), The Potentiality Machine and The Precision Machine. The only human figure in the earlier poems (that of González himself) is joined by the Advocate of Cruelty, a strange character who sometimes speaks like a regular Chilean guy (or rather, like a grammar school teacher's idea of a regular guy) and sometimes like a sibyl or a Greek soothsayer. The setting is the same as for the earlier poems: an open field in the middle of the night, or a theater of colossal dimensions situated in the heart of Chile. (64-65)

I don't know about you, but I wish those poems actually existed--like almost all of the works described in this book. This is part of the genius of Bolaño's achievement here: he's created a reality that, despite some of its horror, you wish were actually real.

New Moon on Thursday

You may recall that in his review, Fosco went all Chris Brown on tween pulp sensation Twilight. Despite his generally harsh reaction to the book, Fosco did admit that he kinda enjoyed it and was willing to give the second book, New Moon, a try. Well, both Fosco and Oz read New Moon this week, and we are pleased to report that it is much better than the first book! In fact, Fosco would be willing to say that he liked this book a lot.

Of course, a number of the deficiencies of Twilight remain unfixed. There's still absolutely nothing approaching sex in the books. In fact, tongue-kissing is still mostly verboten. For lots of vampire fans, that is probably a deal-breaker. And Stephenie Meyer still can't write a climax scene that doesn't feel like a complete letdown. And her prose is still occasionally purpler than one might like. And both Oz and I would still like to see a good fight scene.

However, certain things have improved with this book. Meyer seems to have had a competent editor (finally!). The vampire mythos has been filled out in several important ways. Things that seemed like loose ends in the first book have been picked up and developed. Some of the silly religious stuff has been toned down. Or maybe I'm just becoming inured to some of the bad stuff.

But even beyond these improvements, there is some stuff in this book that is actually quite good. The werewolf plot is really interesting and provides a great conflictual "hook." Bella's depression at being abandoned is really extreme and pathetic, but that's the point, right? Fosco found himself really surprisingly affected by the "hole in her chest"--losing someone you love is actually a lot like Meyer describes. The emotions in this book are a lot more explicable to Fosco than the ones in the first book.

And best of all, Meyer finally provides us (and Bella) with an opportunity to take sides. Vampire or werewolf? Should Bella choose her soulmate, the brooding and unreliable Edward (vampire)? Or should she choose the loyal and handsome Jacob who wants nothing other than to make her happy and keep her safe (werewolf)? (N.B.: Oz votes Edward, Fosco votes Jacob.)

Which means, of course, that Fosco and Oz are moving on to Book 3 with much eagerness! Stay tuned.