Oh, There I Am

Well. It’s certainly been a long time since I updated last, eh? Over a month where titles have been released to no critical savaging and for some reason searches for autumn-themed desktop wallpaper have driven my site’s daily hits up to hundreds per day. My theory is it has something to do with the image I used for my summer reading list conclusion and my failure to change said image’s name.

But none of you care about that I imagine, and you all want to know why this distinctive voice has flickered and died in the cold void of the Internet.

The lack of updates can be traced to two reasons. The first (and lesser) one is that my azure Acer Aspire (c0lloquially known as Nova Express), on which I’d been writing the majority of the site’s content for the last few months, wound up hitting the ground in September and its screen transformed into to something resembling a modern art kaleidoscope. It still works when I plug it into a monitor, but the entire reason I bought the damn thing was to be able to write anywhere and no one can write anywhere when they have to lug a 20-inch monitor everywhere. I’m hoarding my resources to get a replacement, but surviving means I can’t justify dropping $300. Here’s hoping for a successful Black Friday sale.

The more major reason is that the three of us behind the scenes at TLOTE have been very busy with a variety of things. I have finally broken my seven-month exile in the unemployment wilds and am now working as a project coordinator for a Portland firm, leading to once again pulling 40-hour weeks with little energy for criticism that is not directed at easy media/political targets. My contributors have been busy as well on the other side of the Pacific, with Anna settled into Japan for a year (check out her exploits) and Carrie teaching in a new South Korea school. As such, all three of us are involved in non-book things right now that demand a lot of our time and attention, and as such we sadly can’t pour as much effort into writing for you as we used to.

This doesn’t mean that the site’s going down or that we’re going to stop posting, oh no my brothers. For the forseeable future however, postings will be done “when they’re done” rather than the weekly schedule I had been shooting for in the summer. Some content is brewing – a piece by Carrie in the next day or two, a couple of back-burner reviews and a rather extensive Text-to-Screen piece to start with – so I hope you can bear with a little longer wait for the voices of reason to return.

As always, thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll enjoy our upcoming pieces as much as we enjoy working on them.

Coming Soon: The Beat (Second) Generation

“I think the Beats were extremely dysfunctional people who basically had no business raising children.” – Christina Mitchell, daughter of John Mitchell, entrepreneur who ran several Greenwich Village coffeehouses in the 1950s

This quote might seem a rather harsh criticism of a group of people widely considered among the most influential writers of the century, but when you look at their personal lives – frequently their subject matter – it makes a sad amount of sense. Men like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady and Gregory Corso were in no way Ward Cleaver types, but were independents, wanderers and frequent substance abusers, pursuing their own enlightenment and freedom over the stability of a normal life. Certainly they managed to raise a legion of spiritual children by inspiring thousands of youths to follow in their footsteps, but when it came to the very involved process of bringing a child to maturity they preferred to be somewhere else.

But despite the fact that so few of the Beats were equipped to be fathers, several of them managed to pass their genes onto the next generation – and in the cases of Kerouac and Burroughs, also managed to pass on the gift that made them famous. Like their fathers, Jan Kerouac and William S. “Billy” Burroughs Jr. possessed a grasp of language and an interest in using their lives as subject material. However, they also wound up inheriting their addictive personalities and an energy level that would convert into self-destruction.

These next two installments of Back Shelf Review will fall into a subcategory dubbed “The Beat (Second) Generation,” examining the writings of the younger Kerouac and Burroughs. In addition to the obvious evaluation as to the pros and cons of their work, I’ll take a look at just how much of their fathers’ style they seem to have inherited and see where they differ for better or worse.

So, check back on August 18 for “Back Shelf Review: Jan Kerouac” and on August 25 for “Back Shelf Review: William S. (Billy) Burroughs Jr.”

Collective List of Book Lusts

Long-time readers of TLOTE (if you exist) may have noticed that updates to the site have been somewhat scarce as of late, following a blitz of postings and columns and announcements. I do apologize for this, but the sad truth is I appear to have burned out my fuses and have had a hard time embarking on new projects. There are several things in the works, but between being unemployed and pursuing freelance projects outside of this site I have not been able to keep to my schedule.

So, I just wanted to take a brief moment to assure you that this site is not dying out – I love it and the content I’ve created too much to throw it on the pile of dead blogs I’ve already contributed two or three URLs to.  Content will continue to be posted from my contributors and myself, but rather than keeping to a weekly schedule will be posted “when it gets done.” Regular schedules are hopefully not too far off once I catch up to life, but some minds do need time to recharge.

In the meantime though, for a bit of filler that might also help you get inside the heads of our writers, please enjoy these lists recently compiled in our spare time. The theme was to pick fifteen books that have special meaning or that have stuck in your head, and compile them in a list that takes the quickest amount of time to create. Carrie did one first, then Anna, and then I felt I should join in as well. I hope such a listing gives you an idea of what we like and how our creative energies skew.

And yes, I am aware that each of our lists have sixteen titles rather than fifteen, but here at TLOTE we have a hard time keeping in the boundaries.

Les:

1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
2. Junky, William S. Burroughs
3. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
4. Watchmen, Alan Moore
5. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
6. Quinn’s Book, William Kennedy
7. Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
8. This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. Dune, Frank Herbert
10. A Catskill Eagle, Robert B. Parker
11. The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano
12. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
13. The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac
14. All the President’s Men, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
15. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
16. Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell

Anna:

1. Atonement, Ian McEwan
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
4. The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
5. Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer
6. The Night Watch, Sarah Waters
7. Little Children, Tom Perotta
8. The Things That Matter, Edward Mendelsohn
9. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
10. The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
11. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
12. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
13. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
14. Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery
15. Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
16. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Carrie:

1. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
2. Franny and Zoey, J.D. Salinger
3. The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano
4. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
5. Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6. The Wind Up Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami
7. Ariel, Sylvia Plath
8. Mason/Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
9. The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
10. Ulysses, James Joyce
11. what matters most is how well you walk through fire, Charles Bukowski
12. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
13. Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald.
14. The Hairy Ape, Eugene O’Neill
15. House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
16. The Lost Lunar Baedeker, Mina Loy

Announcement: Welcome New Voices

As I mentioned in last month’s manifesto for the future of The Lesser of Two Equals, a large goal of mine for this second year of operation is to bring both a broader scope and sense of consistency to the blog. On my personal perspective this is going well – regular updates and more detailed features  – but the issue has also come up that I simply do not have the energy to do everything I want with the site.

While I am one of the 12 percent of Oregon’s population who doesn’t have a job to occupy their day (utterly depressing number that, isn’t it?), I do devote a good portion of each day to looking for one, and as anyone who has hunted for work knows this is an exhausting routine that saps creativity and rapidly turns one into an antisocial alcoholic. I also like to break up the monotony of constant book reviews by writing reviews of films/video games/albums for other locations, as well as a novel or two that I go to when I feel the urge.

The bottom line is, I by myself am incapable of doing everything I feel I could be doing with TLOTE. I have only a certain amount of words I can call up per day, and to remain sane I have to split them between other topics.

So, I would like to take this moment (and 100th post of this blog, conveniently enough) to let you all know that starting this week, my work at TLOTE will be joined by two other contributors: Anna Williams and Carrie Lorig. Both are already charter members of the family, as my direct successors in The Daily Cardinal’s literature column which served as the foundation of this blog.

Both our new contributors will supplement my media/memoir mindset. Carrie, author of “Conceal and Carrie” in the academic year of 2006-07, will be filling the poetics void by taking a look at contemporary poets and telling us which ones are worth reading. Anna, author of “Williams Shakespeare” for 2007-08, will contribute more of the classic literary perspective with her series “Classical Anna,” which takes a look at reading old reliables in these modern times. An exact schedule is still in the works, but expect us to get regular updates fairly soon, as well as more information on both as part of the upcoming site redesign.

As an introduction to our new contributors, we will be reprinting a few of their personal favorite Cardinal columns on the site over the next couple of weeks. In the same fashion as my columns, they will be offering thoughts on the completed work and some updated commentary. A schedule of regular updates is still being generated, so keep your eyes open for posts on our status.

So, I hope you’ll join me in welcoming these new voices to TLOTE, and that the attention you give my work will be shared with both new members in full.

Manifesto for May 2009 for TLOTE

I have chosen to break from my usual omnipotent position as the all-seeing critical mind to discuss a few of my upcoming plans for The Lesser of Two Equals.

When I started this site up following graduation, I intended to use it as a database for all my writing content relevant to books and as something to keep me busy while working semi-hellish positions in call centers. I reposted older reviews from my student journalist days, wrote a few essays and simply contributed whenever I felt I had something to say.

Now as the site has grown to what I consider maturity (one year old, 85 posts, dozens of titles reviewed, several essays, two specific features and multiple publishers willing to send me their books) I feel it’s time to push it to the next level and enforce a bit more structure on it, to marshal the somewhat disorganized format of my posts from the last few months. So, with that in mind, here is the manifesto for the next few months as I attempt to transcend the boundaries of legitimate literary journalism.

New features: I will be resurrecting my original literature columns that formed the basis of this site when I first pooled my archives, writing a biweekly column on topics of literature that have gotten to me based on personal connection, concern for the industry or simple curiosity. These columns will be appearing every other Tuesday, starting out May 26.

On a weekly basis (this one on Wednesday) I will be reposting links to news articles and reviews that I did not write myself but which interested me and I have a few words on.

Book Reviews: These will of course continue, being the majority of the content, but will also appear on a weekly basis as I work my way through a literary surplus. A new review is guaranteed to appear every Monday, with possibly some additional postings appearing as I complete titles or the mood strikes me. Titles will continue to follow the pattern I have set (literary fiction, memoirs, New Journalism, creative history, etc.) and focus on some of my favorite current authors.

Back Shelf Review: These articles will continue but will begin to differ from the standard reviews I offer, instead taking a bit broader capacity in the same style as my Barack Obama article, either focusing on an author or more than one book thematically linked together. No schedule has been set for these, though biweekly is the most likely.

Text-to-Screen Ratio: After a series of adapted releases I felt I had enough content to get started, but the flow has dried up somewhat with the summer blockbuster releases (and my die-hard refusal to read or watch Angels and Demons) and the ones I’m interested in (The Road and Sherlock Holmes) don’t even have proper posters. So for the summer, we’ll get one or two backlogs cleared up and then be doing retrospective reviews of some classic books and the film versions that ensued. This too will become a biweekly feature, alternating with the columns.

As always, I remain open to any suggestions for articles or titles to review, and encourage any and all feedback on my writing.

E-mail Update

A fast bit of interest: I have now established a specific e-mail address for the blog, so now if any of you:

• Are published authors and want me to review your book;
• Have particular praise for/severe issues with my reviews;
• Wish to chat in a way more extensive than posting comments;

Please direct all requests to thelesseroftwoequals@gmail.com and you’ll get a response as quick as possible.