Interview With Steven Hall: Part 3

And now, the thrilling conclusion of my interview with Steven Hall. If you missed them, be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2.

BGB: Earlier, you mentioned that you are hard at work on your next novel. What can you tell us about that? Other than attempting to carry less of the pieces around in your head, is the process of writing this new novel different from Raw Shark?

SH: It’s very early stages; I’m still very much figuring things out. That’s a fun place to be after all the fact-checking at the end of Raw Shark. Now I can go back to experimenting big ways – putting in whole characters, ideas and subplots and seeing how they fit, whole new directions even. The Raw Shark Texts is still talking up a lot of my time too, that story probably won’t be all-the-way finished for a few more years.

I’m also focusing on my next big ambition, which is to persuade someone at the BBC to let me write and episode of Doctor Who! In fact, if anyone from the BBC is reading this, do give me a shout. Seriously. Please. I have my own dalek and everything.

BGB: So there you were with one month’s rent left in the bank when you sold Raw Shark. How did you get from there to owning your own dalek? Where does one find a dalek? Does it talk?

SH: Ever since I was a kid I’ve wanted my own dalek. I always cheered for the daleks (I was one of those children who cheered for the bad guys, especially if they were monsters). Anyway, I’d sometimes keep my spirits up when I was writing Raw Shark by imagining different, outrageous and very cool things I could buy myself if the best case scenario actually happened – if I sold the novel and got a decent advance. A dinosaur egg and a Samurai sword were also on the list, but in the end, it was always going to be a dalek. My dalek came from the good people at www.thisplanetearth.co.uk Yeah it talks. It says lots of different things. Mostly about killing.

BGB: You mentioned to me earlier in an e-mail that you’ve been working on some updates that will be in UK version of the paperback. When will the US paperback hit the shelves, and will you be setting out on another stateside book tour to support the paperback? We’d love to get another crack at welcoming you to Atlanta.

SH: Thank you! I tried really hard to get down to see you folks as part of the last tour. You spoke to Jamie Byng about sorting something out too, didn’t you? I told my US publishers I’d do whatever to fit it in, but they already had me booked up pretty solid and I had events directly before and after my US tour so there was no way of extending my visit. Next time I’m over, I’ll make sure I can stop by.

That said, I’m not sure when I’ll next be in the States. The US Raw Shark paperback isn’t going to be out until next year and, as far as I know, there isn’t a paperback tour planned. My publishers are going easy on me tour-wise at the moment, I think because they want me to write another book!

BGB: Last Question: My journalist friends advised me to end the interview with a “bar question” – a question that I’d ask you over a pint. So have a few before answering this one.

You’ve sold the movie rights to Raw Shark already, and there is a famous story about Nicole Kidman calling you to see if you’d be willing to change your character Eric Sanderson into a woman so that she could play the part. You weren’t. Surely you’ve already assembled your dream cast for the movie in your mind. Who do you imagine playing the roles of your characters on the screen?

SH: I’m quite hung-over at the moment, does that count? You know, I really don’t have any actors in mind for the Raw Shark film. No one believes me when I say this, but it’s true. I try not to think about it because I know I’d start with the actors, then I’d be thinking about scenes, then I’d end up writing the script and shooting the whole thing in my head. I really don’t want to go down that road, because ultimately I can never 100% have that film, so it’s better for me not to even start thinking about it.

I want to let the people I gave the film rights to go away and make it how they want to make it. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come back with and hopefully I can enjoy it as someone else’s work based on what I did. I think that would be the best thing at this stage. That’s not to say I wouldn’t love to get more involved in film in the future though…

That’s it. Even as I was wrapping up the interview, I had another dozen questions swirling around my head. That’s the beauty of this book. Months after reading it, I’m still thinking about it. Be warned: It begs to be talked about. So make sure to get a Raw Shark Reading Buddy™ if you’re just setting out to read it.

Many thanks to Steven Hall who has been so wonderfully so generous with his time. Here are some additional Raw Shark Texts links that you might want to check out:

• Steven Hall’s MySpace
• Raw Shark Text Forums
• Raw Shark wiki
• Large Hearted Boy’s Book Notes with Steven Hall
• My review of The Raw Shark Texts
• Raw Shark “Prosecast”
• BGB’s Weezie reports from the author’s reading in San Francisco
• Interview with the author on YouTube

RIP Big E

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley. He was 42 when he died. Here in Atlanta, Saturday night was Elvis’s Death Day (Observed) at the Variety Playhouse. The hardest working band in town, King Sized, brought down the house with a 12-15 piece band that included a horn section and three back up singers. Of course, there were also burlesque dancers for that true Vegas feel – The Dames Aflame. Maybe piling it on a little too heavily, a Tiny E brought towels out to the sweaty singer, Big Mike, between songs. Fortunately, no photographs are available for this night out on the town.

If you’d care to mark the occasion in a more literary frame of mind, I recommend the two volume definitive biography by Peter Guralnick. (A tip of the hat to Dr J who recommended the books to me some years ago.) The first volume, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presely, is the better of the two and is a frankly incredible story. Volume two, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, is a slow downward spiral of despair (but still interesting and well written). Expect scholarship over sensationalism in these two volumes. If you’d like a taste of Guralnick’s style on the subject, the New York Times ran an Op-Ed piece last weekend in which Garulnick questions how it is that Elvis has become viewed as a racist.

Interview with Steven Hall: Part 2

We continue on with our interview with Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts. If you missed it, read Part 1 here.

BGB: A San Francisco Chronicle review/interview says that you’ve “engineered three complete readings of the book and worked very hard with [your] editor to make each function on plot and character levels”. It goes on to mention that you provided your editors with a supplemental 200 pages of notes to ensure that your text was faithful to each of the readings. How did you keep three separate readings of the novel clear in your mind while writing and revising the text? Did you have a difficult time preventing one possible reading from stepping on the proverbial toes of an alternate reading?

SH: This was one of the reasons Raw Shark took so long to write. I wanted the book to be open to different readings and, even more than that, I wanted the nature of the book itself to be up for grabs. I wondered if I could write a book that one person could pick up and see as a literary novel on the nature of grief, identity and memory, or on books, language and storytelling but that the next person would read as a genre adventure thriller, or romance, sci-fi or horror story. Could one book do all those things? So yeah, it was a big balancing act.

Keeping everything up in the air as I wrote didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time. It’s only afterwards, when I think back to it that I realise just how much stuff I was carrying around in my head. I didn’t really make any notes before Raw Shark but for the next one I’m already into pages of spider diagrams and flow charts to work out exactly what goes where and how. After the last year, my brain doesn’t seem to have as much space in it as it did.

BGB: I’m interested in finding out whether you’re willing to shed some light on some of your more offbeat characters. The first character I’d like to ask about is the sinister Mycroft Ward. In just about every review that I’ve read that mentions the character, a reference is made that the name is very similar to a certain popular computer word processing program. That interpretation would seem to be in keeping with some of the themes of the novel. Then, in an essay that Joyce Carol Oates wrote about “amnesia lit” (in which she called your novel “ingratiatingly literary”) she says, “Hall would seem to be alluding to Mycroft Holmes, the elder, obese genius-brother of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.” That assumption would also seem to be in keeping with the novel’s themes. While writing, did you have one or both of these ideas in mind (others?)?

SH: This is where I start having to be very careful. I made a promise to myself very early on not to say too much about my readings of the book, because I wanted to make it as open as possible for readers to find whatever they find. But I think I can say that yes, both interpretations were intentional (and I’m keeping whether there are others to myself!). Like Mycroft’s name, most of the book is set up to do two or three jobs at once and hopefully what you see depends on where you’re looking from.

I should go on the record and say that one of the things I’m most pleased with about Mycoft is that, like Gavin, he never shows up personally in the story. The main characters never have a direct confrontation with him. There’s a couple of big reason for this, both of which can go some way to unlocking different readings of the book. Some critics saw his no-show as some sort of absent-minded plot hole – I have to say made me spit out my coffee in surprise. When you’ve spent a day counting every instance of the word ‘blue’ in a book for stupidly complicated multi-plot reasons, it’s quite something to read that you must have forgotten to include your main villain!

BGB: The second character that I’d like to ask about is Ian the cat. Ian provides comic relief in the novel, and the descriptions of his expressions are some of my favorite pieces of writing in the book – if you don’t mind my saying so. In my reading of the book, Ian seems to also serve the role of Eric Sanderson’s conscious or “conscious mind” – as though Ian was Eric looking at himself from outside of himself. The unexplained loss of the other cat, Gavin, also seems to mirror the loss of Clio. What can you tell me about the cats? And do you have a cat that served as a model for Ian’s expressions?

SH: Thank you. That’s a nice reading. I couldn’t/shouldn’t comment further

Ian certainly has a lot of jobs to do, maybe even more than the shark. He’s central in a lot of ways. As you say he works as comic relief and also to ground the book in some sort of reality. But he’s a slippery customer too. If you look carefully you’ll see that he does have a habit of walking through closed doors… There’s more to Ian than meets the eyes and more on him still to come.

Oh yeah, I grew up with huge grumpy tomcats so I’ve always had a love for that sort of feline bad attitude. I don’t have a cat at the moment because we live in an apartment but my folks do have a cat called Dave. He’s quite a piece of work.

BGB: Thanks for the insights on the characters. I won’t push my luck by asking you to reveal more…

I came across this statement in a review of the book in Paste Magazine: “Hall is clearly having the time of his life with this book. He’s jazzed about the concepts of memory and death and self that he’s exploring, and he carries us in a headlong rush to test the very edge of what a novel actually is.” Would you describe the process of writing this book as “having the time of your life” and being “jazzed”? On your MySpace page you recount the story of writing a complete novel prior to this one that you attempted to publish, but that you ultimately scrapped. You mention that the book served the purpose of teaching you how to write a novel. How did the writing experiences differ between the two novels? And will we ever see that first novel?

SH: Would I describe writing Raw Shark as ‘having the time of my life’? You know, that’s such a tricky question. On the one hand, it was a lot of hard work – as any writer will tell you, writing novel is a tiring, scary, stressful, frustrating process. On top of that Raw Shark is also a pretty complex book and there were some specific challenges associated with that that we’ve already chatted about. There was also the small problem of me rapidly running out of cash as I tried to finish the book. I had just one month’s rent left (from a maxed-out credit card) when I sold Raw Shark Texts, so there were a lot of sleepless am-I-going-to-get-evicted nights. But, on the other hand, I really was so excited about what I was doing, the concepts I was playing around with and the things I was trying to achieve. I loved Raw Shark and I still do, I’m proud of it. Hmmm. Worryingly I seem to talk about it as if it’s a child. I guess in a way it is.

That first novel was ambitious and exciting to write in its own way. Problem was that I didn’t really know what I was doing and the book didn’t work out. No, no one will be seeing that book although there’s a chance a character or two will crop up somewhere else in the future.

Come back tomorrow for Part 3.

Interview Part 1

Interview Part 3 

Interview with Steven Hall: Part 1

If you’ve visited our blog much over the last year, you know that we are huge fans of Steven Hall’s novel The Raw Shark Texts. Our first contact with the author began many months ago when I (wrongly) accused him of belittling the blogging community. He responded the very next day on the Powell’s blog and extended a generous olive branch, which he made good on. In May, BGB West Coast correspondent Weezie reported on Hall’s reading in San Francisco. We’ve pointed to many of the book’s reviews, reported on the near theft of a special delivery of the book by Cracky, and have otherwise brought up the book at every available pretext. Despite our stalker-ish antics, Hall agreed to let me interview him over the last few weeks via the safety of e-mail and an ocean between us. Here’s Part 1 of the interview:

BGB: Your MySpace page says that after your US book tour you were off to the Hay-on-Wye Book Book Festival and then to to Australia. The Hay-on-Wye Fest sounds like a magical literary Shangri-La from the accounts in The Guardian and various blogs. Can you tell us a bit about your travels? Did you ever, in your wildest dreams, think that things would work out this way – write a novel and see the world?

SH: I had to head off to Australia, so I was at Hay at the very beginning of the festival, on the first Friday. Most people arrive at the weekend but it was still really great and far from empty. It’s a wonderful place deep in the British countryside where mobile phones don’t really work, every other building is a bookshop and great cultural icons of our times queue with everyone else at the ice cream van. So yeah, a literary Shangri-La for sure.

Australia was really great. The Sydney Writers Festival was wonderful and the people there are so friendly, and so funny. I loved it. They have fruit bats in the botanical gardens in Sydney. I came home with about four pictures of the opera house and maybe a hundred blurred shots of fruit bats. I was impressed beyond all reason by the fruit bats. Did I ever think it would work out this way? No, not at all. It isn’t something you can plan for! I wrote Raw Shark with the hope that I might be able to get the book out through a smallish cult publisher and maybe 50 people or so would read it. That’s a realistic ambition when you’re writing a book, I think. The last year or so has been so far beyond anything I could have imagined.

BGB: Some of the early articles about your book were not about the book at all but focused rather on some of the marketing behind the book. It seemed as though it was considered somehow unseemly for an author to be working on the marketing campaign of his own book. The New York Times ran a positive toned article about the marketing of your book, but then had what I’ve called “the laziest possible review” of the actual book. What did you make of this interest in the marketing aspects of your novel and what impacts do you think it had (if any) reviews? Do you think that you’ll take a similar approach with your next novel?

SH: I’m really interested in the way programmes like Lost and Skins (where viewers created some of the characters online) are promoted now. Actually, it’s not really fair to call it ‘promotion’ in the traditional sense, it’s more about involving the viewer in the creative process, letting them role their sleeves up and dig into the mythology for themselves rather than just staring at a screen for one hour a week. It’s about making the viewer active. That interactivity is exciting to me and I think it’s something that books already have as part of their DNA, reading being a more active process than watching. I wanted to push that aspect of books with Raw Shark, try to make something where the reader would take a very active role in deciphering the story. It seemed logical to extend that beyond the covers of the book.

It’s never been about selling lots of books for me – it was always about finding new ways to tell a story and look at the how a story can exist and evolve in the world we live in today. Some of the things I wanted to do got picked up by the marketing people and found a budget, others I’ve been happily doing myself – like printing off bonus, hidden pages on the backs of envelopes, that sort of thing. Nobody may ever find or notice some of the things I’m doing, but then that’s part of Raw Shark too. The idea of lost and missing things.

You’re right, there has been a lot of coverage of the marketing. Sometimes, when there’s a lot of noise around what you’re doing, it feels like you’re starting from -10 in the eyes of some people rather than zero. There seems to be a lot of cynicism around the marketing of books at the moment. Until recently book marketing has been very old-fashioned compared to TV, films and games. That’s changing now, so maybe there’s a friction there. Perhaps it’s also because there are concerns that the big corporate publishing houses are increasingly controlled by the money managers rather than editors. Who knows? I’m lucky to have a small independent with a great list controlling my world rights. Hopefully, now the noise has died down a little, people can just engage with the story.

The beyond-the-cover elements I have planned for the second novel are on a much larger scale, although I’ve got a feeling that far fewer of them will fall under the marketing banner this time.

BGB: Paul Auster is frequently cited as one of your literary influences, and there is a specific reference to Paul Auster in the novel – your character Eric Sanderson finishes an Auster novel while vacationing in Greece. When did you realize that your novel and Auster’s latest, Travels in the Scriptorium, would begin with essentially the same setup – man wakes up in room with no recollection of who he is or how he got there? Was it alarming knowing that your first novel would inevitably be compared to Auster’s?

SH: I saw the opening to Travels in the Scriptorium the morning after The Raw Shark Texts launch in London. I read the first page in a bookshop when my girlfriend and I were out exploring and trying to shake our hangovers. That was a pretty odd moment (and the hangover really didn’t help). I remember feeling a little like an Auster character, coming up against one of his strange, disturbing coincidences.

If anyone compares me to Auster then that’s hugely flattering. It’s not alarming, The New York Trilogy is a work of genius. Being mentioned in the same sentence in any context is a great result!

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the interview tomorrow.

Interview Part 2

Interview Part 3

Lost City Radio

Daniel Alarcón is of two worlds. He was born in Lima, Peru, yet he was just named one of Granta’s Top Young American Novelists. He is the associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, a monthly magazine published in Lima, and he lives in Oakland, California. Alarcón’s short story collection, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and he was recently on a panel of Latin American authors who are replacing “magic realism” with “gritty realism”. He is both North American and South American.

It should come as little surprise then that Alarcón’s novel Lost City Radio is loaded with contradictions and dualities. The novel takes place in an unnamed South American country that has undergone years of civil war. The war pits the government of an authoritarian dictator (the right) against guerrillas and idealists (the left). The seat of the government power is in the city, while the opposition hides in the jungles and country side.

The title refers to the name of late-night radio call-in show. Callers phone Miss Norma, the beloved host, to talk about family members who have become lost in the upheaval. Occasionally tips come into the station that lead to tearful on-air reunions. More often than not, however, the missing are not found. The lost have usually left the jungles, as we are told all of the boys do, for a chance of a future in the city. The future that awaits is generally not what they have imagined.

Alarcón’s descriptions of the lush jungles contrasted with the rapidly decaying capitol city are highlights of the book. Each has its own dangers and pitfalls, and it is not clear which is preferable – the suffocating and wild Eden or the unpredictable and cruel squalor of the once great city.

It is out of the jungle that a boy is delivered to the radio station at the insistence of his village after his mother’s (and sole parent’s) drowning in a river. His appearance opens a door to Norma’s past. The novel then alternates between Norma’s present and her past. The past for Norma was a time of optimism, hope, excitement, and love. Her present is filled with fear, longing, grief, and despair. Norma’s story, in many ways, mirrors that of her country. Each has suffered its share of betrayal.

The armed struggle in Norma’s country has been going on so long that its beginning is shrouded in mystery. It’s no longer clear what sparked the conflict. It has become clear, however, that neither side is innocent. Both sides are responsible for the destruction of the country and acts of great cruelty upon its citizens. There is no longer a claim to the moral high ground.

“Gritty realism” is an apt a descriptor for Lost City Radio. Gritty as it is, the novel does not lose sight of its humanity. Norma’s story is that of a real person trying to make sense of her life in a world that stopped making sense long ago. It’s easy to see why Alarcón made the list of Top Young American Authors.

Hitch on Harry

Christopher Hitchens, the professional contrarian and “Russian Judge” essayist, weighs in on the new Harry Potter in the New York Times. He may have forgotten that it was written first and foremost for children. He brings Orwell, Hitler and Stalin, and Beowulf to the discussion. He also gets to mention that he went to boarding school.

Ed has already parodied the review with a Hitchens review of Green Eggs and Ham. Good stuff.

Free Books

Let’s start the week off right. I’ve got two non-fiction books to pass along – free to a good home.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman presents “speculative journalism.” Weisman, a noted science journalist, imagines what would happen to the planet if all of the people on it were to suddenly disappear – say, next Thursday. Janet Maslin reviewed the book for the NYT this morning, and you can hear the author discuss the book on the Diane Rehm show here.

The second book is Monkey Girl, a look at the “controversy” – yes those are snicker quotes – surrounding the teaching of evolution in schools by Pulitzer-winning author Edward Humes. A blurb on Amazon calls the book, “the best book for staying current on the arguments for and against the teaching of evolution in our public schools.” So there you go. Free from us to you.

The books will be handed off to the first two commenters to correctly give us “the phrase that pays.” Difficulty: we don’t currently have a phrase that pays. (And be sure to tell us which book you’d like to receive – for free.)

Doubleplushot

I think that Ingsoc has taken over the National Weather Service. How else to explain this snippet of a weather alert that arrived in my feed reader yesterday? (Ellipses are theirs.)

…HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM TO 9 PM EDT
THURSDAY…
…HEAT ADVISORY HAS EXPIRED…

THE HEAT ADVISORY IS NO LONGER IN EFFECT. A HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS
IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM TO 9 PM EDT THURSDAY.

Judging by the Cover

The Guardian’s book blog will be reading a Booker longlist title a week and writing about each one. This week though, they judge the books’ chances by checking out the covers, the heft, and the jacket blurbs. Worth a read for the least pretentious overview of the nominated books that you may ever see. Examples:

Fortunately, closer inspection reveals that the type is quite big, and there are lots of spaces. Plus, the skulls and tombstone motifs give it an appealing gothic edge.

I know it’s wrong and I know it’s immature, but I find this guy’s middle name rather amusing.

A half-ruined family photograph on the front and mention of “Dublin”, “sexual history” and “lyricism” on the inner sleeve elicit the big yawn response.

Plus, the book is only 130 pages long, so I’m all for it.

NOLA News

With the approach of the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the near destruction of New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast, there’s been an uptick in news about the hometown:

• Critical Mass continues its Thinking About New Orleans series.
• The Guardian runs a similar account of the state of literature in Louisiana.
• Entertainment Weekly and R.E.M. team up on a video pairing Michael Stipe’s Katina photographs with the band’s “New Orleans Instrumental No. 1″ (Thanks for the tip Decatur Beth)
• Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal featured a page one article by my pal, Rick Brooks. It seems that on top of everything else, some New Orleans residents have to worry that someone will come along and knock their house down while they’re not paying attention. If you don’t have a subscription to the Journal, DangerBlong has posted the whole article to her blog.
• The New Orleans Musician’s Relief Fund is selling music downloads to raise money for their self-explanatory charity organization.

First Usage

I could be wrong, but I think that Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing has just coined a new word: spokesdouche – as in, “Andrew Keen, … who recently reincarnated as professional troll and spokesdouche for internet-fearing reactionaries everywhere.”  Well, it’s new to me.  Use it in a sentence today.

Penguin 2.0

Not every giant international publishing house seems to know how to work the internet. One that does is Penguin UK. Check out the evidence.

• Their web site does not suck.
• They’ve got a new blogger: Nick Hornby.
• They are mailing random Penguin Classics to the first 1400 readers that want one. The catch? You have to post a review of the book on their Blog a Classic site. Sadly, the offer is only good for UK residents.
• I’ve mentioned their “My Penguin” program before (you may remember my truly sweet photoshopped covers for Crime and Punishment). Penguin is offering selected classics with blank covers so that you can create your own. They host an online gallery of user submitted covers, and they’ve even asked musicians like Beck and Ryan Adams to participate.
• There is a Penguin blog that provides some human face to the company, and they even have a Penguin Podcast.

The critical thing is that they are doing all of this with some class, while avoiding that snooty, ultra-serious/no-fun-allowed look that other houses seem to think is mandatory. Unfortunately, the Penguin US site is only marginally as cool. There are also no blank-cover classics for the US.  However, Penguin US does have the new graphic classics that I LOVE.

Booker Reaction

Galley Cat has a nice round up of the reaction to the Booker longlist, which is really handy when you don’t have time to do that sort of thing yourself.  Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones and Consolation by Michael Redhill are emerging as possible contenders to the Ian McEwan hegemony.

Booker Season

The longlist for this year’s Booker Prize were announced yesterday. Is it me, or is Booker season longer than hockey season? I haven’t read any of these novels. Actually, I haven’t even heard of any of the books – with the exception of Ian McEwan’s. McEwan is required by British law to to make the list.
Said list:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (not available in US yet)
• Self Help by Edward Docx (not available in US yet)
• The Gift Of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (not available in US yet)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
• The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
• Gifted by Nikita Lalwani
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
• What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn (not available in US yet)
• Consolation by Michael Redhill
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha
• Winnie & Wolf by A.N.Wilson (not available in US yet)

As I’ve said, I am unfamiliar with everyone here except McEwan. If you’ve got a recommendation, I’d love to hear it in the comments. Unless it’s Winnie & Wolf – I’m not too keen on fiction featuring Hitler.

Hot Hot Hot

It’s been blistering hot here in Atlanta. Temperatures today may break the 100 degree F mark. There’s only one thing for it – load up the kids – any kids will do really – and head over to The Little Shop of Stories for the trifecta: Olivia, air conditioning, and ice cream. There’s an ice cream store in the book store. Woo hoo. As BGB’s RaeRae says, “It’s never too early to recruit the younger generation!”

Unexpected Justification

The New York Times Health Section reports on some unexpected benefits of reading. Researchers have found that good readers among a cohort of lead smelter workers suffered less severe neurological effects from lead exposure than their co-workers. From the article:

People who are good readers, generally a sign of better education, have been found in earlier studies to have better health. The presumption has been that this is because they can take better care of themselves or afford better food, housing and medical care.

But writing in the July 31 issue of Neurology, researchers said that in this case some smelter employees were protected not as a direct result of their reading but an indirect one. The years of reading, the study said, may have helped their brains develop more of what doctors call cognitive reserve.

Never feel bad about lounging pool side reading, when you could be doing something more productive. You’re working on your cognitive reserve. I’m thinking about laminating the article and carrying it around with me.

The Zen of Fish

The Zen of Fish should be mandatory reading for all self-professed sushi enthusiasts. For one thing, we’d all stop embarrassing ourselves in sushi restaurants. We really are a bunch or rubes. Secondly, we might stop hiding at our tables and move up to the sushi bar, which all the real action is. The author, Trevor Corson, is a masterful guide to the nearly ubiquitous cuisine of which we remain – for the most part – so blissfully ignorant.

Corson weaves together three distinct threads in this wonderful food book. The author begins with the centuries-in-the-making story of how the Japanese arrived at modern sushi (and how Americans have desecrated it in less than 50 years). He also follows a group of sushi-chefs-in-training at the California Sushi Academy. Finally, he describes sushi fish and its accoutrements with Alton Brown-style scientific detail.

The history of sushi is as fascinating as it is improbable. Someone thought that burying fish in a jar would be a good way to preserve it. Later, rice was added to the jar as a cheap filler that would soak up moisture. The vomit-smelling rice was thrown away when the fish were dug up. Yum! From these humble beginnings would emerge the cuisine that is served in the most expensive restaurant in New York City, Masa. The author also describes how sushi was slowly introduced into this country and has evolved to the point where it is a staple that can be found in almost any grocery store.

The California Sushi Academy portions of the book read like a reality TV show. It’s riveting, and you’ll find yourself rooting for your favorites. There’s Kate, the hapless student who finds a new way to do everything wrong. Marcos is a 17 year-old high school student who figures becoming a sushi chef would be an excellent way to meet chicks. There’s Takumi who is wildly famous in Japan for being in a boy band and hosting TV shows. The international cast is bolstered by an Australian instructor and a Danish chef/super model. If I was a betting man, I’d wager that the California Sushi Academy will soon have its own show on The Food Network. (Read about the class featured in the book here.)

The “food science” portion of the book is no less interesting. Corson describes why some fish taste better raw than cooked, how soy sauce is made, why virtually none of us have eaten real wasabi, and other sushi ephemera that we didn’t know that we didn’t know. It’s an education.

For many of us, half the fun of eating sushi is the dining ritual that we’ve all learned over time from our more knowledgeable “sushi friends”. The problem, Corson points out, is that for the most part we’re doing it all wrong. For example, the japanese do not rub their wooden chop sticks together. They actually eat most sushi with their hands (that’s the point of that steamy towel). The Japanese do not make a grey/green wasabi and soy sauce paste that effectively wipes out the delicate tastes that the chef has carefully assembled. Almost all nigiri (a cut of fish perched atop a ball of rice) made in the US is packed too tightly, because we are too dumb to know that the fish side gets dipped in soy sauce – not the rice side. Really, our cultural ignorance knows no bounds. (The author offers tips and proper etiquette for eating sushi here.)

It is an unavoidable side effect of the book that the reader will develop an uncontrollable need to run out – right now! – and eat sushi. Corson raises the ante by challenging the reader to eat sushi the way that real afficianados do – at the bar without a menu. The author tells us that the thing to do at a quality restaurant is pull up a chair at the bar and utter a single word to the chef – omikase – chef’s choice. This allows the chef to showcase his skills, ensures that you’ll get the freshest seafood in the house, and it makes a fine show. I haven’t mustered the courage to try this myself yet, but I will.

The Zen of Fish does stumble occasionally. The descriptions of students cutting the nth variant of seafood can be a tad repetitive, as are some of the longer scientific descriptions of various kinds of fish tissue. Really, though, this is nitpicking. I enjoyed this book thoroughly, and I plan to hand out copies as gifts to some of the sushi lovers on my shopping list. I’d loan them mine, but it is covered with soy sauce, fake wasabi, and sake.

90210 & Erin Brokovich

A few months back, I came across an interesting news article. (It was originally in the LA Times, but it is no longer available on line. You’ll have to take my word for it.) It seems that “Erin Brockovich, Ed Masry and their law firm Brockovich-Ellis” filed 23 claims against the City of Beverly Hills. The case alleged that benzene from the oil wells on Beverly Hills High School property (!) caused the Hodgkin’s disease and other cancers that a number of alumni developed after leaving the school.

I thought that the article would make a great basis for a screen play. Julia Roberts could reprise her role as Erin Brokovich, the 90210 gang could appear as alumni, and actual alumni from the time period of the law suit could play themselves (e.g., David Schwimmer, Alicia Silverstone, Gina Gershorn, Tori Spelling gets to play “Donna” and herself, Lenny Kravitz, Monica Lewinsky!, Antonio Sebato, Jr.). Come on. This thing writes itself.

Then I came across a post at the Counter Balance blog about a recent reading for a book about the case. The book is called, Parts Per Million: The Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School. It turns out the reading was fairly heated. After reading the post, I think I’ll be a little less glib about the whole thing – especially since I know nothing about the particulars. Sounds like the book can’t help but be interesting though.

DJ Cayenne is Dead

Here’s the story:  Over 2 1/2 years and 580 posts, I’ve written on this space under the name DJ Cayenne.  This may come as a shock to some, but that is not my real name.  When we started this site, it was initially read and written by only +/- 10 people.  We have all written under noms du web to keep our “real” worlds and blogging worlds separated. Looking back, I’m not sure why that was important.

For me, it’s become increasingly difficult and pointless to maintain separate identities.  As I’ve become more involved with the local scene and meet with real people, it seems to be increasingly silly.  So from here on out, I’ll be writing under my actual name, Tim. I’ll update our “about us” page soon with additional info.  That is all.

Burke on NOLA

James Lee Burke is interviewed about New Orleans/Katrina/his recent work at Critical Mass, the NBCC Blog.  Here are some nice quotes:

The great wars of the twentieth century and the war we’ve been enmeshed in since 9/11 are about oil. If people wish to see the fate of this country under a petrochemical oligarchy, visit Louisiana. It’s not the past, it’s the future…The key to the novel is the epilogue. It’s not about the storm, it’s about the betrayal and abandonment of the people, the poorest of the poor. It’s about greed. And the same people wage war. People who never go themselves. They use the suffering they cause to validate their deeds. They are timeless.