“By their estimation, a handful of blog reviews and the privilege to work with someone who sent Lenny Kravitz posters to record stores in 1995 has already cost the band upwards of $109,000. I want to write that number again because it’s so absurd, and then pick up a sandwich board and write it again — next to the words YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG — so that I can boycott Two Lights shows around the country with a small, but angry cult called The Church of Rational People.” Norman Brannon on Two Lights.

• Jacket Copy on MoMA’s Print/Out exhibit, coming next month.

• The Books have called it a day, which crushes our dreams of having a post titled “Band Booking: The Books.” Which would have been awesome.

• Hey, it’s an Etgar Keret design contest!

• If you have nominees for the 2012 edition of Best Music Writing, the ballot is up.

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A weekly appreciation for the art of the review.

“…like watching someone give his funeral audience a lengthy disquisition on his life while digging his own grave and knocking together his own coffin in front of them.”

Warren Ellis on Iain Specter’s Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project.

“A book such as Chris Matthews’s biography of President Kennedy would not ordinarily seem like best-seller material.”

David Greenberg at The New Republic on Chris Matthews’ biography on JFK.  We were under the impression that books by well-known political pundits and books about historical figures always seem like best-seller material.  Maybe we were wrong?

“These beautiful, brutal sections of The Flame Alphabet contain some of the most thoughtful and moving writing I’ve ever read about family life.”

Michael Jauchen at The Rumpus on The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus.

“Switching from descriptions of the pseudo-bohemian life of a allowance-receiving, aspiring artist who lives in Bushwick and dates a girl at Sarah Lawrence to the life of a detained enemy-of-the-state awaiting tribunal, FMOANEC is delivered with a precise and trenchant eye for satire.”

Our own Jon Reiss on Alex Gilvarry’s “From the Memiors of a Non-Enemy Combatant”

“The songs come off like 15 different variations on a drunk chick at the bar trying to convince someone to come home with her.”

Tom Breihan of Stereogum gets pretty descriptive about Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die.

“The album’s full of Del Rey’s lurching attempts to Pull Things Off — and it’s most interesting when she’s not quite succeeding, but trying very hard regardless.”

And Nitsuh Abebe has some astute observations about the album in question for New York.

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“The faux-democratic ideal of plain-spokenness, the sense that a novelist should not write too beautifully or he sacrifices some vaguely articulated, semi-mystical claim to honesty, is not a million miles away from the Sarah Palin-ish suspicion of east coast liberals, or a Harvard education, or people who know the dates of wars.” – Katie Roiphe feels it necessary to go on the defensive for John Updike on the anniversary of his death.

• Ben Shattuck at The Morning News on historians studying the cause of the Salem witch trials and history being an “imperfect science.”

• Douglas Rushkoff on making the leap fro media theory to fiction.

• Mort Persky at the Los Angeles Review of Books on the art of the newspaper column.

• The Rumpus talks to Chelsea Wolfe.

• Watch a teaser of the Bill Callahan tour documentary at Pitchfork.

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At the Portland Mercury, Alison Hallett looks at Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife, which looks increasingly inescapable: “calls to mind Jonathan Lethem’s recent Chronic City and the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, as much as it does sci-fi predecessors like Philip K. Dick or even Cory Doctorow.”

• At The Lit Pub, Greg Stahl looks at Tim Kinsella’s The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense. (We reviewed it earlier this month.)

• Hey, it’s Jonathan Lethem’s book on Fear of Music.

• At Reading in LA: Amanda Briggs considered.

• At Sadie Magazine: Blake Nelson is interviewed. (via Elisabeth Donnelly.)

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Posted by Jason Diamond

“Just because I speak with a posh southern public school accent everybody assumes I’m posh or I’m a toff.”

- A man wearing a cravat while reviewing P.G. Wodehouse.

Review by Jon Reiss

From the Memiors of  a Non-Enemy Combatant
by Alex Gilvarry
(Viking, 320 p.)

From the Memiors of  a Non-Enemy Combatant is the story of Boyet (Boy for short) Hernandez, a Philippine-born aspiring designer who, having grown up in admiration of his fabric slinging uncle, lusts for a future as New York’s most desirable, heterosexual male clothing designer (of which there area bout 10.)  Living off a meager allowance from his parents, Boy is barely able to afford an apartment in Bushwick.   Meanwhile he yearns for success. To him, this means — among other things — an apartment on the illustrious streets of Williamsburg.  Stranded in Bushwick, far from the glamour of the fashion world, he comes into contact with a seemingly affable if not mercurial fabric salesman named Ahemd who commissions him to make a pair of suits, eventually offering to fund his entire debut clothing line.  Boy’s desire for success is so that he accepts Ahmed’s offer despite looming doubts and distrust of his methods.  As Boy’s dreams begin to come to fruition, the stage is set for his eventual downfall, one that results in him being stranded in a government facility for detainees far more remote than the Kosciuszko stop on the J train.  Writing this tale as a long form confession from the offshore facility nicknamed “No Man’s Land” Boy is forced to come to terms with the fact that the decisions made to bolster his (B)oy fashion label also resulted in the new, notorious label bestowed upon him by the media: “The Fashion Terrorist.”

Switching from descriptions of the pseudo-bohemian life of a allowance-receiving, aspiring artist who lives in Bushwick and dates a girl at Sarah Lawrence to the life of a detained enemy-of-the-state awaiting tribunal, FMOANEC is delivered with a precise and trenchant eye for satire.  From his girlfriend with a penchant for gratuitous use of the word, “random,” to Boy’s attempt at cutting the sleeves of his orange detainee jumpsuit in order to use the extra fabric to taper his pants, to Boy’s publicist who cannot get on a plane because his name is Ben Laden, the fashion industry, the post 9/11 US government, and the lives of bohemian hipsters are given a solid tussle.

“I know this all sounds sophomoric but such is the fashion industry.”

Littered with footnotes that come from an unidentified, presumably government-affiliated source, FMOANEC is unique in its narrative delivery. It seems a trend lately for novels to employ narrators that aren’t taken especially seriously, often unreliable, but not on purpose. Though Gilvarry’s protagonist seems at times naive and self-involved, his foibles are presented so as not to be poked fun at or judged, but merely to show how one, when driven, can become wrapped up in an extraordinarily fucked-up situation.  Even if the satire of the fashion industry doesn’t compel you, nor a send-up of the Williamsburg trust-fund hipster lifestyle, or even a critique the hyper paranoid post-9/11 anti terrorism effort, FMOANEC as a book about ambition and desire is worth its weight.

Plainly put, Gilvarry’s debut novel is an absolute breath of fresh air for two major reasons.  From The Memoiors of a Non Enemy Combatant feels like the first novel with substantial buzz to come along in quite some time that doesn’t try and wow the reader with the author’s intelligence.  Not to say that GIlvarry’s intelligence doesn’t shine through, but it’s understated, and not delivered via injections of incremental quirk in the protagonists voice.  Also, while FMOANEC isn’t entirely reliant on plot, there’s plenty of plot to speak of.   Though the plot is delivered in a way that isn’t entirely conventional structurally, we’re still being taken for a ride here, one which, even if the subjects mentioned (Fashion, post 9/11 paranoia) on the back cover don’t grab you, quickly proves itself well worth taking.

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"Rothko"

Things we are 110% behind: Great works of art turned into sandwiches.

• Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wants to put out a newspaper to unify the disparate peoples of Russia through a common literary canon.

• Women writers get more money but less respect.

• Hey!  There’s a new Bookrageous episode available for you.

• From the “Stuff Vol. 1 Editors Wrote” department: Tobias on six authors who have also dabbled in songwriting, and Jason profiles Nathan Englander for Capital New York.

• Exactly how much does an iPad cost in human lives?  The New York Times story on the dangers faced by working in Chinese electronic factories will clue you in.

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Ann Powers looks at Spin‘s experiment in 140-character record reviews, and reverse-engineers two full-length reviews from it. Shades of Christopher Orr’s review of 21 based only on the preview…

• Molly Gaudry on work from Jeanne Winterson and Mary Ruefle.

• Irvine Welsh has written Skagboys, a prequel to Trainspotting.

• If you’re looking for an excellent reading in northern Brooklyn tomorrow, you have two outstanding options: Largehearted Boy’s tenth anniversary at WORD (with Emma Straub and Jennifer Gilmore) and the Caryn Rose/Rosie Schaap combo at Pete’s Candy Store.

• Conde Nast Traveler also has some nice things to say about WORD.

• If you’re an emerging writer based in New York City, you may want to look at this fellowship at the Center for Fiction.

• The lineup for this year’s EMP Pop Conference, held at NYU from March 22nd to the 25th, has been announced.

• The deadline to help distribute free books as part of World Book Night is rapidly approaching.

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Posted by Tobias Carroll

The post title does not refer to the last of a dozen Yetis roaming the countryside. Even better: it’s a reference to the latest issue of the long-running Portland-based publication. The new issue features a slightly tweaked format, lengthy articles on Tiki Men and NYHC, and a cover illustration (see above) by Carson Ellis.  The accompanying seven inch features Grouper covering Dead Moon, as well. In other words, it’s basically tapped into the collective unconscious of Vol.1′s editorial department…

Also of note, perhaps: our 2011 interview with editor Mike McGonigal.

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