More on NOLA

The buzz in New Orleans last week was centered on a feature in this month’s National Geographic.  The story suggests that the city is ultimately doomed and seriously questions the efforts to rebuild.  These are fighting words if New Orleans is your home town – no matter how much truth there is to the argument.
I’ve been asked in several e-mails what New Orleans is like right now.  It depends on where you are.  The tourist areas, which are the oldest parts of the city, look pretty good and have returned to some degree of normalcy.  Everywhere else is looking rough.  The National Geographic article has some heart-stopping photography.

Summer is a great time to visit the city if you want to do it on the cheap and aren’t afraid to sweat.  I stayed at the W Hotel in the French Quarter for $102 last week.  During Jazz Fest that room will cost well over $500.

Literary NOLA

Continuing with the events of last week, and picking up where I left off yesterday: I made it to the airport in time for my flight to New Orleans. I was immediately confronted with this book critic who didn’t seem to think much of the new Harry Potter.

That’s the new Harry bunched up at his head

Mrs. Cayenne says he is clearly insane. The new Harry requires non-stop reading. Shortly thereafter, I met a friend in the waiting area who also lives in Atlanta but is also New Orleans native. We hatched plans to hit the town together later that night. New Orleans has a new campaign for natives to visit their hometown as tourists. We agreed to do just that. We met up on Thursday night and announced our expat status at each stop, and we were treated like kings.

Friday morning, I met my mom at the Cafe Du Monde for beignets and cafe au lait, and we did a quick power walking trip around the French Quarter before I had to leave for my flight back to Atlanta. She agreed to join me on a quick literary tour. Right off the bat, we came across a closed books and gift shop that had the Brer Rabbit stories in the window.

Next, we tried to visit the Ignatius J. Reilly statue under the old D.H. Holmes Department Store clock, but we couldn’t find him. The store is now a Sonesta Hotel, so we inquired within. We learned that the statue had been knocked down and was temporarily off display. The clerk couldn’t tell us where Ignatius was or when he would return. Bummer.

Our next stop was the Faulkner House Books store. The store takes its name from the historical fact that Faulkner lived in the building when he wrote his first novel.

Faulkner House books is one of my new favorite “foreign” book stores. It is maybe the size of your kitchen, but it is stacked floor to ceiling with only the best books. Last week I was unable to find a copy of the new James Lee Burke book at other New Orleans book stores. My mom bought a signed copy at Faulkner House. That’s just how they roll. If you go to New Orleans, you can not miss this book store.

As we were finishing our whirlwind tour, we popped into a bank. Helpfully, the bank pointed out that if you plan to vacate your home this hurricane season, you might need a credit card.

Soon I Will Be Purchasing

I haven’t added Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman to my TBR stack, but it seems inevitable. The book was reviewed this weekend in the New York Times.  Over at Wordsmiths’ blog, Russ and Alice debate the book Point/Counterpoint-style.  Oh yes, it will be mine.

Sin in the City

I am way behind on my posts. Case in point: last Wednesday night I attended A Cappella Books and the Chattahoochee Review’s Ballroom Bash (II) at the Highland Inn. The event was centered on the Karen Abbott book, Sin in the Second City. The book is about the sisters who ran a legendary brothel in Chicago in the early part of the last century.

The evening began with music by Bernadette Seacrest and Her Provocateurs. Seacrest belted out a set of torch songs and standards that went well with the pouring rain and the free beer. Ms. Seacrest was a striking presence. She looks like one of the Andrews Sisters in fishnets and a perfect period hairdo. The ink on both of her arms, shoulders, chest, and back was also impressive.

Afterwards, Ms. Seacrest graciously agreed to pose with the free beer crowd.

A handsome group enjoys high concept literary action

The second part of the evening was a performance by the Black Sheep Big City Burlesque. It seems that there are currently more burlesque groups in Atlanta than there are bands. Is this true everywhere? It’s all the rage with the kids these days it would appear. The high point of the group was the second performerwho has this whole Jessica Rabbit thing going on.

Zoinks.

Karen Abbott rounded out the evening with a brief talk about her first book, a short reading and some Q&A. The book sounds interesting, and my signed copy is now in the TBR stack.

Karen Abott signs books

All in all, it was a fairly mellow, but enjoyable, evening. The rain was still coming down in buckets as the event wrapped, so our group was forced to head to the cafe upstairs where our scintillating literary conversation continued over cocktails. Things weren’t looking good for making my 7:15 AM flight the next morning.Special thanks and photo credits to Nicole who fowarded her pictures from the evening. Thanks, Nic!

No Country

The trailer for the Coen Brothers adaption of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is giving me the willies.

The Path of Minor Planets

As anyone who’s followed my illustrious career as a poster on this here blog knows, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer, was one of my favorite books, and his writing style (based on that one book) was right up my alley. At long last, and thanks to the good folks at Wordsmith’s in Decatur, I finally laid my mitts on his first novel, The Path of Minor Planets. (Note: Max Tivoli was his second novel.)

First things first — Max Tivoli was a hard act to follow for any author. Especially if the book they’re following it with was actually written before it, and represented the author’s first attempt at a novel. And The Path of Minor Planets was not as engaging, compelling, or moving as Max Tivoli. Which doesn’t mean it was bad. Just not as good.

This book tells the story of a group of people linked through a circle of astronomers, and follows their lives over time beginning with a meeting/celebration held on an island in the Pacific in 1965 where they’ve all gathered to witness the return of a comet named for one of them, and picking up every six years or so as the comet’s orbit takes it to its farthest and nearest points. My mild disappointment with this book was that there were quite a few characters to follow, and I don’t believe any of them was developed enough to truly gain the reader’s trust, empathy or compassion. It’s not really clear who was good, who was bad, and who was indifferent. And that’s what made the story less compelling for yours truly.

But, and this is a big but (that’s a shout out to our blogmaster), Greer’s writing style was already polished by the time he wrote this. I’ve got at least a dozen pages dog-eared in the book so that I can go back and read and re-read quotes that I found just spellbinding. Some examples:

She was in the present moment only, and the present felt very different for her, very unlike that of these languid scientists with their wine and smoke. For them, the present was a hinge between the past and the future, but for her it was a wide, clear plain in which to act.

Another:

He learned then that failure was not a mallet; it was a trowel, smoothing and solidifying a life.

And one more:

She wanted to go back and speak to each different girl she’d been — the heartbroken twenty-year-old artist, the cocky adolescent slut, the lonely stupid child — and give them a good talking-to. [She] did not feel as though they were part of her, but rather that these former selves were the team that built her; and, like a monster ashamed of its creation, she wanted to confront her makers. She knew, though, that even if she could, she would not have had the nerve — they would have stood before her, shaking, merely children.

Maybe it’s just me, but each of those (and the handfuls more printed on the maimed pages of my copy of the book) are examples of brilliant writing. And even though the story (which typically represents about three-quarters of what I care about in a book) was mildly disappointing, the words on the pages that told the story are so well constructed that I have no regrets about having invested my time and energy on this book.

Flight

This was a total impulse purchase. Years ago, I read some positive reviews of Native American author Sherman Alexie’s first collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. I didn’t read the book, but I later saw the movie Smoke Signals, which was based on the book. I really meant to read the author’s work before just this minute. Then, I walked into a book store, saw the cover of Flight from across the room, and it had to be mine.

Flight is the story of Zits, an orphaned and homeless, half-Indian/half-Irish teenager. Says zits:

Yes, I am Irish and Indian, which would be the coolest blend in the world if my parents were around to teach me how to be Irish and Indian. But they’re not here and haven’t been for years, so I’m not really Irish or Indian, I’m a blank sky, a human solar eclipse.

The only identity Zits can call his own comes from his acne-scarred face. He has been in and out of foster homes and is well known to the law enforcement establishment of downtown Seattle. He finds himself in juvie, where he meets a mysterious inmate who calls himself “Justice.” Once on the outside, the duo begin to flop together in an abandoned building, and then things get weird.

Zits appears to be killed in a misguided bank robbery attempt that he somehow has come to believe will strike a blow against the injustices received by indigenous peoples. “I am still alive when I start to fall, but I die before I hit the floor.” What follows could be described as an empathy fest.

Zits “becomes” a variety of characters in the novel. Their shared characteristic is that they are involved in one side or the other in the history of conflict between Native Americans and the Government. It’s been a long, complicated history, and the novel doesn’t set out to provide any easy answers. Zits’ mixed heritage muddies the waters even further, perhaps allowing for a greater empathy.

Alexie writes crisp, cracking prose that had this reader cranking through this book at a brisk pace. I would have read the whole thing in a single sitting if I hadn’t started it at 11PM. I recommend this one as perfect summer reading with some extra depth.

Elsewhere…

The NYT takes a look at how un-groovy the bestseller list was during the Summer of Love – now 40 years ago.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the sacrilege of an Arizona library’s attempt to do away with the Dewey Decimal System. Librarian.net provides a link to the analysis of what it all actually means.

The Wren’s Nest: home of the burlesque. That Lain Shakespeare has one of the hardest jobs in town.

PopMatters reviews The Raw Shark Texts. (via The Swivet)

The Millions writes about Neal Stephenson as polymath: “But I find this aspect of Stephenson’s writing appealing: ultimately metaphysics is more important than mere physics. Why is more important than how. Is it not impossible to answer the question why without moving from a discussion of hard science to a discussion of something more ineffable?” Stephenson’s Cyrptonomicon should be on your reading list if you haven’t read it yet.

Maud Newton describes the joys of visiting the out-of-town bookstore. We couldn’t agree more. Here’s our list of stores we love from a a few months back.

Reminder/Contest

The Reminder: My friend Kelly Greene will be reading from her New York Times’ bestselling book, The Wall Street Journal Complete Retirement Guide, at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur, GA this Saturday afternoon. The event starts at 1 PM and will be followed by food, drink, and general bonhomie. You don’t want to miss out on free bonhomie. If you go, please say hello. I’ll be the guy sitting up front saying, “Hey! That’s my friend Kelly.” Additional details here.

The Contest: Win a copy of Kelly’s book by completing the following sentence in your best old man/woman (or Charles Nelson Reilly on Match Game) impression in the comment section:

When I was your age, _____________

L’il Cayenne will draw a name out of the hat before the reading.

I Haven’t Read You Yet

I listened to an excellent interview with Jonathan Lethem about his novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, last night. The interview is podcast (is that a verb?) by KCRW’s Book Worm guy, the most depressed, yet brilliant book interviewer dude around. For starters, the interview settles a discussion that we had in the comments some time ago: the picture on the cover is Lethem. I also just found out that the title comes from a Roky Erickson (13th Floor Elevators) song. One more mark in the “+” column. I haven’t read this one yet, even though I love Lethem as a general rule. I may have to pick this one up, finally, in paperback.

Sin in the Second City

Tomorrow night (Wed, July 25, 8PM, $5) A Capella Books and The Chattahoochee Review are hosting a Ballroom Bash at the Highland Inn (Atlanta) for the book Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott. The event will also feature live music by Bernadette Seacrest and Her Provocateurs. More info here.

Janet Maslin reviewed the book for the New York Times, and it was also reviewed in the Washington Post Book World. The book’s release party in New York City was so scandalous that it made Page 6 headlines in the New York Post. Galley Cat was in the house and has the pictures to prove it.

See you there. If you would like to see the author read, but you have a reputation to maintain in your community, Abbott will also be reading at the Decatur Library on August 2. Info for that reading can be found here.

Books & Music

I love the books. I love the music. When the worlds collide, it is like someone put chocolate in my peanut butter (or vice-versa). Clearly then, I was beside myself to hear the news that Joe Pernice of the The Pernice Brothers has signed a book deal with a division of Penguin Books. Pernice has previously written the fantastic novella Meat is Murder (rave review by me here). The news is doubly amazing, because the press release also announces that Joe is hard at work on the screenplay of Meat is Murder. A tip of the cap to Frank (TTT) who e-mailed me the scoop while driving his kids home from Disney World.

Harry Potter Weekend

The dogs began barking feverishly at the door Saturday morning (during the first individual time trial of the Tour de France no less!).  It was the delivery of our copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows that we had ordered from Amazon months and months ago.  Sadly, it did not arrive by owl but by a clearly humorless UPS lady.  Mrs. Cayenne has been reading feverishly ever since.

It was reported last week in The Guardian that a British children’s telephone counseling service will have additional grief counselors on hand to help children cope with the book.  If the reactions of my wife and my mother are any guide, it was a sound decision.  Apparently there is death, persecution, torment, and grief aplenty.  And that’s just in the first few hundred pages.  As far as I know, Harry is still alive.  Michiko Kakutani called the series a “seven-volume bildungsroman.”  If it viewed as an epic coming-of-age story, Rowling seems to be pretty clearly asserting that growing up sucks.

I did feel a little guilty about having the book dropped in my lap by a corporate behemoth rather than purchasing the book at one of my fine local, independent book sellers.  However, having the book delivered on the first day is a tradition, and you don’t mess with tradition.  To ease our consciences, we set out Saturday to purchase some Amazon Harry Offsets.

First stop was the Little Shop of Stories.  In addition to having the best children’s book selection in town and giant over-stuffed couches for reading, LSoS also serves ice cream.  L’il Cayenne could spend the rest of her life there. LSoS hosted a book release party starting at 11 PM the night before.  According to staff accounts, it was a rocking good time.  There were still some brooms parked at the front door and warning signs around the store: no spoilers or suffer the penalty of a cruciatus curse.  They mean business.  We made some purchases, ate some ice cream, and then walked around the corner to Wordsmiths.

Wordsmiths had a copy of the James Lee Burke book that could not be found in New Orleans, so I scooped one of those and some free coffee.   I’m not sure how my drinking their free coffee helps offsets my purchase of Harry from Amazon, but it’s good coffee. Anyway, we had a big bag of locally-bought stuff for our train ride home, so we’re feeling better about the whole episode.

Celebrity Features

Famous dead Simpsons avatars are visiting The Wren’s Nest! (That’s my Joey Ramone hanging out with Janice Joplin and General Custer.)
Famous (and alive) author Joyce Carol Oates has a fascinating essay about amnesia lit in the New York Review of Books (featuring BGB fave The Raw Shark Texts). Be sure to read this essay as a homework assignment for an upcoming top-secret BGB feature coming soon.

Check out the bottomless lyrics of the Flight of the Conchords and TTT and My Tragic Right Hip. All the cool kids, as you can see, are down.

That’s it for this week. It’s been a looooooong crazy week. Have a happy and safe weekend.

Update: Friend of the blog Stephanie Cassamas is part of a group photography show, Atlanta Urban Photography, that opens in Castleberry Hills tonight.  Do something cool tonight and go see the show. I’ll be on an airplane, so you can tell me all about it later.

Michiko Likes It

Embargo-busting Michiko Kakutani has written a review of the new Harry Potter today in the New York Times. No one, not even Michiko, is supposed to be able to get their mitts on the book before Saturday at 12:01 AM. The review says that the book was bought yesterday from a book store in New York. She must have one of those The Devil Wears Prada-style assistants. Somehow she read the book in a day and wrote a review. Impressive. In a particularly stunning development, she likes the book.

Reading NOLA Style

I’m traveling for work most of this week, which allowed me to pop into one of my favorite book stores, The Maple Street Book Shop in New Orleans. The store is celebrating its 40th anniversary, and it was a favorite of Walker Percy. The New Orleans author has his own section featuring pictures of him shopping in the store. It’s a small store, as you can see below. Shelf space is at a premium, so they only stock the good ones. To the right of this picture, a FEMA trailer stands incongruously in a driveway. To the left is the Maple Street Children’s Book Store.

The buzz on the New Orleans book scene is the new James Lee Burke novel, Tin Roof Blow Down. The novel is the latest in Burke’s Dave Robichaux detective series. The book looks at the popular detective’s Hurricane Katrina experiences. The book has been getting some positive reviews (e.g., this review in the LA Times). I was trying to make it a point to buy the novel in New Orleans, but was sold out in the two book stores that I visited. Instead, I bought Burke’s story collection, Jesus Out to Sea.

Today’s Special

I’ve compiled some interesting links.  Just for you.

• Welcome Back, Potter.   (Via Boing Boing – bonus the voice of Jar Jar Binks plays Washington)
• Tom Wolfe, once a poster child for the “new journalism” may be the biggest Luddite yet.  Worse, Newt Gingrich seems to “get it.”   Read all about it as the Wall Street Journal notes the 10th Anniversary of the blog.
• If one library has its way, the Dewey Decimal System’s days are numbered.
• A British book seller has a copy of a Bridget Jones follow-up book signed by Hugh Grant with title page art work by the author Helen Fielding.  The seller says, “This is probably the most explosively desirable copy of this book on the market — an exceedingly rare copy thus.” Rather.  (Bonus info: the article talks about the book “Skinny Bitch” further down the page.  BGB’s FlavaWheel (male) was once hilariously called a skinny bitch — actually an “eskeenee beetch” — following a parking altercation in front of a Miami post office.  Have him tell you the story.  You’ll wet your pants. Guaranteed.)
• Hemingway’s cats may be safe in Key West, but U.S. sanctions against Cuba may doom important literary/historical Hemingway treasures on the island.  Of course, you’ll have to read the story in a British newspaper.

Green Reading

A few days ago, L’il Cayenne and I were watching The Wiggles. Murray was trying to figure out why his encyclopedia weighed more than his cook book (he’s not too sharp). Jeff pointed out that although a single page weighs hardly anything, a lot of pages together (like in an encyclopedia) are quite heavy. It got me thinking about the huge number of pages in my house.

Cosmically,  I then received an e-mail yesterday from an organization called Eco-Libris. The idea behind the new earth friendly group is to provide a method for book lovers to offset their dead tree habit by paying for the planting of new trees. Their web site says:

Every book was once a tree.

Now you can plant a tree for every book you read.

I have some issues with the one-to-one correspondence between books and trees. However, the site charges $5 to plant five trees, which seems pretty reasonable. Check them out for one more way to reduce that big ‘ol footprint you’ve got.
I have a ton of books all over my house. Still, I don’t feel as bad about books as I do newspapers. Books will be re-used, shared, sold at a garage sale, or donated to charity. I’ve never seen anyone throw a box of books into a trash can. Newspapers on the other hand…

Travels in the Scriptorium

I’m concerned about Paul Auster well being. His new novel, Travels in the Scriptorium, is a bleak glimpse into the solitary world of novelists. More on that in a bit.

In a strange bit of circular literary references, I was introduced to Auster’s novels through Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts. A character in Hall’s book is reading an Auster novel while on vacation, and Hall himself has cited Auster as an influence. In the ultimate weirdness, Hall’s novel and Auster’s Travels in The Scriptorium, which were released very close to one another this year, both begin with the exact same set up: a man awakens alone in a room with no idea of who he is or how he got there.

The room is very austere, and the man may or may not be locked inside. It may be an institution of some kind. Various people come to visit the man in the room, most seem vaguely familiar. He’s not sure if he’s being held there, but the narrator tells us that everything is being recorded and filmed as part of the treatment. A treatment that the man has apparently volunteered for and may have even suggested. Some clues are presented by a stack of photographs and a stack of manuscripts that the man begins to read. It’s tough to say too much more about the story without giving the game away. I hate that.

The New York Trilogy (reviewed here) was the first Auster novel that I read and that was just a few weeks ago. Travels in the Scriptorium is the second. I’m glad that the Trilogy was still fresh in my mind, because several of the characters in Trilogy appear in Scriptorium. This is not merely self-referential or artsy, and it is central to the novel’s theme. I suspect that most, if not all, of the Scriptorium’s characters are from prior Auster novels. In this regard, the novel is more likely to reward those intimately familiar with Auster’s work than the casual or first time reader.

A clue to the real nature of the room comes from the title. A scriptorium is a room reserved for writing. According to the dictionary I consulted, these rooms were usually in monasteries. I may be giving too much away here, but Auster seems to be commenting on the confinement of an artist’s body of work as well as his relationships with the works that he has created. If the man in the room is Auster, as I suspect, I’m concerned for the author. Someone give him a hug.

This is a brief but powerful novel that definitely gets the reader to thinking. That seems to be Auster’s M.O. I’m late to the Auster game, but I’ll definitely be reading more. Next up will be The Brooklyn Follies, unless someone has a more pressing suggestion.

Group Photo

Pictured together are select members of the BGB organization and an even more select group of friends (i.e., those that chose to participate). Our collected Simpsons avatars have congregated beneath the Eiffel Tower. You know, like they do.

Back Row (l to r): Frank, Herman Glimscher, Nitro Nicole, Wordsmiths Russ,
Lain Shakespeare, and Jenn.

Front Row (l to r): Rich, Dr J, Rae Rae, DJ Cayenne, L’il Cayenne, Shortbus (aka Mrs. Cayenne), Shaft, and Toronto Beth

Thanks to everyone who wasted precious time (and lots of it) to participate. My original idea was to do a version of the Sgt. Peppers album. I vastly over-rated my PhotoShop skillz. If you’ve got a hankerin’ to waste even more time, Lain is collecting famous dead people as Simpson avatars over at the Wren’s Nest blog.