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.

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.

Just Kids

I was driving home a few weeks ago and heard Terry Gross interview Patti Smith about her new memoir Just Kids.  It was one of those interviews where you sit in your car and keep listening well after you get where you’re going.   I picked up the book days later and dove in as soon as I could.  It was the right choice.

Just Kids focuses on the unusual and enduring relationship that Smith had with photographer/artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith, at the age of 20, had set off to New York City to try to make her mark as an artist and poet.  On her first day there, she met Mapplethorpe, himself a struggling artist.  The two eventually developed a romantic relationship and move in to a Brooklyn hovel together.   It’s the Summer of Love, but neither is much into the hippie thing.  They are each preparing for the Next Thing.

Their early New York days are the archetypal starving artist experience: constant struggling to pay rent, going hungry when money is tight (and money is always tight), getting lice from seedy lodgings, etc.  And if that sounds romantic to you, consider this:  Patti’s first hint that her soul mate might be gay surfaces when Robert begins street hustling to help pay the rent.  Even as Smith describes her dismay at seeing her boyfriend go out into the night, she can sense your judgement and offers simply:

Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?

Difficult as it was, Patti and Robert make unlikely and important connections within the art world almost from the very beginning of their life in New York. For example, Patti first met Beat poet Allen Ginsberg when he bought her a sandwich in a Manhattan automat. It turns out that Ginsberg thought that she was a very pretty young boy. Ginsberg would later champion Smith’s poetry and he provided introductions to Gregory Corso and William S. Buroughs.  Corso teaches Patti how to avoid giving boring poetry readings, and Burroughs is among the earliest attendees of Patti’s rock shows at the nascent CBGB’s.  She meets Hendrix and provides relationship advice to Janice Joplin.  After the romantic side of her relationship with Robert runs its course, Patti dates Jim Carroll, Sam Shepard, some guy in the Blue Oyster Cult, and Fred “Sonic” Smith (who she would eventually marry).

The young couple eventually found themselves residents of the famed Chelsea Hotel, all but sealing their fates as artists of renown.  Patti became famous first.  Just as their career trajectories were primed to seriously take off, the pair landed their first and only joint art show.   Patti describes the show:

We chose to present a body of work that emphasized our relationship: artist and muse, a role that for both of us was interchangeable.

And that’s the point of this book.  This is the story of a relationship that was greater that the sum of its parts.  Neither would have realized their artistic potential had the other not been in their life.   Each provided what the other needed in support and nurturing companionship to get through the crisis at hand and strive to create another day.

The book also provides a fascinating look at tortured process through which art comes into the world.  Smith did not set out to be a rock star and Mapplethorpe had less than no interest in the field of photography.  Robert Mapplethorpe took the now iconic cover picture for Patti’s first album (listen to the Fresh Air interview to find out why the record company hated the picture). From there he went on to become a controversial giant of the art world.  The books ends after Robert’s death with AIDS, as it must.  Smith promised Mapplethorpe that one day she would write their story. She has made good on that promise, and it is quite a story.  This is a beautifully written book that is sure to top many year-end “best of” lists.  It will be on mine.

Post Script:

As a fortuitous accident, I read Just Kids not long after finishing Helen Weaver’s The Awakener (see my review), a memoir of Weaver’s relationship with Jack Kerouac.  Between the two books, a picture emerges of the avant garde art scene in New York from the 1950s through the 1980s.  A direct line between the Beats and the punk scene that would emerge from CBGB’s can be clearly drawn, which was a revelation for me.  The two memoirs have notable similarities. Both authors write about transformative relationships with men who certainly had their demons.  Each woman survives their subject’s death – deaths that were caused to an extent by “lifestyle” choices.  Both credit/blame their subject’s Catholicism for important aspects of their personalities.  It’s an interesting comparison and progression through the decades.

But wait, there’s more:

Clearly this a book that begs to have some music to accompany the review. Let’s start with my favorite Patti Smith song that’s not Because the Night.

Patti Smith – Dancing Barefoot

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I have no idea why that’s my favorite.  It just is.  Another of my favorite Patti Smith recordings is her backing vocals on the R.E.M. song E-bow the Letter.  Her spooky and ethereal keening is so emotive, it kills me every time.  I saw Patti Smith join R.E.M. for a live performance of the song just last year.  If I had any hair, it would have stood on end.

And some songs by singers that were clearly influenced by Patti Smith (according to me):

PJ Harvey – Good Fortune

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Pretenders – The Adultress

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Cat Power – Speak for Me

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Video of 10,000 Maniacs covering Because the Night, a Smith/Sringsteen collaboration

And lastly, I include Sympathy for the Devil since it was mentioned specifically in the text. Smith remembers that Mapplethorpe was completely taken with the song on first listen and seemed to relate to it as he was beginning to explore what he considered the darker side of himself.

Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil (Neptunes Remix)

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And if you need more, you can tune into the Just Kids station that I set up on Pandora to complete my Patti Smith immersion experience.

10 Rules for Writing Fiction

The Guardian collects writing tips from an all-star gallery of authors:

Part 1

Part 2

A few highlights:

• Philip Pullman – “My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.”
• Colm Toibin – “Stay in your mental pyjamas all day” and “No going to London.”
• Roddy Doyle – “Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.”
• Anne Enright – “The first 12 years are the worst.”
• Jonathan Franzen – “ Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.”
• Neil Gaiman – “Write.”

Don’t Call it Filler

The 2010 Atlanta Open Orthographic Meet is this Saturday!  If you are local, you must go. It’s amazingly awesome.

The Obamas stock White House library with socialist tomes. J’accuse!  What?  Oh…oops. Update: Read Carolyn Kellog’s more thoughtful take on this ridiculous story.

And from the Library of the Absurd: Queen Victoria – Demon Hunter

Cory Doctorow christens this year’s Sci-Fi “it” novel.

Before you plunk down your hard-earned on an e-book, know what you’re buying with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s e-book checklist.

Ripped from today’s headlines, Sherman Alexie’s Ode to My Sharona:

BGB Interview with Stuart Archer Cohen

Stuart Archer Cohen is the author of three novels, Invisible World, The Stone Angels, and his latest – The Army of the Republic.  Cohen lives in Juneau, Alaska and is the owner of a company that deal sin the trade of wool, silk, alpaca and cashmere in Asia and South America. I posted a review of  The Army of the Republic yesterday.  I noted that the novel stuck with me and raised all sorts of questions.  I am thankful that Mr. Cohen generously agreed to answer my burning questions.

Baby Got Books interview with Stuart Archer Cohen, author of The Army of the Republic

Baby Got Books: Army of the Republic features the activities of several citizen groups that are in opposition to a repressive and powerful Right wing presidential administration. Their responses to the perceived injustices range from protests/direct actions and violent “terror”. Were there particular real world events that inspired you to write this novel?

Stuart Archer Cohen: I was inspired by two things. One was a long-standing interest in guerrilla movements and revolutions in South America. I’ve been doing business there since 1984, and I was intrigued, on a human level, how a bunch of university students and young professionals could develop the will and the skills to take on a corrupt state. I was also acutely tuned in to how the state responds to that.

With the 2nd Bush Administration, I saw our government becoming more and more like Latin America in its corruption, cronyism and absolute impunity. Also, the Right has taken on an increasingly war-flavored rhetoric and stance, where the goal is now to utterly destroy the “Left” and its institutions by any means necessary. I see this as a recipe for political violence, and that made me want to tackle the subject of political violence in a United States setting.

BGB: The recent non-fiction work It Could Happen Here: America on the Brink by Bruce Judson says that a potential political uprising could occur here that would be driven by financial inequality. The events in your book that lead to protests and sometimes violent political action include mass privatization of water supplies, ballot irregularities, domestic use of of a Blackwater/Xe-type contractor for police actions, and the abuse of courts. Are the issues that you raised in your novel the specific powder kegs that you see on our horizon? Or were they more hypothetical?

SAC: I haven’t read that book so I can’t comment on it. The things you mentioned above are all elements that can engender a violent reaction, as they are in the book.

However, I think the real danger is not those symptoms, or even inequality, but rather the constant, dehumanizing propaganda that is being regularly pumped into American society. The non-communist world has never had such a sophisticated, wide-ranging and cohesive propaganda campaign directed against its own people. Psy-ops techniques that we formerly used on enemy countries are now being used against the American people by the Right. The message of Fox News and other hate-speakers is that Liberals are subhuman weaklings, that Left-of-Cheney politicians are liars and traitors, and that we are engaged in a civil war of Right vs.Left, Patriots vs Elected Government. That’s the real powder keg, both because it stokes Right Wing anger, and, more importantly, because it sets up a future Right Wing administration to ruthlessly, violently repress any opposition.

BGB: I read that your research for this novel included conversations with 60’s activists, CIA operatives, and current student protesters. How did you go about locating these people and were they generally open to having frank conversations with you?

SAC: I locate sources in various ways. The CIA people I met through martial arts connections. It’s something that I have in common with these men and it establishes a certain bond beyond politics. The Argentine revolutionaries I tracked down through introductions provided by friends and other sources. Some people I contacted simply as names I saw on the Internet. I hit some dead-ends, too. I’m not so big and famous that everyone is eager to talk to me.

My experience is that people will answer as honestly as they can if you are non-judgmental and they know you won’t embarrass them. Sometimes, it’s what they don’t say that’s most revealing.

BGB: “The Inside Story” on your web site mentions that you were once held under suspicion by the Salvadoran military. How did that experience inform the events that unfold in AOR?

SAC: That experience really enlightened me as to how decent people become caught up in an evil machine. Things came out fine for me in El Salvador because I had an American passport, but Salvadorans picked up there who were equally as innocent as me met some terrible ends.

BGB: The types of reading that you did as research for this novel, books on “how to form a new identity, improvised explosives, surveillance and bodyguarding”, would seem to send up numerous red flags under the “Patriot Act”. Were you concerned at all about ending up a “No Fly” list or experiencing other negative consequences as a result of researching/writing this novel?

SAC: I didn’t really worry about that, although that distributor where I got most of those books was under constant pressure from DHS to surrender his client list. My feeling has always been that I’m just a novelist writing fiction. People like community organizers, lawyers and investigative journalists are a much greater threat to a regime than someone working in a dying field of the entertainment business. When I see those people start to go down, I’ll worry about myself.

BGB: In the book you present a fictional right-wing reactionary television news host called The Hammer who seems all too believable. In the novel, your protagonist Joshua Sands has a discussion about the power of pictures over words, and The Hammer seems to embody the power of the “picture” side of that argument. Why did you elect to tell this story in words (instead of pictures) and what does that say about where you weigh in on the relative merits of each?

SAC: To tell a story in pictures, you need a movie studio, and I don’t happen to have one of those at hand. Also, making a movie is, above all else, a major business venture, and a book like mine, where urban guerrillas are, to some degree, the heroes, isn’t necessarily a good risk for a backer. I did get a film offer on this book but I turned it down because I didn’t like the direction they wanted to go with it to make it more mainstream. It was probably a stupid decision on my part.

That being said, words can convey ideas in a way that pictures simply can’t. That’s why movies are always shallower than the books they are based on. I was an Art History major, so I know well that pictures can be beautiful, and they can convey a lot of emotion and spirituality. But they are in no way worth a thousand words, not if the words are any good. If you want to illuminate deeper, complex truths, there’s no substitute.

My two previous books were optioned, and at one time I thought I might want to write screenplays of my books, both because of the money and because movies are just so damned large. You think you’re large by extension, but you’re really not. You’re still just a guy sitting in an empty room, so you might as well be writing what you want, and not have to take notes from some producer or see your work covered over by some re-write man.

BGB: While reading your novel I had Reagan-era punk songs going through my mind, songs that were relatively straight forward in their left wing militancy. I kept waiting for these kinds of songs and other artistic responses to surface during the Bush 2 presidency, but for the most part they never did. Do you think that Sept. 11 effectively killed what I’ll call the “romanticism” of anti-government action and rhetoric during that period?

SAC: I think Reagan’s 1984-style propaganda was new, so maybe people reacted to it more strongly. I think by the time Bush 2 came around, the Right had massively amplified and perfected its propaganda machine and 9/11 had also enabled them to up the ante. Rove and his gang made it pretty clear that anyone who didn’t support them internationally was an enemy, and domestically, a traitor. I think this was very successful in intimidating a lot of people in and out of government. Look what happened to the Dixie Chicks for making a few comments on stage in London: they were vilified and their records were burned publicly. Artists see that and they don’t want to go down that road. Also, the propaganda machine made the troops sacrosanct, and, by extension, the wars, so it was just uncool for artists to question government policy.

There was protest music, such as Green Day’s American Idiot, but I think people were worn-down by the endless barrage of garbage that was being dumped every day by the propaganda infrastructure. That’s one reason they do it. After a while, I think it’s hard to keep reacting.

I truly don’t understand why no other novelists have taken on the issues that I did in The Army of the Republic. My book was rejected more than forty times by publishers: so maybe all those other writers were right! The only books I’ve seen dealing with the possibility of political violence are racist garbage like The Turner Diaries, or Right-Wing heroic fantasies written by ex-military guys, where heroic gun-owners fight an oppressive Federal Government.

BGB: Does the rise of right wing protests and direct actions (i.e., Tea Parties, attempted bugging of Sen. Landrieu’s office, etc.) surprise you?

SAC: I’m not surprised, because dissatisfaction among that element of the Right was pretty high even in the waning days of the Bush Administration. Those people are doubly angry, both because of the drift of the country and because their illusions about the Republicans have crumbled. Unfortunately, they are so crippled by their own ingrained hatreds, as well as a completely fanciful view of how the world really works, that they’re unable to express their very justified anger in a positive way. Instead, they just want to dig the hole even deeper. They don’t even realize it’s a hole.

I thought it was interesting that the Corporates used these people to harass and intimidate the Democrats during the health care debate, disrupting Town Hall meetings, etc. The Tea Party people would say that it’s not Corporates who are organizing them, but let’s not forget that the main platforms for Tea Party ideologues (Beck, Limbaugh, Palin) are Corporate platforms like Fox News and Clear Channel. So, yes, to a great degree, this already is a Corporate-backed movement.

If the Tea Party people succeed in gaining real or ideological control of the Republican Party, and the Corporates decide to fully back them, we will be on the fast track to authoritarian government and political violence.

I actually would like to see the Left working on organizing them, because they have the potential to help change this country for the better.

BGB: As an author whose work was recently caught up in the Macmillan/Amazon feud with the result of having your book become suddenly unavailable from the world’s largest bookseller, what do you make of the situation?

SAC: I don’t know all the ins- and outs: it has something to do with electronic rights and e-books. My general impression of Amazon is that they’re always looking for a new way to pick the publishers’ pockets, and I guess the authors just got in the way this time. My advice is: try www.Powells.com or your local bookstore.

Need more? Check out Cohen’s blog post about the Revolution from the Right.

The Army of the Republic

The first thing that struck me about Stuart Archer Cohen’s The Army of the Republic was it’s Banksy-like artwork.  The image captures a man in what appears to be a politically motivated act about to launch himself along a violent arc.  As it turns out, it is an image that perfectly captures the essence of the words within its cover.   The conflict between words and images turns out to be a central theme of the novel, so it’s an interesting choice on that level as well.

The Army of the Republic takes place in a dystopian United States that some would say didn’t seem all that unlikely just a few years ago.   A right-wing administration operates under its own interpretation of the laws of the land.  A  judiciary stacked by the ruling party seems unlikely to enforce laws detrimental to the Administration.  Questionable electronic voting returns threaten to eliminate the power of the ballot.   National security interests serve as a smoke screen to all manner of shady dealings.   The use of mercenary forces (think Blackwater/Xe) for hire by both the government and corporations ensures that the non-governmental security forces are effectively answerable to no one.  Right-wing talk shows serve as an echo chamber for the Administration, reinforcing their message through repetition of sound bites and artfully edited images

Lando (not his real name) is a young a young idealist who has decided that enough is enough.  He belongs to a secretive organization known as The Army of the Republic (AOR).  The AOR aims to disrupt the information flow of the Administration and highlight the injustices of their corporate cronies by conducting high profile direct actions, which have recently come to include violence, destruction, and general mayhem.  In other words, the AOR wants their own images on the evening news to counteract the story lines of corporate news services and the Administration’s talking points.  As the AOR’s campaign begins to ramp up, support for their tactics and their cause begins to grow, and a showdown with the administration seems imminent.  However, Lando’s view of the world (and justice) as black and white becomes clouded when his parents become engaged in the looming conflict – on opposite sides.

A fascinating part of this novel is the glimpse into the operations of how extreme shadow organizations of the left and right are organized and operate.  Cohen also does an excellent job of highlighting the many ways that news and information become distorted on its way to consumers.  (In a brief comic note, the news coverage of the action of a riot is called by what amounts to a play-by-play man and a color guy.) It’s enough to make a reader extremely paranoid.  The novel stuck with me, and I had lots of questions floating around my head.  Luckily the author was  gracious enough to submit himself to an interview by the likes of us. Come back tomorrow to check out my interview with Stuart Archer Cohen.

Audio Bonus: The whole time I was reading this book, the soundtrack in my mind was playing the political punk songs of the late seventies and early eighties – songs by bands like The Clash, Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, etc.  But the song that seemed to get at the ethos of this novel the most was this one:

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Red Rockers – Guns of Revolution

Friday Links

Have teenage vampire romance novels finally run their course?  From the looks of this, at least one YA author hopes so…

In other news, an Emory University professor with an awesome/incredibly unlikely last name has made an incredible Faulkner discovery.

This item at McSweeney’s notes the passing of Timothy McSweeney, explains who he was, and why their literary journal was called Timothy McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern.

Comics Round Up

Somehow, I’ve found myself well into February still writing about books that I’ve read in 2009.  Maybe I should just let it go, but for some reason I’ve become obsessive about writing about ALL OF THE BOOKS that I read over the year.  So to satisfy my OCD, I’ll try to wrap up last year in as few posts as possible.  I was particularly slack in writing about the comics that I read last year for two reasons: (1) my approach to comics is completely haphazard, i.e., I pick things up that look interesting without much forethought and (2) I don’t know how to write about them.  Here, allow me to  highlight item number “2″ for you:

Fables 1 and 2

This series came highly recommended to me from various comics aficionados.  The series kicks off with Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile. We learn that the characters of our childhood fables are real and they have been driven from their world into ours.  Unsurprisingly, they live among us in New York City where they are able to keep a mostly low profile. Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf, etc. are real people with very human shortcomings.  It seems those fables were an idealized version of these troubled souls.  In Fables Vol. 2: Animal Farm, we learn that the non-human fables (like the three little pigs) are forced to live apart from their human counterparts on a farm up-state.  This doesn’t sit well some of the animals.  And that’s as far as I’ve gotten.  The day that I went to buy the next edition, my comics dealer was sold out of Volume 3’s.  I haven’t felt the need to overcome this surmountable obstacle.  This is one of the problems that I have with comics series: how long do you continue on the potential of a story line before you call it quits?

Cecil and Jordan in New York

Cecil and Jordan in New York was a comic of a completely different stripe.   Think of a collection of wry short stories about life for twenty-somethings in NYC and you’ll have a good idea of what Cecil and Jordan offers.  These are fresh and interesting stories that somehow were meant to be told with the assistance of pictures.  My only complaint is that the slim volume is over too soon. I picked this one up while visiting the bookstore of the comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly.  If you find yourself in Montreal, don’t miss this store for any reason.

A Drifting Life

A Drifting Life is the comics memoir of “the godfather of Japanese alternative comics”, Yoshihiro Tatsumi.  It is also a doorstop weighing in at 800+ pages.  This is a fascinating look at a man and comics movement that I knew absolutely nothing about.  It also provides an intriguing glimpse of daily life in post-war Japan and its relationship with the US. One of my issues with comics in general is that the medium tends to set limits on the length of the stories that can be told.  However, A Drifting Life, decades in the making, provides a near immersion experience.  It took me a week or so to make my way through this excellent book.  It’s staggering to think about how many hours of work must have gone into this.

Exit Wounds

I’d say that of the comics discussed in this round-up, Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan was my favorite.  A terrorist’s bomb in a busy market brings a strange young woman into the life of Koby Franco.   Franco’s long-estranged father may have been among the victims of the blast, and the young Russian woman at this door says that she was his lover.  The officials say that Koby’s father was killed in the blast, but his girlfriend has her doubts.  The unlikely pair set off to learn the truth, and each brings their own expectations and baggage to the search.  Exit Wounds masterfully depicts modern Israeli life while telling an intriguing story.  Thumbs up.  I picked this one up at Drawn and Quarterly, too.

Nemi (Volume 3)

Nemi is the anti-Cathy.  She is a goth.  She’s Norwegian.  She drinks and swears.  And she’s not putting up with any crap from you.  Nemi is presented primarily in the traditional 4-panel style of the funny pages.  I have not read Volumes 1 or 2 of Nemi’s adventures, but Volume 3 is charming and funny in that sassy, goth, Scandinavian kind of way.

See? All over the map.  I have been comic-less so far in 2010. If you’ve got some titles that I should check out, leave your suggestions in the comments.

Friday Short List

Please allow me to draw your attention to this:  Book news and social netowking site Book Army has named BGB one of the Top 50 Book Blogs (we come in at #9).

Novelist Scott Westerfeld explains the Amazon vs. Macmillan Kindle dust-up.

There’s a lot to love about this St Vincent video. The scene takes place inside a local feminist bookstore and the staff includes SNL’s Fred Armison and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein. St Vincent held the release party for her first album at the now shuttered Wordsmiths Books in Decatur. (Moment of silence please.) I can say that Wordsmiths’ events guy Russ M ran a little tighter ship than this bookstore.

St. Vincent – “Laughing With A Mouth Of Blood”

st. vincent | MySpace Music Videos

Adventures in e-Books

I follow the latest news and gossip on e-books and the “future of books” obsessively.  If books are really doomed, then maybe I need to start blogging about model trains are something.  Over the last month or so, the word from e-book land has demonstrated that no one really knows what the heck is going on.   Certainly the book industry has no idea which way is up.  They should start an e-book reality show.  I’d watch.

Some highlights:

According to Amazon, Amazon sold more e-books than “real” books this past Christmas.  Jessamyn West says:

1. they’re creating a distinction that isn’t necessary, between ebooks and paper books
2. at the same time they’re obscuring the very very real distinction that exists and is terribly important: you do not own an ebook, you license or lease it

Carolyn Kellogg notes: and by sold they mean allowed to be downloaded for free

Readers: “We’re not dead yet!”  Study shows an increase in reading since 1980.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) destroys books, says Cory Doctorow:

“anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself.’ Doctorow says that for centuries, copyright has acknowledged that sacred connection between readers and their books and that when you own a book ‘it’s yours to give away, yours to keep, yours to license or to borrow, to inherit or to be included in your safe for your children’ and that ‘the most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned.’” (read the speech for some awesomeness)

The e-book could save the day for publishers’ backlist, but “It seems at times that the publishing industry is just muddling along, hoping for the best. One can’t help but wonder if the industry, dazzled by the technological potential of e-readers, has lost sight of the most important thing: how readers actually interact with books.”

Tech author sells books without DRM, sells more books.

According to a company that wants to sell book companies digital protections and services, pirated copies of books “added up to a potential loss overall to the book publishing industry of $2.75 to $3 billion” last year.  Does that sound even remotely believable?

Kindle users are up in arms about the delayed release of some titles as e-books.

The Guardian asks: Is it really doomsday for books?

Amazon sells books without restrictive DRM, but are they any freer (i.e., less restrictive)?

Counter to every argument you’ve ever heard against it, technical book publisher O’Reilly drops restrictive DRM, sales go up 104%.  Hmmm, this seems to be a trend…..

In the NYT: How to create a Kindle bestseller?  Charge $0.

Speaking or pirating books, you know who the worst pirates are?  Librarians!

Calling themselves “Librarians”, they talk about promoting literacy, education, culture and economic development, which are, of course, code words for the use and dispersal of intellectual property. They readily admit to their activities, and rationalize them because they’re perfectly legal in the US, at least for now.

Cory Doctorow wakes up to find that his books are no longer available on Amazon (as an e-book or old school “pages” version) due to the first volleys in a pricing skirmish between Amazon and publishing giant  Macmillan.

Macmillan’s CEO issues a statement.

Understatement?:  Steve Jobs says publishers are not happy with Amazon.

Why the iPad will save publishing.

Why it won’t.

And this just in: Amazon feels that they will eventually give in to Macmillan “because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles.”  Do you even hear yourself Amazon?

Update: Pee-Wee gets an iPad and puts it to use…

Salinger is dead. Happy now?

Frank Portman, author of King Dork, which features a defaced Catcher in the Rye as its cover, answers the question at The Huffington Post. (Thanks, Kathleen!)

Peace, JD Salinger.

For a man who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, the hoopla around JD Salinger’s death would surely frustrate the reclusive author.  A local DJ here in Atlanta not known for his love of literature was breathless wondering aloud if now – finally! – unfinished manuscripts would be discovered in his home and published.  If only he had died sooner! Groannnn…

Best of all the million headlines so far: Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger.

BGB Interview with Michael FitzGerald

Yesterday I glowlingy reviewed Michael FitzGerald’s excellent debut novel, Radiant Days.   The author graciously consented to subject himself for a little Q&A from the likes of us, which will endear him to us forever.  Onward…

Baby Got Books interview with Michael FitzGerald, author of Radiant Days

Baby Got Books: I found out about your book over beers with an author that I met through my blog. I read your book, loved it, and then was able to meet up with you via Goodreads. What’s your take on this crazy web 2.0 world? It must be nice to have these avenues for getting word out about your book and to interact directly with readers, but does it take away from time that you would have spent writing if a global corporate marketing department was doing the work for you?

Michael FitzGerald: Many cool things happened with the book because of these avenues, but communicating with people on Goodreads, while somewhat rewarding, just sort of wasn’t writing. As it’s been said, the web is a 2-inch deep ocean, going on in all directions indefinitely, but nothing really under the surface. I guess to extend that flimsy metaphor: marketing your book on the internet is like wading through this massive puddle. No real danger, but not a rewarding as swimming across something big and deep.

Sort of along these line… my own process with this book…I’m not connected to any sort of writing community or the publishing world in any real way. I don’t teach regularly. (I’m a software developer to pay the bills—although I was laid off last Friday!) I had two boys under the age of 3 when the book came out. So I really had no idea what I should be doing for promotion. The best I could come up with is to treat it like writing, which is to just show up. My writing process—if you could call it that—is to wake early and write for 2-3 hours before my day job. When the book came out, I did the same thing with promotion. Just made sure I spent 30 minutes every day doing something, anything, toward getting it read. The Web 2.0 world certainly made this easier to do from Boise, ID than it would have been 5 or 10 years earlier.

BGB: The reviews that I’ve seen for your book focus on Anthony, your protagonist, as a prototype of the disconnected American youth living abroad. Yet by and large the European characters seem to be as morally bankrupt, if not more so, than Anthony (perhaps for different reasons). Do you think that this emotional disconnection among young people is just part of the modern condition?

MF: I did when I was in my 20s, when most of the book was written. Now I think it’s just how we are in our 20s. And the European characters were a bit extreme… they were forged by war or 50 years of Communism.

On a personal level—and I think each of us has some distinct thing like this that we use—but I had a strict Catholic upbringing. All-boys Benedictine uniform-wearing boarding school. And while in that structured environment, I experienced all the normal stuff high school kids do: a bit too much LSD, awkward desperate attempts at sex, humiliating social life. But because the Catholic part was so unbending, there was a feeling that once the rules have been broken, just get hurly-burly. You’re going to hell anyway, etc… It all felt very dramatic but cool, since we were in bowties.

BGB: I read Radiant Days after reading “genius grant”-winner Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project and couldn’t help but notice that the two books work well together as companion pieces. In Hemon’s book, a young Bosnian finds himself disconnected and adrift in the US. (Some literature class somewhere will be assigned both books.) I’ve read an interview where you were quoted as saying that you have read all of Hemon’s work. Do you know if Hemon has read your book? Is your genius grant on its way?

MF: Yeah, Hemon is so amazing. I read The Question of Bruno just as I’d finished the first draft of Radiant Day and immediately felt like a fraud. I don’t know if he’s read it. I think my ears would fall off.

BGB: Marsh, the British war correspondent, was an especially interesting character. He was one of the few people that seemed to have some purpose (and a real job) in his life and there are hints in the book that suggest that his aloof attitude may have been a front to some extent. In many ways he seems out of place with the motley group in Bucharest. I kept wondering what he was doing with those people. (There’s a question here somewhere – I’ll go with this:) Does the expatriot scene lend itself to this type of strange bedfellow scenario?

MF: Yes and no. Common language, especially someplace like Hungary where expats are pretty isolated from the natives, creates bonds between people that wouldn’t normally exist. But at the same time, the young journalists I know tend to be game for anything. Marsh was accomplished, but he was also just sort of finding his way. He was educated, but he really couldn’t drive a car. And there’s a tradition of witty Brits who have little utility outside cocktail conversation.

I don’t how I feel about revealing this… but Marsh is based on two close friends, both journalists. He’ll vigorously deny this, but Owen Matthews was a main inspiration for Marsh. (Read his Amazon review.) He’s brilliant and a lot of fun. He’s presently the Moscow bureau chief for Newsweek and the author of the astonishing, Stalin’s Children. The other is Charlie Graeber, who writes for Wired, National Geographic’s Adventure, and others. He has a book coming out about the compliance of New Jersey hospitals with a serial killer nurse. He’s a dear friend.

BGB: It is unclear from Anthony’s account whether Anthony’s “girlfriend” Gisela’s activities in Hungary and Croatia were on the level, and he may not have cared one way or the other. Did you purposely keep her actions vague to keep Anthony on the hook for his apparent lack of concern?

MF: I’d like to say there was something purposeful behind this. But mostly I just felt it was true. I dated Hungarians when I was over there, and I never had any idea what was going on with them. Once, I thought we were going to church, and we ended up a pig slaughter (family ritual) which involved a four-wheeler and palinka.

BGB: The travels in the book kept me running to my laptop to fire up Google Earth to follow the trail and check out the locales via maps and the user-posted pictures there. Some of the war torn areas you describe in Croatia are among the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, and they appear (from here) to have recovered well. I’ve read that you visited the area extensively before the war broke out, have you been back since writing the book? If so, how has it changed from your memories?

MF: No, unfortunately, I haven’t been back. I was pretty delusional about how a book gets published. Specifically, I thought there would be a step where I got a massive advance and could return to the Croatia for some fact checking. Whoops.

BGB: Radiant Days was nominated for a Henry Miller Award by Nerve.com for best literary sex scene. I went and re-read the passage that they cited. What’s wrong with those people?

MF: Intern with a wicked sense of humor?

Radiant Days

Sometimes this blog thing pays off.  For instance, I never would have learned about the amazing debut novel  Radiant Days by Michael FitzGerald without it.  I was talking about books over beers with author and all-around cool guy Ben Tanzer (who I first “met” through these virtual pages).  We were tossing out the titles of books that we thought had been criminally overlooked.  I forget what I said, but Ben was fairly insistent that I drop everything else that I was doing so that I could run, not walk, to the nearest bookseller and grab a copy of Radiant Days.  I owe Ben a huge debt of gratitude for steering me toward this stellar novel (which is on my favorite books read in 2009 list).

The globe-trotting book begins in San Francisco in the midst of the dot-com boom.  Anthony Sinclair is a twenty something who is getting paid very well for doing very little, and he  feels like a bit of a fraud.  After an unfortunate incident, he becomes awash in guilt and need of a change.   Anthony is wallowing in a self-destructive haze when a beautiful and mysterious bartender, Gisela, invites him to travel with her back home to Budapest.  Sensing an opportunity for something positive, a fresh start and the potential for a relationship with someone seemingly way out of his league, he agrees.  But what starts out with so much possibility, rapidly falls down a rabbit hole of what one of my literature professors would call “moral bankruptcy.”

In Budapest, Anthony finds himself with little to do.  Gisela come and goes irregularly and on her on her own schedule – and without feeling the need to explain herself later.  Anthony is left to fall in with a group of expatriots and English speakers led by Marsh, a cocky and enigmatic British journalist.  Instead of finding a renewed sense of purpose, Anthony finds himself ever more disconnected from the world around him.  The Europeans that he encounters are in many ways even more morally adrift than Anthony.  Where his remove seems to have evolved from a life of relative affluence and ease that seems undeserved, Anthony’s acquaintances on the continent seem to operate on a different moral plane altogether.  Their lives bear the permanent imprint and emotional distance brought on by generations of constant war and international conflict.

Things come to a head when Marsh, Gisela, and Anthony set out together for Croatia during the last days of war in the Balkans.  Marsh is going to cover the war, and Gisela is setting out on a vague mission that may be of a dubious moral/legal nature.  Anthony is more or less  tagging along without really questioning his motives for continuing on with people whose acceptance he craves and yet is becoming increasingly more disenchanted with.  It is made clear to Anthony on this journey that Americans have no history (relatively speaking) and no real understanding of the history of the broader world. When Marsh calls Anthony out on this point, it is really an indictment of all of us (Americans):

“Didn’t you say you went to college?” he asked.
“Yeah”
“European history? World history? What did they teach you?”
“I didn’t really take any history.”
“How did you graduate?”
“I only had to take classes in my major.”
“You didn’t read Bridge on the Drina?  Ivo Andric won the Nobel Prize.”
“Missed that one.”
“No requirements?”
“Not Balkan history.”
“This isn’t Balkan history. This is the history of Western civilization…our civilization..wouldn’t exist if places like Croatia and the greater Balkans hadn’t so generously taken it up the arse for the past one thousand years.”

During the journey from Budapest to Croatia, the novel had me scrambling to Google Earth to figure out where exactly the travelers were (which further served to highlight my own ignorance of this part of the world).  I was surprised to learn that many of the places mentioned are stunningly beautiful (Exhibit A and Exhibit B), at least as viewed form here and after the war.  Helpfully, someone has compiled a Google map of all of the places mentioned in Radiant Days (with page numbers and reference!).   If you plan on reading the book, bookmark the map already.

Radiant Days is a tremendous novel.  For me, it raised many interesting questions.  How far are you willing to follow that really hot girl that you know is no good for you and how much are you willing to put up with? What are the limits of moral relativism?  Is it possible to be more emotionally insulated and self-absorbed than when you are in your twenties?  What does it take to snap out of that deadening torpor?  Where do you fit into the world as a North American? What responsibilities (if any) come along with the geographic accident of birth?  Simply put this is a novel that sticks with you when you’re done.

So. Many thanks to Ben Tanzer for sending this gem my way.  And now I share the love and heartily recommend it to you.

Punctuation Unplugged

How does that saying go?  Singing about punctuation is like dancing about blog posts?  Something like that.

Hot Book Tip

Between diaper changes, I received this book tip from my friend Anne:

Not one to normally pick up non-fiction, I felt I needed to give When Everything Changed by Gail Collins a chance when I saw her on The Colbert Report (below).  I thought maybe it would shed some light on the whole Women’s Rights movement that happened while I was a kid.  Well, I LOVED this book!  Going to high school and college in the 1980’s I had no other goal, or frankly choice, than to go to college and get a job.   I now have a much greater appreciation for the women who really did fight for women’s rights to choose on so many issues – from career choices and family planning down to the simplest right to wear pants in public.

There’s a fabulous review of the book at Slate.  It’s long but does the book justice.

Thanks, Anne!

Update: The New York Review of Books has this podcast of Cathleen Schine speaking with Sasha Weiss about Gail Collins’s book