Eros Among the Americans

My friend Chris Cessac is a man of many talents.  We went to law school together, played in a band together, and did lots of immature things together.  And throughout all of those times he showed himself to be a scholar, an innovative songwriter, a talented visual artist/cartoonist, and just a funny guy.  And when law school ended and we went our separate ways, he remained true to himself and his muse(s), returning to Texas and finding a way to not only practice law, but to continue his artistry through poetry.

He received the Kenyon Review Poetry Prize for his first book, Republic Sublime (a now-unfortunately-out-of-print collection of staggering poetry).  He has returned with his second book, entitled Eros Among the Americans, a collection of nineteen poems each named after a town in America.  And as much as I loved Republic Sublime, I fell for this one even more.  And not just because he dropped a reference to my hometown (Lorain) in the poem entitled “Laura, Ohio”.  I loved this one because I think it shows growth in his writing style — growth, believe it or not, in the form of simplicity.

Republic Sublime was a gorgeous read, but being the simpleton that I am, I couldn’t profess to truly “get” all of the biblical, mythological, and historical references; I loved the words, but I can’t say that I understood all of them.  Eros Among the Americans, on the other hand, is quite simply an ode to America and to all of the love and longing that its residents feel.  Cessac’s gift for language is evident in every one of these poems, and I often found myself taking five minutes to read one short page because I wanted to concentrate on every single word, because every one mattered.  I think it is somewhat of an injustice to pick apart any of these poems and try to break them apart for the sake of quoting portions of them, but I’m a hack and so I’m going to anyway.  A few samples:

• We feel deceived and our own deceptions thus justified.  (“Amor, Minnesota”)
• The goal is to be loved not loveable and they are not the same.  (“Ovid, Michigan”)
• We keep poor records.  What matters most happens so slowly no records are kept at all.  (“Romance, Wisconsin”)

I’m not sure what more I can say.  The book is published by Main Street Rag and is not expensive.  For anyone who loves poetry, and for anyone who’s forgotten how beautiful poetry can be, treat yourself to this.   Check out poem length samples here.

Secret Son

What little I know about Morocco is from French history lessons or immigrants I have met in America and France, so I looked forward to reading Secret Son by Morrocan Laila Lalami.

Youssef is a very poor 19 year old student living with his mother in the slums of Casablanca.   His mother had always told him that his father died shortly after he was born and Youssef has an old tattered photo of a man he thinks is his father that he looks at frequently.

As one would guess, the truth is slowly revealed.  Youssef’s father is actually a very prominent, rich businessman who had hired Youssef’s mother to take care of his ailing pregnant wife – 19 years ago.  In order not to bring shame to her family as an unwed, pregnant woman, Youssef’s mother did not return to her village and invented new identities for herself and her son.  After learning the truth, Youssef finds his father and is welcomed into this unknown upperclass world.  Youssef is mesmerized by his father while he is briefly a part of his life.  Doors open for him that he never imagined – the wallet full of money certainly helps.  At the same time he feels guilt about neglecting his friends and and questions his father’s true intentions:

Youssef was ashamed to see he was more like a mistress than a son; he spent hours waiting for a man to show up and was happy only when they were together. What was becoming of him?

While Youssef is frolicking with his new “friends” and wealth, The Party, a fundamentalist Muslim political group, is becoming a strong presence in Youssef’s poor neighborhood.   They succeed in gaining followers, especially young men, by improving buildings, soccer fields and bringing aid to the poorest people in the slums, all in the name of Allah.  Youssef’s mother is not convinced by either Youssef’s father’s intentions or those of The Party and begs Youssef to focus on his studies.  Devastating to Youssef, his father changes his mind about his son and The Party, preaching against excess wealth becomes very attractive.

I really wanted a happy ending!

Secret Son begins with a lie. Throughout the story, Ms. Lalami searches for truth. Interestingly, several times she approaches an event from the perspective of each person involved.  If three people have the same experience, they each can have their own interpretation.  This happens frequently in life, especially right now in the political arena – everyone has their own opinion of an event.  Which perspective, if any, is the actual truth?

I often say, sort of jokingly, that if suicide bombers had jobs they would be too busy to blow things up.  This story of the slums in Casablanca supports my theory.  Ms. Lalami vividly describes a place where it is easy to see how kids are more than happy to sacrifice themselves for Allah. There is nothing else going on. Even for Youssef who in the beginning was hopeful because he was admitted into the university, ultimately becomes depressed and sees nothing postive for his future.

Secret Son explores the contrast between the very rich and very poor of one of the busiest cities in North Africa while searching for the truth.

When Tim reads a book he has a soundtrack playing in his head. When I read a book I think about the food.  My menu for Secret Son would include a tagine of chicken/olives/almonds, couscous, cinnamon scented rice, a romaine, tomato, onion salad with a lot of parsley and mint.  Dessert would be an eclair from the French pastry shop that would surely be located down the street from Youssef’s father’s apartment.

Reader-in-Chief

The President recently went book shopping at the independent bookseller Prairie Lights in Iowa City.  Awesome to see such a high-profile visit to an independent bookstore.  As Galley Cat notes, the President used Prairie Lights as an example of the typical of small businesses that struggle to offer their employees health care AND remain profitable.

To be fair, W was reportedly a big reader, too. Just ask him.

Friday Miscellania

All the news that’s fit to link to in a haphazard fashion:

Oh, Dear God. There’s  a Jersey Shore book a’coming:  the book will “explain how to balance work, love, and partying, while properly taking care of hair, nails, and skin — as well as everything else that goes into living an authentic Jersey Shore lifestyle.”

Book Review Cliché Bingo exists.  I am in trouble.  ”That said” and “beautifully written” are my Achilles heel.

Alien vs. Pooh. The Comic.

Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood will score the film adaptation of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

Tribune Co. owner distributes a list of 119 words/phrases that he doesn’t want to appear on the air.  NPR blogger uses all of them.  In one sentence.

Check out the first three chapters Pride and Predjudice and Zombies for free.

The NYT Book Review dreams up other monster mash-ups that might be coming our way soon.

This is the Kansas City Library’s Central Branch Parking Deck:

How cool is that?

I meant to post this a few weeks ago,but…  NPR interviews The Girl Who Fell From the Sky author Heidi Durrow. (Thanks, Anne!)

The Tournament of Books has completed the quarterfinals round of competition.  Check in to see how your brackets are holding up.  Salon recently ran a piece on the TOB phenomenon.  (Thanks, Frank.) Book Fever…Catch It!

I mostly failed to enthuse about Patti Smith and her excellent book Just Kids last week.   But did you catch the story about Patti on the cover of the New York Times’ Style Section last Sunday?  She also turned up throughout a Guardian interview with actor/writer Sam Shepard to provide colorful background.

BGB Interview with Scott Russell Sanders

A Conservationist Manifesto by Scott Russell Sanders is a collection of essays on conservation and environmental issues.  Though titled a “manifesto”, Sanders’s writing here is a wide-ranging and often personal look at the state of the environment and our obligations to it.  Often the essays bravely tilt at modern windmills, such as the modern culture of greed and entitlement, “prosperity gospel” churches that distort  the ideas of environmental stewardship presented in scripture, and the misplaced notion that corporations will do what is right.   An underlying theme of many of the essays is the search for the peace and tranquility that accompanies nature and is often missing from our frantic lives. An echo of Thoreau’s call for the need to live more simply is evident throughout Manifesto. Sander’s also makes clear that environmental conservation is very much a matter of social justice.  The titular essay, among the last presented in the collection, lays out the principles that should guide capital “C” Conservation.

In a rare display of literary vandalism for me, I jotted notes directly in the margins of Manifesto, adding my own ideas to Sanders’s and jotting down questions for future thought.  Luckily, Dr. Sanders was kind enough to field some of my questions directly. Dr. Sanders is a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Indiana University.  I am deeply appreciative of his thoughtfulness and of his generosity with his time.

Baby Got Books interview with Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Conservationist Manifesto

Baby Got Books: The Conservationist Manifesto is an impressive collection of essays on environmental and conservation issues. How many years of work does the book represent?

Scott Russell Sanders: The essays gathered in the book were written over the past six or eight years; but the ideas and concerns have been building in me for most of my adult life, ever since I began to realize, in my twenties, that the industrial economy and Earth’s wild economy are on a collision course.  The book draws on Biblical stories that I first encountered in childhood, on science that I began studying in high school and college, and on reading and travel that I have pursued ever since.

BGB: When you first started writing on these topics, did you envision that they would grow into a book length body of work or did it just evolve organically over time?

SRS: I wrote the essays separately, and only later gathered them into the book.  Because they all arose from the same ecological and cultural concerns, however, they combined to lay out a larger argument.  In its briefest form, the argument is that we need to shift from a culture based on consumption to a culture based on conservation.

BGB: Your essay “The Warehouse and the Wilderness” concludes with a passage about the power of myths, i.e., storytelling, as the basis for how we collectively view the world and our place in it. It seems that our national myths have become increasingly materialistic, more deeply ingrained, and more widely broadcast. How do we change the stories that we tell about what it means to live productive lives as Americans in the face of such strong (and frankly very glamorous) opposition?

SRS: The dominant stories in America are indeed materialistic, and that is because they are composed and broadcast—from television, radio, billboards, the pages of magazines and newspapers, and every other medium of communication—for the sole purpose of persuading us to buy things.  The advertising that permeates our society is funded by corporations, which are not devoted to improving our lives, serving our society, or protecting the planet, but only to selling their goods and services.  The US Supreme Court has enshrined this crass storytelling by defining corporations as persons and dollars and speech. It’s hard to imagine how any collection of ordinary citizens can gain a hearing in an arena dominated by multibillion dollar corporations.  So changing the dominant story will not be easy.  But it will change, if only because its ruinous consequences, for ourselves and our world, are ever more obvious.  Meanwhile, each of us can speak up for a vision of personal, communal, and ecological good that embraces peace, justice, caretaking, and spiritual richness, rather than aggression, power, and material accumulation. That our voices seem to be small and scattered is no excuse for remaining silent.

BGB: Thoreau is often cited as the first American guide to living simply and to getting in touch with nature. However, if all of we city dwellers were to suddenly decamp for the woods, it would be an ecological disaster. How do you think city dwellers should go about maintaining a healthy balance between city life and time spent in natural settings? And how do the urban poor get to join in?

SRS: Certainly we can’t all go build cabins and live in the woods.  All except the very poorest Americans, however, can live more simply than we do, whether in city or country, in house or apartment.  When I advocate living more simply, I am not speaking to the poor—and perhaps a third of the world’s people live in desperate poverty. They deserve to have better food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, and education than they presently do. I am speaking mainly to middle class and rich Americans, who consume nonrenewable resources and emit greenhouse gases and other pollutants at a rate ten or twenty times as high, per capita, as do people in developing countries.  Conservation should begin with those of us who are most privileged, and that includes myself along with the vast majority of the American population.

BGB: You note that “conservative” and “conservation” share the same etymological root but the politics of the two words are often in conflict. Why do you think that modern political conservatism places so little interest in conservation?

SRS: The first question I ask of anyone who labels himself or herself a conservative is: What do you want to conserve?  My own answer to that question would include preserving a stable climate, drinkable water, clean air, diversity of species, a fair judicial system, honest government, high quality public parks and schools and museums, and many other shared forms of wealth.  Too often, today, self-proclaimed conservatives seem intent on conserving only their own money, their power to acquire and keep more money, and their freedom to do as they wish regardless of the consequences for society or planet.  There is nothing conservative about such an attitude; it is reckless in the extreme. Traditional conservatism—epitomized by Theodore Roosevelt—placed a high value on conservation of land, water, wildlife, and natural resources.  The loudest voices in conservatism today seem to regard nature and other species as raw material for private profit; they resist efforts to protect the environment or endangered species as a restraint on “free enterprise”; and they fight every attempt to reduce our rate of resource consumption.  To explain how that shift in mindset came about would require more space than we have here.

BGB: You argue for the need of a return of the “common wealth” – the idea that there are things and places that should belong to us all. If recent events are any indication, the ideas of taking any actions for the “greater good” are wildly unpopular in certain (very vocal) circles. How can the national dialogue on conservation be rescued from the scorched earth partisan fighting that we’re seeing now?

SRS: I’ve offered a partial answer to this question in my previous responses.  America’s founding generations maintained a balance between a regard for individual wealth and a regard for the common wealth.  They insisted on the protection of private property; they celebrated the opportunity for entrepreneurs to make money, for hard work to be rewarded in cash. But they also created the world’s first free public schools, free public libraries, national parks and national forests; they cooperated to protect and foster the whole domain of shared goods—air, land, water; museums, courts, roads, bridges, colleges; scientific research, inventions, and so on.  Over the course of the past two centuries, and especially the past thirty years, however, the balance has been tipped heavily toward private wealth, especially that of the very richest individuals and the largest corporations. Our political system, from the city to the state to the federal levels, has been all but taken over by those moneyed interests. How can we restore the balance?  Let’s require television, which uses the public airwaves, to provide substantial time each day for public-interest programming, including alternatives to the stories told constantly by commercial advertising. We need to insist that all political campaigns be publicly financed; that the public airwaves be made available, free of charge, on an equitable basis, for all qualified candidates; we need to take the primary nominating process away from political parties, and instead allow all candidates that accumulate the specified minimum number of voters’ signatures to appear on a single primary ballot, and then allow the two top vote-getters to compete in a run-off election.  The moneyed interests that currently have a stranglehold on our democracy will not give up their control without a fight.  So we’ll have to fight—not with violence, but with every means at our disposal.

BGB: You make a distinction in a story about your own life between “making a living” and “making a good life.” While we may not be able to drastically change the national dialog, making changes to our own personal narrative seems within the motivated person’s reach. What advice would you pass along to those who want to begin making changes towards a “good life”?

SRS: The meaning of a “good life” will vary from person to person, of course.  I don’t presume to tell anyone else how to live.  But I do invite people to ask themselves a few questions:  What gives you the deepest satisfaction?  How do your actions affect the lives of other people, for better or for worse, and how do they affect the earth? What gifts have you received, from family or biology or society or God, and what obligations follow from those gifts? What are your talents, and how do you wish to use them?  What do you love most deeply, and how can you protect and nurture what you love?  What are the values you seek to live by?  In answering those questions for yourself, you will gain a clearer sense of how to lead a good life.

Dr. Sanders will be giving a reading tomorrow evening, Thursday, March 25 from 8-10 PM at Agnes Scott College in Decatur as part of their 39th Annual Writer’s Festival.

On The Corner of Bitter and Sweet

As I was looking through the books on the display shelf, the Japanese parasol on the cover of On the Corner of Bitter & Sweet by Jamie Ford caught my eye. When I read the back and saw the phrases “Seattle’s Japantown and Chinese American” I knew this book had met my very scientific criteria for choosing a book.  And again my system worked!

Henry Lee, a first generation Chinese American has spent his entire life in Seattle’s Chinatown (now called The International District).  In 1986 the new owners of The Panama Hotel in Japantown find boxes and suitcases left behind when the Japanese were sent to internment camps.   We begin with Henry searching for something long lost from Japantown in the old hotel and we get to travel back to 1942 and the beginning of WW II when Henry was a boy.    As the only child of Chinese immigrants, Henry’s parents arranged for him to go “scholarshipping” at the local white school for a better education.  Of course he is routinely harassed and beat up by the white kids, but his life improves when an Asian girl joins him working in the cafeteria as part of their “scholarshipping”.   When Henry realizes she is Japanese (third generation actually, she doesn’t even speak Japanese) he goes against all wishes or hopes of his father and becomes not only best friends with her, but falls in love with her.

The Chinese loathe the Japanese for invading China.  Anyone who has read Amy Tan or Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls understands the atrocities brought upon the Chinese by the Japanese.  The hardships were undescribable and impossible for Henry’s family to ignore, even while living in the United States.  In addition to the far away war, Henry as an adult, explains more of the bitter history to his son,

Around 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress – no more Chinese were allowed to immigrate. This was when competition for jobs was fierce. Chinese laborers like my father were used to working harder for less, so much so that when the local fisheries added canning machines, those machines were called “iron chinks.”   But still, the local businesses needed cheap labor so they went around the exclusion act – they allowed Japanese workers to come over. Not just workers but picture brides too. Japantown flourished while Chinatown remained stagnant.

One day while eating lunch, Henry and Keiko look out the window to witness what they think is a parade:

The line went on forever. There were mothers with small children in tow.  Old people, with faltering steps, pitching forward in the same general direction.  Teenagers ran ahead, then walked when they saw the soldiers everywhere. All were carrying suitcases, wearing hats and raincoats. That was when Henry realized what Keiko already knew…he realized they were all Japanese.

The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.  Keiko’s Japanese American family is sent to a camp and Henry, with the sneaky influences of my favorite character, Ms. Beatty, is able to visit her.  With the help of technology in 1986, Henry’s son and fiancé help him make some new exciting discoveries.

Although I loved this book, the part that I’ll recall in 10 years is the history lesson.  World War II was a sad and embarrassing time in America’s history for our citizens of Japanese heritage.  Families were forced to evacuate their homes and leave everything, often never returning to collect these items.  Mr. Ford certainly brings this part of history to life for me.  Being from Seattle, I could smell the salt water as Mr. Ford describes the “roundup” at the ferry terminal.  And knowing that Seattle is currently a city that celebrates diversity it is enlightening to learn about its discriminating past.

In his first novel, Mr. Ford brings us much more than a sweet story of friendship.  He allows us to form our own opinion about a part of U.S. history that we don’t hear much about.  It’s worth using this wonderful story to investigate a corner of histlory.

Juliet, Naked

Don’t call it a comeback, because Nick Hornby never left.  Many of the reviews that I saw for Juliet, Naked stated that this is Hornby’s best book since High Fidelity (probably) and that it marked a return to form.  Hornby only lost me in How to Be Good, which the author told wrote from a woman’s perspective.  It seemed an odd departure for the author, because he writes from a certain kind of male perspective better than just about anyone around.  It is fair to say though that Juliet, Naked is a High Fidelity for an older and more digitally attuned crowd.

Tucker Crowe is a little known American musician who disappeared from the public eye after releasing what his fans considered his master work, an album called Juliet that chronicled his break up with his supermodel girlfriend.  Twenty years later the musicians legacy is kept alive by the cultish fans, Crowologists, that band together on the internet to examine his life in microscopic detail.

Duncan, the keeper of the Crowologists’ web site, maintains a life devoted to the music of his youth, surrounded by vinyl and CDs.  Through the internet, he is able to find kindred spirits and validation for his musical obsession.  His long-suffering live-in girlfriend Annie lives is left wondering if there is something more for her than the life she has inhabited with Duncan in a nowhere English seaside town.

Things are kicked into motion when Duncan is among the first to review a newly released CD from Tucker Crowe, a stripped down version of his masterpiece, an acoustic/demo called Juliet, Naked.  Tucker and his Crowologists create an echo chamber of hype that is baffling to Annie.  She thinks the CD is crap, stripped of the original’s powerful arrangements.  She writes an anonymous review lambasting Juliet, Naked on Duncan’s web site.  As it happens, Tucker Crowe agrees with Annie’s assessment and e-mails her to tell her so.   Annie and Tucker become electronic pen pals, which begins lasting changes in both their lives.

One of Tucker’s neighbors is mistaken for Tucker by a Crowologist who snaps a picture of the neighbor that becomes widely circulated and romanticized as the current state of the “crazed genius.”  The description of the picture reminded me of the famous picture of a seemingly unhinged Salinger going after a photographer.  The book was written before JD Salinger died, but Tucker’s self-imposed exile certainly seems to be based upon Salinger’s “just leave me alone” aesthetic.  Unlike Salinger, Tucker and the neighbor have fun with the misunderstanding in several humorous scenes,.

The novel does a wonderful job of exploring the myths that surround music – of how our musical heroes are usually flawed people like us. The inertia that can consume a life due to regrets – regrets for the things that have been done and things left undone are a big theme in the novel as well.  This is a wonderful novel that speaks to the older music obsessives everywhere.  And so even though I originally chafed at the description put forth by others, I tend to agree that this is Hornby’s best novel since High Fidelity.

The Soundtrack in My Head™:

While reading this book the songs that kept going through my head were by Bon Iver from his album, For Emma, Forever Ago.  The story is that the singer/song writer hid out over the winter in a cabin in the woods and recorded the album after breaking up with his girlfriend.  The track Skinny Love in particular seems like it could have been on Tuckern Crowe’s fictional  album Juliet, Naked. Except it is a good song.

Bon Iver – Skinny Love

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Friday Roundup

It turns out that Hamlet’s Ophelia just needed a Sassy Gay Friend.

The world’s most beautiful bookstore.  Yes, it is.

Grisham is going big into the world of YA with Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer.

Today’s greatest thing ever:  Google Books now has every issue of Spin in their entirety.  Holy time machine, Batman! The 80′s issues are blowing my mind.

The Tournament of Books is back.  And the first round is over already.  How did I forget to mention it here?  I’ve been checking it out daily, and you should, too.  I’ve only read two of the books in this year’s lineup, but I am going to have to go back and check out many more.

The Guardian catches up with Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the subject of Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun.  There are spoilers a’plenty, so you may want to skip it if you haven’t read the book yet, which you really need to do.

Apparently there will be no mention of Patti Smith or her amazing book Just Kids this week.  I’ll redouble my efforts next week.

Attention Book People

Our pal and BGB Contributor Todd Moye’s new book has just been released by Oxford University Press (fancy!). Freedom Flyers: The Tuskeegee Airmen of World War II is based upon the author’s work directing the Tuskeegee Airmen Oral History Project here in Atlanta. My copy arrived in the mail yesterday, and I can’t wait to check it out. I’ll be back later with a review that will be completely biased, but you should buy it now so we can compare notes then.

Her Fearful Symmetry

I really liked Audrey Niffenegger’s first novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife.  In fact, I liked it so much that I didn’t see the movie because I didn’t think the story could be replicated on the big screen in a way that made sense.  And for a linear thinker like myself, the fact that she was able to tell me that story without getting me utterly confused and lost is a testament to her writing skill.

I just finished her second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, and I while I liked it okay, I think that many among you will absolutely love it.  Because it’s a ghost story.

I’m not really into vampires/werewolves/ghosts/wizards/hobgoblins, etc., and so if I had known it was a ghost story, I might not have ventured into this one.  But I didn’t, so I did.  And I’m glad I did.

The story takes place in London, where I had visited just last summer.  So I thought that was cool.  And while there is a significant cast of characters, Niffenegger does a pretty good job of developing each of them.  Including, most importantly, the twenty year-old twin girls Julia and Valentina, who are the focal point of the story.  As soon as I realized there were going to be twins, I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.  Despite the fact that I couldn’t see them.  But she does a good job of bringing you along to appreciate not only the twins’ similarities, but also their differences.

The twins’ mother, Edie, who lives in Chicago, and their recently-deceased aunt, Elspeth, were also twins.  And while those two sisters had not been in contact in many, many years, when Elspeth died, she left her flat in London to Julia and Valentina, subject to a few conditions.  And when the twins take the offer and move to London, living in the same building as Elspeth’s mourning lover, Robert, the story begins to take shape, and the twists and turns (and ghosts) come out in droves.  I have to confess that at one point, I had to read and re-read a certain part of this book multiple times, and refer back and re-read an earlier part multiple times, to try to get my brain to absorb some of the plot points.  But I did it, and so can you.

I think this is the closest thing to chick-lit that I’ve read in as long as I can remember.  And it wasn’t a bad thing.

BGB Recommends

I picked up the latest from the lit mag on steroids Granta, Issue #109: Work, because I saw that a favorite author (Steven Hall) had a non-fiction  in the work-themed issue.  This is only the second Granta that I’ve bought and the first that I’ve read under new editor John Freeman.  Granta costs $17, which seems a little spendy.  This issue, at least, is worth every penny.

Some highlights:

Steven Hall (The Raw Shark Texts) reports from a US robotics lab:

TANK is a robot with a job.  He has had lots of jobs–he once worked for NASA–but wasn’t very good at any of them. After a string of demotions, TANK now works as a receptionist at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. At least, that is what he’ll tell you.

Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio) reports on the alarming book piracy endemic to Peru:

Suddenly it was August and I still hadn’t been pirated. I was starting to get nervous…Then, on the morning of August 14, my last day in Lima, my editor called with the good news. He’d seen the book for sale in San Isidro, on the corner of Aramburu and Via Expressa…My editor’s tone was congratulatory.  I was frankly relieved. (Read the entire essay. See the slideshow. Check out Alarcon’s conversation with John Freeman.)

Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin) remembers his father, a newspaperman, telling him to stay out of the newspaper business.

The issue also contains work by Salman Rushdie, Jim Crace, Julian Barnes, Joshua Ferris, and others.  Check out the video intro to the issue here.  Then grab a copy.

Good Fortune

After reading a little about Noni Carter, I was very excited to buy her book Good Fortune to continue my search for black history.  Ms. Carter is only 18 years old and currently attends Harvard.  She grew up in Georgia listening to stories passed down through generations about her great-great-great-great grandma who came to the United States from Africa as a slave. How lucky their family is to have this oral history!

In a nutshell, the book tells of a girl who is taken from her family in Africa when she was four years old.  (So as not to confuse anyone I don’t use a name because she has three names throughout the book).  It is written in the first person as we accompany her on her journey.  She is sold to a plantation in Tennessee where she becomes a house slave and is “adopted” by the black woman who oversees the household help.  When she takes the white children to their lessons she stands close enough to the school house to listen to the teacher in order to educate herself.   One day after learning that her brother plans to escape, she decides to go with him.  She and her brother flee the plantation and eventually find themselves in a small, black-only residential area outside Dayton, Ohio.

Ms. Carter shares with us a compelling story about a young African American girl with all odds against her who never gives up on her long term goal of an education.  This character finds creative ways to memorize what she learns and hide those facts in a time when it was illegal for her to have any sort of book knowledge.

At first I had a hard time following the book, and I hate to admit this because I realized it is a young adult book.   The girl has several flashbacks to her time in Africa and she has a lot of dreams, I found this a little confusing at first.  Ms. Carter is a poet and she writes beautifully but I found it a bit drawn out at times.  However, once I gave the book some dedicated reading time, I enjoyed it a little more.  My experience may have been more positive if my expectation was a story and not a history lesson.

This book is being compared by some critics to Roots by Alex Haley.  After picking up a copy of Roots to re-familiarize myself, I searched for reasons why.  They are both about Africans being sold into slavery in the United States.  Ms. Carter’s book, however, is about one girl, Mr. Haley’s book spanned generations.  Ms. Carter is a poet and that is evident in her writing style as she colorfully describes many situations.  Mr. Haley was a journalist.  Roots was ground-breaking, there had never been such a comprehensive book on black history ever written in the United States.  Since Roots was published there have been many books about the slave trade.   Perhaps there is a hope that Good Fortune will ignite a spark in young people to take an interest in their family history and even a different side of American history that is often overlooked.  And we can’t ignore the fact that this story reiterates the importance of an education and what everyone can do with more knowledge.   Roots is more than 30 years old now – Good Fortune is new and may appeal more to the YA reader.

In the end, I am glad I read Good Fortune and would certainly recommend it to young readers. This is Ms. Carter’s first book and I know we haven’t heard the last of her – remember, she’s only 18.

More Patti

Can it be that I haven’t mentioned Patti Smith or Just Kids at all this week?  Let’s fix that.  Check out Part 2 of Patti’s interview with KCRW’s Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt:

Then check out my review of Just Kids.

On Plagiarism

I make my living as a university professor—a teacher who also writes books. This semester I’m teaching US History Since 1929, an upper-division course, one of my favorite classes. I like it in part because US History Since 1932 was the one class I took in college that made me want to go to grad school and become a history professor. (Perhaps more to the point, I decided that the professor who taught it, William E. Leuchtenburg, was who I wanted to be when I grew up. More about him in a moment.) I think I like teaching this course because it’s easier for me to imagine that there’s a student like the young me whom I need to inspire in this class than in my other classes.

I put a lot of time into thinking about the books I will assign, the writing assignments, what I’ll do in a given day’s class to stimulate discussion, etc. There is no relationship that I can decipher between the amount of time I put into a given task and how well the students react to it. Some things just work and some things don’t. I slave over some ideas that land with a thud, and I pull some out of my rear end that soar. If enough things work, we’re all happy. When they don’t work, everything can go downhill very, very fast.

Earlier this semester I assigned a book about the 1932 presidential election between Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It’s a good book and I thought the students might engage it because in retrospect the 1932 contest has so many parallels to the 2008 election. They found it a little dry, but I thought it would provide enough fodder for good discussions that even if they didn’t particularly care for it, everything would be OK. That’s what ended up happening. They all wrote their reaction papers and moved on.

Except for one student. I only made it through the first three sentences of her paper. The third sentence just sounded weird, so I typed it into google. Sure enough, she had lifted that sentence and 2 others from her introduction straight from an essay she found on the internet. That’s as cut-and-dry a case of plagiarism as you’ll ever see (when I looked closely at it, I even noticed that the parts she copied and pasted were in 11-point font, and the rest of the paragraph was in 12), so I gave her a 0 and didn’t bother to read the rest. But then that was the last thing I thought about that night, and it was the first thing I thought about the next morning. I was so mad about it I threw up while brushing my teeth.

I emailed the whole class and told them they had to upload their papers to turnitin.com, the site that uses plagiarism-detection software to bust cheaters. Meanwhile, I started having all these thoughts about what a failure I must be that someone would try to pull this on me. Why didn’t I explicitly tell the students that they couldn’t copy and paste their essays from internet sites that aren’t even any good in the first place? What kind of idiot must this person think I am that she thought she could get away with this? I can guarantee you that I spent 100 times as many thinking and worrying about this than the cheater did.

When the student finally ran her paper through turnitin, the software determined that she had plagiarized seven sections of her essay from two sources, which together comprised more than half of her paper. The second source, from which she pilfered an entire paragraph, was an online chapter of The FDR Years, a terrific collection of essays that I’ve assigned in previous iterations of this class. The FDR Years was written by William E. Leuchtenburg, the man who encouraged me to go to grad school and wrote my letters of recommendation.

I had to go to my class the next day and read them the fucking riot act about plagiarism. What I didn’t tell them was that if you plagiarize, I will fail you (and I will take it personally and I will take it 100 times more seriously than you will), but if you plagiarize my mentor, I will hate you. That day the atmosphere in class was as toxic as it could possibly have been. But the student realized soon thereafter that she could withdraw from the class without penalty from the university (because this was the first time she had been caught cheating, even though she’s a senior and I know damn well this is not the first time she’s done it), so she did so. Without her the class has been great. For whatever reason, I feel like I’m doing the best teaching I’ve ever done. It’s funny how quickly the dynamics of a class can turn on a dime.

I’ve reflected a lot over the past couple of weeks about who this student cheated and how. Herself and her family, obviously: her parents paid a lot of money for her to sit in this class for a month and a half and learn exactly nothing and receive zero credit for it. Her classmates, too, including one who timed the delivery of her third child for spring break so she could get her assignments in on schedule and get back to class with as little time lost as possible, and another who told me last week that he’s an Iraq War vet dealing with PTSD. They, of course, managed to turn in papers that they had written. She cheated me, but I guess I get paid in part to deal with that kind of disappointment. She cheated Professor Leuchtenburg; even though she didn’t exactly harm him materially, she stole from him the currency of his profession, his ideas and the way he expresses them.

I’ve thought about what it would feel like to have someone plagiarize from one of the books I’ve written. I’m strangely neutral about it (at least in the abstract; talk to me again if it happens in real life). It won’t be like they’re stealing from me, unless they’re publishing my words in another book without attribution, and even then, there’s so little money to be stolen from authors of academic books that “stealing” doesn’t seem like the right word to use. No, the plagiarizer steals the expectation we have as readers that what we’re reading is real, no matter the context of what we’re reading. The plagiarizer steals from us.

Read This

What’s that?  You haven’t read Zeitoun yet?  Of for the love of Pete.  Read this interview with Dave Eggers and get to reading the book already.  Geez…

Jewish Confederate Saved by Talking Parrot

Check out this article by BGB favorite Dara Horn for an amazing story that would strain credulity if it weren’t true.  Then check out our two (!) interviews with Dara Horn over there in the sidebar.

Heartbroken SWM Seeks Bookstore To Love

A year ago, I had my heart broken.

It’s easy to say, in retrospect, that there were signs the relationship was going to fail from the beginning. We spent too much time together from the very beginning, basing our foundation in dreams. When the fallout came, it was long and painful for more than just me-I wasn’t the only one hurt by the dissolution, and by far wasn’t nearly the one who suffered most. If anything, I got out easy, left with a handful of great memories to look back on fondly.

I am, of course, talking about when Wordsmiths Books closed in March 09.

The bookstore, which had made its home in downtown Decatur, GA (for which I’d served as Marketing, PR and events director since its inception, and had, with my friend/boss Zach, seen the project from birth to death)-had been a daily/hourly/to-the-minute part of my life, and the lives of others, for years. This isn’t about those others. It, like everything I write, is about me, and how I flew my book-weary (“weary”’s an easy word, here, “exhausted” is better, “totally damn over it” is infinitely more accurate) heart from Atlanta to New York closed off to the book industry entirely…and found true love.

Let’s be frank: when Wordsmiths closed, it sucked. IT. SUCKED. And it left a lot of people in tailspins. For me, I’d then seen the glitzy, glamorous side of publishing, but I’d also spent, at that point, way too much time nose-first in the filth of the book world and I was over it-over what I viewed as the big publishing houses’ failure to understand retail, and for most indie bookstores to understand that they need to…well, to try harder.

I was burnt out on galleys and grids and Barbara Walters’ stupid string cheese needs & her massive lack of book sales-all of it left me wanting to run as far away from publishing, from bookstores, from caring about an industry made around stupid ideas about monetizing dead trees and stupider ideas to monetize electronic dead tress, as possible.  This would prove to be difficult, partially because my life plans post-Wordsmiths involved moving to New York and partially because the majority of contacts I’d amassed in the years I’d had my head up publishing’s colon were all, well, in the book biz.

But I was damned if I was going to give my heart to books ever again.

Then I came across a little bookstore called Word in a little area of Brooklyn called Greenpoint that reminded me of Decatur, GA done properly, and everything changed.

Like the great poet Kelly Clarkson once said, here’s the thing: we started out friends. The store’s manager Stephanie, basically the world’s most famous bookseller thanks to Twitter-also a friend of mine, also because of Twitter, bless you Twitter-forwarded me a position that had opened doing events at Word right when I was moving. Timing didn’t really work out, but in the process I became intrigued by the bookstore that I didn’t really know.  My first free day in New York, I Hopstop’d my way to Greenpoint. This was way more difficult than it might seem. Queens, where I was living (and still live now), to Brooklyn is a three-train trek, one that I’ve become quite accustomed to now but then? Less than a week into New York, three trains was NOT something I was prepared to navigate. Also, as anyone who knows me can attest, my sense of direction is…nonexistent.

New York requires a lot of its residents in terms of directional navigation.

Three Trains.

Dear Gentle Readers, I got lost on the G train.

As such, hours after I’d left, I arrived in Greenpoint-shaken, sure, but relatively unmolested (HEY Y’ALL THE SUBWAY’S NOT THAT SCARY!).

I came with my heart closed to Word Brooklyn, the bookstore with the name shockingly only two syllables away from that of the bookstore I’d recently seen shuttered. A small corner bookstore in a hip neighborhood not gunning for hipster cache (see: only one Bret Easton Ellis book stocked, which should be a total deal-breaker for me, no Joanna Newsom on the stereo in-store), basically just being itself: trade paperback fiction-focused with a small selection of new-release hardcovers, thoughtfully-stocked sections, a small and smart staff…
Yeah, love was inevitable, wasn’t it?

And it happened, it did-the store’s thoughtful, purposeful existence, the incredible events that have found me, amongst other things, gushing to Kate Christensen about how hot her sex writing gets me, the staff that takes a constant interest in not just hot books, or just important books, but in books. If the Word staff are to be believed, books are the stuff of dreams-a sentiment that a year ago would’ve had me spit on the ground and say “bah, humbug”, but right now? Right now, yeah, I can buy into that, thanks to the friends I’ve made at Word.

A good independent bookstore should do more than sit quietly-it should foster community. Word does just that-beyond book-related events, they have a basketball team, a group Sunday run, cooking events, this awesome date night that involved classic cocktails. Also, they helped me find the perfect Valentines card.

Oh…oh, yeah, about that… I found love, too, on their bookstore matchmaking board, but you can read about that elsewhere.

I may give off the general perception of being callous if not apathetic, but it’s been through the Word Brooklyn community that I’ve come back to seeing the publishing world with new, fresh eyes-eyes that don’t see how much money’s wasted on Stephanie Meyer but rather what falling face-first into a great book, like Emily Mandel’s Last Night In Montreal, can do to alter life permanently. Like the Grinch when whatever it was that made his heart grow ended up happening…yeah. You can read this however you want.

Word Brooklyn celebrates its third anniversary this month, the same month that will mark a year since my last bookstore community, Wordsmiths Books, shut its doors for the last time.  In that time, I’ve made and lost friends, fallen in and out of love, and read books both great and horrible.  I thought I’d given up on being giddy about publishing…and that, too, has changed. And, ok, maybe Word’s not responsible for all of that (as I am, ya know, given to over-romanticizing), but it’s amazing the little part of your heart, and your life that can be filled by the perfect bookstore.

Hey, Word? Thanks for being just that. I love you, you complete me, etc etc. And happy birthday.
Also what’s up I’m your mayor on 4Square.

Linky Links

I geeked out late last night listening to Michael Silberblatt interviewing Patti Smith on KCRW’s Bookworm.  And it’s only Part 1!  Listen to it. It’s at least twice as good as the interview with Terry Gross that kept me in my car a few weeks ago.  Fun fact: The Devil’s opening in Sympathy for the Devil, “Please allow me to introduce myself…”, is from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.  I’m not going to shut up about Just Kids anytime soon. (My review)

Speaking of which, I was enthusing about the book on Monday night with some tasteful and erudite dinner companions who let me know that PBS aired a documentary about Patti Smith, Dream of Life, a few months back.  I had no idea, as is usually the case.

The New York Review of Books examines Publishing: The Revolutionary Future. (Thanks, Dr J.)

The Count goes medieval on Edward.

In the New York Times: The Math of Publishing Meets the e-Book.

To see the new math in action, check out what the new math means for friend-of-the-blog Ben Tanzer.

Check out this comic about why DRM means that checking out an audio book at the library is a simple  22 -step process, and you may agree with this comic that suggests that DRM creates the very thing it tries to control – piracy.

Kathryn Borel Jr Uncorks in the ATL

Atlantans, mark your calendars.  There’s a very cool reading in town this weekend that you’ll want to check out. Kathryn Borel will be reading from her memoir Corked on Saturday evening at the Savi Urban Market in Inman Park. There will be free wine.  Free. Wine. And I trust Savi to bring the good stuff.

I first became aware of Borel when Boing Boing posted a video of the author demonstrating how to open a bottle of champagne with a sword.  That’s a skill you can use.  They posted another Borel video titled How to Sample Wine Without Looking Like a Clown.  That one’s fairly self-explanatory.

I’ve been meaning to check out Corked ever since. I was alerted to Borel’s upcoming Atlanta visit by Russ Marshalek, sometime BGB contributor and the hardest working man in books.  Russ sent an impassioned e-mail to his Atlanta friends and associates urging us all to drop everything and check out Borel’s reading.   Well, I’ll let Russ speak for himself…

(Dramatic interpretation of an an original e-mail by Russ M created by the Baby Got Books Thespian Society.)

The reading is at 5PM on Saturday March 6. A Capella Books will be there to hook you up with a copy.  Here are the directions.  You remembered the part about the free wine, right?

Let the Great World Spin

True Story:  I was visiting the eye doctor a few weeks back, and I needed to get my pupils dilated to finish the examination.  It takes about half an hour for the drops to take effect, so I was sent out to the waiting room.  Rather than look at old copies of Redbook, I walked two doors down to the local indie bookseller to browse for a while. I came across Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin on the shelf and picked it up.  For reasons unknown to me, I was dead set against  this novel despite it being a National Book Award winner and having garnered near universal rave reviews. With my vision starting to blur, I read all of the accolades on the first six(!) pages inside the cover (and then more on the back cover) and remained unconvinced.  Then I noticed the epigraph, which is a quote from Aleksandr Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (read my review):

All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere.  That is what the world is.

That passage is underlined in my copy of Hemon’s book, and it finally sealed the deal for me.  Then my eyes lost focus with the bonus of my retinas searing from the sunlight streaming through the bookstore windows. It was time to throw some bills on the counter and leave with my purchase.

The prologue of the novel is a brief passage recounting Phillipe Petit’s walk on a high wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center in the 1970s.  That’s him depicted as a stick figure on the paperback version of the book.  From there the novel bounces between the stories of various people of wildly disparate backgrounds living in New York City at the time.  Each of the strands has a connection to Petit’s almost incomprehensible stunt.  Eventually the various strands connect in entirely believable but totally random ways.  Like life.

The high wire act that McCann pulls off with this novel is writing about the September 11 terrorist attacks while barely touching on the act itself.  Invoking the image of the towers before their completion and Petit’s incredible act of artistry is enough for the reader to fill in the blanks for themselves.  The last few chapters of the book hopscotch over the eighties,  nineties, and 2001 directly to present day.

Back to that Hemon quote epigraph.  A central theme of this novel is certainly the richness of life and the many unseen connections that we all have with one another.  The world is made up of people that we will never know and possibilities for ourselves that we may never fully realize or even recognize.  The challenge that McCann lays before us is to find the connections within the breadth of humanity we encounter  in our everyday lives and to look within ourselves for the lives that we could/should be living.  If that’s not as powerful a “message”  as you are likely to encounter in contemporary fiction, I don’t know what is.  If you’ve waited as long as I did to get on board the Let the Great World Spin bandwagon, do it now.