The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, October 7, 1997 - 9A iNovelist Leyner gets playful with 'Tetherballs' By Jessica Callaway For the Daily Junior high is a bitch. "It's the ugliest time in a person's life," said author Mark Leyner in a ¢ interview. "People are like larvae then. They're in between childhood and adulthood and their faces are sort of amorphic." Leyner will be in Ann Arbor to read at Borders this evening at 7:30. Leyner's new novel, "The Tetherballs of Bougainville", concerns a seventh grade narrator inevitably named Mark Leyner, whose junior high years are just painfully self-conscious enough to gake the coolest reader weep with anpathy. He revels in the sweaty odor of his low-slung Versace leather pants after a long game of tetherball. Later, he comes through a series of awkward adolescent discoveries about sex, life and the seductive propaganda of puppet dictators. To Mark's embarrassment and annoyance, his father is unsuccessfully executed by lethal injection, which kes precious time away from Mark's attempt to finish work on his screenplay in time for the deadline of the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo/Oshimitsu Polymers America Award. Ah, to be 13 again. Huh? Those unexposed to Leyner's writing may not remain out of touch for long. A film adaptation of a previous Leyner novel, "Et Tu, Babe,' to star Cameron Diaz, is in the works and MTV is plan- ning a number of PI spots featuring prose from his most recent novel. After publishing 1 novels such as "I Smell Esther Williams" and "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist," Leyner has become a minor media talking head. Chalking up appearances on talk shows such as David Letterman and writing columns for George and Esquire, Leyner has achieved a level of fame and notoriety that has become rare for a novelist. The author's media savvy aside, "Tetherballs" is great fun to read and features what is perhaps some of Leyner's most hilarious writing so far. The novel is composed of a faux autobiography, screenplay and movie review. "I wanted to use three narrative forms that seem to be most readily available to the lay people out there,' explained Leyner, "There is a memoir craze going on. And screenplays have replaced novels for the ambitious young writer. REVIEW Mark Leyner Today at 7:30 p.m. Borders Free "You'll occa- sionally find peo- ple who say 'I'm working on my screenplay' in the same way writers used to say 'I'm working on my novel,"' contin- ued Leyner. "Which is an odd and not completely healthy thing. But it's out there. It's a great form to play with. It's a colossal amount of fun playing with screenplay form." Leyner said he was interested in experimenting with the conventions of film reviews, a type of prose which most Americans are exposed to every day. Leyner's trademark rush of product names, celebrity references and intri- cate scientific and technical babble cov- ers late 20th century American mega- culture like colored saran wrap around a bowl of potato salad. Leyner continues his usual rhapsodies of weirdness, only this time they contain an element of social satire louder than before. For instance, describing a tome from his favorite young-adult book series, about a pre-teen who "invariably finds himself mistaken for someone else and then gets abducted by gorgeous women who torture him," the narrator elabo- rates: "There's 'Rusty Hoover Goes to Law School,' where Rusty accompanies his parents to visit his older sister Tara at law school, and he's confused for some pervert who's been sending pornographic e-mail to fellow students in his Patents class, and he's forced to sign a confession in his own prostatic fluid, subjected to pseudoscientific experimentation, and flogged by Professor De Brunhoff, a loose com- posite of Catherine MacKinnon and Lisa Sliwa, and her frothing acolytes." Leyner described his position as a social critic as "anarchic." "I'll target anything," he said, "I'm like some heav- ily armed lunatic in the middle of the street, going after whatever moves". After referring to his writing style as "carnavalesque," Leyner deadpanned: "I'm a carnivalist," adding with sar- casm, "It's a new movement" Taking inspiration from advertising brochures (which Leyner himself once wrote for a living), magazines and any sort of modern cultural refuse, Leyner talked about his writing as a process of "getting very crazy and potentially destructive ideas and incorporating them. Things that could potentially ruin a whole book. I'm willing to risk com- Leyner said, chuckling, "1 will miscal- culate and that will be it." Leyner's own painful junior high experiences inevitably influenced his choice of subject matter. "I was the shortest boy," he said, "There were only three girls I could date, and two of them were twins. It was very pathetic. And one of the twins didn't like me, and I couldn't tell the twins apart" Leyner later added, "kids have such a merciless pecking order based on phys- ical height." Much of the personal development of pre-teen-agers is a result of their spending time alone, according to Leyner. "The bedroom is "The Tetherballs of Bougainville" tells the humorous, faux autobiographical tale of one jaded junior high boy and one dumb sport. the laboratory in which adolescent boys invent themselves." And why tetherball? "Tetherball is probably the most ridiculous sport ever. I don't think everyone ever wrote a teth- erball novel before. I'm pretty sure this is the first tetherball novel ever. It's something I'll always take great pride in. My great-grandchildren will know that their great grandfather wrote prob- ably the first and only tetherball novel.' Perhaps Leyner has exhausted the lit- erary treatment of tetherball. "How long can you go on hitting a ball around a pole before it loses its allure?" he joked. Playing "Tetherball" for all It's worth, author Mark Leyner has become quite a hot commodity with his latest novel. Poet Doty makes mark 'on war against AIDS with compassionate Atlantis' By Jessica Eaton Daily Books Editor How do you reveal a life through a work of poetry? How do you capture beauty in words? How do you honestly reveal yourself without confessing your secrets? How do you build on a theme, and still let the complexities of the interpretation Wine through? Through poetry, Mark Doty has accomplished all of this. Doty, the PR' author of four books of poetry and a memoir, will be reading at Rackham this afternoon. Doty's work is intimate and moving . F because it is extremely personal; much of his writing is themed on his encounter with AIDS and the disease's destruction and redemption on various levels. "Atlantis," the poem from the book of the same name, is just one example of this dramatic *otif. .. Wally Roberts, Doty's friend and lover, was diagnosed with AIDS, and Doty was with him throughout his deterioration. Doty looks at the illness in its stages, from his disbelief - "not even a real word but an acronym, a vacant four-letter cipher that draws meanings into itself, reconstitutes the world" - through his attempt to forget, and his eventual acceptance. 'E Rack He views the unreadable future as a lost world "rising from the waters again: Our continent, where it always was, emerg- ing from the half-light, unforgettable, drenched, unchanged." Doty's poetic style is full of metaphor; he captures the out- side beauty and reveals the beauty of the inner life. In "Atlantis," he observes a neighbor girl cradling a sick loon in her jacket, taking it home to care for it and ® search for help. His only emotion is a V I E W rather bitter phrase, "stubborn girl." However, he recognizes that in his own life Mark Doty he is exactly like that girl. He is stubborn, Today at 4 p.m. and he is caring, and he will continue to kham Amphitheater search for a rescuer. Free His books of poetry have received the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Whiting Writers Award, and Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry. "Heaven's Coast," his memoir, won the PEN Martha Albrand Prize for Nonfiction and was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, who rec- ognized the book as "a terrifying and elegant document of the age of AIDS?' Doty is currently a professor at the University of Utah. "What is description, after all, but encoded desire?" That line is taken from "Description," the first poem in "Atlantis?' 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