November 2005
Monthly Archive
Books& Non-Fiction& ReviewPosted by Tim on November 30, 2005 at 1:10 PM
The Tender Bar
The aim of this post will be to resist over-selling
The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer. From time to time, I can be guilty of over-selling. That said, The Tender Bar is one of the best books that I have read this year.
In addition to both having read the book, Mrs. Cayenne and I went to see a reading by Mr. Moehringer the Friday Night before Thanksgiving at the
Center for Southern Literature. The reading was easily the best event that I have attended at the CSL.
I promise to tell you about the book, but first a few words about the author. J.R. Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the L.A. Times. The
piece that won the Pulitzer was a 10-part story about an isolated African-American community in Gee’s Bend, Alabama that was soon to be re-connected directly with their white neighbors for the first time since slavery when a ferry would be built linking them to the other side of the river. At the time of the award, Moehringer was the Atlanta Bureau chief for the L.A. Times (he now lives in Denver). Moehringer attended Yale and was also a Fellow at Harvard.
Moehringer’s talk before and after the reading was essentially a literary stand-up routine. He was glad to be in Atlanta, which he said has a proud literary history. He hated living in L.A. where “no one reads and everyone thinks that they are a writer”. While living in L.A., Moehringer went on a blind date with a girl whose favorite poet was “Jack Frost”. He suggested that perhaps she meant Robert Frost. She disagreed. To prove his point, he began quoting from “Stopping by Woods on a Snow Evening”, and the date thought that he was reciting poetry to her to be romantic. The punchline: “needless to say, there were miles to go before we sleep”. At a cocktail party in Denver, a buddy introduced Moehringer to a single female friend pointing out, “you know, J.R. just wrote a memoir” - to which she replied, “Really! About who?”. Flabbergasted, Moehringer answered, “me - moi - it’s all right there in the word”. “Well, I don’t speak French,” was the annoyed response. I’m telling you, Moehringer had the room laughing their collective asses off.
At the reading, a distinguished woman named Mary Lee, a center-piece of the Pulitzer story was in attendance - to the amazement of Moehringer. Since he had lived and worked in Atlanta, many of those in attendance were writers themselves, including a few other Pulitzer winners. We also ran into an old acquaintance (a friend’s ex-girlfriend) at the reading who was surprised that we had known J.R. from his time in Atlanta as well (we didn’t). It was a fairly incredible evening is all I’m saying. I had proposed this reading as an Atlanta area get together for the BGB crew - oh well.
And the book is really, really good. I had read a few glowing reviews of the book, but I wasn’t sold at first. In the book, Moehringer has a scene where someone at the bar asked him what the book he was reading was about. As a newly minted Yalie, Moehringer hated the question and laid into the guy about not reducing books into a bullet list of plot points. So you would think that some of the reviews would skip this approach. You’d be wrong. Almost all of the book reviews that I read hit these plot points without much in the way of touching on the larger themes:
- Boy abandoned by father
- Boy lives with single-mother at grandfather’s house
- Boy raised by bar
- Boy makes good
- 9/11 happens
That is technically what the book is “about”, but reducing it that way really does a disservice to the weight of the book. I became sold on the book after hearing Maureen Corrigan give the book a proper treatment on NPR.
The book does tell the story of J.R.’s abandonment by his father, forcing he and his mother to live with his grandfather in the crappiest house in the very tony Long Island town of Manhassett - a town, Moehringer tells us, that takes its drinking very seriously. Being from such a town myself, I could relate to the sentiment. To make matters worse, J.R.’s dad was a famous New York DJ who chose fame over family. J.R. was able to follow his dad up and down the dial throughout his childhood, but seldom saw the old man. J.R. worried constantly about his mother and their situation, becoming a bit of an old woman at an early age.
One day he and his mom watched the local tavern team (Dicken’s - later Publicans) playing softball. J.R. instantly fell in love with the men (asking his mom why they are all so happy - his mom replies, “I guess they’re happy about the beer). One of the men was his Uncle Charlie, head bartender at the bar. Concerned about the lack of male role models, his mother, perhaps unwisely, taps Uncle Charlie and the men to spend some time with the boy. The men take J.R. under their collective wing and initiate him in the manly arts. None of this, by the way, is gay.
The book follows J.R. as he comes to count on the men and the bar as his support structure - his reference point for how to be a Man and what it means to be a Man. The book is loaded with great New York bar chatter. One of the greatest characters in the English canon is presented in this book - that he actually existed does not diminish the characterization in any way. The minor character “Fuckembabe” steals every scene that he’s in. Every patron of the bar got a nickname. Fuckembabe got his name because his speech consists mostly of gibberish but always ends with a cackle and the words, “Fuck ‘em, babe”.
Manhassett was the basis of the fictional East Egg in The Great Gatsby, so there are literary allusions to Gatsby sprinkled throughout the book. One of the more resonant references was in a scene on a melancholy night at the bar where the men each discuss their “Daisy Buchanan”. The scene is so evocative that you want to have a pull on your beer and talk about your own Daisy. Plus, now I have to go back and re-read Gatsby.
The book is “about” a lot of things, and there is a lot of wisdom in its pages. What the book is about is abandonment, familial love, disappointment, replacement love, emotional and chemical dependence, failure, disillusionment, belonging, becoming a man, identity, etc. I’m going to go out on a limb and describe this book in a way that I’m reasonably sure it has never been described anywhere else: it is a thinking man’s Rocky. You know that Moehringer is going to be a success before it is all over, but you can’t help but cheer for him throughout. It’s the great American story, and it is a really, really good story in Moehringer’s hands. So much of this book resonated with me that it was a little scary. And so much of the book is essentially about the painful and poorly illuminated process of becoming a man that I would have thought it exclusively a “guys” book. However, Mrs. Cayenne loved it every bit as much as I did. So read it already.
An aside: Many of the reviews talk about the book being an ode to the local tavern where everyone knows your name. And much of the book reads that way. Moehringer himself no longer drinks, however. He had a realization that for him, “drinking and trying are not the same thing.” There are no spectacular drunken depths to crawl out of - the unspoken implication is that he just felt better able to focus on life when he got himself out of the bar. He still goes to bars to write and soak up the atmosphere. At the reading he was despairing that a study found that the number of bars in the US has declined by 50% since the 60’s. Moehringer wondered where all of the young men would go to learn “guy culture” (my term).
Another aside: The book ends with a clear turning point in Moehringer’s life, and there the book would have ended if 9/11 had not happened. Moehringer went back to Manhassett for the first time in 10 years after the attacks, and an epilogue tells of that experience. He felt isolated as a boy without a father, and now there are hundreds of such boys in his hometown. The epilogue catches the reader up on what has happened to some of the “characters” in the bar in the intervening years - usually with just a quick sentence or two. Mrs. Cayenne had become so attached to some of the characters that she berated the author at length about not telling us more about their whereabouts, peppering him with questions about the lives of these men who had been so integral to his life that he rarely saw anymore. Clearly this line of questioning is a testament to the amazing talent that Moehringer has of bringing the men “alive” and how much the reader comes to care about them. Nevertheless, my book has been signed by the author with the following inscription: Dear xxx and xxx - Sorry you hated the book - J.R. Moehringer.
BooksPosted by sallyrogers on November 29, 2005 at 10:57 AM
New Internet Plaything
This post will reveal the following:
1) I have OCD.
2) I am a geek.
I have just discovered my newest Internet toy:
LibraryThing. You can catalog up to 200 books for free or a $25 lifetime subscription buys you unlimited catalog space. It has the coolest little tool for searching US libraries and Amazon.com for your book title. It imports the graphic for you. You can rate the book, share your library….
This is the coolest thing EVER.
Did everyone else know about this? Do any of you have a library yet?
Awards& Books& To CheckoutPosted by Tim on November 28, 2005 at 4:08 PM
NYT’s 100 Notable Books for ‘05
The New York Times begins the “Best of…” list season with their 100 notable books for 2005. Its a good start to see what you might have missed out on this year. Lists like these should be coming out every few days into next year.
Books& FictionPosted by sallyrogers on November 22, 2005 at 4:02 PM
Throwing in the Towel
I am doing something I only do with great reluctance… I am giving up on a book.
For the last month I have been enmeshed in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I’m about halfway through it. A couple of weeks ago my husband begged me to set it aside for a while when the detailed, vivid description of a man being skinned alive troubled me. I don’t like THAT much reality, thank you. But that’s not what has made me put the book away. [hit “more” for the rest of the story…]
Murakami is a tremendous writer. He draws you in and medicates you with beautiful decriptions and fluid transitions until you are there…. you are in the book. I loved Norwegian Wood. So if anyone out there can offer me some kind of hope that something redeeming will happen in the last 200 pages of the novel I will pick it back up.
The story is narrated by Toru, a young man whose cat and wife have disappeared with no explanation or warning. His life becomes complicated by a stream of bizarre, almost inhuman characters who seem to appear with the sole purpose of messing with his mind. Toru, in an attempt to find himself, to find the answers to why his relationships are so complicated, literally goes down into a well to, as Gomer Pyle would say, take a think. I really thought that this would hold me. I love the idea of going to that kind of extreme in order to find out something important about yourself or about your life. But I’m leaving in Toru in the well.
I read some reviews of the book, hoping for encouragement to continue. It seems that this is not a delightful Western novel with a happy ending and neat little package at the end that makes you say, “See, life IS worth living. Silly Toru!” Instead it continues plodding its dismal, dream-like course for another 200 pages and leaves you hanging with unanswered questions.
I loved, at the beginning, questioning the characters’ motives and, in some cases (i.e. the phone sex woman) who the characters were. But when Toru’s wife started working unusually late and was distant and emotional and he couldn’t put two and two together to get ‘affair’ I became impatient with him and his lack of motivation and lack of passion for anything.
Now…. all of what I have said here (except the positive stuff) is completely unfair because I haven’t finished the book. So if anyone has an arsenal of reasons why I’m a moron (who obviously lacks motivation and passion) feel free to hurl blunt objects in my direction.
Books& Fiction& ReviewPosted by Tim on November 18, 2005 at 4:28 PM
The Pleasure of My Company
I came to read the book The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin in a sorta roundabout way.
Sure, I had heard of the book when it was released, but then I completely forgot about it. A few weeks ago I read an article about Steve Martin winning the Mark Twain Award for American Humor. Then, I started to see commercials for the movie adaptation of Steve Martin’s other novella, Shopgirl. I guess Steve Martin was on the brain when I then got locked out of my office (long story). I spent a few hours working out of the Public Library down the street. As luck would have it, the Friends of the Library were having a huge book sale while I was there. When I saw The Pleasure of My Company sitting there on the table for $1.50, it no longer seemed optional that I buy it. And I should also mention that I am huge Steve Martin fan in general. I saw him once doing a Q&A before his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile (soon to be a movie) here in the ATL. If you’re curious, Steve Martin’s favorite character, at that time, was Rupert the Monkey Boy. Anyway, I guess I’ll get around to talking about the book - after the jump…
So the book begins, “This all started because of a clerical error…”. The clerical error is that Mensa must have left a “1″ off Daniel Pecan Cambridge’s reported IQ score of 90. He imagines how embarrassed they will be when he reports their error. So begins our acquaintance with Daniel, a home bound obsessive compulsive who has what some might call a “very rich inner life”. Events slowly drag Daniel from his carefully constructed habits, and he is forced to engage with the world at large. Martin injects some social commentary as well (I think) when Daniel wins a contest to find the “Most Average American”. What does that say about us?
While his antics are often humorous, Daniel remains a sympathetic character. Martin has a soft touch and avoids full-on slapstick for the most part. The characters’ human-ness is what makes this book enjoyable, and we don’t mind some deft emotional manipulation to the “feel good hit of the year” ending. Overall, a nice book.
Awards& BooksPosted by Tim on November 17, 2005 at 1:58 PM
National Book Awards
William T. Vollman won the National Book Award for fiction with his behemoth Europe Central. Joan Didion won the non-fiction prize for The Year of Magical Thinking - a book that I will have to be made to read at gunpoint. Bookslut has an interview with Vollman wherein he discusses smoking crack and whoring. Bookslut also has a link to a quiz where you can test your LQ (literary quotient), which is based on the number of prize-winning books you have read in the past 10 years. Take the quiz, and join me in feeling like a dumbass. My score was a 9. Humiliating.
BooksPosted by Tim on November 16, 2005 at 10:10 PM
G-Unit Books
Fitty has a new line of books coming out on his new G-Unit label. Seriously. Hey, if it’ll get kids to read, I’m all for it. I am hereby volunteering to read the first one when it comes out.
G-Unit is an imprint of Murder 4 Life Books.
BooksPosted by Tim on November 15, 2005 at 9:58 PM
Book Hunting
Last week, Slate ran a five-part story about book hunting in Britain. The author visited some of the best book stores and private collections in the English-speaking world. My house is completely over run with books - with no relief in sight. So I know that I have some book issues. I consider these articles a cautionary tale about how bad things could get.
BooksPosted by Dr J on November 14, 2005 at 2:12 PM
700 Lbs.
Wow. The total number of books in New Mexico just increased by 20%.
It’s interesting that this lady lives in Los Alamos, of all places. I think she’s da bomb.
Books& Fiction& ReviewPosted by Nitro Nicole on November 10, 2005 at 4:21 PM
The Known World
There have been enough books written about slavery in the South that you wouldn’t think that there could be any original portrayals on this topic. Edward Jones, author of the Pulitzer prize winning The Known World, creates a fictional world around the town of Manchester, Virginia and the the family of Henry Townsend, a freed black man and slaveowner.
Henry is the central character of this book which begins at Henry’s deathbed and goes back and forth throughout his life from his time as a young slave boy to becoming free and then wealthy enough to build a plantation and purchase slaves himself. While Henry is the central character, Jones also sprinkles the novel with tales of many other members of this community ranging from William Robbins the wealthiest plantation owner in town who used to own Henry and then mentored him in the “art of slave owning”, to Sheriff Skiffington who believes he is anti-slavery but even more ardently believes in upholding the law, to Alice one of Henry’s mystical slaves who ends up escaping to the North and becoming an artist.
I love historical novels and this one does an amazing job of conveying what life was like on rural Virginian plantations. I was intimately immersed in the daily ebb and flow of the slaves, plantation owners and townsfolk. While Jones is clearly painting a picture that slavery poisons a society and brings down everyone that associates with it, I did not feel that he was portraying the slavery issue as one about the white man owning the downtrodden black man. Rather, it was a commentary on the evils of an economic system in which humans (black or white) own other humans and a social system which was the equivalent of a caste system. Towards the end of the novel, Henry’s widow, Caldonia (who was a free black woman when she married Henry), begins to have an affair with the slave overseer, Moses and she wonders if this is miscegenation. This was just one example of how Jones portrays how the evils of slavery can make the world completely illogical. Throughout the novel, I found it hard to imagine that blacks particularly former slaves could find it acceptable to own slaves themselves but this did practice did actually occur down South.
The Known World is a wonderful novel that was as thought provoking as it was entertaining. I highly recommend it and particularly for Dr. J - this is definitely right up his alley…….
Books& Non-Fiction& ReviewPosted by Shaft on November 09, 2005 at 8:14 PM
How to Cheat Someone Who Likes Poker into Buying a Book
I just finished How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker — The Wisdom of Dickie Richard, by Penn Jillette and Mickey D. Lynn. It sucks. Either that, or I suck. Let me explain.
The book is very clear in the early going that it’s not a joke book — it’s the real deal, and it essentially recounts the memoirs (with tips included) of a guy (Dickie Richards — not his real name) who made a great living cheating at poker. It says that Penn Jillette (whom I will never stop loving, even if he attaches his name to a crappy book) was taken in by this fella when Jillette was young and broke, scraping by as an aspiring magician and juggler. As a payback many years later, this guy supposedly got in touch with Jillette and said he wanted Jillette to help him publish this book. Yada, yada, yada, the guy’s book sucked, Jillette rewrote it (and for some reason dragged this Lynn fella into the mix), blah blah blah. [more after ther jump]
Anyway, I don’t know what I expected, but I guess I expected the book to be funny, and maybe include some cool card tricks. Wrong. Sure, there are some stories where the writer uses harsh words to make fun of the suckers he cheated, but I can’t say there are too many truly funny lines in the book. And there are no card tricks. In fact, for all of the sleight of hand maneuvers, etc., that you need to know in order to be an effective cheater at cards, they refer you to another book (The Expert at the Card Table, by S.W. Erdnase)!
I didn’t buy this book so that I could start cheating at cards. Yet for some reason, I’m extremely disappointed and frustrated that I’ve finished it and can’t cheat any better than I could before I started it (which is zero, zilch, nada). I guess it’s kind of like karate — you don’t want to have to actually use the skills, but it’s nice to know you have them. But no dice here.
And the “cheating” that you are supposed to be learning in this book goes completely off the deep end — all the way to different ways to steal money from the host of a game to how to get in the sack with the host’s wife. Now I just have to hope that none of my friends read it and comprehend it better than I did.
Books& Fiction& ReviewPosted by Tim on November 09, 2005 at 12:15 PM
Anansi Boys
Anansi Boys Anansi Boys is the second Neil Gaiman book I’ve read this year. The other was the graphic novel Marvel 1602. Anansi Boys is what our Dr J calls a “word book”. The only pictures are on the jacket.
Anansi Boys is a mythic novel (I’d hate to say Sci-fi or fantasy and scare everyone away). The book is about two brothers and their relationship with each other and with their father - with a few out of the ordinary complications. Gaiman is a great story teller, and this is a very fun book. [more at the ‘more’ link] The story centers around the average-joe Fat Charlie. Fat Charlie isn’t really fat - it’s a nickname that his father gave him during a temporary chubby period. Fat Charlie feels that he has been humiliated through an assortment of transgressions by his father all his life. His father was such a burden that Charlie moved to England to provide as much distance between them in the English-speaking world as possible. Charlie toils in a mind-crushingly dull job that provides modest security and less than modest pay. About all Charlie has going for him is his engagement to his nice (and chaste) fianceé. Even this source of happiness is dimmed by the spectre of a future mother-in-law who hates him. When Fat Chalie’s fianceé convinces him to invite his estranged father to the upcoming wedding, he learns that his father has died. At the funeral, Charlie begins to learn the true nature of who his father was. His father was a source of annoyance, in part, because he was the African trickster god, Anansi. So that’s where things depart from the everyday. Later, Charlie inadvertently summons the brother he never knew he had, Spider. Spider seems to share some of the old man’s unique gifts. Hilarity ensues. In the two Gaiman books I have read, it appears that the author’s gift is re-imagining popular and ancient mythologies and having fun with the results. This book does not take itself too seriously, not should it. It seems to be written with knowing smiles and winks to the reader throughout, as if the author were saying - “come on, this will be fun”. If you stop to question the plausibility of some of the action along the way, the book may just have to leave you behind. Govern yourself accordingly. The book has been on the NYT bestsellers list for a few weeks, but here’s how Gaiman knows that he has finally arrived: In a commercial last night, I saw an Anansi Boys poster in the fictional bookstore that is the setting for the TV show Stacked (season premiere tonight). Check out the ad at the top of the Stacked web site. “More Fuller Radiant Lips” - that’s what it says - “More Fuller”. Nice.
Books& Moral OutragePosted by Dr J on November 08, 2005 at 2:36 PM
What is it with these perverts?
And why can’t we beat them?
Add Scooter Libby to the long list of freakshow Republicans who have published deeply strange fiction. The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins weighs in here.
You can also get your mitts on some hot pioneer lesbo action by pointing your browser to this site excerpting Lynne Cheney’s tome. [Ed. note: whitehouse.org is a tongue-in-cheek site, but this book is real. I only wish I was kidding.]
Books& Non-Fiction& ReviewPosted by swizzle d on November 07, 2005 at 9:33 PM
Shadow Divers
In keeping with my non-fiction only book streak, I read with great interest, I might add, The Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson. This story chronicles the drama and adventure that was involved in the discovery and salvage of a World War II U-Boat.
The two principle divers, Chatterton and Kohl risk everything to pursue the identity of this mysterious wreck off the coast of New Jersey. The author is a journalist who contributes to Esquire and does a great job detailing military history, deep sea diving technicalities, as well as really drawing the reader into the characters of all the principle figures in this tale. As an aside, I understand that Clint Eastwood has bought the rights to this book and is working on a movie version. Let’s hope he doesn’t f*ck it up like that Perfect Storm mess. Anyway the drama, aside from the often life threatening dives and relentless pursuit of the identity of this wreck and her crew, also lies in the personal sacrifice these men made for the truth as well as a borderline obsession to rise to an extraordinary challenge. Two regular guys that rise to the occasion.
Good Stuff.
BooksPosted by Tim on November 07, 2005 at 8:47 AM
Speaking of NPR
My morning commute inlcudes a bus, two trains, and shoe leather to cover the distance to work. There is no car involved, so I miss the NPR news “cycle” going to and from work, which is a drag. I also miss commercial morning shows - which is not a drag. Most shows, like Fresh Air, are available for download from the NPR web site. I recently stumbled across NPR’s “podcast” subscription page. Sign up using your favorite news feed compiler (I use Bloglines) for automatic notification of “topic” orieneted content, like the week’s book news and reviews. There are also several weekly music podcasts worth checking out. I’m partial to All Songs Considered. Download the MP3 files to your iPod for later, or listen directly on your computer. (If any of the above is gibberish - read more about how news feeds and podcasts work).
Books& Fiction& ReviewPosted by Shaft on November 04, 2005 at 9:07 PM
The Kite Runner
Wow. I just finished The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. This is just an amazing book. Love (in various forms), justice and injustice, fear and fearlessness, and just plain karma play huge roles in this tale.
A guy I work with told me that this was the best book he’d ever read. Having an inordinate amount of trust in my fellow man, I took his word for it and gave it a shot. Reluctantly. Why reluctantly? Because I know so little about Afghanistan and its culture that I was afraid that I wouldn’t really “get” the book. This assumption was frighteningly wrong. Despite my going in to this book with as little knowledge as I had, Hosseini made it easy to relate to these characters. Against a backdrop completely foreign to me (weak pun completely intended), I didn’t struggle one bit following this story and truly feeling for its characters.
For those few of you out there who haven’t read this yet, the book tells the tale of Amir, a boy growing up in Afghanistan in the early 1970’s, and those around him. It reflects the oppressiveness of its culture (which wasn’t quite so impressive if you were with the “haves”), and the horror of the events that unfolded over more than a quarter of a century there. I had never before been so compelled to think so deeply about what’s happened over there. And reading this book scared the sh*t out of me and made me thank my lucky stars for being born when and where I was.
I won’t give away what happens to Amir and his friends and family, but the book follows him from his childhood to the present day, and represents a study of his values and what drove those values throughout that period. This was a book that I truly had a difficult time putting down (often tempting myself to skip to the end to find out what happens, although I never did). You have to read it.
[ed: read DJ Cayenne’s previous post and the comments]
UncategorizedPosted by Tim on November 02, 2005 at 6:16 PM
November Issue
BooksPosted by Tim on November 01, 2005 at 8:39 PM
BGB Social
I thought it would be a nice idea for the ATL BGB-ers to get together, have some cocktails, and in a few cases, actually meet one another. So here’s an idea that I am floating: on Friday November 18, J.R. Moehringer will be at the Center for Southern Literature (Margaret Mitchell Hosue facility) for a “book bash”. He will be reading from his book The Tender Bar. Maureen Corrigan gave the book a positive review on NPR. The book was so nice that the NYT reviewed it twice (1 and 2). The reception includes food from Atkin’s Park and cash bar. RSVP at the CSL web site (the spaces fill up quickly), and shoot me an e-mail if you plan on going.
