Reluctant Roundup

If there were more time in the week, almost all of the bullets below would have been subjects of their own posts.  Instead, you get this:

• The New York Times narrows its 100 notables to 10 Best Books of 2008.
• Smart guy and author Clay Shirkey is guest blogging at Boing Boing this week.  His first post decries the wrong-headedness of “ye olde-ing” book publishing.  
• National Book Tokens?
• There’s a novel out in the UK called Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood.  It reads as an autobiography of the Tarzan chimp/sidekick (who is apparently still living) from the Johnny Weissmuller movies.  It’s not out in the US until February. 
• The Best Book Covers of 2008 according to the Book Design Review blog.
• Largehearted Boy has named his favorite albums of 2008 (with audio).  He has also been busy compiling a comprehenive list of “Best of 2008″ lists for books and for music - and they are comprehensive.  He has also compiled a list of the Top 10 Literature Blogs.   We feel confident that we were on the bubble at #11.

Pure Country

I recently enjoyed Amanda Petrusich’s book It Still Moves, which is about Americana music.  Then I discovered the treasure trove of the Life Magazine photos now hosted on Google.  It seems that I was being primed for the book Pure Country: The Leon Kagarise Archives, 1961-1971.  It’s an amazing collection of photographs of musicians in what was almost a forgotten era in American music.  Almost.

The book chronicles a time when “traditional” country singers were being squeezed out of the increasingly slick and corporate Nashville music establishment.  They took their show on the road to play at venues like Sunset Park in western Pennsyvania and New River Ranch in Maryland.  These were rural venues where day long concerts were held for $1 a car load.  There was no backstage area, so performers mingled in the crowd while they waited their turn to go on stage.  The picture of Johnny Cash and June Carter below is a good illustration of how low-key the vibe was. 

Many of the stars pictured were well within their prime.  That’s George Jones on the cover sporting a buzz cut and a sweet suit (and it snot exactly a mob scene behind him).  Other musicians pictured inlcude Johnny Cash, June Carter, Porter Wagoner, Dolly Parton, Kitty Wells, and Roy Acuff.  Check out the line up on the sign for the upcoming Labor Day show (behind Ernest Tubb on the mic):

The collection is one of those stories that is impossibly fortuitous.  Leon Kagarise was an electronics engineer and country music fan.  He had to hide his love of music from his parents, because they belonged to one of those Footloose churches that frowned on all music.  He quietly spent years taking pictures at the shows that he attended (after putting his then state-of-the-art recording equipment on the stage to record the music) and filled his home with incredible historical documentation that he didn’t think anyone else would be interested in.  He was sort of an accidental Alan Lomax.

NPR ran a story several years ago that details how Kagarise’s bootleg goldmine was discovered by a local record store owner.  I assume the same discovery is responsible for this book.  Hopefully the music will be making its way out soon.  I’d love to hear what some of these shows sounded like.  

This is the part of the post where I usually mention that the book’s subject is an excellent excuse to put up some streaming audio.  I’d love to post something from the recordings at these shows, but I don’t have any. Here’s what I pulled together instead:

Hank Williams – Jambalaya (recorded live in 1952 at Sunset Park — Thanks, Frank! I love Hank’s Cajun cooking lesson at the end.)

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The Carter Family – Wildwood Flower (from a 1928 recording, but that’s Maybelle on guitar)

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George Jones – He Stopped Loving Her Today (live on Austin City Limits – saddest song ever written)

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Dolly Parton – Silver Dagger (not from the time period nor is it live – but it feels like it could have been something from that era)

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Two Cookbooks to Avoid

If you had to pick one, without knowing anything else, from which new cook book would you rather select a recipe:

1) Fat or 2) The Testicle Cookbook

Iodine

Haven Kimmel’s novel Iodine came recommended.  It was placed in my hands actually. I had heard good things about Kimmel’s previous book, A Girl Named Zippy.

The novel begins with one of the more in-your-face opening lines of my recent memory:

I never…I never had sex with my father but I would have, if he had agreed.

Of course, that sentence follows a heading labelled “Dream Journal,” so the reader is left to figure out whether our heroine Trace Pennington, which we soon learn is an assumed name, is trying to tell us something.  

Trace lives in an abandoned farm house on the outskirts of a college town.  She lives alone with her dog without electricity, heat, water or other modern conveniences.  She bathes at the truck stop on her way to the college.  Trace is taking classes with names like Special Topics in Archetypal Psychology and Archetypal Analysis of Literature.  We learn that she is double-majoring in English and Classics with three (and maybe four) declared majors.   She is also very attractive, but doesn’t like to talk with anyone at school.  So, she’s complicated.  

The middle of the book involves Trace’s time in class focusing on three primary lectures.  If you like heady descriptions and critiques of the study of archetypes and feminist theory, this part of the novel is for you. When Trace decides to finally drop her guard (and all of her classes) to have a relationship with one of the professors, the carefully constructed world that she inhabits begins to crumble.  

Eventually the events that led Trace to assume someone else’s identity, live in an bandoned house by herself, etc., are accounted for.  You might guess that the resolution of the novel might involve something of an archetypal situation.  The ending seemed a bit implausible to me, but it does provide a basis for Trace’s actions.

Iodine was a good read in stretches, and the college course discourse grew a little wearying in others.   I wasn’t crazy about it, but I can see how others might really enjoy it.  If you’d like my copy, leave a comment saying so, and I’ll share the love.  I’ll pick a name from any takers on Friday.

Pics from the Past

Life Magazine has partnered with Google to make a metric crapload of vintage pictures available via the internets. It’s fantastic.  Many of the pictures were never published.  All are available for sale as framed prints.  I’ve been a’Googlin’ all the authors and musicians that come to mind.   My favorite picture so far is this one of Woody Guthrie playing his fascist killing machine guitar at McSorley’s in NYC (1943).

I was in that bar years ago, and it looks exactly the same.

Other cool pics:

Authors

• Ernest Hemingway with Noel Coward (1959) in Sloppy Joe’s (the one in Havana)
• Dorothy Parker in hat (1937)
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading poetry with no berets in site (1957)
• The completely not crazy Vladimir Nabokov working in his car (1958) writing on index cards
• John Steinbeck with the Shaggy D.A. (undated)
• Ralph Ellison in Italy
• William Faulkner receiving the National Book Award (1955)
• Allen Ginsberg at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (1968)
• Rachel Carson (1952)
• W. Somerset Maugham has a cool writing room (1939)
• Gertrude Stein with Alice Toklas (1944)

If you find something cool, share it with us in the comments.

Monday Must Read

In light of recent world events, you may want to check out the New York Times editorial by Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found writes an editorial for The New York Times.  Mehta’s book, a love letter to Bombay/Mumbai, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.   It is jumping onto my overcrowded to-be-read stack as we speak.

The Shack

In another one of my mysterious “found it on the bookshelf” moments, I stumbled upon, started reading, and through sheer determination finished The Shack by Wm. Paul Young.  I thought this was going to be a murder mystery with some elements of faith thrown into the mix.  I was wrong.  This was preaching with a side of faith, and some extra preaching for dessert.  Or as one of our collaborators referred to it:  “that crazy Jesus book.”

The story centers on Mack Philips, whose youngest daughter Missy was kidnapped and presumably murdered while on a camping trip in Oregon with Mack and two of Missy’s older siblings while Nan, the wife and mother, was away at a class in Seattle.  Mack refers to the effect of Missy’s disappearance as “The Great Sadness” and it smothers him until one day he finds a note in his mailbox from “Papa”, a term Nan uses to refer to God, inviting him to visit the cabin in remote Oregon where the authorities had found Missy’s bloody dress years earlier.

Mack is not sure what to make of the note, but he secretly ventures to the cabin.  And then all heaven breaks loose.  I’m not fond of preaching or of anyone claiming to personally know more about God than I do, but I gave Young the benefit of the doubt and read on, in the hopes that he would use metaphor to explain how Mack found God at the cabin.  But no.  There is no metaphor involved — The Holy Trinity are all at the cabin, taking forms to make Them easy for Mack to understand and relate to, and They have a big ol’ boondoggle together so that They can make Mack understand how They operate.

The preaching is so heavy-handed, and the writing so laden with over-the-top happy shiny descriptors of Mack’s meeting with God that I couldn’t take it seriously.  I know, I know — nobody made me read this book, and if I didn’t like it, I should have put it down.  This is a free country, and the First Amendment allows folks like Young to write about whatever they want to write about, however they choose to write about it.  My only point is that you should be prepared for how Young communicates his message.

Strangely enough, while much of what Young writes about vis-a-vis organized religion and the role of faith in our lives isn’t too far off from what I personally believe, I was so put off by the way in which he foisted his perspectives on me that I was embarrassed that I shared anything in common with him.