Holding up the 48th second of the Beatles‘ “Rain” as an example, Wolk claims that, “if some band of 25-year-olds with radio aspirations wrote and recorded ‘Rain’ today…that take would probably be thrown out, or at least digitally edited to fix the screw-up.”

With respect to Wolk, this strikes me as a hollow, distinctly codger-y argument. (And one that cites exactly zero contemporary acts by way of illustration.) Couple points here:

1. “[The Beatles'] recording [of "Rain"] is a mess.” Not perforce true. Sure, it’s loose, and there’s a soupy-psychedelic lag to the arrangement, but the Beatles were always in tireless pursuit of shit like that. (As when John instructed George Martin to make “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” smell like “sawdust on the floor.”)

2. “It’s full of mistakes, accidents and inconsistencies that would be utterly unacceptable by the pop-music standards of 2009.” What “pop music” are we discussing here—the Jonas Bros., or indie rock’s more mainstream extrusions? ‘Cuz it seems to me we’re still in an era where authenticity, even salable authenticity, gets stored in the garage. manifested in tape hiss, &c. &c. The White Stripes were massive in spite and because of the over-discussed sloppiness of Meg White. And I’m no expert in the whole Jay Reatard thing, but doesn’t he tend to drop eighth notes here and there?

3. The Beatles is an odd band to tout as an example of studio imperfectionism. It’s true, their obsessions geared toward invention rather than toward metronomics, but after 1964, this was no garage band. These are the guys who lugged 40-piece orchestras into Abbey Road and spent over 30 hours recording this song.

4. Studio perfectionism isn’t a product of Pro Tools. And it’s not a phenomenon unique to rock, either—think Glenn Gould, whose OCD approach to studio work infuriated sound engineers and entailed unprecedented (and literal) cutting and pasting in order to effect a synthetic perfection that live performances couldn’t approach. (Christ, imagine what a pain he would’ve been in the Pro Tools era!)

5. “The lead singer’s wobbly notes, and the not-quite-in-tune bass guitar, would get fixed with AutoTune.” Sorry, how many current rock acts actually use AutoTune on a consistent basis?

What I’m wondering, I guess, is why we have to discuss this exclusively in terms of songs from the mid-’60s. “The high-tech ideal of popular music means no botched rhythms, no sour notes, no shaky dynamics, but also no ‘Sex Machine,’ no ‘Louie Louie,’ no ‘Rain.’” These are the only three songs Wolk even mentions in the post. I’d love for Fischer to chime in on the lo-fi implications of all this, and mebbe Riggs has something to say re: Emo or something like that. But this whole thing strikes me as a pretty straw-man mode of obituary.

Mike West is out this week; here’s some jazz!

Nov. 12
Elikeh Afropop at Bohemian Caverns. Togolese infusions over brooding funk; featuring Michael Shereikis of Chopteeth. Elikeh Afropop performs with Funk Art at 8:30 p.m. at Bohemian Caverns. (202) 299-0800.
ALSO: Joe Sample (piano) at Blues Alley, Nov. 12-Nov. 15 at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m.

Nov. 13
Lenny Robinson Quartet feat. Orrin Evans at Bohemian Caverns, Nov. 13-14 at 8:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.; The Sharón Clark Quartet Nov. 13 at Mandarin Oriental. (202) 554-8588; Luis Faife Quartet Nov. 13-14 at Twins Jazz. (202) 234-0072.

Nov. 14
Stefon Harris and Blackout (pictured above) at KenCen Jazz Club. Youthful vibraphonista leads sweet polyrhythmic ensemble through covers and originals. (The group’s NPR session from August? Worth a listen.) Performances at 7:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. at the Terrace Gallery, Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600.
ALSO: The Big Joe Mahler Trio with George Botts at Mandarin Oriental.

Nov. 17
Ziv Ravitz with Avishai Cohen, Omer Klein, Haggai Cohen Milo. 6 p.m. at KenCen Millennium Stage. Free.

Nov. 18
Panama B at Twins Jazz. Barbara Lynn at KenCen Millennium Stage at 6 p.m. Free.

A Friday item, in which we feature a playlist suggested by one of our critics—or by a friendly guest.

Christian McBride has laid down records with so many jazz icons that to list them here would be sort of obnoxious. (It would also require us to discuss the latter-day work of Sting.) Suffice it to say that whatever jazz greats were alive in the ’90s, McBride played with them—and made their records a better place to spend some time.

Mike West, City Paper’s jazz guy-in-chief, calls McBride “the most revered bass player of his generation.”

More important, perhaps, is McBride’s statesmanlike work as a bandleader and composer. McBride’s new band, Inside Straight, which backs him on this year’s Kind of Brown, represents a return to a traddier brand of music (what the bassist describes as “right down the pike, straight-ahead, swinging jazz”) after the forward-leaning funk of the Christian McBride Band. Not to say that the dude’s playing it safe or anything…but if John McLaughlin wanders into Blues Alley this weekend, he’s not gonna hear anything to turn his hair unwhite.

Still! A man’s allowed his guilty pleasures. In anticipation of his four sets this weekend, I phoned McBride to solicit a playlist of his favorite non-jazz songs. Predictably, they’re heavy on the low end. (Hey, a bassist has to look out for his own.) Also predictably, one of the songs is by Sting.

Playlist & videos below the interview.

Washington City Paper: You’ve said that the inspiration for Inside Straight was so that they’d let you back into the Village Vanguard. How did it turn into an album?

McBride: Well, we should clarify—it wasn’t that I was banned from the Vanguard; I just hadn’t played there for a long time. And I thought that was a gross oversight on my part that I hadn’t. What am I doing? I’m supposed to be a jazz musician, and I haven’t been back to the Vanguard? That’s inexcusable! But of course, I had to put a certain band together to play the Vanguard.

And then?

Then it took about a year for us to play again, and it was determined that my next CD would be with that band. We played the Monterey Jazz Festival, and it was in that run in Monterey that we had a “name the band” contest, and we had submissions sent to my Website to name the band. Anyway, this couple sent “Inside Straight,” and I thought, “That’s perfect.” Philosophically and everything.

And what happened to the Christian McBride band?

Well, everybody seemed to really like the quintet—even for a month after the initial vanguard arrangement, the guys in the band, the people in the jazz community…plus it was also a combination of the guys in the CMB, in the old band, getting so busy doing other projects, it became increasingly difficult to get all the guys together at the same time. Ron Blake joined the Saturday Night Live band 4 seasons ago, which pretty much eliminated his being able to work on Friday and Saturday. And what kind of band doesn’t work on Friday and Saturday?

Were you tempted to sneak some dirty fusion into your first set at the Vanguard?

[Laughs] No, no, no, no, no, no. That is not the place to do that. I didn’t need to do that. That’s what I’d had the CMB for.

So we asked you to put together these “top 10 favorite non-jazz songs.” First of all, you cheated. You tried to sneak in a second Stevie Wonder song at the end.

Oh, did I send you 11? I’m sorry!

It’s cool. The other artist you doubled up on is James Brown. Is that just ‘cuz you played with him, or….

He’s been my childhood hero—he has been the central focus of my entire musical universe since I was 8 years old.

Wow.

I saw him perform live when I was a kid and I became obsessed with his music. Obsessed might not be a good word—I’m at, like, a historian status now. I like to think I’m part of this James Brown Experts task force. There’s this guy named Alan Leeds who does a lot of essays on James Brown…anyway, I’m part of their little circle now, so James is my hero.

What happened when you were 8?

I saw him at the Academy of Music in downtown Philly. It ruined me.

So you picked “Soul Power.” Have you seen the new flick? The one from Zaire 74?

Oh yeah, I saw Soul Power before it came out—I told you, I’m part of the James Brown Elite task force, so I had a chance to see one of the test runs before it hit the theaters. That is a really, really great documentary. Everybody in that movie is in peak form…from Bill Withers to Big Black and the Fania All-Stars.

On “Every Little Thing,” Sting seems to be playing an upright. That why you chose it?

No, out of all the Police hits, that just seemed to be my favorite one. I just gravitate towards it. [Laughs] And when i joined Sting’s band and we’d play that song, I’d have try really hard not to smile too much. It’s just such a cute song.

How’s Sting as a bass player? You teach him anything?

[Laughs] Ah, no—I was just there to play the parts. He’s a good bass player. I mean, he certainly plays—he has a certain way that he likes his music played, and obviously nobody can do it better than him. So I was really honored that he asked me to play in his band. He would just sing. But there were a number of times…it was actually kinda cute—he was so used to singing and playing at the same time, there were moments where it was uncomfortable for him—so there were a number of times when he would put his bass on and turn the volume down. Because to only do one at a time was a struggle for him.

Public Enemy—that mainly a Philly thing, or does it go deeper?

That was my high school thing—I was class of 1989, and that was my high school’s unofficial theme song. ?uestlove and I grew up together, we went to high school together—I mean, you remember, when Public Enemy came out they were huge. and ?uestlove and i just loved them. Fact, I remember seeing Flava Flav in a burger place in downtown Philly right around the time that “Fight the Power” came out. He was just crazy—that politically aware rap, that positive rap…man, this was one of the seminal songs of that era.

When’s the last time you fought the power?

Oh, goodness—every day when my wife tells me what she wants me to do. My wife is the power.

Christian McBride’s Friday “Non-Jazz Playlist”:

1. Soul Power – James Brown

2. Got the Feeling – James Brown

3. Love TKO – Teddy Pendergrass

4. Every Little Thing She Does is Magic – The Police

5. Fight the Power – Public Enemy

6. If You Think You’re Lonely Now, Wait Until Tonight – Bobby Womack

7. Lady in My Life – Michael Jackson

8. Ball of Confusion – Temptations

9. Fantasy – EWF

10. Summer Soft – Stevie Wonder

11. Superwoman – Stevie Wonder

Christian McBride and Inside Straight perform at Blues Alley at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., tomorrow and on Sunday.

As approximately 62 of you know, I’ve been spinning a Friday Soul mix via the old Twitter account. Man is it groovy! I’m even linking to videos. The playlist so far:

1. Otis Redding, “Shake” (live at Monterey Pop, 1967)
2. Raphael Saadiq, “Let’s Take a Walk”
3. Laura Nyro, “And When I Die”
4. James Brown, “Super Bad”
5. Buddy Guy, “Feels Like Rain”
6. Mofro, “Ho Cake”
7. James Cotton, Muddy Waters, Johnny Winter, “Got My Mojo Workin’” (hey, we’re branching out)
8. The Impressions, “Long Long Winter”
9. Rod Stewart, “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher”
10. Bettye LaVette, “You Don’t Know Me At All”
11. Van Morrison, “I’ve Been Working”
12. Curtis Mayfield, “People Get Ready” (some live version from, I think, 1974)

Eclectic, see, yet accessible. But it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings! (No Aretha jokes, if ye please.) Just point the browser of your choice in this direction, make like a lemming, and follow along. Suggestions are appreciated. As are witty remarks concerning my inclusion of Rod Stewart…or the fact that a number of these tracks don’t necessarily qualify as soul.

Below the jump: the remainder of the mix, updated incrementally.

13. JJ Grey, “The Sun Is Shining Down”
14. Al Green, “Get Back” (yep, that one)
15. The Acoustics, “I’m Gonna Stay In A Hurry”
16. Jackie Wilson & Count Basie, “In the Midnight Hour”
17. Sam Cooke, “Somebody Have Mercy” (live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963)

Photo by niecieden, Creative Commons attribution license

The all-female five-piece—after Bonnaroo, no longer a parlor trick but still an oddity—sacrifices little in its sonic parrotry: enlisting Eddie Kramer to produce its self-titled debut; treating the Zep canon essentially as sheet music, “as if it were, I don’t know, a symphony by Beethoven,” guitarist Steph Paynes told the A.V. Club. The group’s performances are noteworthy for the virtuosity involved; for the appropriation of cock-rock swagger; for the fact that they’re, you know, all women; and because unlike Plant, lead singer Sarah McClellan never cracks on those high notes.

(She also refuses to bait the audience with annoying lines like, “Remember laughter?” Possibly because Lez refuses to play Stairway-to-You-Know-What.)

Video & deets below the jump.

Friday, Oct. 30 at 7 p.m.
The State Theatre
220 N Washington St.
Washington D.C. VA 22046
703-237-0300
$17

“Heartbreaker,” from the group’s 2007 performance at the State Theatre

But now I’m back. Hell, I may even start twittering again. Still, those bookish weeks up north gave me time for something other than woodwork and typing. After the jump, four books suitable for reading by a crackling woodstove, and one suitable for kindling.

1. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Gore Vidal’s blurb—”her genius for prose remains one of the few satisfying achievements of our second-rate culture”—is a.) practically self-parody and b.) probably true.

2. The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson. This is the kindling candidate. Abundantly smutty and, for all its posturing, as hardboiled as a three-minute egg.

3. The Book of Guys by Garrison Keillor. Just because this is the sort of thing your grandfather might hand you over Christmas brunch with a smack on the back and a cloying chortle doesn’t mean it isn’t inspired.

4. Westward, Ha! by S.J. Perelman. My only previous experience of Sidney Joseph Perelman was a childhood squandered on Marx Brothers movies. Turns out? His prose is the literary equivalent. In this slim 1947 volume, Perelman tours the orient on Holiday’s dime*, whipping idiom with the glee of a lion-tamer and treating Al Hirschfeld, his traveling companion, in much the same way. Also of note are Perelman’s New Yorker sketches, like “Farewell My Lovely Appetizer,” a dig at the noirists with whom Perelman used to get “fractured on Manhattans.”

5. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee. Inside my copy, I discovered a yellowed clipping from the New York Review of Books (early ’70s, I believe) in which the critic calls this volume “the book few read and no one finishes.” A challenge! I gritted my teeth and dug in. (Full disclosure: still digging.) Couple points: a.) The most readable passage in this book is Walker Evans’ opening encomium, “James Agee in 1937.”  b.) Certain passages are eminently skimmable, including a 50-plus-page digression describing, plank by plank, the farmhouses of three sharecropper families. c.) The rest is arguably worth the slog because d.) reading Agee is an unmatchable tonic against writer’s block and e.) certain grafs feature that commodity once known as “deathless prose.”

* Three weeks ago, I was invited to tour Columbia Heights on City Paper’s dime. Their dime not being what it once was, I maintained a half-block perimeter centered around the corner of 15th and Girard NW. The nurses at La Clinica del Pueblo were confused by my presence but otherwise charming.

But no! Take the vid for the band’s lead single, “Hang You From The Heavens,” an exercise in transmitting single-frame doses of cool and little else:

Then there’s “Treat Me Like Your Mother,” a kickass song with  a better, but still repetitive, vid:

(Note to Sasha Frere-Jones: I know you like this one! But I think you’re allowing the quality of the song to color your critical view of the video. ‘Cuz with the exception of that one color-saturated shot [2:52 and ff.], eez boring.)

Now, White directs (and does his best Johnny Depp impresh in) “Cut Like a Buffalo,” a song about the tireless repopulation efforts of the NPS. And also about androgyny & CPR:

So, sure, not bad. Obligatory non sequiturs; obligatory dance of the seven veils; obligatory weird hats—all well and good. But (and forgive me if my expectations are too programmatic) this video doesn’t take you somewhere unexpected any more than it illuminates an already opaque song.

Herewith, let’s direct the DW’s next video by fusing elements appropriate to the group’s celluloid aesthetic. (Suggestions welcome.)

1. Recurring circus imagery (choose two)
a.) Circus midgets
b.) Bearded ladies
c.) Conjoined twins singing in harmony
d.) Cotton candy served by Mustachioed Gentleman in pinstripe pants & suspendies (prbly Jack White)

2.) Ersatz noir-isms (choose one)
a.) Slinky nightclub singer w/ gun in garter
b.) Lifesize cardboard cutout of Humphrey Bogart shot w/ crossbow by Allison Mosshart
c.) Old Packard driven by Private Detective w/ pencil-thin mustache (prbly Jack White)

3.) Firearms (choose two)
a.) Uzi
b.) AK-47
c.) Small plastic pistol that, when fired, emits a flag featuring photo of Allison Mosshart killing buffalo

4.) Anachronistic headgear (choose one)
a.) a bowler
b.) a top hat
c.) one of those joke-shop arrow-through-the-skull knickknacks
d.) a fez

5.) Allusion to Orson Welles film (choose one)
a.) Journey Into Fear
b.) Touch of Evil
c.) Othello
d.) Casino Royale (1967, not 2006, obvi.)

6.) Cigarettes smoked languidly by (choose one)
a.) Allison Mosshart
b.) Jack Lawrence
c.) Dean Fertita
d.) All of the above, plus Mystery Man dressed in Louis-Seize frills (prbly Jack White)

The F-Word
By Jesse Sheidlower
Oxford University Press
$16.95

Ed. Note: the following post contains a number of naughty words, including Fuck, Cunt, and Goat. If there’s a toddler on your lap, best to blindfold him or her before reading any further.

Having read Erika’s post on the third edition of The F-Word, I was cheered to discover a copy in my mailbox this weekend. “What fun,” I thought, admiring its sleek, unsuggestive firetruck-red jacket, its blurb from Steven Pinker (”You’ll never hear the F-word in the same way again”), and the Henry IV Part II quotation that opens the volume (”‘Tis needful that the most immodest word / Be looked upon and learned”). Also of note: a curiously restrained foreword from Lewis Black (guess we all grow up a bit when the OED comes a-calling); eight (8) pages on variants of the word frig; and a note on “new inclusions” in this edition:

The dictionary text is about twice as large as the Second Edition, and well over 100 new words and senses have been added…. Examples {…} include CUNT-FUCK noun, which previously had only a single quotation from 1998, from a Usenet newsgroup devoted to erotic stories, but has now been expanded into a full-fledged entry, with four quotations covering the range of 1879 to 2002; FUCKWITTED adjective, previously part of FUCKWIT noun but now on its own; FUGLY noun, separated from the adjective; and SPORT FUCK noun, upgraded from the verb.

You get the gist. Of course, what might make a great coffee-table book for Ari Gold is probably just re-gift fodder for the rest of us. Before I unload my copy on an unsuspecting family member (Aunt Penny, you reading this?), allow me to share a number of crucial inclusions (full glosses omitted):

ACRONYMS {FUCKRONYMS?} I HAVE NO PLANS TO USE:

• DILLIGAF interjection
  “do I look like I give a fuck?”
• FTN interjection
  “Fuck the Navy.”
• HMFIC
  “Head motherfucker in charge”*

EVENTS THAT I HAVE NO PLANS TO ATTEND:

• fuckerware party noun [FUCK + (Tupp)erware party]
  Especially Homosexuals. a gathering of women for the group use or purchase of sexual toys.
• goat fuck noun
  Especially Military. a fiasco; mess; CLUSTERFUCK. Also (euphemistically) goat dance, goat screw, goat rope.
• fuck-your-buddy week noun
  Especially Military. a hypothetical period during which betrayal and exploitation of one’s friends is supposedly encouraged. Compare BUDDY-FUCK.

THE DEPT. OF REDUNDANCY DEPT.:

• cunt-fuck noun
  a sexual act involving the vagina, esp. an act of heterosexual vaginal intercourse.

*OK, might use that one.

“The vestigial result of something useful in earlier times”—this phrase can describe a number of things (naked pictures of your ex; the Zagat guide; newspapers; &c.). Phillip Prodger uses it to describe Charles Darwin’s theory of the human countenance. If emotions evolved biologically, Darwin reasoned, so did facial expressions. It’s an idea he put forth in 1872—a year after his Descent of Man—in a treatise titled Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Darwin’s Camera is an engagingly literate survey of the intersection between evolutionary theory and photographic technology at a time of accelerated development for both. Darwin came to depend on photography to bolster his speculative argument because, as Prodger notes:

[M]anually produced pictures were prone to all sorts of error…. Besides, works of art are made to communicate ideas, not facts. Artists trade in viewers’ perceptions, not accuracy for its own sake…. The comparatively new medium of photography offered a possible answer to these problems, so Darwin began to collect photographs….. Expression extended Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection to the realm of the mind; it was arguably his boldest extension of evolutionary theory.

But there’s one thing sexier than Victorian evolutionary theory. And that’s a photographic taxonomy of expressions published to bolster Victorian evolutionary theory! After the jump, witness the five most striking photo juxtapositions to be found in Prodger’s volume.

1. ‘Disdain, Contempt, and Disgust.’ Or as I like to call it, ‘A Visual Refutation of the Idea that Muttonchops Were Ever Advisable’:

2. ‘Horror and Agony‘ by Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne. For this shot, Darwin used electro-shock prods to induce the desired expression. And it worked!

3. ‘Insane Woman—from Bethlem Hospital‘ by Henry Hering. In which the subject looks far less insane than any of Darwin’s other subjects.

4. ”Oscar Rejlander, Introducing…Mr. Rejlander.’ Darwin’s chief photog having fun by combining two negatives.

5. ‘Astonished Baby‘; or, as I like to call it, ‘Baby confused as to why [it] appears to be blogging.’

Readers of a less writerly bent will likely experience a similar “jacking up”: Carpenter’s terse, overtly masculine prose, precise vernacular, and above all the unsentimental yearners who populate his book constitute a plausible, troubling world—one from which it’s hard to emerge without a bit of a head rush. The novel follows Jack Levitt, an orphan who bounces around the Pacific Northwest—between an orphanage, pool halls, reform school, dank hotels, and prisons—before marrying and siring an heir in San Francisco. It’s a volume fairly dripping with testosterone—the women get a fair shake, sure, but exclusively through the eyes of the men who sympathize, or try to; not for nothing is the book’s most intense relationship between Jack and Billy Lancing, a light-skinned black pool prodigy from Seattle who rematerializes next to Jack in San Quentin.

Without relying on the “postwar” handle, it’s fair to say the book is structured as a noir cogitation on escaping the system—and it’s also a more sophisticated man vs. authority narrative than Cuckoo’s Nest. Carpenter’s stronger in the pool-hall/prison grit milieu than in the stumbling-towards-family passages, though in each case the narrative boils down to Jack’s earnest struggle and chronic inability to buy into an inherited schema—whether he’s down and out or marrying up. The author reserves his deftest portraiture for dissolute vagrants and the idle rich, both sets wrestling with the same period listlessness, the same incompatibility whereby their raw desire outstrips all potential targets: Money, sex, adventure, family—none of these are commensurate with the gaping, wordless need of each individual.

I spoke with Edwin Frank, editor of the NYRB classics series, to discuss his decision to reissue the novel.

How’d you settle on reissuing Hard Rain among this year’s selections?

EF: I’d been hearing about it for some years, and at a certain point it reached a kind of critical mass. I knew Jonathan Lethem was a big fan, and then Richard Price got in touch [about a year ago] saying he just thought it was a great book. Turns out he had heard about it from Pelecanos. It’s a remarkable book, and it seemed to make sense.

What sold you on it?

EF: It’s just remarkable on a sentence-by-scene level—you take the first sentence of the book about the motorcycles, you’re already pulled in. And there are so many stories going on in the book. The scenes are vivid, the prison reformatory scenes especially—extraordinarily vivid scenes. And there’s a kind of reach and ambition of trying to cover every base. One of the appealing things is it’s a book about the trials and tribulations of manhood. People don’t write about that any more. In its day it wasn’t an unusual subject—think Mailer—but I think another issue there…there’s a certain kind of macho writing that became unpopular. And this book is interesting partly because it deals with homosexuality, something that was ruled out in the old manhood stuff.

The Times‘ obit described Carpenter as “a novelist and sometime screenwriter whose unflinching examinations of disheveled lives won more critical acclaim than popular favor.” Which is, obviously, true. Why do people tend to gloss over Carpenter when discussing, say, writers like Nelson Algren?

EF: I don’t really know enough about his career to say. The fact is that a lot of good writers don’t—he was writing, living around San Francisco, which was not—you know, there’s a certain tyranny to New York.

How long had it been out of print?

EF: I think since the early ’80s. I think it was available from Playboy Press in a kind of mass-market paperback edition. I’m pretty sure that was the last time it was available.

How did Pelecanos get involved?

EF: Richard Price told us that Pelecanos had told him about the book—I think I knew already, Pelecanos had written about it as a book that he thought was unjustly neglected and he thought was great.

When making selections for the NYRB Classics series, how much emphasis do you put on profit and how much on posterity? ‘Cuz this is a book that ought to be read…but it’s not going to sell a million units.

EF: Right. We have the basic mission—which is not, I hope, incompatible with financial viability—to get books that are good books. They should be good books that also are news now. There are a lot of good books that people want back in print, and I know it’s a worthy book, one that posterity should know about, but there’s not any obvious way that, apart from the people who already value the book, it’ll get a new audience. So I tend to think that these books not only have proven themselves, but can also get a new audience.

“News now”—that’s interesting. What makes Hard Rain news now?

EF: Well, it speaks very interestingly of the pathologies of being a man, and an American man in particular. It’s a subject of interest to at least half of the population. And I think it does it in an unusual way. There’s also another thing going on, complementary to the first: I think people are interested in thinking about the different kinds of things novels can do. So there’s a little bit of looking back and just seeing the lay of the land and all these interesting exceptional things put out in the past as opposed to the latest greatest books.

Photograph of Don Carpenter courtesy of Wikimedia Commons