Speaking of things gourmand and things musical:
In case you missed it, The New York Times Magazine features an amusing viticulture-related essay by Malcolm McLaren, titled Never Mind the Bordeaux. McLaren was the Sex Pistols’ Svengali (today’s alliteration fix) and was also the man behind Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow. McLaren actually tried to get fired from a job as a professional wine taster (to be fair, he was an apprentice to former generals).
In The Tournament of Books, two books went head-to-head yesterday that I had never heard of. I hate continuing to flaunt my ignorance, but the point of starting this blog was to avoid precisely this scenario. We need to redouble our efforts. At any rate, I don’t think that I’d care to read either of those books. Check out today’s match-up between The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner (uh, haven’t heard of that one either) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. On Thursday, Colin Meloy, leader of hyper-literate art-popsters The Decemberists will be juding the action. Tune in.
Russ has published a review of Evan Mandery’s Dreaming of Gwen Stefani at the Wordsmiths blog in advance of Wednesday’s reading at the Aurora Coffee in Little Five Points. He promises a review of John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk today, so check back in later in the day. Check out today’s preview of John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk. You can win a signed copy of both books by entering our rockin’ book giveaway spectacular. Get all of the details on the contest, the readings, the performance by Paolo Nuttini, and see an unintentionally hilarious Kate Bush video here. The entire Cayenne family will be in attendance, so say hello if you can make it. (Free wine and home made cookies!)
A Ghetto Burger follow-up: The word is out on Ann’s Snack Bar since the Journal article. On Saturday there were 40 people in line at her 8-stool counter. While it is advisable to let things cool off a bit before setting out, don’t wait too long, Miss Ann is going to retire next year!
I am passionate about reading and even more passionate about food. I come from a family who thinks and talks about food ALL the time. A typical meal is spent as follows: first 10 minutes critiquing what is wrong or fab about the food we are eating at that moment, second 10 minutes discussing what we are going to eat at our next meal and last 10 minutes spent discussing new restaurants, where we recently dined, and where we want to dine. Needless to say, A Cook’s Tour, by Anthony Bourdain, should have been right up my alley. It was and it wasn’t.
The descriptions of the food and the local scenery were great but by the end of the book I was SO sick of Bourdain extolling his virtrues as an amazing chef and overall cool dude. Anthony Bourdain is the executive chef at Les Halles in NYC and author of Kitchen Confidential. Kitchen Confidential revealed all the secrets of the restaurant trade – never order fish on Monday, extreme abuse is the norm in restaurant kitchens, etc. For his next book, he pitched the idea that he would travel around the world in search of the perfect meal. The end result would be this book as well as a 22 episode TV show. Some of you might have seen the show – I think it has the same name as the book.
Each chapter takes place in a different country and describes the fabulous and wacky meal prepared and eaten by Bourdain. Vietnam is clearly his favorite destination and he devotes three chapters to his eating experiences there. I must admit that Vietnam has always been on my destination list and after this book – I can’t get there soon enough and consume my all-time favorite soup – pho. The book is not for the faint of heart as there is an enormous amount of varying kinds of coagulated blood consumed – pigs blood, haggis, lambs blood and testicles:
…God help me, I tore off a sizable piece of gonad and popped it in my mouth. It was sensational. Tender, even fluffly, with a subtle lamb flavor less intense than shoulder or leg; It was certainly the best testicle I’ve ever had in my mouth. Also the first, I should hasten to say. I enjoyed every bite. It was delicious. Delightful. I’d do it again in a hot second.
You get the idea. That was definitely one of his more wacky meals but for the most part they really made your mouth water. The chapter about San Sebastian, Spain was my favorite and having actually vacationed there in the past year, I can concur that if your ideal meal is having a glass or two of wine and a couple of pintxos (the Basque name for tapas) at many different locales, you must take a vacation there.
Where the book completely fell down was in Bourdain’s preening about himself as the “ultimate” cool, chef dude. His self-image is so over-inflated and just typified everything that is wrong with our celebrity chef culture. I’m sure he’s a decent chef and he’s obviously adventuresome but get over yourself. Given the opportunity – there are thousands of people (myself included) who would travel to crazy places and eat crazy things. He is literally begging the reader to say “Wow you are so cool………” but it had the exact opposite effect on me who said “you’re an idiot and ruined your book with your pomposity.”
Or, BGB plays catch-up with last week’s news…
The National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last week. The winners were:
My thoughts: I’m surprised by Desai’s win. She bested Richard Ford, Dave Eggers, Cormac McCarthy, and Chimanda Ngozi Adichie (more on him her in a minute). I was pulling for Ford and Eggers. The Lost sounds completely heartbreaking. Weschler’s Convergences book sounds amazing. It will be mine.
The Morning News’ Tournament of Books started on Thursday while we were still groggy. Why start on a Thursday? Who knows. Two of the matches are now history. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimanda Ngozi Adichie defeated Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan in Match 1 of Round 1. In Match 2 of the first round, The Echo Maker by Richard Powers lost to Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children. In Round two, the brackets steer these two winners to judge Jessa Crispin of Bookslut. She loathes The Emperor’s Childen, so find a chump and bet accordingly.
And in perhaps the most sought after award of all, the “Ghetto Burger” from Anne’s Snack Shop was named the Best Burger in the United States by the Wall Street Journal’s Raymond Sokolov. Also rans, The Vortex and The EARL, make Atlanta the best city in the US to get a burger, says the article. I’ve never stepped up to the Ghetto Burger at Anne’s, but I can vouch for the other two restaurants. Perhaps a field trip is in order…
The literary and musical worlds are colliding in Little Five Points next Wednesday, March 14th. Wordsmiths Books and Criminal Records are hosting a literary/musical extravaganza. The event begins at 7 PM at the Aurora Coffee in L5P with readings by John Sheppard and Evan Mandery. (Show up early to hear the authors rock the house with cuts off their i-Pods.)
Sheppard will be reading from Small Town Punk, a “semi-autobiographical story of kids trapped and bored in a landscape of Walmarts and Pizza Huts, but buoyed by their love of old-school punk rock.” Mandery’s Dreaming of Gwen Sterfani explores the dark side of our celebrity-obsessed culture. (Is there another side?) There is talk of complimentary adult beverages to take the edge of your triple mocha latte. Bonus: Wordsmiths-guy Russ’s girlfriend is rumored to be baking something for the occasion. How much would you pay for this golden night of entertainment? But wait, there’s more…
Next door, the improbably named Scottish singer/songwriter Paolo Nuttini will be doing an in-store performance at Criminal Records. How sweet is that that? Listen to a reading, listen to some music, and pick up that new Arcade Fire you’ve been hearing about all over the internets. Come on out. No one will have any idea what your talking about at work the next day, which, of course, = cool. And it’s all FREE (no pay).
To further sweeten the deal, Russ (of the cookie baking girlfriend) is hooking us up with a set of both books to give away to our readers, which you can then turn around and have signed on the spot. Winner need not be present or even live locally to win.
For this week’s contest, tell us about one of the following:
- Your favorite book that features music (e.g., King Dork),
- Your favorite song that is based on a book/poem (e.g., “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush),
- or your favorite literary references in songs or band names (e.g., the title of this post – the band “Steely Dan” taking their name from an item in Naked Lunch).
I’ll pick the “most inspired” from the comments section. If you can’t make it to the reading, I’ll get the books signed and ship them to you. You can double your chances of winning by entering the exact same contest at That Truncheon Thing. Also: read Russ’s excellent post on the intersection of music and books. Unlike those cheapskates at TTT, we’ll pay to ship to our international friends. That’s just the way we roll.
We also roll like this:
Update: there should be a really sweet YouTube video above complete with interpretive dance. If all you see is blanks space, it means that YouTube’s service is still down. Dammit.
I originally bought Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen as a gift for Mrs. Cayenne. I read some good things about the book, and I thought that she’d like it. The clincher though was that Mrs. Cayenne was once in the circus herself (no bearded lady jokes, please).
As it turns out, I’m a genius. Mrs. Cayenne did enjoy Water for Elephants. So much so, she convinced me to give it a read. I didn’t think it would be my thing for some reason. It turned out to be a very good story.
The book takes place during the Great Depression. A personal tragedy causes a Cornell veterinary student to turn his back on his old life – in the middle of his final exams of his senior. A veterinarian in all but diploma, he ends up joining a traveling circus as a laborer. If you’ve ever seen the HBO show Carnivale, you have a good mental image of what the circus is like, minus the supernatural “what the…” of the TV show. Lots of insider lingo, a cooch tent, etc.
The story is told from the vantage point of a crotchety old man reflecting on his life from within a nursing home. A circus that has begun setting up across the street begins a series of flashbacks to his time with the circus. The story alternates back and forth between the nursing home and the doctor’s youth.
We learn that his Ivy League veterinary skills quickly improve his fortunes within the circus. A love interest is formed, complications arise, and conflict ensues. I won’t spoil any of the plot. However, an elephant that is obtained by the circus as a status symbol features prominently in the story.
The book is very well written. The characters are well developed and the plot keeps you coming back to find out how things are going to turn out. You can’t ask for much more than that.
I’m not sure when I first saw the title of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but I vaguely remember thinking how brilliant of a title it was (without knowing anything whatsoever about the book). It wasn’t until some time later that I learned who Eggers was (one of the guys behind McSweeney’s), at which time I knew I had to get this book (again, not knowing anything whatsoever about the story).
I also remember spending way too much time thinking about how cleverly I would caption my post on the book, by playing off of its epic-sounding title, or, better yet, how I would write a book and call it something similar (A Hardworking Break of a Struggling Gymnast, or something equally brilliant). But I digress.
I finished the book last night, and I think it’s a pretty good book. The book tells Eggers’ story of how his parents passed away very close together in time, while he was in college, and how he basically had to become the guardian for his younger brother (who I think was 7 at the time). They moved to San Francisco, where his older sister lived, and he went through the process of raising his brother while trying to lead a social life and start a world-changing magazine (called Might).
I generally like Eggers’ writing style, which is at times plainly narrative, but at other times is very stream-of-consciousness. And I love how he spent a ton of time at the beginning of the book explaining who had helped him with it, while apologizing to those folks whose names he didn’t change, or who had given him material without getting credit. At the same time, I found a startling number of grammatical errors in the book (not due to the stream-of-consciousnless style, but just poor editing), as well as a few difficult to believe retellings of conversations with his younger brother (who used language and talked with the experience of a fifty year-old).
But all in all a pretty good read. Except for the end. Not the end of the story, mind you, but the end of the book, in which Eggers goes off on some random rant that I can’t really understand, but in which he inexplicably drops twenty-three F-bombs in the final paragraph.
I’ve been waiting for today to roll around for a few long years. Today Arcade Fire’s new CD is finally released into the wild. I’m heading out at lunch with friend and driver, Shaft, to get my own copy. We may have to eat in the car. I mention it here because the album has been tastefully named after the John Kennedy Toole novel, The Neon Bible. Their last album made a 2004 best books list (you can read about it in this post where I also bust out a Holden Caufield reference). I have also managed to work the band into a post about 9/11 that featured a video of the band singing with David Bowie. I’m a little shameless in my enthusiasm is what it comes down to. Additional reading: The NYT Sunday Magazine fawns over the band and TTT’s Frank says (paraphrasing) – believe the hype.
In other media: I had no idea that Jhumpa Lahari’s The Namesake was being made into a movie until I saw this on Very Short List. VSL handily provides this Venn diagram so that you’ll get the gist:
The post also mentions that the movie is kind of a big deal because it stars several huge Bollywood actors that you’ve never heard of. Skeptical? I ask only so I can then link to Bollywood for the Skeptical site (see what I did there?). If you do nothing else, listen to the beginning of Song 1 – the horns, the Superfly guitar riffs, and especially the song’s only lyrics “makow!” – are amazing. I guarantee you’ll be grooving to it all day long, yelling “makow!” at everyone you see, making it your official song for when you come up to bat in the major leagues, and figuring out how to make it your cellular ring tone.
Which isn’t to suggest that The Namesake is a Bollywood musical with great music – it’s not. However, it is based on a great book. I’m just continuing to be shameless in my enthusiasm. Makow!
It must be March. The annual “Tournament of Books” is about to get underway at The Morning News. The contenders have been selected (scroll down), but the brackets have not been set up yet. I’ll keep you posted.
In other news: the preferred version of our unofficial theme song has been melded to the video of the Sir Mix-A-Lot original. Before you click on the link, please put down any beverages that you don’t want shooting out of your nose. Download the mp3 of the song here.
Last night was the Brooklyn in Decatur event that we’ve been blathering on about endlessly. Shaft and I ventured out in crappy weather to attend what turned out to be a great event. Five writers read briefly from their works, and (free) beer and refreshments were available afterwards during the author meet and greet.
The authors reading were (from left to right and out of focus):
Each of the writers was amazing, but the standouts for me were Aaron Petrovich and Kwame Dawes. Check out Petrovich reading from The Session below:
He’s not even looking at the page! There’s a guy who is one with his work. I also need to read She’s Gone, sooner than later, so I can “hear” it in Dawes Ghanan/Jamaican/Southern accent. I spoke with each of them after the reading and they were each down to earth and very cool.
Sadly, Shaft and I had to split before before we got to talk to all of the authors and the “book people.” I don’t know if things got crazy at the after-party at Twain’s, but people were filing in even as were we leaving. Thanks to Russ and Zach from Wordsmiths for putting together such a great evening and for including us in the fun.
Speaking of Brooklyn authors, Granta has published a list of the top 25 authors under thirty-five. The list includes Brooklyn-ese such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Dara Horn (we were recently speculating if they all knew each other – well Krauss and Foer are married – but do they go to Horn’s house for Scrabble and Desperate Housewives?) Gary Shteyngart is also on there, but according to WikiPedia he’s a Lower East Side guy.
In non-Brooklyn but upcoming reading news: Critical Mass writes up Dave Eggers’ What is the What as they work their way through each of the National Book Critics Circle award nominees. They also post a round up of the best Eggers/Valentino Deng reviews, videos, etc. (Eggers and Deng are reading at the Center for Southern Literature on March 18th.)
A head of state named George goes before his legislature to ask for authorization to send troops from the most powerful nation on earth to deal with insurgents fighting thousands of miles away. No, this isn’t the beginning of Bob Woodward’s latest book or Harrison Ford’s next movie, it is the starting point for 1776, David McCullough’s wonderful telling of the struggles faced by George Washington, his staff, and soldiers during that momentous year.
Like most Americans, my knowledge of the Revolutionary War is dismal, filled with hazy fragments leftover from a clutch of unreliable sources. (Not including history classes. I can’t remember a single one that got past Lexington and Concord and “The Shot Heard Round the World.”) Reading 1776 was a pleasure for many reasons, not least of which was that I could feel that I was finally righting an old wrong and was getting a bit more of our founding conflict into my aging brain.
This book is eminently readable, and McCullough’s distinctive voice rises from the page in the same stately, measured tones he uses as the narrator of Ken Burns’s Civil War and several of the films offered on The American Experience. The approach is balanced, with the perspectives of the British and the Loyalists presented as well as those of the rebels. We see Washington most as he learns through trial and a great deal of error how to command an army and fight an enemy that is better trained, equipped, and supplied than his ever will be.
He starts out with an unexpected victory in the siege of Boston and then endures a series of defeats in and around New York, being outflanked and outgeneraled the whole way. A series of retreats leaves the remnants of the Continental Army on the far side of the Delaware River across from Trenton licking their wounds while the British prepare for winter quarters and a renewal of their offensive in the spring.
The story is well told, and I learned more about Nathaniel Greene (who haled from my family’s hometown of East Greenwich, RI) from this book than I did in six years of history classes in Rhode Island. This is a solid popular history that gave me some interesting perspectives on the headlines I read in The Times every day.
Here’s what’s what:
In case you’ve somehow missed it, get your Brooklyn on this evening at the Decatur Library. Group reading of cool books – beer afterwards at Twains. Starts at 7. Here are some author previews at the Wordsmith’s blog: 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Wordsmith’s has also added a handy upcoming events page. Make a note.
Frank sent me this NYT article (thanks!). Apparently if you want to talk seriously about books on TV in the U.S, you can go on Charlie Rose or a fake news show. So very sad.
According to this excerpt on Bookslut of an article elsewhere, New Orleans Catholic boys’ schools are “renowned for turning out bright, Latin-spouting young men with acute Madonna/whore complexes.” Huh. I graduated from a New Orleans Catholic boys’ school.
Grown weary of hatin’ on hipster parents? Check out the “Queen of Routine” for an antidote. She’s all about ruling with an iron hand. I’ve never heard of her, but she apparently controls 25% of the parenting book market in England. And that makes her right. Says the queen:
She said: “I know that Penelope Leach and Miriam Stoppard say I damage babies. But three of my books corner 25% of the childcare market. Why is that happening if I am damaging babies?”
Books, Happenings | Tim | 
March 13, 2007 7:00 am | 
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