Books Stink: Super Sad True Love Story Review

Super Sad True Love Story: Immigrant love in dystopia

Gary Shteyngart goes over the top with his corporate satire, but his third novel still has bite

Toronto Star | August 21, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

On the Bookavore tumblr, an anonymous Brooklyn bookseller recently posted an “E-books Article Drinking Game.” Trigger phrases and their alcohol equivalents include “any discussion of book world after 2020 — one drink” and the debilitating “smell of a real book — clean out the liquor cabinet, drink until you pass out, wake up next morning, puke, then continue drinking.”

Meanwhile, in Super Sad True Love Story, anti-hero Lenny Abramov is forced to mask the odour of his formidable book collection with Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast. In Gary Shteyngart’s satiric dystopia of the near future, books stink. Literally. (“Duder, that thing smells like wet socks,” notes an airplane passenger, referring to Lenny’s collection of Chekhov short stories.) But a crashing American dollar and the possible repossession of Manhattan by the Chinese means Lenny has bigger problems than the uncoolness of his antiquarian reading habits.

Shteyngart’s comic timing has always been exceptional, but with Super Sad he demonstrates his socio-cultural radar is equally well calibrated. Anticipating the triumph of our smartphone-addicted, attention-span deprived, Google-stupid culture, Shteyngart is less concerned about the future of the book (i.e. Kindle versus hardcover) and more focused on whether books have a future, period. (“Lenny Abramov, last reader on earth!” declares his friend Noah, over drinks at a popular new bar on Staten Island called Cervix.)

Although there is plenty of overlap between Super Sad and his previous two novels (especially Absurdistan), pushing the setting 15 minutes into the future helps make Shteyngart’s obsession with slang, sex, the Russian immigrant experience and the shortcomings of the American military-industrial-political-media complex appear fresh. Is his strategy is a success? This depends on whether you find such corporate monstrosities as LandO’LakesGMFord and ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandViacomCredit hilarious or hokey.

Like many futuristic dystopias (Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or We by Yevgeny Zamyatin), the bleakness of Super Sad’s over-surveillanced and politically restrictive America is relieved by a sweeping romance. But Shteyngart is only willing to allow Lenny partial happiness. As his semi-girlfriend Eunice Park explains in a quasi-diary entry on Facebook-of-the-future site GlobalTeens, “he’s gross physically, but there’s something sweet about him.”

Although the novel is told through the alternating journal entries of Lenny and Eunice, their romantic chemistry is never entirely explained. Opposites attract, but 39-year-old Lenny and 24-year-old Eunice are less a couple than an engineered way of highlighting the novel’s major tensions. That said, their ongoing relationship is messy, complicated, argument-ridden and complicated by past obsessions and emotional scars — which is to say, entirely believable.

Since the novel’s title functions as an obvious spoiler, suspense is instead generated by Lenny’s tenuous job prospects at the Post-Human Services division of Staatling-Wapachung (a company that promises immortality to those who can afford it) and ongoing corporate intrigue. As befits a novel with Super Sad in its title, Shteyngart eventually stops cracking jokes as the country he loves starts to crumble for the last time.

Can a novel filled with references to TotalSurrender panties and a website called AssLuxury also serve as a serious work of cultural and political commentary? Duder, I’m not entirely convinced. Can an author successfully mock our rapidly depleting attention spans through the creaky medium of the novel? Duder, yes. And for such audacity Shteyngart deserves to be read —preferably in a quiet room, in a few sittings and without the compelling but empty distractions of Facebook, Twitter and iPhone.

Are You a Modern Gentleman or a Man of the House?

Reading this New York Times article about the website ManoftheHouse reminded me that I should post this Globe article I wrote about The Modern Gentleman.

Advice from dad? No thanks, I'll just Google it

Globe and Mail | October 23, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

It’s a recent Thursday evening at School Bakery and Café in Toronto’s Liberty Village. Gavin Roy Seal and Phil Adrien have just settled back for an after-work drink. Sipping beer served by a waitress dressed as a schoolgirl in a neighbourhood thick with tech startups seems entirely appropriate, given that Seal and Adrien are the brains behind The Modern Gentleman, a new online magazine designed to help 18-to-29-year-old men make the most of their leisure time.

“We want men to take the hard-earned money they’ve made in their first jobs and spend it wisely on stuff we think is fulfilling,” explains Adrien, a web developer and designer who graduated from Ryerson University’s radio and television arts program last year. “We all read GQ when we were younger,” adds Seal, who works at CBC Sports and graduated from the same Ryerson program this summer, “but couldn’t afford anything in it.”

Taking sensible style as its guiding principle, The Modern Gentleman is one of at least three recent guy-oriented Web publications that eschew fart jokes and wet T-shirt contests and instead speak to young men like, well, a dad might, honestly and intelligently.

Others include Boston-based The Good Men Project Magazine and New York-based Made Possible. While their tones range from the heartfelt earnestness of Good Men (recent article: “Confessions of a Recovering Homophobe”) to the empowered sensitivity of Made Possible (recent piece: “What You Can Learn From Chick Flicks”) to the more straightforward beer and career advice of TMG (recent article: “To Pour, or Not to Pour”), they all share something that Maxim and Details never aspired to: filling an informational role that, in previous generations, fathers once held.

“I think that today guys make their style or fashion mistakes on their own,” says Adrien, who’s 25. In the past, advice about the gentlemanly arts, such as pairing ties with suits or shaving properly, “would be passed on by my father, but now we have the Internet and Google.” And, increasingly, resources like TMG.

When Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, used to ask his students in the mid-1990s to name their heroes, “I had many saying their dads were their heroes,” says the author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Now, however, “I don’t get that at all. The most common answer I get from students is: ‘I don’t have any heroes.’ “ In the absence of strong paternal bonds, which can be ascribed over the last two decades to everything from increased divorce rates to longer work hours, the cultural knowhow that is passed down through generations also falls through the cracks. From a style point of view, even dads who spent a great deal of time with their sons over the past 15 years were Baby Boomer fathers likely unschooled themselves in the intricacies of tying a Windsor knot or evaluating wine, valuable social info today. As for the media aimed at young men until now, publications such as Men’s Health, Maxim and Details, says Kimmel, who sits on the board of advisors for Made Possible, spent the past 15 years trying to replace fatherly advice, but failed to take into account the increasingly complex nature of masculinity.

Men under 40, Kimmel notes, have cross-gender friendships, acknowledge that their wives will have significant careers outside the home and assume a more involved role in raising their children than their fathers did. But you’d be hard-pressed to see such issues addressed in a mag like Details. Instead, he says, most mainstream men’s magazines have preyed on the anxieties and insecurities of men in order to make them avid consumers.

By comparison, the new crop of online men’s magazines take these developments into account and “assume that there is no battle between the sexes … they actually minister to men at their best, not pander to them at their worst,” says Kimmel. In doing so, he believes, they address the disconnect between the male fantasyland of Maxim and 21st-century realities.

Not that those realities are necessarily straightforward. “There’s still that male misconception that you shouldn’t publicly share your feelings, that you should be very reserved and not talk about fashion or style,” says Adrien. In the past, questions about such issues were answered, by fathers, other family members or at least the family tailor, in the privacy of the home or a draped-off fitting room. Not coincidentally, the anonymity afforded by the Internet may explain why these new men’s sites – which can be regarded as de facto digital dads, the fitting rooms or barber shops of today – are blossoming right now and becoming so popular.

Since launching in March, TMG’s audience has grown from about 1,000 visitors a month in the spring to between 5,000 and 6,000 now. Seal and Adrien have been hard-pressed to keep up: Both are quick to admit that the site requires more content updated more frequently, but their focus of their handsomely produced Web mag has been quality over quantity.

So what is the biggest sartorial dilemma facing wannabe gentlemen today? “Right now, it seems that, for young professionals, formal attire is dress pants and a dress shirt chosen without any thought whatsoever,” Adrien says. “If a shirt has a collar and your pants have pleats, then it counts as formal wear.” Asked to name someone who embodies the ideal aspects of a modern gentleman, Adrien and Seal point not to George Clooney or Barack Obama, but, anachronistically, to Mad Men’s Don Draper.

Well, kind of. While they admire Draper’s style and workplace elan, they are not, in keeping with the gentlemanly code, impressed by his adultery. “That’s not something we’d ever aspire to or want from a friend,” says Adrien.

Come to think of it, Draper’s fathering skills leave a lot to be desired as well.

The Radical Compression of Language (aka TLDR.it will rule us all)

In honor of tldr.it, I’m reprinting my Toronto Star article about the radical compression of language:

The long and the short of naming things

Toronto Star | September 3, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

Four years ago, Toronto journalist Andre Mayer wrote about very long song titles as the latest trend in music for CBC Arts Online. Offenders included and Sufjan Stevens (“To the Workers of the Rockford River Valley Region, I have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament, and It Involves Shoe String, a Lavender Garland, and Twelve Strong Women”).

But the wordy excess detailed by Mayer now appears to be a relic of the pre-Twitter era. The first single from M.I.A.'s new album is called XXXO, and none of her other song titles are longer than 17 characters. (Compare that with the aforementioned Sufjan Stevens song, which exceeds Twitter's 140-character limit by a whopping 20 per cent).

This brevity tendency is not limited to music, either. As Stephanie Strom reported in The New York Times on July 11, “The organization previously known as the Y.M.C.A. is henceforth to be called ‘the Y.' ” When a four-letter acronym is too time-consuming, we've clearly entered the era of radical compression, when the abbreviated convenience of URL shorteners like Bit.ly is now being applied to offline phenomena.

Perhaps the best, (if not funniest) example of this trend appeared in The New York Times Media Decoder Blog on March 23: “Stefano Tonchi, the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, has been appointed editor of W, the fashion magazine published by Condé Nast.” Given that magazines are generally in the business of delivering a bushel of words, it seems strange to mute themselves with such nondescript titles. And while T and W might be isolated letters, they aren't isolated examples of publications with barely there names. There's a Toronto-based technology magazine called UR (full disclosure: I'm an occasional contributor) along with a couples magazine called 2.

Which is not to suggest that a single letter (or number) cannot contain multitudes. In his 2008 book X-rated!: The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture, University of Toronto semiotician Marcel Danesi argues that symbols like the letters X and V “tell us more about the state of the world than do theories and sophisticated academic debates.” Along with V (a feminine symbol) and X (which blends the sacred and the profane), Danesi uses X-rated! to discuss the ubiquitous lower case “i” prefix attached to anything remotely technological (iPad, iTravel, iSandwich).

But rather than panic about our one-letter future, Danesi points out that humans have an inbuilt tendency toward language efficiency (or laziness, depending on your perspective). Referring to the work of the late Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf and the law that bears his name, Danesi notes that “the more frequent, necessary, or popular a form becomes for communicative purposes, the more likely it is to be rendered compressed or economical in structure.”

Tom McCarthy, a British writer and artistic provocateur, appears to have taken Zipf's Law to heart with his upcoming novel, entitled C. Although it won't be in stores until September, C has already made the Man Booker Prize Long List. Unfortunately, Danesi has nothing to say about the letter C, nor does he provide insight into L, which is what Montreal writer Ian Orti titled his recent novel. Although, to be fair, the full title of L includes a parenthetical: (and things come apart).

Since bookstore browsers might find it difficult to judge Orti's book by its sole letter, I will offer a quick review: sly. If my review leaves you wanting, it's only because I'm emulating filmmaker and illustrator Sarah Lazarovic, who in June started posting three-character book reviews via Twitter. Examples include: Ugh. Ha! Meh. Yup. Those, respectively, are for The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis, The Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman, The Ask by Sam Lipsyte and The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman.

Of course, given the ever-shrinking book coverage in newspapers, it's probably dangerous to draw attention or otherwise legitimize three-character literary reviews.

Instead, I'll conclude by praising a children's book from 1968 whose four-character title appears to have anticipated text message shorthand. I refer to CDB! by New York illustrator William Steig. Re-released in 2000, a few years before Steig's death, CDB! (see the bee) is a book where “letters and numbers are used to create the sounds of words and simple sentences 4 u 2 figure out.”

So, for example, the book contains an L-F-N (elephant), an L-F-8-R (elevator) and a boy saying I N-V-U (I envy you).

CDB!'s word puzzles are a perfect mix of charming and goofy. Or, in keeping with the three-character review format, fab. And given the current climate of compression, Steig's publisher should consider reissuing the book yet again. The way things are going, it's sure to be a bestseller.

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

(Toronto Star link).

Never Too Proud to Recycle Content Nearly a Decade Old

Late last month techcrunch revealed that mailing all those AOL CDs during the 1990s cost quite a bit of money. Which reminded me of an article I wrote for Shift back in December 2001 about Lydia Cline, a woman who collects AOL disks. I can still clearly recall that I tried my best to imitate the witty sophistication of Adam Sternbergh with this article. I'll let readers judge how successful I was. 

Discography

Shift | December 2001 | Ryan Bigge

Until this very moment, you were unaware that Lydia Cline of Overland Park, Kansas, packrats Lucite purses, vintage TWA posters, Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls and cartoon character glassware. But this list evaporates when you learn Cline has willingly acquired over 500 playfully-decorated AOL disks, the ur-junk mail of the nineties. While most deride and scorn the software delivery devices that lurk inside cereal boxes, flyers and magazines, Cline has lovingly gathered all manner of AOL product: CDs, mini-CDs, even 3 1/2 disks. She also has Q-Link diskettes (an AOL forerunner) for the Commodore 64 and discs printed in funny languages from strange, faraway countries like Brazil, Germany and Hong Kong.

She has a lot of them.

It wasn't always like this. "I used to throw 'em away at first just like everyone else," admits Cline.

It was a slow, tranquil evolution from skeptic to completist. A few years ago, Cline, an AOL user and small fry shareholder since 1994, started putting disks aside in a basket in case she needed to reinstall the software. Then, one fateful day, she realized each of her fifteen discs featured a different, snazzy image. Her curiousity piqued, she began to seek out other designs in the same way as a pog or Coke bottle enthusist might. Two years later, her collection includes such oddities as a Spiderman disk, a Bugs Bunny disk, even an X-Files disk. And 497 others, examples of which are neatly displayed at http://www.lydiasaoldisks.com/

Cline is an otherwise sane, forty-one-year-old mother of two, an architect and professor at Johnson County Community College who just happens to be able to wax poetic about old AOL discs the way other people discuss wine vintages. "The pre-1992 version 1.0 are really neat because they're on 5 1/4 floppies, they have packaging which includes a letter from Steve Case, a fold-out poster, and a booklet on getting started."

Cline is the sort of person who refers to 5 1/4 floppies as "antiques."

Nevertheless, Cline is a pragmatic collector. Her living room doesn't boast an AOL shrine. Instead, "they're just in a bunch of Rubbermaid tubs in my basement." She adds to her stash by trading disks with a small circle of eight similarly afflicted collectors who all met through eBay. (She even has a rival, KrazyErik). Thrift stores, garage sales, newspaper ads, friends, students, and email lists are also an excellent source of digital booty.

She'll even go as far as to politely pester webmasters in foreign countries for disks in hopes they have a stash of AOL product they have no use for. When all else fails, she capitulates to eBay.

Thus far, Cline has spent between $500 and $700 on her hobby. "It sounds really sad to hear myself say that," Cline says, laughing, before rationalizing her addiction. "I know other collectors on eBay have spent far more than me because they always outbid me on the really desirable disks."

Like many visionaries, Cline is content to wait for the rest of the world to catch up. She views AOL discs as another Pez or metal lunchbox -- a pop-culture collectable that will eventually appreciate in value. Despite the millions of free discs distributed, most end up in the trash can or as drink coasters, meaning there are fewer mint-condition discs than you might think. As Cline sagely observes, "Ten or 15 years from now, people who have websites on mangling the disks, are gonna slap their foreheads and say, 'I wish I'd saved a few.'"

Content Strategy For Twitter (Magazine Edition)

Toronto Life has a popular twitter feed. It has many inbuilt advantages, including a lot of quality content that it can reference and leverage.

What it doesn't quite have yet, however, is a coherent content strategy. Sending out 14 tweets in under an hour, all about their Good Stuff Cheap issue makes no sense. I understand that Toronto Life (wisely) puts their previous issue online for free once the new issue hits the stands. But either send me to your table of contents or schedule your tweets throughout the day. The firehose is a blunt instrument that is only designed to work on fires and wet t-shirt contests.

Jason McBride Explains Toronto Real Estate Syndrome

In the new February issue of Toronto Life, Jason McBride manages to perfectly articulate my real estate frustrations:

House hunting, for us, was like having a hobby you hate and can't afford but which you're compelled to spend every free moment pursuing. We kept looking and looking, every weekend, most weeknights, for six months. This crusade ate away at a sense of entitlement I didn't even know I possessed. Isn't one of the privileges conferred upon the privileged the ability to buy a small house in a neighbourhood in which you'd want to live?

 Thank you for saying what I was thinking.

Toronto Life Regrets The Error

"For one thing, Toronto may have dodged a bullet: Smitherman was a lousy candidate who never managed to define what he believed in ... He struck me as nervous and shifty -- not a natural leader."
-- Toronto Life, Editor's Letter by Sarah Fulford, January 2011

"[T]he city is ready to bust out of its self-stifling punctiliousness … We need a brash mayor who will throw some weight around. Which brings us to George Smitherman, the oddsmakers’ favourite in the October 25 mayoral election … Smitherman is staking his campaign on the issue of job creation, while his rivals are proposing no end of brazen ideas—from subway networks to privatizations to casinos—in an effort to be what he already is: larger than life.

The Conservative strategist Jaime Watt—one of the architects of the Harris Conservatives’ two majority election victories and a partner with Navigator, the PR firm, and now one of the key players on Smitherman’s campaign team—once said that the key to image management isn’t to make a politician into someone he’s not, but to convince voters that a particular politician, warts and all, is the person they want to elect for the job at hand. And George Smitherman is looking more and more like the proverbial right guy in the right place at the right time."

-- Toronto Life, 50 Reasons to Love Toronto, Philip Preville, June 2010

Funny Person Jessica Holmes Writes Funny Book

Funny Ladies

Canadian Jessica Holmes is the latest female comedian to trade stage for page

Chatelaine | October 2010 | Ryan Bigge

In January 2009, exactly two years after Vanity Fair claimed women aren’t as funny as men, Tina Fey got revenge by appearing on the magazine’s cover. Not only are female comics as hilarious as their male counterparts, they are also now storming bestseller lists as well as sitcoms and stages. And their rising popularity means female funnybooks are now being taken very seriously (so to speak) by publishers and readers alike.

Royal Canadian Air Farce’s Jessica Holmes is the latest comedian to humorously over-share with her new memoir, I Love Your Laugh: Finding the Light in My Screwball Life. Her book combines family zaniness (her father’s predilection for buying crappy brown cars) with an emotionally revealing look at various professional and personal humiliations (such as going to a drugstore to return a box of condoms during the height of her Air Farce fame).

Holmes’ philosophy is that you cannot die from embarrassment — it will only make you stronger (and funnier): “Whatever you experience at the time, hopefully in the end it’s something you can laugh about.”

Today Holmes has plenty of company on bookstore shelves, including The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee (I Know I Am, But What Are You?) and Sarah Silverman (The Bedwetter). But this wasn’t the case when she began the book. “It was only after I started writing that Kathy Griffin’s book came out,” Holmes explains. “I thought about studying the technique for writing a book, but in the end I just decided to literally put what was in my brain down on paper.”

While Holmes jokes that “books don’t pay the mortgage” because most authors earn “six cents an hour,” the quip isn’t entirely accurate. In October 2008, Tina Fey signed a book contract worth an estimated $5 million — proving that female punch lines can be very good for a publisher’s bottom line.

(Chatelaine article link).

Steve Martin Name Checks Deborah Solomon In My Chatelaine Interview

I interviewed Steve Martin for Chatelaine back in September and he mentioned Deborah Solomon as an art writer he admires. Given the recent hullabaloo about Martin's recent appearance at the 92nd Street Y (where he was unsuccessfully interviewed by Ms. Solomon), I thought I'd post it here. I should also mention that, like Solomon's Q&As in the NYTM, my interview with Martin was condensed and edited.

All About Steve

We talked to the master comedian, actor and banjo player about his love of writing and his new novel, An Object of Beauty

Chatelaine | December 2010 | Ryan Bigge

From interviewmagazine.com culture blog

Steve Martin remains best known for his comedy – be it as an Academy Awards co-host, Tina Fey’s one-time love interest on 30 Rock, doting boyfriend to Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated or, of course, his wild and crazy stand-up days. But over the past 10 years he has quietly developed a respectable career as a man of letters. Along with a couple of novellas, 2001’s Shopgirl (about a sad young woman selling gloves at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills) and 2003’s The Pleasure of My Company (about a young man with obsessive-compulsive disorder) Martin has also written the memoir Born Standing Up (2007), which details how he conquered the stand-up world before quitting forever in 1981 to focus on feature films. The newest addition to Martin’s book list is An Object of Beauty, his first full-length novel. “I wanted to blend art history with a novel,” Martin explains. “And making the narrator an art writer gave me an excuse to recall what I thought were some fascinating historical stories about the art world.”

Spanning 18 years, An Object of Beauty is a dark and wry look at the 1990s boom and eventual bust of the contemporary art market in New York. The novel follows the exploits of a young, stylish and ambitious woman named Lacey Yeager who starts as an underling at Sotheby’s auction house and eventually opens her own gallery in Chelsea. Along the way she breaks a variety of hearts, inflicting multiple fractures on an art-collecting playboy named Patrice Claire. Narrated by Daniel Chester French Franks (an art writer and friend of Lacey), An Object of Beauty is filled with sharp and witty observations about fashion, Manhattan rituals and the culture of money. And, as an added bonus, the novel includes various colour reproductions of famous artworks (including pieces by Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha), providing Martin with an opportunity to dabble as a curator.

Despite recently turning 65, Martin has no desire to slow down. “I don’t even know what that means,” he says. “Sometimes for me, retiring is sitting down to write a book and doing nothing else. But in a sense I am retired since I don’t have a job.” Chatelaine spoke with Martin by telephone from his New York home about his favourite kinds of literary characters, his brand-new Twitter account and the financial (and artistic) genius of Andy Warhol.

What inspired An Object of Beauty?

I have been fascinated with art and the art world and how they overlap my whole life. I’ve also been fascinated with a certain type of character that exists in both men and women: the narcissistic personality or sociopath, although I don’t like to use those terms because I think they ruin books. I’ve seen these characters come and go throughout my life and since I’m a writer, I’m always looking for things to write about.

Why did you decide to include colour reproductions, like Pablo Picasso’s Woman with Pears and Willem de Koonig’s Woman I, in your book?

I found myself describing the pictures – and I really enjoyed writing those descriptions – and I suddenly thought “Why not create an illustrated novel?” Which, by the way, is not unique: they used to do woodcuts in novels. It felt interesting to have colour photographs of paintings in a novel. I hope the images help the description’s poetry rather than inhibit them.

An Object of Beauty includes a lot of references to Andy Warhol: There’s an image of his Marilyn silkscreen; the character Lacey Yeager buys a Warhol and you describe the work of Picasso and Warhol as equivalent “objects of beauty.” What’s so appealing about Warhol?

Not only is Warhol important as an artist, like Roy Lichtenstein, he was also a financial wonder during the period of time I describe in the novel. He was really leading the way in terms of the art world and the auction houses. As I explain in the book, his phenomenal prices were actually making work by new artists more valuable.

You’ve written two novellas before, but this book is your first full-length novel. Did you experience any significant challenges while writing the longer work?

I tend to write terse. And I knew I wanted to write a longer book. So I wrote about a longer period of time. Both Shopgirl and The Pleasure of my Company were about events that occurred over about two years. This book takes place over 18 years. So that was one way I tricked myself into writing a longer book.

You’ve written a number of screenplays, including L.A. Story and Roxanne. Do you approach fiction and screenplays differently?

Yes, completely different. A screenplay is an interface that is not an end in itself. It’s almost a shorthand or a guide, while a book is the final thing. You craft every sentence. You let it stew. You put it down for three months. You pick it back up. You read it aloud to yourself. I read it to my dog. I worry over individual choices of words for weeks.

Who are some of your favourite authors?

In terms of this book, I would say my favourite authors are art writers. Adam Gopnik – but he hasn’t written about art lately. Peter Schjeldahl. John Richardson. And Deborah Solomon, who only writes sporadically about art. She wrote the Joseph Cornell biography and is working on biography of Norman Rockwell.

Is there something you’re reading right now that you’re exciting about?

Not right now because I’m overwhelmed. But I do recommend the John Richardson biography of Picasso.

What projects do you have coming up next?

I’m working on another bluegrass-banjo album that will be out in February. It’s called Rare Bird Alert. And I have a movie coming out next year that I’m quite proud of called The Big Year starring Owen Wilson and Jack Black.

And you also recently joined Twitter. Last week you wrote “Reading other people’s Tweets, I think I’m getting the hang of it now. 9:23am: cleaning toenails.”

Yes. I do jokes. I don’t do personal stuff. I’m not sure how long it will last. I’m just experimenting. But it’s fun.

SMS MLS = Stned Dk Hdwd Thruout

The recent downturn in the real estate market apparently means that agents can no longer afford to use vowels.