In their persistent humor and charm and their seeming effortlessness, these essays remind me of the best of Mark Twain’s.
 

You may have come across a condensed version of Amis’ hangover recovery advice in the Daily Mail a couple years ago. I enjoyed it at the time, but now, having read that section of the book in full, I’m aghast that so much was lost in the cutting. Couldn’t the editors have omitted some of the day’s news instead?

Amis advocates a two-pronged approach to hangover recovery: the physical, and the metaphysical. The third step in his treatment of the metaphysical hangover (M.H.) — “that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future” — entails embarking on either the M.H. Literature Course or the M.H. Music Course, or, if necessary, both in succession. “The structure of both Courses … rests on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim.”

Amis’ Rx for hangover reading:

Begin with verse, if you have any taste for it. Any really gloomy stuff that you admire will do. My own choice would tend to include the final scene of Paradise Lose, Book XII, lines 606 to the end, with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624-6. The trouble here, though, is that today of all days you do not want to be reminded of how inferior you are to the man next door, let alone to a chap like Milton. Safer to pick someone less horribly great. I would plump for the poems of A.E. Housman and/or R.S. Thomas, not that they are in the least interchangeable. Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum is good, too, if a little long for the purpose.

Switch to prose with the same principles of selection. I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is not gloomy exactly, but its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate in no mood of self-pity.

Turn now to stuff that suggests there may be some point to living after all. Battle poems come in rather well here: Macaulay’s Horatius, for instance. Or, should you feel that this selection is getting a bit British (for the Roman virtues Macaulay celebrates have very much that sort of flavour), try Chesterton’s Lepanto. The naval victory in 1571 of the forces of the Papal League over the Turks and their allies was accomplished without the assistance of a single Anglo-Saxon (or Protestant). Try not to mind the way Chesterton makes some play with the fact that this was a victory of Christians over Moslems.

By this time you could well be finding it conceivable that you might smile again some day. However, defer funny stuff for the moment. Try a good thriller or action story, which will start to wean you from self-observation and the darker emotions: Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, Gavin Lyall, Dick Francis, Geoffrey Houshold, C.S. Forester (perhaps the most useful of the lot). Turn to comedy only after that; but it must be white — i.e. not black — comedy: P.G. Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Captain Marryat, Anthony Powell (not Evelyn Waugh), Peter De Vries (not The Blood of the Lamb, which, though very funny, has its real place in the tearful category, and a distinguished one*). I am not suggesting that these writers are comparable in other ways than that they make unwillingness to laugh seem a little pompous and absurd.

This weekend, while grapefruit is still indisputably in season, I’m going to make Amis’ Salty Dog: “Moisten the rim of a glass and twirl it about in a saucer of table salt, so that it picks up a thickish coating about a quarter or an inch deep. Carefully add one part gin and two parts fresh grapefruit juice, stir thoroughly; add ice, stir again, and drink through the band of salt. Splendid for out of doors.”
 

* Hear, hear.

Mark Twain, who died a hundred years ago today, entered the world and left with Halley’s Comet. His essays have a permanent place on my bedside table; I read them whenever my own writing stalls. Those perfect verbs, those unexpected but accurate nouns, that distinctive sense of the absurd and limitless ability to evoke it…

We’ve had our difficulties, Twain and I, but no writer, living or dead, is as important to me, the young William Faulkner be damned.

Tonight WFMU offers a musical tribute centered around “the 19th century author’s seemingly contradictory relationship with the keyboard. Twain often publicly claimed a distaste for the piano, yet privately had a particular affection for it and was involved with the instrument and its players his entire life. The [program features] nine piano works connected to Twain, interspersed with readings of Twain’s sardonic observations about the instrument.” (Thanks to Sean and Min Jin; past Twain idolatry resides here.)

But every curmudgeon is at least something of a hypocrite, and I am no exception. I visit writers’ houses, read their recipes, and sometimes stop in at the White Horse Tavern, a bar that has nothing to recommend it apart from the fact that Dylan Thomas was served his last drink there. Last night A.N. Devers gave me a replica of Mark Twain’s pen knife. It’s sitting here on my desk next to — ahem — the Poe figurine.

And now I am going to recommend a book for your coffee table.
 

My friend Dwight Garner’s Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements, a revealing cultural history marketed as a novelty book, collects one hundred years of book ads, from the creatively manipulative to the hilariously misguided. Read Me shows, more effectively than any treatise could, how pitches to book-buyers evolved in the last century, and also that the marketing arm of the publishing industry has always had the capacity to be more than a little tone-deaf (as in the perky ad for Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark, below).

It’s the perfect thing to pass around and read aloud from after holiday meals, while everyone is still drunk and merry and not wanting to contemplate the moment they’ll have to head back out into the cold.

Maud is a nickname now, one most of my friends call me, but it started as a pen name. I chose it years ago as a sort of homage to Maude Newton, my great-great aunt, a woman nobody wanted to answer questions about.

For the longest time, I only really knew about her marital separation by peppering. Then census data told me her husband’s last name: Simmons. And in a letter earlier this fall, my granddad’s cousin mentioned that Maude was a schoolteacher.
 

Now here she is, above, at 92, in her King Midget, The World’s Lowest-Priced Car. The photo is taken from James Dickerson’s May 1977 story for the Delta Democrat-Times.

Apparently Maude had seen the company’s ad in National Geographic and called up to say that she’d like to be the Midget Motor Corp dealer for Sunflower County, Mississippi. The top brass were amenable.

When her first King Midget arrived on the train from Athens, Ohio, more than 12 years ago, Mrs. Maude Simmons, 92, of Drew said that Main Street was filled with curiosity seekers.

“It was my first car,” Mrs. Simmons said. “And I couldn’t drive an inch. The man who taught me was a driving instructor at the local school, and he taught me all I needed to know in about two or three days.”

Although she got a deal on the car, which cost her $500, Maude told Dickerson “it was not an easy decision to make.”

“‘My family didn’t want me to do it,’ she said. ‘So I listened to them for about a year. Then I wrote the company anyway and told them to send me a car.’”
 

As for the King Midget itself, Dickerson reports:

Not everything has worked out the way she planned, though, over the years she has been unable to sell a single King Midget…. But there are also advantages of a unique sort.

“I ran off the road once,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it, when some fellow came along and helped me out. It wasn’t any trouble at all. He just pulled it out of the ditch by hand.”

The article also reveals that Maude’s house was filled with books and magazines, and that she met Simmons in Indiana, where she had a job in an architectural office. “‘I learned how to do house plans there,’” she explained. “‘In fact, I did the plans for this very house I’m living in right now.”
 

She also remembered teaching in southern Mississippi “‘when we had Halley’s Comet.’” “‘That was 1910, the year Mark Twain died,’” she adds. “‘When the comet came over we all went outside to have a look.’”

Twain was born shortly before it passed, and died the day after its return. “It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet,” he reportedly said. “‘The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”

Like most people, Maude, who was born in 1885, got to see the comet only once. She died in 1981, at the age of 97.
 

Many writers say that they write what they do because the novels they want to read don’t exist.

I don’t think about my own book quite that way, but to me one of the most frightening things about writing fiction is the corollary to this idea: namely, if you have an individual voice and any skill whatsover, it will occur to you one day, as you obsess over the problems with your latest draft, that you are the only one who can fix it.

Obviously trusted readers are necessary and invaluable; their advice will help when your own vision falters. And once the book is in its nearly final stage, a good editor can pare away the fat and tell you, in a way that shows understanding of your project, what’s missing or not working. But no one else is going to be able to produce the actual words that will make the story work the way you want it to.

Because I’ve been preoccupied with this idea while writing lately, here’s the “You’re On Your Own” or “Revise, Revise, Revise” installment of writers’ quotes.
 

“Simply stated, maybe too simply, it is the writer’s business to have something of his own to say; second, to say it in his own language and style.” — Katherine Anne Porter

“I think and think for a sentence, and every sentence I think for is wrong, I know it. Then, all at once, the illuminating sentence comes to me. Everything clicks into place.” — Jean Rhys (pictured)

“In the case of a story, the beginning and the end always reveal themselves to me, but not what happens between the starting point and the finish line. There are writers who say that they don’t work this way, that for them the beginning is sufficient, later they look for the best ending, the best solution. I know the beginning and the end, and I have to figure out what happens between them for the story itself, and I can be wrong. So I have to start again when I realize this.” — Jorge Luis Borges

“There is much that I like in the book — it seems to me more simply and clearly written than its predecessors and ingeniously constructed to avoid the tedium of the time sequence (I had learned something from my continual rereading of that remarkable novel The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford), but until I reached the final part I did not realize the formidable problem I had set myself.” — Graham Greene, on The End of the Affair

“You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God’s adjectives. You [can] thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.” — Mark Twain
 

Prior literary quips, observations, instructions, and warnings: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

My latest NPR appreciation is of Who Is Mark Twain?, a collection of previously unpublished writings by my favorite essayist. Here’s an excerpt:

Best known for crowd-pleasers like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and for his lucrative speaking tours, Mark Twain was a writer whose livelihood depended on maintaining enough down-home affability to appeal to the masses. Yet as we see in Who Is Mark Twain?, a new collection of previously unpublished writings, he fantasized constantly about the freedom death would bring.

Among the writings left behind at Twain’s death in 1910, at age 74 — in his “large box of Posthumous Stuff” — were squibs, rants, unfinished essays and his most heretical and passionate work, Letters From The Earth, a satirical attack on Christianity so scathing that his daughter forbade its publication until the 1960s.

Weekend Edition ran an interview with Robert Hirst, the editor of the collection and head of the University of California Berkeley’s Mark Twain Project.
 

Previously on Twain (a sampling): Twain’s manufactured, curiously theological thoughts on Shakespeare (in which my obsession begins); Send up the clowns; In the beginning, again, with Alter (and Twain); Fear of burning out on a writer; The New Yorker, Mark Twain, and Christians live forever; Whenever Twain was about to publish a book.

Last December The New Yorker offered a preview: “The Privilege of the Grave,” which sheds light on Twain’s thoughts about death and posthumous publication.

Now B&N Review provides another excerpt, Whenever I Am about to Publish a Book. Here the author claims that, before committing fully to publishing a work, he always read the manuscript “to a private group of friends, composed as follows”:

1. Man and woman with no sense of humor.

2. Man and woman with medium sense of humor.

3. Man and woman with prodigious sense of humor.

4. An intensely practical person.

5. A sentimental person.

6. Person who must have a moral in, and a purpose.

7. Hypercritical person — natural flaw-picker and fault-finder.

8. Enthusiast — person who enjoys anything and everything, almost.

9. Person who watches the others, and applauds or condemns with the majority.

10. Half a dozen bright young girls and boys, unclassified.

11. Person who relishes slang and familiar flippancy.

12. Person who detests them.

13. Person of evenly balanced judicial mind.

14. Man who always goes to sleep.

These people accurately represent the general public. Their verdict is the sure forecast of the verdict of the general public. There is not a person among them whose opinion is not valuable to me; but the man whom I most depend upon — the man whom I watch with the deepest solicitude — the man who does most toward deciding me as to whether I shall publish the book or burn it, is the man who always goes to sleep.

The rest is here.
 

Twain was preoccupied not only with predicting the public’s reaction to his work (and setting aside the most inflammatory stuff for publication after his death), but with preserving memory.

Pictured below is a dubious game of his creation. According to one critic, it looked “like a cross between an income tax form and a table of logarithms.”

The New Yorker recently made everything — from its very first issue to the latest — available to subscribers online. This means you can read Mark Twain’s “The Privilege of the Grave” right now.

Although previously unpublished, the essay will be immediately recognizable as Twain’s to anyone who’s had even casual exposure to his nonfiction. Here’s a brief excerpt from the beginning:

Its occupant has one privilege which is not exercised by any living person: free speech. The living man is not really without this privilege — strictly speaking — but as he possesses it merely as an empty formality, and knows better than to make use of it, it cannot be seriously regarded as an actual possession. As an active privilege, it ranks with the privilege of committing murder: we may exercise it if we are willing to take the consequences. Murder is forbidden both in form and in fact; free speech is granted in form but forbidden in fact. By the common estimate both are crimes, and are held in deep odium by civilized peoples.

Toward the end, he says:

Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take to the pen and pour them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are waste, because I can’t print the result…. It does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and admire the trouble it would make for my family.

He resolves to leave the inflammatory work behind, and “utter it from the grave,” since nobody bothers to hold a grudge against a dead person.
 

When he wrote this essay, Twain was almost certainly thinking of his Letters from the Earth, an indictment of Christianity so scathing that his wife refused to discuss it with him, and his daughter held up its publication for decades after his death.

Although the book is uneven, the best pieces in it are some of Twain’s strongest work. (And I say this as a Twain fanatic.) They engage with Christianity on its own terms and highlight its illogic without resorting to the supercilious, you-idiots! tone of a Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens. Unlike those men, whose real aim, or at least only real hope, is to galvanize atheists and convert agnostics, Twain is a true satirist whose intended audience is people who are, as he was, raised in the church.

And his rhetoric is a powerful tonic for believers. A good friend’s father, who was a missionary, lost his faith for many years after reading Letters from the Earth. (I’ve said most of this before; I’m so obsessed with the Letters from the Earth, I once started posting it line-by-line at Twitter.)
 

“The Privilege of the Grave” is not Twain’s only work that depicts death and the grave as the reward of the longsuffering. One of the best passages of Satan’s tenth letter, which is collected in Letters from the Earth, begins:

In time, the Deity perceived that death was a mistake; a mistake, in that it was insufficient; insufficient, for the reason that while it was an admirable agent for the inflicting of misery upon the survivor, it allowed the dead person himself to escape from all further persecution in the blessed refuge of the grave. This was not satisfactory. A way must be contrived to pursue the dead beyond the tomb.

The Deity pondered this matter during four thousand years unsuccessfully, but as soon as he came down to earth and became a Christian his mind cleared and he knew what to do. He invented hell, and proclaimed it.

Obviously I’m not hostile to the book as a printed object. There are hundreds (thousands?) of them in my apartment. No doubt there will soon be hundreds more.

Nor, however, am I averse to reading books electronically. My first successful attempt came by accident early this year, when I ended up tearing through most of my friend Marie’s novel manuscript on my iPhone.
 

My train stalled on the way home from work that night, and after I finished the pages I’d printed for the ride, I was left the middle of a suspenseful scene. The “sick passenger on the train ahead of us” (i.e., did she fall, or was she pushed?) situation dragged on. And on. Finally we crept into an above-ground station where I could get reception. I whipped out my phone and downloaded the attachment.

Although grumpy and self-conscious at first, soon I was so drawn in that I forgot to be annoyed. Everything — where I sat, what I was holding, the fact that we were now speeding toward my stop — fell away, except the world of the story. (Granted, I am probably not the best test case.)
 

Since then I’ve tried Stanza (free) and Ereader (free). As you may remember, my phone plummeted to the subway tracks in September while I was engrossed in (what else?) Twain’s nonfiction. When the MTA guys handed it back to me 45 minutes later, I hadn’t even lost my place.

Recently I downloaded the bare-bones (but searchable! and free) Shakespeare app. And right now I’m re-reading Robinson Crusoe using Classics. (Pictured; $.99, comes with 13 books.)

Of these, Classics offers, overall, the most pleasant experience once you get the hang of the page-turning. I intend to keep using it until I can get my hands on the next thing, which might happen very soon.
 

For now, a few links that may be of interest:

• Side-by-side screenshots (scroll down) of the iPhone and the Kindle reveal that the number of words on each screen is roughly the same. (Also, an October Wired report suggests that iPhone Stanza downloads may top Kindle sales. No idea if that theory holds up in light of what we know now about the Kindle market.)

• “We’d love to see Amazon (AMZN) take the Netflix (NFLX) approach — make its digital content available on as many platforms as possible; not just its own gadgets — and create a Kindle reader/store app for the iPhone.”

• The rocky economy drives some lower-income mobile consumers to the iPhone (soon likely to be sold by Wal-Mart, possibly for for $99?). (Via; via.) Also, Apple dominates the “smartphone” market.

• Random House offers free books for the iPhone, and Penguin sells some “enriched eBooks.”

• Net Galley centralizes galley and digital press kit services, enabling publishers to avoid bombarding reviewers and bloggers with unwanted books and catalogs. (I really hope this takes off.)

If you order the book now, you’ll be at less of a loss for something to do once the ballots have been counted, the colors on the map are filled in, and the liquor bottles are gathering rainwater out by the curb.

Here’s the beginning of my introduction:

“Doesn’t make any difference who we are or what we are,” a cholera germ announces in one of Twain’s stories, “there’s always somebody to look down on!”

No recent novel illustrates the truth of this axiom with more precision, intelligence, and humor than Amara Lakhous’s Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, which is exactly what the title promises, except better. It’s a satirical but not unsympathetic examination of the events leading up to a murder in a modern-day Roman apartment building where immigrants, transplants, and multi-generational locals can’t seem to stop arguing about the elevator. The book was a surprise best-seller, and the winner of the prestigious Flaiano and Racalmare-Leonardo Sciascia awards, when it appeared in Italy two years ago, and has just been translated from the Italian by the formidable Ann Goldstein (who also translated Elena Ferrante’s remarkable Days of Abandonment).

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio presents a series of conflicting, casually bigoted, and often very funny monologues. These turn out to be witnesses’s statements following the brutal killing of Lorenzo Manfredini, aka the Gladiator, who was stabbed to death in the very elevator where — according to some — he often enjoyed surreptitiously urinating.

Between each of the statements are brief collections of eight or ten journal entry fragments written by prime suspect Amedeo, aka Ahmed Salmi, who, most everyone is amazed to learn, now that he’s disappeared, is not actually Italian. But he’s so gentlemanly and respectful! He can debate the teachings of Jesus and tell you the history of any street in Rome! Every single morning, he orders the “three ‘C’s” that only true Italians know the value of: “cappuccino, cornetto, Corier della Sera“! (“I’ve never in my life,” the proprietor of the establishment where Amedeo breakfasts says, “seen a Chinese, a Moroccan, a Romanian, a Gypsy, or an Egyptian read the Corier della Sera or La Pepubblica! The only thing the immigrants read is Porta Portese, for the want ads.”)

You can read the rest here, and sample an excerpt from the novel here.

Also, in the current issue of Words Without Borders, translator Ann Goldstein discusses the challenges of translating the novel, PEN American Center Translation Committee chair Michael F. Moore looks at the characters’ sweating and swearing, and the author is interviewed by Suzanne Ruta in Scheherazade, C’est Moi?

Finally, if you’re free this Thursday, November 6, Idlewild Books is hosting a conversation between Goldstein and Moore.

Thanks to all who came out to Housing Works for our Witches, Demons, and Thieves Puritan Halloween party last night. I’m on deadline, so no time for a recap, but we had fun.

For those who couldn’t make it, here’s the kinda-on-theme trivia quiz we handed out. The best part — aside from William Boggess’ questions — was that the winner, Leah, leapt out of her seat in amazement when told she’d won (with 8/10). She was so excited, I felt like a preacher at a tent revival, but I resisted the impulse to commence the laying on of hands.
 

1. Which New England author wrote, in praise of Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” “It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin”?

a) Henry James
b) Edith Wharton
c) Herman Melville
d) Harriet Beecher Stowe
 

2. Witches aren’t unique to New England. According to Roald Dahl’s book The Witches, they are most plentiful in Norway. Identifying Dahl’s witches is a little more of an exact science than it was in Salem, however. Which of these characteristics do Dahl’s witches not have? (Contributed by William Boggess.)

a) They are hairless, forcing them to wear itchy wigs
b) They are toeless, making it nearly impossible to wear fashionable women’s shoes
c) They have cobalt blue saliva, so they can never spit
d) They have extremely hairy legs, so they must always wear long pants
 

3. It was Puritan custom to let a house struck by lightning burn down, in deference to the will of God, while trying to preserve the other dwellings nearby. Which sometime admirer of Cotton Mather made a scientific discovery that called this practice into question?

a) Jonathan Edwards
b) Benjamin Franklin
c) Silence Dogood
d) John Winthrop
 

4. Strings of deaths in families led to the belief, in 19th Century New England, that one of the dead had transformed into a vampire and was returning at night to feast on everyone else. In the most famous of these cases, when Mercy Brown’s brother became ill soon after her death, their father ordered the girl dug up. Finding her oddly well-preserved, and her heart full of fresh blood, he cut out her heart, burned it, and fed the ashes to the boy, who died anyway. What very contagious disease do scientists say was actually killing these people?

a) Dropsy
b) Tuberculosis
c) Pneumonia
d) Billious colic
 

5. Despite playing girl-who-cried-witch in the 1996 film adaptation of The Crucible, Winona Ryder is no Puritan. In 2001, she was arrested for shoplifting $5,500 worth of designer clothing from which high-end store? (Contributed by William Boggess.)

a) Neiman Marcus
b) Barney’s
c) Saks Fifth Avenue
d) Nordstrom
 

6. Some scholars have speculated that the hysteria that culminated in the Salem Witch Trials may have been brought on by contaminants in Salem’s food supply. Specifically, Salem’s stores of rye may have been laced with a fungus that contains large quantities of Lysergic Acid, an analog and precursor for synthesis of LSD. What is this fungus called? (Contributed by William Boggess.)

a) Peyote
b) Ergot
c) Magic Mushrooms
d) Corn Smut
 

7. In an effort to turn everyone’s favorite childhood movie into a breathtakingly boring civics lesson, high school history teachers often teach The Wizard of Oz as an allegory for the economic and political situation of the 1890s. On the off chance that you did not sleep through these lessons, what does the Wicked Witch of the West represent in this interpretation? (Contributed by William Boggess.)

a) The California Gold Rush
b) Marauding groups of bandits on the Southern-Pacific Railroad
c) The money of the old West Coast oil establishment
d) The impending rise of West Coast hip-hop, about a century later
 

8. Which New England author, cartoonist, and illustrator, accused of being predictably drawn to the gothic, responded, “If you’re doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there’d be no point. I’m trying to think if there’s sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children – oh, how boring, boring, boring.”

a) Maurice Sendak
b) Lewis Carroll
c) Eric Carle
d) Edward Gorey
 

9. Which of these authors wrote a story in which the protagonist’s wife makes “frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion [that] all black cats [are] witches in disguise”?

a) James Hynes
b) Edgar Allan Poe
c) Henry James
d) Mark Twain
 

10. Which writer famously defined a Puritan as “someone desperately afraid that somewhere, someone might be having a good time”?

a) H.L. Mencken
b) Mark Twain
c) Ben Hecht
d) Dorothy Parker
 

Answer key: 1. c, 2. d, 3. b, 4. b, 5. c, 6. b, 7. c, 8. d, 9. b, 10. a.

The image shown is “Shot Through,” one more of Michael Aaron Lee’s gorgeous forest paintings.