The Hypothetical Library

Short break for The Hypothetical Library

This week the overworked, but loyal staff (me) of the Hypothetical Library are taking some time off. I’m a little worn out from, as musician Mark Eitzel puts it “the pleasures of the treadmill and the factory”. But The Library will be up and running next week with Brian Evenson’s entry, Immobility. It promises to be an unsettling marvel, in keeping with all of his work to date.

In the meantime, I’ve posted a related side project soon to hit the world—The Hypothetical Library card. The card is a promotional piece I hope to place as give aways in some of Brooklyn’s and possibly our countries finest, independent bookstores. The design is based on the now distant memory of going to the local library of my childhood, where cards like this were taken from the back of the book, signed by the lender, and stamped with a due date. 

The icon on the card envelope will be embossed and should look very impressive. The logo was inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges story, The Library of Babel, and the phase “Ex Hypothesi” was picked up directly from the story and means “according to assumptions made: by hypothesis” which I thought was a pretty good tagline. Borges’ story was one of many inspirations for this project, so it only seems fitting that I reference him for the card. 

When and where these cards are placed will be announced when they go out, so stay tuned.

Hypothetically yours,

Charlie

 

Next week: Brian Evenson
 

Thomas Kelly

Introduction

“The number one rule of thieves is that nothing is too small to steal.”—Jimmy Breslin

When I started this introduction I was looking for a good “big city” quote, that would best describe Thomas Kelly’s writing, and found it in the above, from Jimmy Breslin—patron saint of urban wisdom. It struck me as perfect because in all of Kelly’s novels everyone from upper echelons of power to lowlife thugs are all stealing what they think is rightly theirs from New York City. Whether it's power, influence or cash, his characters are all driven by ambition.

The idea that New York City is both a place and a metaphor that describes American progress and is shaped by it’s immigrants, is a running theme in Kelly’s three novels: Payback, The Rackets, and Empire Rising. They focus, in part on the place of the Irish-American experience at different stages in New York City’s progress. I say “in part” because his novels trace the physical and political momentum of NYC as much as they do its citizens. Kelly shines a light on the intersection of labor, politics, and crime. He understands that this triad of effort, infuence, and interference is the equation that has driven the city since it was a Dutch trading post.

He is uniquely qualified to tell these tales. At different points in his life Kelly has been a Teamster and Sandhog (the labor union that digs the tunnels for New York ). He’s worked for two mayors: for one as an advance man, for the other as an occasional speech writer. And he has worked as a consultantant for the NYPD. Kelly knows the cops, and the robbers, the stumblebums and champs, and where the bodies are buried.

To quote fellow New Jerseyan, and voice of NYC, Frank Sinatra...

I’ve been a puppet, a pauper,
A pirate, a poet,
A pawn and a king,
I’ve been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing
Each time I find myself laying 
Flat on my face
I just pick myself up and get back in the race

But all the real life expeirience in the world doesn’t make for good writing, and Kelly’s New York City lives and breathes through his charecters and well crafted plotlines. He populates his novels with a range of thieves, martyrs and saints. The bosses, chumps and innocent standbyers, alternate between mayhem, contemplative internal monologue, and back again. And through it all vocalizing crisp dialogue as they all careen on Kelly’s literary collision courses.

With his entry into The Hypothetical Library—Metropolis—Kelly would have expanded his documentation of NYC’s ascendancy to a quartet of novels. Metropolis would be set during the 1950’s. It was a decade when the cops and fireman were almost all Irish, when labor’s power was becoming entrenched, and the political landscape was begining to shift as New York’s and America took its place as the driver of the world’s future. Although we all know more or less what happened, we’ll just have to remain in the dark as to how it would have happened as described by Kelly’s unflinching insight, and hypothetical pen.

The Cover

 

METROPOLIS—The hypothetical flap copy

“New York, 1950’s: A city at the height of its power and influence is being re-made. All over town wrecking balls swing, obliterating neighborhoods to make way for housing and highways and new civic landmarks. Fortunes are being grabbed. It’s called progress but for the thousands of powerless people displaced it is something else entirely. On a snowy April night the broken body of a community activist is found amidst the ruin of a Manhattan tenement block slated for demolition.  

Meanwhile, the mob, which has its grip on all the city’s power centers, is at war. The psychotic Vito Genovese is waging a bloody campaign to unseat Frank Costello, the underworlds’ urbane political czar.

Detective Jack Minogue, a dissolute hero of the Pacific war, is re-energized when he catches the case of the murdered activist.  But as he digs deeper he realizes it’s a murder that his bosses don’t want solved. Just as he decides to go along with the program and drop the case, the dead woman’s grief stricken daughter commits suicide. Now, nothing can stop Minogue in his quest for the truth. His only true ally in that search is Angela Cioffi, a beautiful photographer for the Daily News, whose own experience covering the war in Europe has left her scarred and elusive. The answers they find will rock the city to its core.

Kelly’s panoramic portrayal of a city in the midst of it’s post war transformation is stunning in it’s sweep and ambition. His characters real and imagined take us from the shimmering stage of the Copacabana to the back alleys of the Bronx, from the inner workings of Tammany Hall and the NYPD to the construction sites of the ascendant metropolis. But most vitally they take us to the intersection where the above world and the under world meet – the place where true power lies.”

The promotional quote—T.J. English

"With Metropolis Kelly has achieved something far trickier than the Great American Novel—he has delivered the Great New York Novel"
 
TJ English—Author of Havana Nocturne

Biography

Thomas Kelly is the author of three critically acclaimed novels and has been hailed as the premiere urban novelist of his generation.
 

Before embarking on his writing career, he spent ten years as a construction worker, including four years as a sandhog in the Bronx. He went on to earn a bachelor's degree in political economy from Fordham University and a master's degree in public administration from Harvard University. He also worked on a number of political campaigns on the city, state, and national levels.

New Line Cinema optioned Thomas Kelly’s first novel, PAYBACK, for Ted Demme’s Spanky Pictures.  David Mamet adapted PAYBACK for the screen.

Tom’s second novel, THE RACKETS, was published by the esteemed Farrar, Straus & Giroux and was selected by the New York Times as a notable book for 2001. Tom adapted the novel for Touchstone Television/ABC as a one-hour drama with Sydney Pollack serving as Executive Producer.

Tom’s latest novel EMPIRE RISING was published by FSG in Spring 2005 to coincide with the 75^th anniversary of the construction of the Empire State Building. EMPIRE RISING was selected by the New York Times as a notable book for 2005.  EMPIRE RISING was a finalist for the IMPAC Dublin, literary award. 

Tom has developed and produced numerous television shows including NIGHT WATCH, an original drama series for HBO, the one-hour dramas ONE POLICE PLAZA and GETTING MADE for Paramount Television/CBS, CITY INVINCIBLE a show set in the world of New York’s construction industry for AMC, and SANDHOGS for the History Channel.  His documentary THE GREATEST TUNNEL EVER BUILT won best documentary prize at the VISION FEST film festival at Tribeca Cinemas.

Tom has also worked as a journalist and his work has appeared in numerous publications including Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Mondadori First, The Times of London, the New York Post and the New York Daily News

Next week: Brian Evenson

Lydia Millet and Kierán Suckling

Errata Hypothetica

The Hypothetical Library is in need of its first major correction above and beyond the usual poor grammar, run-on sentences and overuse of commas. I neglected to place a hypothetical promotional blurb from the very real Jonathan Lethem on the cover of Apocalypse Animals. Please see the revised cover. In anticipation of future mistakes, I’ve decided to name these occasions “Errata Hypothetica.” Mea culpa, all.

Introduction

Two of my oldest and closest friends—one a poet, the other a fiction writer—have a game they play on occasion called “Drop the Needle”. The premise is that with truly good writing you should be able to grab a book off the shelf, open it up, settle on a line or two, and be impressed by what you have just read. It should at least be a necessary and perfectly constructed sentence, and at best be beautiful. These are pretty brutal criteria—even the expository descriptions are held to these standards. 

As I was reading Lydia Millet’s How The Dead Dream, I was reminded of this game, because page after page, I was amazed by the consistently gorgeous prose. Her writing is relentless: beautiful, funny, sad, and profane, often all in a single sentence. It makes you want to turn the radio down, curse the passing traffic, and forego that second glass of wine, all so you can focus on the writing.

In her most recent novels: Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and the above mentioned How The Dead Dream, Millet addresses the uncomfortable, looming reality of species extinction—both animal and human. She is documenting more than the epochal inevitability of extinction, she is reporting on the shifts in human manner and psychology as we experience, ignore, and contribute to it. Her work makes me think of the sentiment that was famously phrased in cartoonist Walt Kelly’s POGO: “We have met the enemy and he is us”. 

Millet is not the only voice speaking about what we are doing to the world, but she is easily one of the most elegant. I “Dropped the Needle” on several pages of How The Dead Dream while writing this introduction. All were wonderful, but here is my third “drop” from page 214: 

“ Here man was fully animal again, but he was still tender . . . you never lost what you were, never lost it fully. There was always the suspicion of a past life that faded and returned
        And you did not have to know yourself to be fully human. There were always those who did not, and no one said they were beasts.”

For Millet’s entry into the Hypothetical Library she is collaborating with her husband, the environmentalist, philosopher, and executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, Kierán Suckling, on what would be her first non fiction work and his first long form book, Apocalypse Animals. With their combined passion and knowledge about what many consider to be the earth’s sixth mass extinction, in Apocalypse Animals Millet and Suckling would have explained the link between biology, belief, and imposed obsolescence.

As with every entry on the Hypothetical Library, I want to read the book, but with and Millet’s and Suckling’s offering, I feel like I need to read this book. Unfortunately that will never happen. But with Millet’s evocative description of Apocalypse Animals, we are given enough information to connect the dots, go out and get the information for ourselves, and build our own texts.

If anyone asks you who composed this song,
if anyone asks you who composed this song,
tell him ‘twas I and I sing it all day long.

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song,
it takes a worried man to sing a worried song,

I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long.

The Cover

  
  

APOCALYPSE ANIMALS: Dreaming and Wanting at the End of the World —The hypothetical flap copy

“This powerful and strange hybrid beast — part epic story, part incantation, part polemic and part memoir — by novelist Lydia Millet and her husband, environmentalist and philosopher Kierán Suckling, tells the story of a relationship between human impulses toward self-destruction and our perception of the sublime; of a relationship between past and current visions and stories of the apocalypse and the psychology of climate-change denial; and of the cultural, historical and religious implications of the world’s ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction.”

The promotional quote—Jonathan Lethem

"Millet and Suckling's APOCALYPSE ANIMALS made me want to melt down my possessions and build an ark. I recommend it to any doomed species." —Jonathan Lethem

Biography

Lydia Millet 

Lydia Millet is the author of six novels and a short story collection; her 2002 book My Happy Life won the PEN-USA Award for Fiction, and more recent books such as Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and How the Dead Dream, the first in a trilogy about extinction, have been acclaimed critically and named by various best-of lists. She also works as a writer and editor at the Center for Biological Diversity, and has recently begun writing novels for younger readers, the first of which will be published in the next year or two. She lives with Suckling and their two young children in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona. For more information about more of Lydia's work check out http://www.lydiamillet.net/

Kierán Suckling

Kierán Suckling is the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, the leading U.S. nonprofit on protecting endangered species. Suckling, who grew up on Cape Cod and studied philosophy at the graduate level at SUNY-Stonybrook, co-founded the Center in 1989 and has since become known as a powerful innovator in the fight against species extinction. He has published several widely cited, peer-reviewed papers in conservation science as well as essays on biodiversity issues, and lectures and presents often on subjects ranging from the value of linguistic diversity to global warming. He created, and maintains, the country’s most comprehensive database on endangered species. For more information about Kierán and the crucial work he does you can read here, and here.

Next week: Thomas Kelly

David Lehman

Introduction

As a poet, historical/cultural critic, editor, and educator, David Lehman is something of a literary cottage industry. So when I contacted him for this project I wasn’t sure what he might come up with. I was anticipating poetry, but got history instead. 

In Lehman’s historical/cultural writings, beginning with his 1989 The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection to his wonderful The Last Avant-garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets and most recently A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, he rewards the reader with his unique style of authoritative reportage.

It’s the same voice that echoes through all of his writing. In his works of journal poems The Evening Sun, and The Daily Mirror, the reportage is turned inward, but has the same canny voice. Dates, facts, and name checks, are combined with an emotional resonance, and the effect moves from poignant, to funny, and back again.

After writing several drafts of this introduction at one point I typed “Is Lehman a poet that writes history, or a historian that writes poetry?” but realized that’s a silly question. Lehman is simply a writer that loves to write, and the distinctions between the forms, or categories he works in are false boundaries. 

His love of writing extends beyond his personal efforts. Lehman has a built a prominent career as an editor. In 1988 he initiated The Best American Poetry and he remains the annual anthology's series editor all the while also overseeing such efforts as the Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (again, history).

Lehman’s project for the The Hypothetical Library would be an ambitious one, were it to actually be fulfilled. Vowing to write two volumes a year for the next five years, he promises to lift the veil away from historical events to reveal the hidden facts. Sadly we will never get the actual stories since this is library is only hypothetical, but I hope you enjoy the three interpretations of what could have been, what might have been, and What Really Happened.

The covers

 

What Really Happened at Waterloo

“Lehman skillfully narrates the sequence of events that culminated in the defeat of Napoleon. Challenging the conventional view, Lehman takes as his point of departure the fact that in any free-association game, people will respond to the mention of Waterloo with Napoleon’s name, not the Duke of Wellington’s.”

What Really Happened at Yalta

“In this newly enlarged edition of Lehman’s classic study—Originally published in 1989 as “Yalta: The Turning Point”—the author describes the negotiations among Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, which determined the map of postwar Europe. Including never before released photographs of key figures.”

What Really Happened in Dallas (November 22, 1963)

“Lehman’s access to classified FBI files lends authority to his account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In addition to the official version of events as presented in newspapers and in the Warren Report, Lehman explores the most popular conspiracy theories of “what really happened on that dreadful day in Dallas when the nation lost not only its young leader but also its intellectual virginity.” His startling new assessment of Lee Harvey Oswald makes it clear why the conspirators had to have him killed.”

What Really Happened: Series—the hypothetical flap copy

“David Lehman initiated the What Really Happened series of books with the published vow to write two such volumes a year for five years. Each book is a succinct and highly readable account of a major historical event or chain of events. While conjecture is irresistible and has its place in the construction of historical narratives, Lehman brings to each book a solid grounding in facts and details. The first three titles in the series are: What Really Happened at Waterloo, What Really Happened at Yalta, What Really Happened in Dallas (November 22, 1963)”

The promotional quotes

“With admirable lucidity and a flair for the telling anecdote, Lehman takes a multifaceted incident or issue and renders it intelligible to a wide audience. He has a talent for summarizing received opinion as modified by previously unreleased documents. Recommended for all libraries.” Valery Paulson, Bibiliophilia

“Lehman has a strategic mind.”—Donald Kessinger, author Imperial Agency: The Glory Days of the CIA

Biography 

Lehman’s body of work is so amazingly long that it threatens to eclipse the length of this blog entry! So here are some highlights. As a Poet he has written nine books. Three of my favorites are; When a Woman Loves a Man, The Evening Sun, and The Daily Mirror. Special mention goes to Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man which he coauthored in collaboration with poet James Cummins and artist Archie Rand, and which I had the great pleasure and luck of designing. 

As an editor he has overseen seven anthologies and initiated The Best American Poetry series, of which he remains the series editor. David has also written six books of criticism including the great The Last Avant-garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. Most recently he has written A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, a truly fascinating and illuminating study into the back-story of the American songbook. For a fuller account of David’s work click here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lehman

Next week: Lydia Millet