Children of Men

Children of Men, by PD James, was recently made into a motion picture. The trailer for the film looked pretty amazing, and I read some great reviews, although it didn’t quite hit home that the praise in those reviews was targeted primarily at the filmmaking and cinematography, as opposed to the underlying story itself.

I just finished the book, and I kind of wish I’d have spent the seven bills to see the movie instead. The book started off pretty okay. The writing style was elegant but comprehensible, and the premise of the story was downright intriguing. The year is 2021, and all of humankind has become infertile. The last children born were born in the mid-1990′s, and the entire population of the world has grown older, as well as somewhat jaded because of the impending demise of the human race.

The story takes place in England, and tells the tale (partially through narrative and partially through journal entries) of Theo Faran, a college professor at Oxford who also happens to be the cousin and former advisor to the Warden of England. Theo is divorced from his wife and is pretty much a loner until he meets Julian, a member of a separatist faction of five individuals with lofty objectives and a big secret. Theo unwittingly/unintentionally/inadvertantly joins forces with this group as they run from the law.

I’m not going to waste a lot of time getting into the details of the situation, because I don’t think the book merits the effort, and here’s why: after a couple hundred pages of setup and storytelling, it seems like James got tired, because the denouement (which is somewhat lacking and ridiculous) takes place over the course of about three pages. Now I’ve stated before that I’ve got a short attention span, but come on! This undershot even my low standards for getting to the point.

What is the What: Ongoing

If you’ve read and were moved by Dave Eggers’ novel about Sudanese civil-war and genocide, What is the What, then you need to run – don’t walk – over to Google Earth. The coolest map toy in the world has partnered with The US Holocaust Memorial Museum to bring actual pictures of the atrocities that are taking place now in the Darfur region. You can zoom in on destroyed cities, click on embedded pictures, read eyewitness testimonies, etc. I had no idea that the USHMM was doing this kind of work, but God bless ‘em. It sure makes it a lot harder for governments to deny this is happening when anyone can check out the evidence for themselves. Here’s a screen shot of what you can expect:

Of interest

The Millions blog has a round-up of notable upcoming fiction. Give it a read to see how much time you have to clear your TBR stack.

The Guardian interviews Barbara Kingsolver at her farm in Virginia. They talk about her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and the interviewer is almost molested by a turkey. (BGB’s RaeRae reviewed Kingsolver’s latest earlier today).

If you’re an Atlantan interested in giving the local food thing a whirl, a friend recommends the Moore Farm co-op. They deliver a basket of whatever is in season each week at various points around town for cheap – well, cheap-ish.

Steven Hall is interviewed about his book The Raw Shark Texts.

BGB Mailbox: BGB reader Nicole (not to be confused with our Nitro Nicole), who clearly has superior taste, asked if I knew where she could find a copy of The Raw Shark Texts with the way cool Canadian cover (much cooler than the US cover).

Yes, I do. Right over here. (BGB reviews of Raw Shark – here and here.)

A Famous Author that I Know

I’ve been living the thrill of first time publishing vicariously over the last few weeks. My friend Kelly Greene is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, so seeing her name in print is old hat for her. However, she has just co-authored a book called The Wall Street Journal Guide Complete Retirement Guidebook: How to Plan It, Live It and Enjoy It. Seriously. You can find this book at Barnes and Noble and everything. And Kelly wrote it with that other guy. That’s the coolest thing ever.

In the months before the book came out (way back when I ordered my copy), the book had a sales rank in the tens of thousands. As the sale date crept slowly forward, the number began to slowly drop. An advance book review suddenly bumped the sales rank into the low hundreds. Thinking positively, I told Kelly that we had a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator with her name on it to celebrate when it jumped into the top 10.

The big giant bump came when the Wall Street Journal sent an e-mail announcing the book’s arrival to all of its subscribers. Suddenly Kelly’s book was #9 on the Amazon non-fiction list. She just found out yesterday that her book will debut on The New York Times Bestsellers List (non-fiction Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous trade paperback bestseller list) at #13 on July 8. (This post should bump the sales right up to #1.)

We haven’t broken out the champagne yet but plan to soon. There will also be a reading/signing/pahr-tay at a local Atlanta book store soon. I’ll post that news when it comes in. In the meantime, you either will retire one day or are retired now. Either way, go get Kelly’s book – RIGHT NOW!

I asked Kelly’s three-year old son what it was like having such a famous mommy and he said, “I’m a pirate!”

A Winner

The winner of our Anthony Winkler books giveaway is Ms. Ann Swope with her classic “not my dog” gag. Ann, we’ll contact you shortly for how best to get those books to you if you can’t make it to the reading tonight.

The Worst Hard Time

I came for the social history. I stayed for the weather porn.

The Worst Hard Time is New York Times reporter Timothy Egan’s historical account of the Dust Bowl and the people who lived through this country’s worst extended environmental disaster on record. The term “Dust Bowl” refers both to a region that extends from the southwestern corner of Nebraska down through western Kansas, eastern Colorado and New Mexico, and into the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, and to a collective weather phenomenon, the dust storms that tore out the southern Great Plains’ topsoil over and over again and blew “black blizzards” from roughly 1933 to 1937.

This climate catastrophe was almost entirely man-made. As late as the turn of the 20^th century this regional ecosystem was in relatively perfect balance. The buffalo (and the American Indians who hunted them) had been removed from the plains by this time, but they had been replaced for the most part by cattle ranches. The native grasses that held the soil in place remained. This is not an insignificant point. People tried to get rich quick by plowing this part of the plains under to plant wheat when World War I caused the price of that commodity to spike, and it profoundly upset the ecological balance that had been in place for eons.

The Dust Bowl region historically received less than 20 inches of rain a year. The late teens and early 1920s were unusually wet, but when drought hit in the 1930s the ecological destruction reached a tipping point. Winds, which were strong even in a normal year, tore out the plowed topsoil, which created dust storms, which created a chain reaction that seemed to cause the storms to intensify. Americans of the time tended to blame the storm on the fickleness of Mother Nature, but they could have blamed it on their own hubris–which was supported by the federal government’s homesteading policy. The New Deal’s Soil Conservation Service (remember when people understood that government could solve problems, as well as cause them?) began to right the ship.

Egan says that he wrote the book to give voice to the people who weathered these storms. He succeeds in doing that, and uncovers some true American originals. But the most compelling character in the drama by far is the storm that seems to happen in an endless film loop over a span of years. It’s just about impossible to exaggerate how devastating these storms were, and the statistics Egan throws out every so often throughout the narrative are mind-boggling. Here’s one representative example: in the year 1935 alone, dust storms ripped out the equivalent of 8 tons worth of topsoil for every man, woman, and child in the United States from the Dust Bowl and deposited it… god knows where (mostly, it appears, in the Atlantic Ocean). The people affected by the Dust Bowl didn’t receive much attention from the powers that be until a freakish 1934 dust storm system traveled all the way to the East Coast and browned out New York and D.C.

As an academic historian I’m forced to tut-tut a bit about calling this a “history.” Egan did a great deal of research for this book, much of it in regional archives, and his book is much richer for the local flavor he culls from oral histories (in addition to his own interviews) with Dust Bowl survivors. But, like another great writer in this genre, Erik Larson, he has the habit of “reproducing” conversations that took place decades ago between real historical people, even though he wasn’t there to hear the conversations and no one else recorded them. So these “reproduced” conversations aren’t really historical, but they’re clearly not fictional, either. (For an interesting discussion of Larson’s speculation-as-history, see this excerpt of an op-ed that first appeared in the Chicago Tribune.)

I’m content to call this a “non-fiction narrative” that deserves all of the awards it has received and leave it at that. I would recommend the book to anyone interested in American social history during the Great Depression and anyone thinking about climate change and man’s effects thereon. Above all, if I say “Jennifer Lopez” and this is who you think of first, The Worst Hard Time is definitely the book for you.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Yes, we have no bananas.

After talking about making a change in their lives for years, Barbara Kingsolver and her family moved from the desert of Tucson, Arizona to live and farm in rural southwest Virginia. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Kingsolver tells the story of what it is like to live entirely off the land for one year, deriving all sustenance from the family farm. However, this isn’t just a down-home country tale, but a wake-up call along the lines of The Omnivore’s Dilemma about how we live as Americans in regard to our food.

The idea for the family move is to get closer to their food source, thereby becoming less dependent on industrial food and lowering their carbon footprint. Almost overnight, the family goes from a lifestyle where everything they need, water included, has to be shipped in from other places, to buying locally and, eventually, growing and raising everything they eat. They go from eating supermarket bananas, kiwis and cantaloupe whenever it strikes their fancy to a menu completely dependent on the locale and season.

The chapters follow the months of the year, and in each month, Kingsolver describes what kind of activity goes on at the farm. (You know the song: a time to plant, a time to reap.)They seek out varieties, fighting the loss of genetic diversity brought about by big farming, and plant 8 kinds of potatoes (um, we only have two kinds at my grocery store) and 14 types of tomatoes, for starters. They reap 350-plus pounds of tomatoes and infinite zucchini and harvest their cherry trees. They raise their own heirloom turkeys and chickens. They make their own cheese, can tomatoes, pickle cucumbers, and bake their own bread. Added bonus: They eat without the all the fun additives, such as the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup in every bite.

We’re a nation with an eating disorder, and we know it. The multiple maladies caused by bad eating are taking a dire toll on our health—most tragically for our kids, who are predicted to be this country’s first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. That alone is a stunning enough fact to give us pause. So is a government policy that advised us to eat more fruit and vegetables, while doling out subsidies not to fruit and vegetable farmers, but to commodity crops destined to become soda pop and cheap burgers.

Okay, they aren’t totally perfect – they still drink coffee (fair-trade), bring in wheat flour from out-of-state, have a crate of oranges shipped in, and enjoy wine, their goal is to get the items they cannot grow or raise themselves from the most local source possible, whether it is from a neighboring farm, nearest organic wheat mill, or in the case of the oranges, a splurge from a few states away. This still beats burning fossil fuels to ship food clear across the globe.

While moving to a farm is completely out of the question for most of us (as bucolic as it sounds), let alone giving up bananas (best default kid snack ever), Kingsolver nudges us to think more of how we eat and what we eat. She urges a return of the family meal, making the kitchen a center once again for deliberate eating and discussion, with friends and family. She suggests a backyard garden — even container gardening, buying local, and going organic. Sounds good to me – in the end, the logic and rationale of this lifestyle choice make this an appealing read.

Cultural Ephemera

Speaking of book blogging monkeys, Wordsmiths’ Russ writes about the mixed feelings involved in welcoming people into your brand new book store on the National Book Critics Circle blog. He’s all famous now.

The Washington Post Book World has a rave review of The Wild Trees by Richard Preston. Of course, their review ran after BGB’s blogging monkeys RaeRae and Nitro commented on it here. I’m just sayin’… This ebola-free monkey just made the connection that the author, Richard Preston, is the same Richard Preston that wrote The Hot Zone. The man can drop some science on you.

McSweeney’s (not monkeys at all) have announced that their fire sale was a huge success. I can’t find a link, but a recent McSweeney’s newsletter says:

In the past ten days, thousands of you have visited, shopped, bid, and bugged your friends to follow suit. From the first morning of the sale, we’ve been mindboggled by your response — the enthusiasm, the encouragement, the stern commands to persevere. We’ve been sitting in our office all these days, emboldened and so happy, sharing with each other each kind note, each crazy order and new auction item, cheering at the end of each day when we tally up.

You’ve made a very real difference: because of your incredible response, McSweeney’s isn’t going anywhere. We’re sticking around as long as you’ll have us. The ship is damp but afloat, sails full, jib doing whatever the jib is supposed to do, and we’re getting back to work. (For last-minute shoppers, we’ll keep this sale going through the weekend, and the auction still includes pieces from Art Spiegelman, John Hodgman, David Foster Wallace, and Miranda July.)

The J.T. Leroy court case verdict is in. That was quick. Where were the weeks’ worth of testimony. I haven’t even had time to learn the judge’s name on E! Our legal monkeys have explained the verdict to me this way: if you sign a contract with a fake name, you don’t get to keep the real money. Galley Cat wonders if the verdict sets a bad precedent.

The feel good hit of the summer: The NYT drops in on a Long Island book club that has been meeting for about 50 years. Ike was President when they started.

Behind the Scenes at BGB

Have you ever wondered how your favorite lit blog magically appears on your computer screen each day chock full of reviews, book news, and exciting cultural ephemera? You’ve asked yourself don’t these people have jobs? lives? Yes, we do. We also have a secret weapon — our lit blogging monkey. Why a monkey? Two words: prehensile tails. Our lit blogging monkey is a free lancer, so he can work from anywhere. It just so happens that right now he lives in a basement in Terre Haute.

The lit blogging monkey was created by the artist known as Ape Lad (but signing as Adam Koford). I first saw Ape Lad’s work on the 700 Hoboes Project. Recently BoingBoing linked to some of Ape Lad’s custom monkeys, and I just had to have one of my very own. Now our lit blogging monkey does all the work (look at him go!), while I get to take naps and eat tacos. You can get your own monkey from Ape Lad by visiting his site and following the directions on the right side of the page. He’s also drawing cool retro LOL Cats, if you’d rather go that route.

The New York Trilogy

My interest in reading Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy started when Auster was referenced in The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Reviews of The Raw Shark Texts have hinted at Hall’s indebtedness to Auster. I loved Raw Shark, so it seemed like a natural progression to check out Auster’s work, which I had not read. There were other signs pointing to this book as well. When we were coming up with our list of the Top 25 books of the past 25 years, a reader’s e-mail suggested that our list should include The New York Trilogy. The book is also included on the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. When I spotted it on Weezie’s book shelf, I just had to borrow it.

The book is comprised of three novellas: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. Each story has a mystery at its center that requires an investigation of some kind. The stories seem unrelated, until the final story, The Locked Room makes some connections that will have you flipping back to reread sections. That doesn’t mean that a nice package of inter-connectedness falls neatly into place. It doesn’t. Rather, Auster refers back to characters in previous stories in ways that give them new dimensions.

The first story , City of Glass, begins with a mysterious phone call to a mystery writer, Quinn, who is mistaken for a private detective named Paul Auster by the caller. The writer eventually decides to help the caller, and we soon learn of his own tragic circumstances even as he being pulled into the personal tragedy of another. Loss and identity are definite themes in this story, and they will be echoed and reflected back through the cracked mirrors of the remaining stories.

The second story, Ghosts, is about a private detective, Blue, who is hired by Black to keep an eye on White. (I had the idea that Quentin Tarantino was almost certainly influenced by this story in naming teh characters in his movie Reservoir Dogs). The two men spy on each other from opposite sides of the street and their lives become hopelessly connected. Why have they been asked to watch each other and who is pulling the strings?

The final story centers on the mysterious Fanshawe. Fanshawe’s widow contacts his long lost childhood friend, a writer, to evaluate the manuscripts that Fanshawe wrote before he died. The books are published posthumously to enormous acclaim, which more than adequately provide for his widow and friend (now romantically involved). Then things get weird.

Here’s some real-life weirdness. Steven Hall is an acknowledged fan of Auster, is influenced by his work, references Auster by name in his book, etc. Check this out: The Raw Shark Texts begins with a man awakening in a room with no idea of who he is or how he got there. Paul Auster’s new book, Travels in the Scriptorium, begins with a man awakening in room with no idea of who he is or how he got there. The books came out within three months of each other (Auster’s came out first). If you’re Hall, does that just mess with your head completely?

Auster’s work in these three collected stories will mess with your head. As each layer of the onion is peeled back, revealing more of the nature of what is truly happening, more questions are raised than are answered. The questions asked are the “big” questions for which there are no answers. WikiPedia describes the book as “experimental detective stories” that are “not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, creating his own distinctively postmodern form in the process.”

Yeah. That’s either your thing or it isn’t. I thought that the book was great, and I’ve become intrigued with Auster as an author. I’m on way to working through Auster’s back catalog. I picked up Scriptorium as soon as I finished Trilogy. If you’re an Auster fan, please make a recommendation for what I should be next on my list.

Free!

We’re going to start this week off by giving away some free books. This Wednesday night, June 27, author Anthony Winkler will be reading from his book The Lunatic at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur. It’s free, and it starts at 7. Author Karin Gillespie will also be reading. So it’s a 2-for-1 deal. If you haven’t checked out the store yet, this would be a good excuse to get down there.

Wordsmiths have given us two of Winkler’s books, which will be signed for you by the author, to give away to one of our readers. Winkler is reportedly very, very funny, so here’s our contest: Tell us a joke in the comments to be entered. L’il Cayenne draws a name from a hat on Wednesday. Winner need not be present.
Here’s a joke to tell your geologist friends:

A geologist walks up to a river and says, “I feel very strongly that
your bottom is composed of dirt, silt, small rocks, bits of dead
animals, and other particulate inorganic matter.”

The river replies, “Yes, those are my sediments exactly.

Odds and Ends

A collection of tips and links that have been gathering dust in my inbox:

The Laura Albert/J.T. Leroy trial has begun. GalleyCat has a nice overview with links to media coverage. SallyRogers posted about the brou-ha-ha earlier this week.

Salon writes about the PGW bankruptcy, “the Enron of publishing”, that has screwed over McSweeney’s, Soft Skull, and other independent publishers. Read the article. (Thanks of the link, Frank.)

The American Bookseller’s Association talks with Wordsmiths owner Zach Steele about the foundation that was laid on the internets prior to opening their new bookstore. The always classy Zach gives BGB a shout out in the article. (we have GOT to update our update our “About Us” page.

In Chabon news: Is the Kavalier and Clay movie not quite dead yet? Premiere Magazine suggests that it may have life yet. (Thanks for this link, too, Frank. I’ve got to get you on the payroll.)

Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer-winning poet, Emory Proffessor, and Atlantan, has a Q&A in the New York Times Magazine (Dr J forwarded this link to me on May 13th. How’s that for timely?) It has also come to light that Trethewey was on a high school gymnastics team with BGB’s Weezie. We’re very well connected over here.

Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions is now available as an audio book. How they are going to pull this off, I have no idea. The book is available in five “reels” at the iTunes store. (Read my review of the book here.)

If you’re looking to go beyond just book geekiness and want to become some sort of uber-nerd, check out Lifehacker’s 13 Book Hacks. The tips include tricks for tracking library books online, getting books cheap (or free), and projects for your unwanted books.

The Wild Trees – Awesome recommendation

I don’t think that we have spent enough time touting one of the great benefits of this blog – the recommendations of our fellow bloggers. I love being part of my book club because it forces me to read books that I would never typically pick up. And now I feel that BGB is accomplishing the same thing.

RaeRae’s recommendation for The Wild Trees was so compelling that I decided to check it out even though I had absolutely no interest in the topic. Contrary to RaeRae’s first sentence, I wasn’t captivated by the redwoods and had never even thought about them. Since I finished the book – I can’t stop thinking about these trees to the point that we are now trying to plan a trip out to the Redwood forest in the fall. Furthermore, I am now compulsively staring at all the trees in my neighborhood and trying to figure out how tall they are, what type of ecosystem might exist on them and whether it is climbable or not.

This book is fascinating and really pulls you in. I was fully vested in the character’s quest to find and climb the Tallest Tree. I was also awed by the character’s passion for the redwoods. I admire anyone who is so dedicated and committed to their field/and or hobby that they pursue it to the highest level of success.

RaeRae – thank you for posting on this book. I thoroughly enjoyed the book from start to finish and have definitely learned a decent amount of botanical knowledge – who else knows what a lichen is?

The Bonesetter’s Daughter

I first found Amy Tan when The Kitchen God’s Wife was hip and hot. I thought she had a gift for what I call in my head “smooth writing”. That is writing which draws you in, enables you to get sucked in by the story, and still has the liquid beauty that makes you gasp at the occasional phrase. It was with some hesitation and the expectation that this book would let me down like The Hundred Secret Senses did that I picked up The Bonesetter’s Daughter at a book sale.

Tan tells the story here of Ruth, a San Francisco based ghost writer, and her complex relationship with her elderly mother. Ruth is shacking up with the man she loves and has two young step-daughters to take care of. Ruth feels smothered and miserable and on top of it all she has her elderly, failing mother to look after and deal with. LuLing, Ruth’s mother, lives nearby in an apartment and is losing her memory quickly. As she feels her memory fading she writes her story in Chinese calligraphy, which she had attempted to teach Ruth long ago. When Ruth becomes painfully aware of her mother’s failing mental capacity she has the story translated into English. As she it the wool falls from her eyes and she is able to empathize with her mother.

I don’t want to talk too much about LuLing’s life, presented as a story-within-a-story and a first person narrative, because I found the thread-by-thread unraveling of the story to be delicious. Suffice it to say that the story is rich in cultural detail and explains LuLing’s obsession with ghosts and particularly the ghost of her nanny “Precious Auntie.”

Amy Tan writes a great deal about mother’s and daughter’s and the generation gap that becomes more emphasized when one generation is raised in one culture and the other in an entirely different one. This book, I felt, steps beyond that and deals also with the idea that we must know someone’s motivation and history in order to fully explain their behavior. Joseph Campbell talks at length in The Power of Myth of the ideal of acceptance and seeing the divinity in other people. That’s easy to do when the other person brings you a cup of coffee or shares a good story but that jerk who cut me off on the interstate is obviously just a jerk. LuLing has been controlling and manipulative and difficult. She has threatened suicide over every issue under the son. At the beginning of the book I couldn’t stand her. As I read her story, though, everything began to fall together and she became a sympathetic character and a person with divinity within.

I found this to be a very good read. I did find that the relationship between Ruth and her boyfriend hit a hollow note with me. They end up happily-ever-after with next to nothing to explain the change. It’s also just another Amy Tan novel about mothers and daughters. Outside of her lexicon I think it’s a very good book but I do wish Tan would explore some new themes.

One cool side note: the photo on the cover of the book is actually Tan’s grandmother. I thought that was kinda cool.

Wrapping up Music Week

Bringing music week to a close! Already? Well, there have been four previous installments, and Music Week works a flex schedule and is ready for the weekend. Anyway, here are the last of this week’s musical offerings:

Dr J sent me an e-mail this afternoon noting that I was remiss in not posting a link to a certain Cure song in my review of African Psycho. Also, just to be clear, the African Psycho review had nothing to do with music. Sorry if that caused the easily confused any difficulties. Here’s the video for all of you Camus fans:

In other news, Frank Portman, front man for The Mr. T Experience and author of the music referencing King Dork, has a title and cover for his new book:

Lastly, rockin’ music site Daytrotter has a cool new feature. If you’ve never checked them out, Daytrotter grabs all the cool indie bands that travel anywhere near Rock Island, Illinois, locks them up in a studio, and then won’t let them out until they record stripped down versions of their best songs. They post the results on the internet for free. It’s all very cool. ANYWAY, they’ve expanded that operation to include locking up indie rockers in recording studios and then not letting them out until they also read from a book or story. So far they’ve only recorded one session, but they promise more. Check out Jarvis Cocker reading an Icelandic folk tale, Bukolla and the Boy.

African Psycho

I decided to pick up African Psycho after reading a great review in The Believer. The title is clearly a riff on American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis (which I read one summer long ago on Miami Beach). And that cover! Is his head spinning around Linda Blair-style? But his face looks so calm… I was hooked. Really, I am an easy mark.

The author, Alain Mabankou, is Congolese and has won several prestigious French awards including the Prix Renaudot. I don’t know what that is, but it sounds impressive. This is Mabankou’s first book to be released in the U.S.

The book begins with this paragraph:

I have decided to kill Germaine on December 29. I have been thinking about this for weeks — whatever one may say about it, killing someone requires both psychological and logistical preparedness. I believe I have now reached the necessary state of mind, even if I have yet to choose the means by which I will do the deed. It is now a question of detail. I’d rather give myself a bit of latitude on this practical point, and in so doing add a measure of improvisation to the project.

The Believer’s review says, “African Psycho presents no gloomy Raskolnikov, nor the fixed sneer of Patrick Bateman, but a haunted burlesque.” Man, am I glad that i just read Crime and Punishment. I totally get that now.

Our narrator, Gregoire, does seem to present himself as a rationale and clear-minded killer, even as he has conversations at the local cemetery with his idol, the great master criminal Angoualima. Who is dead and unimpressed. He also talks matter-of-factly about his bad experiences in foster homes that may have played a role in his current mind set. At an early age he finds himself living among other cast off boys on the fringes of society.

The desire to be famous also plays a role in his determination to lead a notorious life of crime. He fantasizes about becoming a criminal celebrity like Angoualima and is disappointed at the relative lack of media coverage that his petty crimes have thus far received. Even though the novel takes place in an un-named African country, this aspect of the novel is especially resonant for American readers in light of Columbine, Virginia Tech, et al.

Yet the novel is also strangely comic. Our narrator lives is a destitute slum known as He-Who-Drinks-Water is-an-Idiot. The bars in this neighborhood have names like: Drinking Makes You Hard, Take and Drink This is My Blood, You Break Your Glass You Buy It, This Place is Home, Drink and Pay Tomorrow, No Problem We’ll Worry About it Later, and Even The President Drinks. I’m sure these all sound much classier in French. The main street in the red light district in the city was known as At-Least-Six-Hundred-Francs. Now it is called One-Hundred-Francs-Only Street because the whores from “the country over there” have crossed the river to work for less. Someone call Lou Dobbs!

In the end it is Gregoire’s voice that makes African Psycho a wining novel. Gregoire was educated for a time in the city’s best private schools by his foster families. Yet his voice is also “of the street.” Here’s Gregoire ruminating on his method:

Knives? I don’t deny their effectiveness. Back when I was still reading, I saw that several famous authors let their characters use them. I am thinking especially of Camus’s Arab in The Stranger. Okay, that’s another story altogether. It’s true that the Arab indeed pulled out his knife, but did he kill the narrator with it? No, it was the narrator, rather, who used a pistol! Better yet, he fired four times on an already inert body! I also own a chainsaw.

Gregoire’s mind is a disturbing but fascinating place to spend some time. “Will he or won’t he” is the tension that drives the novel.

This is a pretty good read. Interestingly, the book was translated by someone other than Mabankou, although he is currently living in the U.S. and is teaching literature at the University of Michigan. Go figure. If you’ve got an interest in picking this one up, now is a good time to do so. The publisher, Soft Skull, was one of the independent houses screwed over by the bankruptcy of the distributor for all of the independent publishers. The book is priced to move at Soft Skull.

Don’t Stop Believin’

Okay, I watched the Separate Ways video three times last night and twice again this morning. I swear to god, no one will ever produce anything in any medium that can entertain me as much as that can, ever.

Every time I watch it I find something else that cracks me up. The drummer always kills me—absolutely kills me. The half-assed efforts at air keyboards rip my guts out every time. The slo-mo bass playing tickles my funny bone. All of the scenes with Steve Perry attempting to appear earnest and intense are always good for a chuckle. God bless Steve Perry and his stupid mullet, but he’s really trying in this thing. I promise you, this will never get old. The bassist’s mustache. Neil Schon jumping off a forklift and onto his knees to get that last little oomph out of an axe solo. I could go on.

But, gun to my head and hand on a bible, I’m going to have to say the scene from the 1:08 to the 1:23 mark, where the drummer (who woke up that morning in a cut-off t-shirt that appears to say “Foosball Athletic Department” and said, “Fuck it, I’m wearing this to the shoot”) can’t remember if he’s playing air drums or air guitar, is my absolute most favoritest part of this video ever. I don’t know if the chronology would support this theory, but it’s possible that he’s playing the entire performance as an homage to Harry Shearer’s work in This is Spinal Tap.

I’d love to meet the director and pick his brain, as it were. What does the ending mean? Why did you film it at a wharf? A keyboard against a wall?! How many suppositories did you give Steve Perry before you rolled the cameras?

In short, I think this music video is why they invented the tubes for the internets—so we can still watch “Separate Ways” in Music Week 2007.

Songs as Short Stories

We’re rockin’ into day three of BGB’s Music Week (see Day 1 and Day 2). In today’s installment, I’m soliciting submissions for songs that tell stories that are so lyrically strong that they could be the basis of a prize-winning short story.

This idea came to me recently when I dusted off Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska album. Love Bruce or hate him, the stories on this album would make a kick ass short story collection. We may need to assign the songs and make our own tribute collection. We’ll call it, Mansion on the Hill: BGB’s Tribute to Springsteen’s Nebraska. Here’s the beginning of the title song, Nebraska:

I saw her standing on her front lawn, just twirling her baton. Me and her went for a ride, sir, and ten innocent people died.

The rest of the story writes itself. Bruce has a pretty solid career of these kinds of songs. Here’s selected snippets from Bruce’s The River:

I come from down in the valley where mister when youre young
They bring you up to do like your daddy done
Me and mary we met in high school when she was just seventeen
We’d ride out of that valley down to where the fields were green…
Then I got mary pregnant and man that was all she wrote
And for my nineteen birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat…
Is a dream a lie if it dont come true
Or is it something worse…

Bruce writes the whole story for you. For some reason, my lyric hunt on this project takes me to grim and spare places. One of my favorite Luna songs, Bobby Peru, is no exception. If you’re trying to place the reference, Bobby Peru was Willem Defoe’s character in the David Lynch movie, Wild at Heart. Asking “What would Bobby do?” is not a good thing.

I told lies to your family
Concerning your whereabouts
They feel so sorry for me
I invented jealous stories
My imagination ran wild
I made myself so angry
The night that you insulted me
I lay awake thinking
Clever things I could have said
My thoughts kept turning to Bobby Peru
How would he handle this one

OK. One more. Here are a few lines from Leonard Cohen’s First We Take Manhattan. Why that hasn’t been the title of a 9/11 novel yet is anyone’s guess. (R.E.M.’s cover of this song is brilliant.)

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I’m guided by a signal in the heavens
I’m guided by this birthmark on my skin
I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

(Starts off sinister, but then later gets a little weird…)

… And I thank you for those items that you sent me
The monkey and the plywood violin
I practiced every night, now I’m ready
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

(monkey?)

OK. Your turn. Drop some lryical genius in the comments…

BGB’s Greatest Music Hits

Music Week continues here at the BGB. Today we take a look back at our favorite book/music-related posts. (Can you tell its summer? It’s only june and BGB is in reruns.) Join Sherman and I in the way back machine as we revisit these classics from yesteryear. They’re hot! hot! hot!:

• Dr J reviews the band bio Wilco: Learning to Die by Greg Kot. This post is from our second week as a blog.
• I gratuitously use a badly written Slate article as an excuse to talk about the 25th Anniversary of the Clash album London Calling.
• BGB reviews the second of Peter Garulnick’s two epic Elvis biographies, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.
• Shaft reviews Marc Acito’s How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater.
• BGB links to Pitchfork’s summer reading list (2005), which mentions the Wu Tang Clan and gestalt in the same sentence.
• We review Meat is Murder a novella that features the music of The Smiths written by Joe Pernice of the Pernice Brothers. Which reminds me – I loaned this to somebody that needs to return it sometime soon.
• We discover the official version of our theme song.
• I review Gary Benchley, Rock Star – a very funny book about hipsters in Brooklyn. Shaft reviews it here.
• We post the first of many, many posts about Frank Portman’s young adult novel King Dork. My punked-out copy of Hamlet from high school gets a mention on Portman’s site.
• A post that considers the best ambient/techno music for reading.
• Reviews of King Dork are posted here and here.
• A post about the band Luna that doesn’t even try to make a connection to books.
• This post about a Sufjan Stevens concert in Atlanta also has little to do with books. A trend?
• 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
• A books and music post that includes a link to the Beastie Boys children’s book.
• Grups and music.
• Another books and music post, this one links to Terry Gross’ interview with Colin Meloy (others links are included free of charge).
• The post that introduces the “wakow!” meme to our blog is here. I thought that it was “makow!” at the time of writing. I was wrong.
• Shaft reviews Small Town Punk.
• This post features the tragedy that is Kate Bush doing interpretive dance to her song “Wuthering Heights.”
• Love is a Mix Tape reviews can be found here and here. A link to Heather’s Love is a Mix Tape Mix Tape is here.

Fact is Fiction and Fiction is Fact

During the whole kerfluffle over James Frey and his pants-on-fire book A Million Little Pieces a new debate began over the publisher’s role in validating autobiographical material in memoirs. Today I happened upon this article in the New York Times which tells of a lawsuit against a woman named Laura Albert who wrote a book called Sarah under the pseudonym J.T. Leroy. I need a map to follow this one….

Laura Albert is a woman who wrote as a man writing a novel (not a memoir) about a boy who has taken on a woman’s name (his mother’s name) growing up poor and sexually abused in and around West Virginia truck stops. 1+1=96.

The article gives the whole background but at the crux is a series of embarrassed film production studios who feel defrauded by the fact that J.T. Leroy did not have a childhood at all like the boy Sarah. Apparently, I am finding out with Google’s help, J.T. Leroy claimed to have AIDS but Laura Albert does not have AIDS.

It’s funny that even though this story first broke years ago it seems that the James Frey debacle created a longer and more global stir. Could it be because Oprah didn’t publicly back this book? Laura Albert, to my mind, is far more messed up than James Frey. She’s just better at marketing her insanity and has managed to stay something of celebrity rather than a public menace. She’s also a pro at masking her identity since she/he was interviewed on Fresh Air as J.T.Leroy.

As a footnote: Random House, it was announced in May, will be forking over $2.35 million to people who feel defrauded by James Frey’s fairy tale of drug addiction and recovery.