Featuring: Haruki Murakami, Arthur Conan Doyle, Junot Diaz, Stephen King, and John Reibetanz.

1. Running Man In their summer fiction issue a few weeks ago, the New Yorker published an essay by Haruki Murakami about his simultaneous birth as a novelist and long-distance runner. Like most Murakami, it was really good, but sort of hard to say why. It’s actually an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which Bond Street will publish at the end of this month. What to say that doesn’t break the review embargo? I’ll note that if you enjoyed the essay, you’ll enjoy the book, and you’ll finish it with the same sense of perplexed pleasure with which you ended the excerpt. Murakami’s work is, stylistically at least, deceptively simple, and I always leave his novels a little uncertain of what’s transpired, but very sure that I’ve enjoyed its transpiring. Since the book is non-fiction, what happens within it is a bit clearer than in, say, South of the Border, West of the Sun (seriously—was she like a ghost or something?), but the prose still has its mysteries. For instance, how did it manage to entrance me enough to finish a book about long-distance running, a subject in which I have no interest? The title, of course, is borrowed from Raymond Carver, and Tess Gallagher is thanked within for permission. Not thanked, however, is Horace Silver, though he should be—Murakami’s cover borrows and adapts the running man from Silver’s semi-excellent 1972 Blue Note LP In Pursuit of the 27th Man (part of which is pictured above). (more…)

In what is surely one of the worst ideas in recent cinematic history, Warner Brothers has asked Guy Ritchie to direct a new Sherlock Holmes movie. Making it even worse? The script is to be based on a comic book, and both of these iterations are to focus, Variety tells us, on our hero’s physical side in an attempt “reinvent Holmes and sidekick Dr. John H. Watson.” According to information shared by Lionel Wigram, the film’s producer, the new Holmes will “be more adventuresome and take advantage of his skills as a boxer and swordsman.” The Guardian headline really says it all: “Guy Ritchie takes on ‘all-action’ Sherlock Holmes.” I like to think that those scare quotes are some British copy editor’s way of saying, “Hey, listen everybody: how dumb is this?!”

In effect, greenlighting this project is like saying that it would be really cool to make a movie about Hulk Hogan’s recent dalliance with modal logic. It’s not inconceivable that the Hulkamaniac is into the whole possible worlds thing, but it certainly isn’t his day job. The fact that Holmes is physically agile and has a history of boxing makes him a rounder character, but it doesn’t define that roundness; while I would find Hogan more interesting if he had some serious thoughts about David Lewis, I would never expect—nor would I want—it to be more essential to his character than, say, the time he body-slammed Andre the Giant while defending the world title at Wrestlemania III.

The last time I wrote about Holmes, my focus was on the brilliant new Penguin series of paperbacks. While thinking about the man in preparation for writing that, it occurred to me that the notion of order is central to the Holmes world. I didn’t mention it in the post, because it seemed sort of self-evident; the books and stories are based on the possibilities of reasoning, which is an inherently structural act. While Holmes may have distracting tendencies—his occasionally debilitating drug addiction, say—the idea of order is at the centre of his capabilities.

Which is why this news is particularly terrible. Setting aside the fact that the direction of the film stands in distinct opposition to any reasonable interpretation of what is essential to the character (and ignoring the fact that it’s a crass attempt to make a biceps-and-zingers superhero out of a character who is already a superhero, though of a different kind), the idea of Guy Ritchie helming this picture is ridiculous. Ritchie’s style—frantic, frenetic, jittery, annoying—is the antithesis of the masterly calm that defines Holmes’s personal world, and the precision with which Conan Doyle relates the events that happen within it.

But I suppose it’s all tied up in that word ‘reinvention’ To truly reinvent the character, it seems, they’ll need to change not only his fundamental nature, but the way he relates to what is fundamental to his world. So perhaps Guy Ritchie and his MTV editing team are exactly the right choice. Because if you’re going to kill an idol, you might as well make doubly sure he’s dead.

“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”
–Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

It is somewhat of a consensus around the Walrus office, or at least whichever part of that office Paul Isaacs and I happen to be in at a given time, that Sherlock Holmes is tops. This is one of those hyperbolic statements that sounds playful and ridiculous, but which is not. I believe some call this Birony.

The truth is that Sherlock Holmes is just about the best company a person could have. (He’s also a great instructor in the art of reasoning; were we all to study at his feet, the world would be a better, and slightly cooler, place.) But Holmes has had the misfortune of what we might call the public domain treatment. This phenomenon happens when a book is no one’s property and thus anyone can release it in basically any form at any time. This leads to two things: 1) a wider, often less-expensive dissemination of the texts, which in the case of Holmes is excellent, for people tend to enjoy the stories, but which in the case of Hard Times is certainly pernicious and potentially disastrous to the book’s public conception (average twenty-first century reader: not so much with the activist Dickens); and 2) a proliferation of ugly design (see: everything by Dover Thrift Editions) which is often so prevalent as to render the book forever hideous in the reading public’s mind. (I should note that it’s great that Dover makes very affordable books, and I don’t criticize their enterprise there. I’m not even asking them to make the books beautiful. Just less ugly.) (more…)

I tip my hat to one of our web wizards for sending me news that Marvel comics plans to make a graphic novel out of Stephen King’s The Stand. Now this comes as a report on something King said last week on NPR, so one can’t be entirely sure that it’s true (Marvel has not yet commented). But as far as things people said on NPR last week go, this statement—“Marvel is going to do The Stand as a graphic novel”—seems pretty unequivocal.

The Stand is, by many standards, a major book. Sure, it has its issues, in particular a final third where King strives so hard to make everything seem important that the finer dramas and insights that he has spun out thus far become ridiculous. But on the whole, and in particular in the terrifying detail and nuance of its post-apocalyptic vision (as well as the fabulous depth of some of his characters, especially the more preposterous of them), it’s hard to deny that it’s anything short of kickass. (Reviewing King’s latest, Duma Key, in the Los Angeles Times in January, Richard Rayner noted that “no other popular novelist, perhaps no other contemporary novelist period, can take recognizable, ordinary people and put them through the wringer with such cackling panache while always keeping sight of their humanity. King’s characters are always fixed in the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day, wearing silly sneakers or scarfing down luncheon meat out of the fridge, and that’s a huge part of his gift and success.” I think that’s exactly right and would like to associate myself with the argument.) (more…)

PITTSBURGH, PA—We were in an old blue Volvo station wagon, the kind with Lightning Hopkins on the AM radio and black leather interior that’s worn out at the seats. Rain was driving Pittsburgh even deeper into the rusty ground. I was in the backseat, watching the city through the rhythm of the windshield wipers, and as we careened around the preposterous angles of Polish Hill, I couldn’t help but expect to see Carl Franklin’s Hi-Hat around the corner of our next forty-degree turn.

The Hat, as regulars call it, is a ramshackle old juke joint on the Hill, the site of one of my favourite scenes in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and precisely the sort of place a man visiting Pittsburgh would like to spend his Thursday night. But the sad fact is that the Hat doesn’t actually exist, though it might as well, for like most of the fabricated details of Chabon’s Pittsburgh it exists in countless variations across the hills and valleys of this city. (If you’ve got the time and inclination, I think you’ll find Gooski’s a more than adequate stand-in; they’ve got Roy Orbison on the jukebox, and it’s the sort of establishment where a man can accomplish a round of three pints and three Jagermeister shots for less than twenty bucks.) (more…)