It has been brought to my attention that the Sex Workers’ Art Show might not provide a family-friendly cultural experience. Luckily, there is another option. The Alcove Gallery is opening a group show on Friday night. The opening features one of my favorites, Mr. Hooper, who is responsible for the Johnny Cash image below. The evening features live music by Folsom Prison Paul, who I’ve never heard, but I expect to be outstanding by name alone.
The Reserve, a new novel by Russel Means Banks, was savaged on Wednesday in a review by Michiko Kakutani. However, The Boston Globe gave the book a very positive notice. The San Francisco chronicle seems to find some middle ground on the review continuum, offering equal parts praise and criticism. I’m casting my vote with the latter. The novel has much to recommend it, but in the end it seems to have missed some opportunities and crossed
The novel takes place during the Great Depression in the 1930’s. The Reserve of the title is a private wilderness enclave exclusively for the wealthy elite located in the Adirondacks. Here’s the main cast of characters:
OK. Banks tosses those four people in a shaker, throws in the Hindenburg, the Spanish Civil War, and possibly some dark secrets from the past.
The best parts of the novel read like scenes from Fitzgerald and Hemingway, who are mentioned as friends of the artist. The worst parts read like a drug store romance novel. I was describing the novel to someone early on and said, “I was tricked into reading a book with ripping bodices, only the bodice isn’t ripped.” The good parts outweigh the bad, but it’s the unevenness of the story that make it an just an okay read.
The review copy (as Machiko mentions) contains notes by the author that describes the elements of the story and their inspiration.
As a resident of the Adirondacks, Banks wanted to discuss the inequality inherent in the vacation resorts visited by the rich that exist in an area that has never recovered from the Depression - for the locals - that effectively creates two classes of citizens, one dependent upon the largess of the other.
Banks based the character of the artist on Rockwell Kent, a famous illustrator, artist, philanderer, and adventurer. The author set out to contrast the ideals of an artist who is devoted to the causes of the left but whose livelihood depends upon the patronage of the wealthy on the right.
The socialite is based upon a woman who was a mistress of Hemingway, who was truly insane, and not in a good way. I’m not sure what she was supposed to do thematically, but the character in this novel is just crazy.
The Hindenburg shows up in the novel because it actually flew several flights over the Adirondacks on its way to New Jersey with the swastika emblazoned on the tail. That makes for some chilling and ominous imagery.
I don’t know if I would have enjoyed the novel more had I not read the author’s statement at the end. The themes that he wanted to explore are not developed as well as they could have been. Knowing his authorial intent, I felt that he fell short of what should have been an excellent novel.
If I was in charge, each chapter would have begun with an amazing illustration, like this one that Rockwell Kent drew for an edition of Moby Dick:
If nothing else, it would have brought some depth to the artist and could have highlighted some of the novel’s themes with some clever selections. In the end, it seems to be just another missed opportunity.
As a public service, I pass along the following regarding an upcoming event in our community. BGB reader Nicole sent the following news concerning The Sex Workers’ Art Show for our “salacious readers”:
I’ve been going for the past 2 years and it’s always been wonderful…but on the very risqué side. The show usually includes a few authors who read from their short stories or memoirs. It’s pretty great, lots of mixed media and well, lots of naked people. This Friday night at Eyedrum.
We now return you to our regular programming.
Marjane Satrapi was on the Colbert Report. Has anyone seen Persepolis yet? I’m literally dying to go see it.
The Wren’s Nest has a new theme song that features the word “superfly.” Now it’s stuck in my head. Doo doo dooty doo doo doo.
Wired gives Dan Kennedy’s Rock On a 9 out of 10.
Powell’s, indie book store nerdvana, is rolling out a new subscription service that will offer special edition books and/or supporting materials. The service, to be called IndieSpensable (like it!) will begin with a limited edition of Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream (which I’m reading now - so far, so awesome).
What happens after you write your blog post? Let me show you it.
Our blogmaster, Tim, received an uncorrected advance proof of Rock On, by Dan Kennedy, which he shared with me. The book chronicles Kennedy’s somewhat brief career as a marketing guy at Atlantic Records. As noted in the commentary on the book’s back cover, when Kennedy stumbles into this job, he “thinks he has landed a pass to the secret kingdom of rock and roll”, but as his tale unfolds, he learns that the activities behind the curtain at a major record label are a little less logical and polished than you might expect.
As I read, I could clearly pick up on Kennedy’s confusion at the all-too-common dichotomy that many of the proletariats at large companies feel while watching the activities of management; trying to square the belief that “I know more than these people” with the observation that “these people” must know something I don’t, because I don’t understand what they do or why they are in management.
As somewhat of a music geek and someone who works with the music industry at times, I was excited about the prospect of getting the lowdown from someone who was an insider. Alas, by the time I finished, I realized that Kennedy was never an “insider” — he was never treated like one, and certainly never felt like one. Instead, his time at Atlantic was spent under the black cloud of a rumored acquisition (with the layoffs usually tied to a takeover) and in the funk of trying to figure out what the people around him were doing.
His inability to “fit in” led to plenty of funny anecdotes, though. I don’t want to spoil the book for any potential readers, but let me say that his meeting with Duran Duran (in which he couldn’t figure out who one of the guys in the meeting was, despite replaying the video for “Rio” in his mind, and despite having professed being a “big fan” of that guy in particular) and his experience with The Donnas (who unwittingly ratted him out to his boss about the long lunches he was taking) were laugh-out-loud funny.
I would say the stories Kennedy tells about those situations and some others are in and of themselves worth the price of admission. It’s not a groundbreaking work of humor, but it was a quick and enjoyable read.
As a postscript, I harbor a bit of contempt toward Kennedy, because “Rock On” was the title I had previously come up with for the sitcom treatment I was thinking about writing up about a cheesy hair metal band from the 80’s that was getting back together to cash in on the retro fad; now, everyone will think I stole the title from Kennedy’s book. On the bright side, though, now I can bail on that idea, and hey — that’s one less thing to do for me.
Until….
I forgot to mention - somehow - that Georgia Public Broadcasting came out to our Rob Sheffield reading and recorded the evening on film - or whatever. At some point we’ll be able to link to that and you can relive the magic from home. How cool is that? Links to the footage will follow as soon as I hear about it.
Also: PJ at the Yellow Stereo has a nice recap of the evening, as does Wordsmiths.
Notes from a Comics Dilettante
I started off the beginning of the year with some new comics. It had been a while since I had wandered the comics aisle, and I’m trying to get back to expanding the scope of my reading. New Year’s resolutions and all. A few notes on what I’ve taken in so far…
The Best American Comics 2007 (edited by Chris Ware) is a beautiful book. It is a clinic in book design and is almost worth buying on purely aesthetic grounds. I told anyone that would listen in December, “Say, if anyone’s asking what to get me for Christmas, this Best American Comics sure would be nice.” So I bought if for myself after the holidays with a gift card.
For a “best of” collection, this assemblage seemed fairly lame on the whole. There were a number of comics by people who had no clear ability to draw. There were several comics whose central premise seemed to be that they should be incomprehensible and look like they were drawn while on hallucinogens. There were more than a few that just seemed to go nowhere. Apparently super heroes and their ilk need not apply for the serious world of this collection.
That said, there were some bright spots. My favorite by far was a piece near the very end of the collection by Dan Zettwoch. It’s an historical portrait of the ‘37 flood of Louisville, Kentucky that felt very timely. I could have read it all day.
Another standout were the strips by Jeffrey Brown. His are day-in-the-life scenes of a music loving every slacker trying to find his way in the world. With excellent musical references. The drawings look a little awkward and slightly off, which is entirely in keeping with the tone of the strip.
Comic legends are also present, like R. Crumb and Art Speigelman. There was also a lengthy excerpt from Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, which I was glad to see, because I hadn’t gotten around to reading her well reviewed book.
So maybe the collection wasn’t as meh as I originally made it sound. It is also important to note that I am comics dabbler, so my opinion on the collection should be weighed in that context. It just didn’t knock my socks off.
I had much better luck with a single slim graphic novel. I first read about Jason’s (Single name only. Like Madonna.) I Killed Adolph Hitler in the New York Times’ holiday book guide. Later, I came across links to excerpts here and here. (I promise that I was not consciously trying to see how much Nazi imagery I could have on the page in one day.)
This story is wacky - in the best possible way. A hit man, pictured above, is offered a once in a lifetime opportunity. A scientist has created a time machine and wants to hire the hit man to go back in time and kill Adolph Hitler. He promptly botches the assignment, and Hitler climbs into the machine for the return trip. Hi-jinks ensue. It’s a delightfully twisted story.
The biggest problem that I had with IKAH was finding it. My favorite comic outlet had just sold out of it the day before I went in looking for it, on several occasions. No one else carried it, and sales people tended to look at me funny when I asked about it. Hitler? Jason? Comic book? Finally, the good people at Criminal suggested that I just go ahead and special order it. Which I did.
Another of Jason’s books, The Left Bank Gang, features Hemingway, Pound, Fitzgerald and other literary giants deciding to pull a bank heist while living as ex-pats in Paris. Why I don’t own that one already is beyond me.
In one last piece of comics news, The New Yorker is inviting artists to re-imagine their iconic monocle guy Eustice Tilley. Check out the entries on Flickr.
Since I admittedly have no real idea what I’m doing, comics-wise, I’ll gladly accept any recommendations for the more well informer.
Holy smokes! I would have completely missed this had the alert ladybloggers of the Pecanne Log not hipped me to it. On February 5, Art Spiegelman will be giving a lecture at the Savannah College of Art and Design (ATL campus) free-open to the public-and free on campus parking. That’s the awesome trifecta right there. Spiegelman is the author of the Pulitzer-winning Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers. From the press release:
In this talk, Spiegelman will trace the history of cartoons from Hogarth to R. Crumb and will consider what he calls “forbidden images,” inspired by the commotion raised over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad in early 2007. He believes that in our post-literate culture the importance of the comic is on the rise, as “comics echo the way our brain works.”
An enterprising guy with some free time decided to do some data mining. Taking the 10 most popular books by school (as identified on Facebook), he correlated those selections against the school’s average SAT score. Cool! See the results in his handy chart: Books that Make You Dumb. (via BoingBoing)
The Penguin Blog has a fascinating guest post by Clay Shirky, author of the soon-to-be-released Here Comes Everybody. From the post, it sounds like Shirky has some common sense ideas about “new” media that are lost on the capital “M” Media. For instance, Shirky acknowledges that a blog can be different things depending upon its purpose. It is a scalable communication platform.
Weblogs aren’t only like newspapers and they aren’t only like coffeeshops and they aren’t only like diaries — their meaning changes depending on how they are used, running the gamut from reaching the world to gossiping with your friends.
When BlueDuck is blogging drunk at LiveJournal, he’s blogging a communal context, and mostly for the amusement of his friends. As I’m writing this post for Penguin, I am self-consciously working on something for broad public consumption.
I think that a lot of this kind basic reasoning got lost last year when there was that book critics vs. book bloggers skirmish. Common sense might indicate that the purpose of this blog (or most any other book blog) is different from the [insert embattled newspaper name here]’s book review pages.
If you live and blog in the UK, Penguin will send you the book for free. I like thinking about this stuff, so I’m definitely going to check this one out when its available. I expect that this book will be widely discussed when it is released.
Our Evening with Rob Sheffield
So, how did the first evening in the Baby Got Books Reading Series go? Pretty well, I’d say. The place was packed, Wordsmiths sold out of Rob Sheffield’s book, the reading was excellent, the band was great — it was a pretty amazing evening all around.
Rob Sheffield arrived at Wordsmiths about half an hour before the reading, which was enough time to get some shopping done. The hot item of the night was an USB drive with an old school casette case package for making a 21st century mix tape. Lillian brought them over from Criminal Records. Rob bought one. (See Beth’s post about the evening for a picture of what I’m talking about.)
The actual event part of the evening began when Wordsmiths’ Russ welcomed everyone and introduced — me. I got to introduce Rob Sheffield, which was pretty cool. The review that I got for my intro was “rambling…but in a good way.” Wikipedia mentions, for some reason, that Sheffield is 6′5″. That seems about right to me. That guy is TALL. Anyway…
Sheffield read from two sections of the book that were about equally hilarious. (”Sheena was a Man” and “Roller Boogie” if you want to follow along at home). I had forgotten how funny parts of the book were and was charmed all over again. Listening to Sheffield be a Pip while reading lyrics to Gladys Night and the Pips “Midnight Train to Georgia” was worth the price of admission alone.
After the reading, The Swear took to the stage and brought the rock. The acoustics are fantastic in the store, and the band sounded great. As if by design, the band’s set ended almost exactly when the line to get books signed was nearing its end.
There was an impressive showing by the blogerati. Among those present: Beth from Cup of Coffey, Paul of The Yellow Stereo, Lain and Amelia from The Wren’s Nest, Lillian from Criminal Records, Kim at Eskimo Bliss — am I forgetting anyone?
Thanks to everyone for coming out last night. I think that everyone had a great time. At least I did. I think that the powers that be will let us have a Second in the Series. The bar has been set pretty high, but we’ll do our best to achieve the same level of awesome next time around. Stay tuned for that.
The AJC’s Book Page blog explains the unintentional hilarity behind the plagiarism charges being levied against romance author Cassie Edwards. It involves an overly detailed discussion of ferrets. Following a heated scene.
Let’s just pause here a moment. Shadow Bear, old buddy, if you have just done your manliest best with a woman, and you and she are entwined on a pile of pelts or whatever, and she starts nattering on about a book she read about ferrets, then you need to raise your game a notch. Trust me on this.
At The Onion: Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book.
“The whole thing was really engrossing,” said Meyer, referring not to a movie, video game, or competitive sports match, but rather a full-length, 288-page novel filled entirely with words. “There were days when I had a hard time putting it down.”
Adventures in Social Networking: Part 1.5
Last week I took a look at two social networking sites geared towards readers: Shelfari and Library Thing. Shelfari clearly came out on top of that comparison. However, alert reader Patrick pointed out a third way: Good Reads. I decided to take it for a spin. Luckily, Shelfari allows you to export all of your books in a file that can be easily imported into other sites, like Good Reads, and I was able to do an apples-to-apples comparison.
Good Reads beige-on-beige color scheme is very relaxing & mellow, but I still prefer Shelfari’s virtual book shelf to Good Reads books-on-a-line arrangement. Both allow you to search your e-mail address book to find people on the site that you know (which honestly freaks me out a little). Good Reads goes the extra mile and finds friends of those friends that you might also know. It’s only one degree of separation, so I didn’t find Kevin Bacon. Your results may vary. In the long run, it looks like Good Reads may be a tad bit more social, but I actually have friends now on Shelfari.
For now, I’m going to use both. So I’ll get to update my books on two networking sites. THANKS, Patrick.
Be my friend @:
The Baby Got Books reading Series ft. Rob Sheffield & The Swear has been highlighted as the thing to do tomorrow night by Atlanta weekly Creative Loafing. They also call us “bookworm bloggers.”
Meanwhile, our daily paper’s book blog gets the details right but forgets to mention us, all while dissing the name of the book.
In case you missed it:
Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb is one of those novels that makes you ask yourself, “What would I do in this situation?” Repeatedly. Chapter One efficiently summarizes the back story to the novel with this:
His name was Rob Castor. Quite possibly, you’ve heard of him. He became a minor cult celebrity in his early twenties for writing a book of darkly pitch-perfect stories set in a stupid upstate New York town. Several years later, he murdered Kate Pierce, his writer-girlfriend, and then committed suicide, causing the hot lights of the media to come on with an audible whoosh, and stay there, focused on his life, the town of his birth, and by default, we his friends and neighbors.
The story is told by Nick, Rob Castor’s childhood best friend and neighbor. Rob had left the “stupid upstate New York town” for the glamor and fame awaiting him in the literary world of New York City. Though separated by time and space as adults, the two men continued to share a bond even though the saw one another less frequently. As you can imagine, the events that leads to Rob’s exit are unforeseen by Nick.
As Nick tells the story, it is clear that he is failing to come to grips with the headline news nature of his friend’s death. His marriage begins to suffer as Rob becomes more remote. As the story progresses, we learn more of the story from Nick’s encounters with Rob’s family, police and court reports, and another friend who gets a book deal to write about Rob’s life. The revelations add unexpected twists and turns that lead to a resolution that casts everything that has come before in a whole new light.
Before the book was even released, I read word that a movie deal had been struck with the author. This is the kind of book that will work well on the screen. I’ll go see it if it actually makes it onto the screen. It is a tightly wound story that slowly reveals itself and would leave an audience talking in the parking lot. And it’s a good book, too.
It’s MLK day, which means you can’t swing a cat around here without hitting someone who is running for President.
If you’d like to have a productive conversation about race and cultural understanding today, The Wren’s Nest is looking for your opinion: Is Uncle Remus racist? Since the Wren’s Nest is the home of Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus Stories, they’d greatly appreciate your opinion.
Over the weekend we received our second wave of snowfall, which is a big deal here in Atlanta. The Wren’s Nest has a few pictures of what our magical inch and a half of winter cheer looked like, but the Pecanne Log has a picture that best captures how the snow made us feel.
I have a guest post over at Eskimo Bliss about that thing that we’re doing Wednesday.
Resonator Magazine asked me to write about the intersection of music and literature as it relates to the Baby Got Books Reading Series (kicking off on Wednesday!). Man. That was like homework.
Wordsmiths is threatening to have a live reading of a Gilmore Girls script. That’s the greatest idea, maybe ever. I’ll be there. Make it happen boys and girls.
Neither here nor there: I’d like to welcome back our favicon. The favicon is the little BGB icon that shows up in your browser’s address line and tabs (it looks like this 
). It disappeared unexpectedly about 6-9 months ago. I finally managed to get it to reappear by deleting the file and then uploading the same file to the same location. This is why computers will never take over the world.
Bad is the operative word for this review. When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson is an annoying, not funny, trite read.
The book is described as a humorous look at the lives of a Jewish family in England. The family matriarch, Claudia, is a famous rabbi and believes that she has the “perfect” family with 4 wonderful children and a doting husband. This perfection starts unraveling when her eldest son leaves his bride at the altar and her eldest daughter starts shunning her familial duties and suffers an identity crisis. The other 2 kids are portrayed as total losers throughout the book (they are both in their late 20’s, living at home and their lives revolve around pleasing “mummy”), yet their family continues to dote on them.
I did not like any of characters and found them all to be insipid and uninteresting. There is neither character nor story development, and the chapters just flip between the boring lives of each family member.
Needless to say I am surprised that this book received critical acclaim, and I remember picking it up after seeing it on one of the Best of 2007 links on BGB.
Two big thumbs down.
As we may have mentioned, next week we are kicking off the first in what we hope will be a long line of events in the Baby Got Books Reading Series. Our first guest is Rob Sheffield who will be reading from his excellent book Love is a Mix Tape on Wednesday, January 23, at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur (details). Mr. Sheffield graciously agreed to subject himself to a few questions about the book.
Baby Got Books: In the book, you describe yourself as someone who comes across as introverted and fairly reserved. How did you arrive at the decision to begin writing what is an intensely personal story of pain and loss? How much time went by before you started to write the book? How long did it take to get it all down?
Rob Sheffield: Yeah, I guess I was always shy, the “Shy Boy” that Bananarama sang about. When I was in my early 20s, all I wanted from life was to hide out with my records and my fanzines and my books and let the world pass me by. I used to think that was the best I could hope for, but it turned out I was wrong, although I guess I can always go back to being a hermit boy when I’m old and grey if I want. But it took five years before I could start the book, really. There were some false starts in there, but I’m glad I waited until I was ready. I started it in 2002 when I was moving into my new apartment in Brooklyn (which isn’t so new anymore, I guess, but I still love it) and I finally had shelves big enough to hold all my tapes. So I stopped putting them in those rickety Elfa shelves, and put them up in the china cabinet where I could admire them, and took others out of boxes where they’d been cooped up, and slapping them into the boombox, and every tape kept telling me, Play me—I have a story to tell. They brought those moments alive so vividly, I knew I had to write about the tapes, and the book just kind of spilled out of that, for about two years. Somehow writing about the tapes made me feel brave enough to start telling the whole story.
BGB: In the book, your description of Renee’s death and the aftermath is very powerful, because it is written in a way that feels very raw and immediate. Was it difficult to stop yourself (or others) from editing out the rough edges and gritty emotion?
Rob Sheffield: One of the reasons I’m glad I waited till I was ready is that I wouldn’t chicken out of writing about the really bad times. I knew my editor, Carrie Thornton at Three Rivers Press, and I knew she wouldn’t let me chicken out either. I was surprised (more than I should have been, because my friends warned me) how tough it was to write about them, to admit that I was in trouble, even a few years after the fact.
BGB: In retrospect, are there things that you wish that you had not included in the book?
Rob Sheffield: The only thing I regret including is that one of the tapes had a song by G Love and Special Sauce. I really should have left that one out. “My Baby’s Got Sauce,” ugh and ugh again. But I figured, once I start leaving embarrassing songs off the tapes, I’ll never stop, so I better just leave them alone.
BGB: Are there things that you wish you had included?
Rob Sheffield: There’s a lot I had to leave out—I felt like I could have gone on for a thousand pages without using up the story, so it was just a matter of where to draw the line. I wanted it to be short enough to read in a weekend, because there was so much sad stuff in the story it seemed too harsh to ask for more of people’s time than that. Yet I can’t BELIEVE I didn’t have a single tape with a Dusty Springfield song. Now that is a shame.
BGB: Were there any negative reactions from friends or family that were close to you and/or Renee for sharing your story as a couple in such a personal way?
Rob Sheffield: I was lucky to have the support of all our friends and family. I needed all I could get, really. It’s funny how since the book came out, I’ve been hearing a lot of other people’s favorite Renee stories they think SHOULD have been in the book. I guess she told her friends a lot more of our private business than I was telling them!
BGB: I recently attended a funeral for a friend. At a gathering afterward, a mix CD of some of his favorite songs was handed out, which turned out to be a fantastic idea and got everyone sharing stories. Why do you think that music is able to create such intense memories/bonds between those that share it?
Rob Sheffield: I’m sorry about your friend. It is amazing how deeply music connects to the memories of specific people in specific times and places. It’s funny, I was just up in Boston visiting my parents and we were sitting around the fire and my mom made me sing the old Irish song “Bold Thady Quill,” just like she does almost every time I’m there, because that song reminds her of my grandmother from County Kerry. No matter how old people are, or where they come from, the music they loved is something I remember, and that’s the key that puts me in touch with their spirit.
BGB: Your book and others, like Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, resonate with many of a certain age that spent too much time hand-crafting what one hoped would be the ultimate mix tape — one that would be remembered for the ages (or maybe I’m just projecting). The mix tape is now an historical artifact and even CD mixes may be on their way out. Do you think that recent technologies make “the mix” a lost art? Does dropping 30 songs into an iTunes Playlist carry the same emotional weight?
Rob Sheffield: Yeah, it’s definitely a lost art. You can make ten mix CDs for ten different girls in an hour. A mix tape, that proved you put at least ninety minutes into it. You picked out the catchy song at the start of Side Two, and the slow song at the end of Side Two, and the short songs to fill up the blank tape at the end of the side—it’s a complex calling. And they were finite—the other night I had dinner with a friend and we were listening to an ipod her boyfriend gave her with 800 songs loaded on it, and I thought, that’s an awful lot of songs to try and dazzle someone with at one time. Thing is, I just plain love mix CDs too, love how fast and easy they are. I guess there’s no sound-bearing media I don’t love. This summer I got pulled out of the security line at LaGuardia because I had a Walkman in my bag. The guy was like, “What the hell is this?” They asked, Why do you have an ipod AND a cassette player? I started to explain I just like listening to “Beggars Banquet” and “Let It Bleed” on tape better than on mp3—but fortunately they let me through.
Additional reading:
This:
…reminded me of The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, the Facebook group I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar, and, of course, Literally, A Web Log, which tracks abuse of “literally.”
Kerry says that she’s going to start using “figurtively” in a literal sense:
“No, seriously, I was figuratively frozen on the spot.” Or, “I figuratively died.” “He really is figuratively eighteen feet tall.”
I say we join her.
