Tuesday was a day of High Concept book readings around our fair city. The day began with Eoin Colfer reading at the Decatur Public Library. Mrs. Got Books and Lil’ Got Books went to check it out. The author of the Artemis Fowl books receives rock star treatment and rolled up to the Library in his pimped out tour bus. A separate van with Radio Disney staff was on hand to hand out prizes and direct games, etc.
The author's Rock Star tour bus
The reading included a video conference with the author’s son in Ireland via Mac laptop. They exchanged greetings and knock knock jokes before the author began his presentation. Rather than just read from the latest Artemis Fowl book, the author gave a multi-media presentation about his life and his books. It was reportedly very interesting and very funny.
Knock Knock jokes direct from Ireland
Later, just down the street, Doug Crendell read from his novel Hairdos of the Mildly Depressed at Wordsmiths Books. The evening began with the ladies (and later, a gentleman) from Salon Red presenting hairstyling tips and discussing how a change in your look can change how you feel about yourself - certainly a theme that hits home for the protagonist of Hairdos. The follicly challenged members of the audience (including the author and myself) shared laughs over advice to “change our look” every so often. Great idea!
The ladies from Salon Red
The author read from an entertaining section of his novel that featured a Ton-Loc reference. A quick show of hands revealed that not many of us remember the genius of Ton-Loc.
Doug Crendell reads about a "Wild Thing"-esque encounter
After the reading, a drawing was held for a free styling/cut at Salon Red. That was all very interesting, but the real action for me came afterwards when the author handed out a few select hairpieces as trivia contest prizes. I finally got to see what I’d look like as a blonde.
Back in 1960, John Steinbeck took off on a trip around the country. He had not traversed America since the days of The Grapes of Wrath, and he wished to reacquaint himself with it, to find out what the people were like and how life was led. He got himself a truck (this is before the days of the RV) specially built with a camper top and every accoutrement then imaginable. He dubbed it Rocinante after Don Quixote’s horse. He also took with him one lone companion, an aging blue standard poodle who could say “Ftt” named Charley.
His plan was to see the country at its circumference, starting off from his home on Long Island, proceeding northward to Maine and then westward across the northernmost tier of states to California. He would then return to New York via the desert Southwest and Texas and the Deep South. He tried as best he could to avoid the then-still-sprouting superhighways and kept to what we now call surface streets, even though the only streets you find that aren’t on the surface are called tunnels.
What’s important about this book, however, is not the trip itself or his itinerary. It is in the people he finds and his impressions of life in the modern America of 1960. He encounters, again and again, mobile homes and packaged foods and a style of living that he takes to be closer to existing than being. He constantly compares what was with what is and finds the new cleaner, more sterile, and lacking in flavor. When talking about the expedition of Lewis and Clark or that of a 16th Century Spanish explorer called Narvaez, he’s moved to exclaim, “There were men in those days.” He meets many people, few of whom are satisfied with their lives, most of whom have plans for a better time, an easier life, a smarter way.
All of these ruminations stop, however, once he leaves Texas and goes to New Orleans. Suddenly, in part four, it seems as though we are reading an entirely different book about a different place. Nothing is settled and bland.
He reaches New Orleans, a city he knows and loves, during a time when its schools are being forcibly desegregated. There are protests on the steps of the first elementary school to mix whites with blacks, and Steinbeck goes to see it and the performance of a group of ladies who have attained a measure of celebrity for themselves courtesy of their own gifts for hatred. They are known as the Cheerleaders. He gives a blow-by-blow description of the protest, including a description that moves me to tears to think of it:
Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere in the automobiles they extracted the littlest Negro girl you ever saw, dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round. Her face and little legs were very black against the white.
The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades. the little girl did not look at the howling crowd but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll, and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school, and the child was even more a mite because the men were so big. Then the girl made a curious hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle of her first skip the weight bore her down and her little round feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards. Slowly they climbed the steps and entered the school.
The Cheerleaders spew profanities at the girl and at the white father and son who follow her delegation, and the crowd yelps its approval.
Despite the temptation, Steinbeck does not descend into lecture. He reports what he sees and reports the conversations he has with Southerners both white and black concerning the progress of civil rights. He understand the fear that rises from change and understands that correcting such a long-held wrong will have consequences for all involved.
Now that I write that, I see that the book as a whole is about fear and change, among other things. It is about a people who are adjusting to a society that is no longer simple and direct, but complicated and ever-changing. The solid ground beneath them turned to shifting sands, and they struggled to find their balance through improvisation and luck.
This is a brilliant book and a simple one. I have read it before and I shall read it again. Like another book of that era, To Kill a Mockingbird, I carrying it around inside me in little shards and pieces.
The America that John Steinbeck sought is not the America of today, but it is its forebear. To read Travels with Charley is to become acquainted with that world and, by doing so, to become acquainted with our own.
If you’re a regular reader, you may recall that I declared BGB “huge” in Sweden, because we were listed as a recommended Bokbloggar on the fabulous Swedish book blog, Bokhora.
I’m happy to report that we are now twice as huge in Sweden. Lisa Jannerling, author of the blog En Boknörds Bekännelser (A Booknerd’s Confession), linked to my interview with Rob Sheffield in a post that (in part) decries the horrible Swedish translation of his book Love is a Mix Tape. While you’re there, check out her Lankär recommendations. BGB is one of two recommended English language book sites. The other is The Guardian. Cool.
For my part, I’ve become a regular visitor of Bokhora, and I’ll be checking out En Boknörds Bekännelser. I don’t understand Swedish, but I think it’s fascinanting to check out what is of interest to like-minded people in another country who speak another language and have their own culture. It’s amazing how much meaning can be transferred despite the language barrier.
If you check out book blogs in languages other than your own, share your favorites with us in the comments.
Almost last minute notice: Tonight! author Doug Crandell will be appearing at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur in support of his latest novel, Hairdos of the Mildly Depressed. Crandell’s previous book, The Flawless Skin of Ugly People was shortlisted for the William Faulkner Prize. The novels together represent two-thirds of the planned “Beauty Knows No Pain” Trilogy. The novels are linked thematically, but do not include the same characters. You can jump right into book two with no problem.
I just finished Hairdos yesterday, so I haven’t had time to put together a proper review. The publisher’s web site describes the novel as a “tale of hair replacement systems and brotherly love.” I thought of the book as a sort of Karl Hiaasen goes to North Georgia-style page turner. It’s an excellent summer read. Also, you should not confuse this book…
…with this book:
Completely different books. Who’d have thought that I’d go through two hair-themed books in the same year? Speaking of hair…
The publisher says that free combs or toupees will be given away to attendees at the event. (Come on, you only need one or the other.) I’ll be there for the free hair. In addition, Wordsmiths will have a drawing for a free hairdo at Salon Red. As always, you can get the full scoop from Wordmsiths.
In the national conversation about personal privacy vs. the needs of government surveillance, you may hear someone say, “if you haven’t dome anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide.” People who argue from that position should need a copy of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.
The gist: In the “few weeks from now” future, terrorists destroy the Bay Bridge and a BART tunnel in the San Francisco Bay area. A group of high school students skipping school while looking for clues in for an online puzzle game, find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The students are swept up in the ensuing dragnet as “suspicious persons” and submitted to brutal questioning intimidation by a draconian Homeland Security apparatus. Frightened, angry, and humiliated, the teens are determined to fight back by exposing the government’s hamfisted (and ineffective) response to the attacks. And…
Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.
The teenagers are led by Marcus - hacker name w1n5t0n. If you can read that name without saying the names of any numbers, you are smarter than Marcus’s principal. The kids are able to pull off their techno hi-jinks in this novel because they understand things that most adults do not. They are of a generation for which the internet has always existed. They understand the inner workings of computers; cell phones; the internet; and electronic badges, tags and IDs - as well as their privacy implications. Marcus also recognizes the fallacies of computer data mining as a tool for fighting terrorism.
Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten at the outside. 10/20,000,000=0.00005 percent…Now, say you’ve got some software that can sift through…records…and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time. In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.
Guess what? Terrorism tests aren’t even close to 99 percent accurate.
Marcus and his gang of avengers use this knowledge to make everyone appear to be suspicious. The results that the kids are able to achieve are alarming to anyone who has not thought twice about how easily their personal identifying information can get passed around these days.
Doctorow’s book is unabashedly techno geeky. Here’s Marcus waxing poetic on the subject of computer programming:
If you’ve never programmed a computer, you should. There’s nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer it does exactly what you tell it to do…It’s awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe…Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it…
Nerd-tastic.
Doctorow has written a book for teens that (1) they will want to read - on paper even, (2) encourages them to embrace and understand technology, and (3) makes sure that they will always question how that technology can be abused. Even though the book was written for a teen audience, the issues that Doctorow raises are critical for all of us to understand as participating members of a democracy. A capsule review in yesterday’s Washington Post (third review) says:
Cory Doctorow tackles timely issues, including the erosion of civil liberties in the name of national security. Hopefully, teens will pass this cautionary tale on to parents, teachers and government officials.
Or you can eliminate the middle man and just pick up the book yourself.
Doctorow also writes about technology issues (and just about everything else) as part of the team at the pioneering blog Boing Boing.
By now, you probably know if you are a David Sedaris fan or not. I’m a fan, but I have a friend that refuses to read any of his books, because the author’s voice on NPR drives him crazy. I think it’s fair to say, my friend aside, that Sedaris is a wildly popular author. His new collection of essays When You are Engulfed In Flames has been receiving some OK reviews in the press, but it seems to flying off the shelves anyway.
On the whole, I enjoyed the new book. It seems to be a more serious book, but is often just as hilarious as his previous books. Fans of the The Rooster, Sedaris’ brother, will be sad to learn that the family hillbilly makes only a passing appearance in this book. Most of the stories seem to focus on regrets, missed opportunities, and less happy times. However, there is one story - and it seems that each of his books has one - that fails miserably. Skip What I Learned, you’ll thank me later.
The last story, The Smoking Section, is 83 pages long! Most of the author’s tales are significantly less than 10 pages. At 80+ pages, It’s not quite a full length memoir - but it’s also longer than an autobiographical essay, too. Unsure of what to call it, I’m coining what I think is a new word - a memoirlito. The memorilito is the story of Sedaris’ attempts to quit smoking. By moving to Japan for an extended period. It’s like a Marx Brothers film crossed with Lost in Translation. Funny and weirdly awkward. I hope to see more in the memoirlito form from Sedaris in the future.
If you’re a fan of Sedaris, you’re likely to already have read it. I don’t know that there is anything here (maybe the memoirlito) to convert non-fans to the Sedaris cause. Either way, I enjoyed his latest, and I’m looking forward to the next one.
If you’re in Brooklyn and you’re in need of a new set of tights, a new cape, truth serum, or even x-ray vision, The Super Hero Supply Co. has you covered with all of the top brands. The New York Times City Room blog reports on the “front” for 826NYC, home of writing and tutoring programs for cool Brooklyn kids.
The Decatur Book Festival is right around the corner. I did not know this, but apparently our book fest in in the US top ten in terms of the number of authors appearing and in attendance. Cool.
Those are some of the names that jumped out at me on first glance. See the complete list to find your must-see authors. We’ll have more to come as we get closer.
Books& Fiction& ReviewPosted by Nitro Nicole on July 21, 2008 at 7:47 AM
If a friend recommended a book that she described in her email as “a thriller translated from Danish, the story has broad psychological and moral themes” - would you be racing out to the bookstore? Probably not, but after my friend could not stop talking about this book - I decided to give it a go. And I’m so happy that I did. The Exception by Christian Jungersen is one of the best books I have recently read.
This book, a bestseller in Europe, is a fascinating study of human nature. The story is set in a non-profit organization that studies and disseminates information on genocide. This organization is only staffed by 5 employees and when a couple of them receive a death threat - the dynamics within their little office quickly spiral downhill.
Their first thought is that one of the war criminals that they have been tracking down is threatening them but through the irrationality of human nature, they quickly turn on each other. Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of one of the employees which allows the reader to see how the same incident or situation can be interpreted completely differently by each of the characters within the novel.
The 4 women who are central to the book all have their own personal histories and tragedies. One was bullied as a child, one has a debilitating arthritic disease, one was taken hostage in Africa while working for an aid organization and the last one had serious relationship issues. These personal histories all play a large part in how they react to the death threats and how they start to become suspicious of each other and end up forming factions within their own organization.
What is so ironic about their deteriorating relationship is that these are women that study the psychology of genocide and what causes rational people to commit murder and atrocious crimes; yet, they end up demonstrating many of the same behaviors which they study. They use their subject knowledge to further their own suspicions rather than taking a step back and becoming aware that their actions mirror many of the abhorrent behaviors during genocide.
The unraveling of who sent the death threats takes many twists and turns and the author leaves you in suspense until the very end and even then does not positively solve the mystery for you.
I also admired the way that Jungersen used his setting to educate the reader about genocide. I learned so much about the various genocides that have occurred during the 20th century as well as the psychological studies about group think and behaviors in these situations. There were a few studies described that I already knew about such as the Stanford Prison Experiment in which college students volunteered for a study and 1/2 are prisoners and 1/2 are guards. Within days the prisoners became passive, depressed, and despairing while the guards became agressive, callous and hostile. There were no significant personality differences between the 2 groups at the beginning of the experiment but it demonstrated that people act according to the roles given to them by external forces. There were many other experiments and studies that Jungersen described that I found fascinating.
The Exception was educational, thought provoking, entertaining, and a real page-turner. And it accomplishes all this even though it is set in Denmark and translated into English. Kudos to Jungersen - not an easy feat.
[Originally posted 7/16; Updated 7/18 to include Butthole Surfers audio by popular request]
I’ve been told for years that I absolutely had to read Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad. No fewer than a dozen people have recommended it to me since it came out in 2001. I finally relented when there were two recommendations in the same week: another thumbs up from a friend and Largehearted Boy’s review. I found a used hardcover first edition for under $2 the same week. Game on.
I think that my initial, years long reluctance to read the highly recommended book was based purely on ego. My high school and college years fit neatly into the book’s time frame with some cushion of either end. In college, I was a DJ at my university’s station, and I was Music Director my senior year. The reasoning, I think, was that I would quibble, find fault, and otherwise be underwhelmed. What could this book teach me that I didn’t already know? Plenty, as it turns out. Perspective for starters.
The book begins in 1981. It was the first year of that sumbitch Reagan’ s presidency, and the year that the first records were released by what would become seminal bands. The history ends in 1991, because that was the year that Nirvana’s Never Mind came out and the indie music scene was validated beyond its wildest dreams. In between those years, a handful of bands blazed a new path and created some very influential music. Azerrad chronicles the stories of thirteen bands in this rich music history.
The highlighted bands are diverse in the styles of the music that they created (though they are all, essentially, guys with guitars), but all had a strong do it yourself ethic. They formed their own bands, and often, rather than wait for the big record deal that was never coming, they formed their own labels. Then they signed their friends’ bands. Many of these labels (SST, Sub Pop, Dischord, K Records) are still around.
We didn’t want to be just a rock band,” says singer-bassist Mike Watt. We wanted to be us - our band.” In the process D. Boon, George Hurley, and Watt proved that regular Joes could make great art, a concept that reverberated throughout indie rock ever after.
They did their own promotions, booked their own gigs, lugged their own equipment, and anything else that rock stars usually delegate to underlings. They also believed in themselves enough to pile into a van full of equipment and sweaty guys to play their music wherever they could.
One of the things that I didn’t realize before reading OBCBL is that before these bands came along and started knocking on doors, there were almost no venues for small indie bands to play. They shared their contacts and names of friendly venues across the country. I’ve always taken it for granted that there were always places in my town for small, mostly unknown bands to play.
As it turned out, I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did. There was even a band that I had never really heard before. Through Azerrad’s telling, I was able to enjoy the bands that I was familiar with in a whole new light. I read this book at the beach with my iPod in hand. I highly recommend that approach.
OBCBYL is an exhaustive (and it must be said, sometimes exhausting) history of the movement, weighing in at over 500 pages. More than anything though, OBCBYL is inspiring. It presents one case study after another of people who decided that they wanted to created their own scene - and did it with varying degrees of success. The take home message of this book is that if you love something, get out there and do it. Get whatever you care about out in front of as many people as you can. If you’re truly in it for the love, the doing will be its own reward.
Do I need to say that I loved this book? If you are an indie music nerd, this is required reading. Buy the hard cover so that you can put in on your reference shelf.
Of course, this post screams for some streaming audio. Below are selected tracks from some of the bands featured in OBCBYL:
Minutemen - History Lesson Part II (provides the title of the book)
Mission of Burma - Academy Fight Song
Replacements - Bastards of Young
Husker Du - Could You be the One
Sonic Youth - 100%
Fugazi- Waiting Room
Beat Happening - You Turn Me On
Butthole Surfers - I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas
Minutemen - D’s Road Song/Anxious Mo-Fo
If you’re a fan of the music, the book, or both, I highly recommend the documentary We Jam Econo - The Story of the Minutemen. Many of the key players of OBCBYL show up to tell their stories. Many thanks to Shaft for putting it in my hands until I finally watched it, minutes after finishing this book.
Mercury Retrograde Press publishes fantasy, science fiction, and the unclassifiable: fiction that propels the reader through unknown territories in this world and others unlike it. Here you will find complex characters and compelling stories: an alchemical blend of the sense of wonder we all crave with the hard edges and tough questions that thinking readers need.
I picked up the Persepolis DVD yesterday, having missed it while in theaters. I was a big fan of Marjane Satrapi’s books (Persepolis and Persepolis 2). The tone of the movie was much more ethereal than I would have imagined, but very cool all the same. I was all set to watch the movie in the original French (I am always amazed at how good my French is when I have English subtitles to read), but then I noticed than Iggy Pop did the voice of one of Marjane’s uncles in the new English version. Gotta go with Iggy.
Authors& BooksPosted by Tim on July 15, 2008 at 1:22 PM
Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric disturbances is one of my favorite novels of the year so far, and will certainly sit at or very near the top of my year end “best of” list. (Check out my review of the novel and my interview with the author.) I’ve been reading all of the reviews that I come across with interest, and I’ve been a little baffled.
Leisl Schillinger gave the novel a glowing review in this week’s New York Times Book Review. Schillinger compares Galchen to “…Jonathan Lethem, Franz Kafka, Primo Levi and Thomas Pynchon. But she also, quite deliberately, echoes the Argentine giant Jorge Luis Borges.” However, I was puzzled by this phrase:
Although she has intellectualized and mystified her subject, intentionally obscuring it in a dry-ice fog of pseudoscience, the emotional peaks beneath her cloud retain their definition.
Actually, Galchen uses actual published scientific articles by her father, Tzvi Gal-Chen as metaphors for the protagonists views of reality. Not pseudoscience.
Every time we read the name — and it appears more and more often as Leo starts to believe his own lie, convincing himself that Tzvi holds the key to Rema’s disappearance — we are reminded of the fictionality of Ms. Galchen’s world. “Gal-Chen” is like the author’s wink to the reader, delivered over the heads of the characters, reminding us that after all this is just a novel, a made-up story.
The name Gal-Chen is more than a wink at the reader. Once the reader understands that Tzvi Gal-Chen is the author’s actual father (deceased), it adds a layer of devastating emotion to the story.
To attempt to follow the clues in this novel is to engage in a fruitless exercise, like trying to climb the stairs in an Escher woodcut. She’s not there, and you can’t find her that way, anyway. As Liebenstein tacks back and forth in increasingly paranoid circuits through his inner and outer worlds—there are diagrams in this novel, found photographs, and a drawing of the Doppler effect—a weight, beautifully, accumulates in the white space.
Man, oh, man. If you don’t follow those clues, you miss half the point of the novel. The pictures are not “found”, but actual childhood photographs of the author’s family. The diagrams and drawing are from Tzvi Gal-Chen’s published works. Follow the clues…
I’m left wondering how these professional reviewers missed out on the what Galchen was doing in this novel… And I’m left blaming Marisha Pessl. Pessl’s Special Topics In Calamity Physics (which I loved) uses pictures, pseudoscience, and fake journal citations to advance her story. There seems to be feeling among some reviewers that when those devices appear to present themselves, the reader need look no further. It’s just clever post-modernism, a là Pessl. In this case, all it takes is a quick Google search to reveal that Tzvi Gal-Chen is a real person, and the rest quickly follows. To be fair, I didn’t connect some of the dots until I quizzed the author. Then again, I’m not paid for my opinion either. Maybe I’ve become too invested in this book. I do that. I’ll move on now.
McSweeney’s All Known Heavy Metal Bands is a complete listing of - um - all known heavy metal bands. 50,000+. It looks like it might be a fun read to check out the most abusive use of umlauts and other unintentional hilarity.
I backed up the small town criminal losers in Arkansas with Anthony Neil Smith’s Yellow Medicine- a novel that treads similar territory. Yellow Medicine is a much bleaker read though. The book’s cover accurately sends the message that within the cover desolation, loneliness, and despair will reign. Think maybe Fargo without Frances McDormand.
Billy Lafitte is a cop exiled from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi to the tundra of rural Minnesota for a second (and last) chance. Lafitte was asked to leave the Gulfport PD for making up his own brand of justice following Katrina.
I messed with the wrong people…In the wake of the storm surge, plenty of officers were glad to rat me out…I was strung up as an example of the “good” police filtering their own ranks to protect and serve…A scapegoat, a whipping boy, a martyr.
The Great White North leaves little to occupy a wayward cop, other than heavy drinking, bouts of depression, the occasional shakedown of small-time hoods, and, of course, psychobilly music. Like the novel Arkansas, boredom, lack of opportunity, and desperation lead to low-level crime for some. The driving force of Yellow Medicine though is the havoc visited upon the bucolic Yellow Medicine County by outside forces. In this case, a foreign crime syndicate with an eye towards terrorism comes to town. Things get ugly fast.
Yellow Medicine is a good read for those that like their cops hard-boiled, their action bloody, their environments grim and unforgiving, and their justice merciless, if ambiguous. Or something like that. If this describes you, leave me a note in the comments, and I’ll send you a promo copy of the book. First come, first served.
British PM Gordon Brown allowed himself to be compared to Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff, although “maybe an older Heathcliff and a wiser Heathcliff.” Apparently, it’s been awhile since the PM read Wuthering Heights. What was he thinking?
Andrew McCarthy, acting director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire told the Daily Telegraph: “Heathcliff is a man prone to domestic violence, kidnapping, possible murder and digging up his dead lover. He is moody and unkind to animals. Is this really a good role model for the prime minister?’
Maybe he was a fan of Kate Bush’s awesome interpretive dancing.
