O'Brien, Geoffrey 1948–

(Geoffrey Paul O'Brien)

PERSONAL: Born May 4, 1948, in New York, NY; son of Joseph Aloysius (a radio show host) and Margaret Dorothy (an actress; maiden name, Owens) O'Brien; married Carly Francis (a consultant), March 18, 1977; children: Heather. Education: Attended Yale University, 1966–67, and State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1968–70; Nichibei Kaiwa Gaku-in, Tokyo, Japan, intermediate diploma, 1979.

ADDRESSES: Home—200 E. 15th St., New York, NY 10003. Office—Library of America, 14 E. 60th St., New York, NY 10022-1006.

CAREER: Poet, writer, critic, and historian. Dale System Detective Agency, New York, NY, clerk, 1970–71; Robinson & Watkins Ltd., London, England, mail order clerk, 1973–74; Cambridge Graphics, New York, NY, computer typesetter, 1974–78, 1979–80; freelance writer and translator of French, 1980–; Reader's Catalog, New York, NY, editor, 1987–91; Library of America, New York, NY, executive editor, 1992–97, editor-in-chief, 1998–.

MEMBER: Haiku Society of America.

AWARDS, HONORS: Whiting Award, 1988; New York Institute for the Humanities fellow, 1998; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow, 1999.

WRITINGS:

Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks, Van Nostrand Reinhold (New York, NY), 1981.

Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties, Viking (New York, NY), 1988.

(Editor, with Stephen Wasserstein and Helen Morris) The Reader's Catalog: An Annotated Selection of More than 40,000 of the Best Books in Print in 208 Categories, Reader's Catalog (New York, NY), 1989, revised edition (sole editor) published as The Reader's Catalog: An Annotated Selection of More than 40,000 of the Best Books in Print in 300 Categories, 1997.

The Phantom Empire, Norton (New York, NY), 1993.

Floating City: Selected Poems, 1978–1995, Talisman House (Jersey City, NJ), 1996.

The Times Square Story (fiction), Norton (New York, NY), 1998.

Bardic Deadlines: Reviewing Poetry, 1984–1995, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1998.

The Browser's Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading, Counterpoint (Washington, DC), 2000.

Castaways of the Image Planet: Movies, Show Business, Public Spectacle, Counterpoint (Washington, DC), 2002.

Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life (memoir), Counterpoint (New York, NY), 2004.

Work represented in anthologies, including Open Poetry, Simon & Schuster, 1973, Active Anthology, Sumac Press, 1974, and Selected Poetry of Vincente Huidobro, New Directions, 1981. Contributor to periodicals, including Artforum, Film Comment, New York Review of Books, Stony Brook, Chicago Review, Soho News, Village Voice, On Film, Res Gestae, Airplane, Wind Chimes, and Dyslexia. General editor, Bartlett's Poems for Occasions, foreword by Billy Collins, Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2002. Editor, with Eliot Weinberger, of Pony Tail, 1968–70, and Montemora, 1975–76; editor of Frogpond, 1981.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Research on the roots, ramifications, and repercussions, in fact and in media fiction, of American psychedelic culture of the late 1960s; research on "two little known novelists, Jim Thompson and David Goodis."

SIDELIGHTS: Geoffrey O'Brien's Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks chronicles a period in American publishing—primarily the 1940s and 1950s—when a popular taste for sensationalism spawned countless examples of the tough-detective novel. Leading authors included Mickey Spillane, Dwight V. Babcock, and Richard Ellington. Chicago Sun-Times critic Algis Budrys called O'Brien's volume an "engaging, often deadly appraisal of the evolution and devolution of the American paperback novel." Budrys added: O'Brien's text lends lucid perspectives to the paperback phenomenon without descending to either sneers or the tinhorn sincerity of ordinary 'popular culture' studies." Los Angeles Times Book Review writer Herbert Gold also applauded O'Brien's effort: "His book is balanced, intelligent, and sings like a saxophone for a lost time of comfort in the lower depths." However, in a Times Literary Supplement review, Patricia Craig felt that the genre displays a "distrust of understatement," and that "artists and writers share an attachment to the overblown." This extreme treatment includes people depicted on the book covers, of whom Craig remarked: "Whatever they're doing, they do it inadequately clothed." Craig added that O'Brien's "study provides a satisfactory guide to the themes and the embellishments of popular literature."

O'Brien writes about films prior to 1980 in The Phantom Empire, providing his opinions on more than six hundred movies and how they have helped to shape the psychology of the twentieth century. A Publishers Weekly contributor asserted that O'Brien's "insights often hit home." Stanley Kauffmann, writing in the New Republic, added: "His book, awhirl with the force of his filmgoing experience, is a blend of protest and delight. He mixes a wish that film had never been born with a fanatical dependence on it. In short, he's a perfectly normal filmgoer but one who happens to understand his condition and can express it lyrically."

In Castaways of the Image Planet: Movies, Show Business, Public Spectacle the author presents a series of essays that ponder what makes certain movies and television shows, from thrillers to comedies, successful in their own particular ways. Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, called the writing "fresh and stimulating."

Bardic Deadlines: Reviewing Poetry, 1984–1995 is a collection of twenty essays by the author that previously appeared in the Voice Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books. The author writes about a wide variety of poetry and poets and considers contemporary work in relation to poetry from the past. According to Christian Wiman in Poetry, the essays are "not intended as a comprehensive review … but a general meditation that arose during the course of reading."

In a similar title, the author writes about reading and his favorite books in The Browser's Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading. Here O'Brien proposes a nonlinear approach to reading and discusses such topics as memory, allegory, and literary theory. "The ideas are powerful and far-reaching, expressed eloquently and philosophically," observed Erin Doyle in Book. School Library Journal contributor Barbara A. Genco concluded: "This is intoxicating stuff."

O'Brien presents a critical essay coupled with his own memories of music in his life in his Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life. "O'Brien has spent years pondering the intersection of popular music and private experience, and the result is Sonata for Jukebox, a rambling, idiosyncratic, occasionally brilliant autobiography-in-singles-and-albums," observed Jody Rosen in the Nation. Rosen went on: "What raises Sonata for Jukebox above the banality of personal memoir … are its insights about pop music history and recording technology, little epiphanies that the author tosses off as asides." New Statesman contributor Sukhdev Sandhu called the book "an artful and beautifully written memoir that uses music, especially the changing ways in which it was played, transmitted and heard, to explore a dimension of 20th-century US history that is rarely investigated."

In addition to his nonfiction, O'Brien has occasionally ventured into fiction, as he does with his look at New York's Times Square in the early 1950s, The Times Square Story. Illustrated with vintage photographs and old movie still shots, the novel is written like an imaginary movie and focuses on a young and inexperienced young man who heads for the bright lights after getting out of the army. Before long, like an old B-movie, the hero finds himself caught up in a sleazy world that represents more the fantasies of the time than reality. Writing in Publishers Weekly, a reviewer commented that the author's "staccato narrative is an energetic and most entertaining glimpse" of that particular era in New York.

O'Brien once told CA: "In poetry or prose I aim to make a unity out of as many disparate elements as possible: a kind of harmonious collage. Those elements have included (beyond the circumstances of daily life and those more horrid ones of the daily paper) such American artifacts as movies, private-eye novels, comic books, and all the various musics, as well as the literature and culture of Japan, and of England and France (my wife being English and my sometime livelihood that of French translator). Roughly, my poetry is dedicated to imagination and my prose to history, but I like best the uncertain area between those poles. I am particularly interested in the way fanciful or delusory ideas can function as historical phenomena."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

O'Brien, Geoffrey, Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life, Counterpoint (New York, NY), 2004.

PERIODICALS

Book, September, 2000, Erin Doyle, review of The Browser's Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading, p. 82.

Booklist, June 1, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of Castaways of the Image Planet: Movies, Show Business, Public Spectacle, p. 1664.

Chicago Sun-Times, August 30, 1981, Algis Budrys, review of Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 20, 1981, Herbert Gold, review of Hardboiled America.

Nation, May 17, 2004, Jody Rosen, review of Sonata for Jukebox, p. 29.

New Republic, January 24, 1994, Stanley Kauffmann, review of The Phantom Empire, p. 39.

New Statesman, July 5, 2004, Sukhdev Sandhu, review of Sonata for Jukebox, p. 54.

Poetry, August, 1999, Christian Wiman, review of Bardic Deadlines: Reviewing Poetry, 1984–1995, p. 286.

Publishers Weekly, August 2, 1993, review of The Phantom Empire, p. 68; September 7, 1998, review of The Times Square Story, p. 86; February 9, 2004, review of Sonata for Jukebox, p. 73.

School Library Journal, December, 2000, Barbara A. Genco, review of The Browser's Ecstasy, p. 65.

Times Literary Supplement, December 25, 1981, Patricia Craig, review of Hardboiled America, p. 1488.

Variety, April 8, 2002, Lauren Horwitch, review of Castaways of the Image Planet, p. 36.