Big in Japan

Big in Japan by M. Thomas Gammarino is yet another book where the literary and the musical converge.   Have I mentioned that I tend to enjoy when that happens?  No?  It’s true.   And it only seems like these are the only kinds of books that I’ve been reading lately.  I’m reading other stuff, too.  Really.  Anyway…

Big in Japan begins with a going-nowhere-fast prog rock band called Agenbite plotting their next big move.  Agenbite take their name from a passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit. Conscience.”  I’ll admit that I had to look up “agenbite” even with the context.  ”Agenbite of inwit” sounds like a Hobbit’s name, and even though that would fit very well with the prog rock ethos, it is not.  It means remorse (and is my new favorite word).   And if there were ever to be an embodiment of remorse, it would be Agenbite’s leader, Brain.

Brain is an ironic nickname that stuck when Brian misspelled his name in grade school.  He’s a nerdy guy and a perfectionist in his craft as a technical guitarist and Agenbite’s songwriter.  He seems a little despondent to note that most of his band’s fans are dudes, which is doing nothing to help him land his first real live girlfriend.  When the band decides to go to Japan in an attempt to boost their lackluster record sales, Brain is the last to get on board with the plan.

Once in Japan, Brain promptly falls down the rabbit hole.  An encounter with a Japanese sex worker is the catalyst that sends Brain’s life directly off the rails.  Like the Chinese idea of yin and yang, from there on out the novel explores the opposing forces at work in Brain (and by extension – us).  East versus West.  Love and lust.  Sacred and profane.  Intellect (or Brain!) versus the body.  Striving versus slacking.  And so on.  These dualities lead to some questionable behavior in Brain, which of course leads to the agenbite of inwit – the nagging of conscience.

Remember the questionable essay in the New York Times Book Review last weekend, the one where the author noted that modern American male writers no longer write about sex as a conquest or means of redemption/salvation or whatever?  I had this novel in mind when I was reading that essay and immediately thought “bullshit!”  Big In Japan is all about sex as conquest and a possible means of temporary redemption/salvation.  The novel places these ideas in Japan, questioning the cultural imperialism of the conquest and the human cost of the redemption/salvation.  The novel also highlights some of the cultural differences between Americans and Japanese in attitudes about sex.

The subtitle of the book, “A Ghost Story”, baffled me until the very end.  This isn’t a horror novel nor are then any phantasms rattling chains on the fringes.  However, a jarring vision does come to Brain in his most desperate hour that explodes his conceptions of where things stand in the world and his place in it.  The stunning denouement arrives at a conclusion – a very Eastern conclusion – that puts all of Brain’s internal deliberations and waywardness into the ultimate context.

I love this cover

If there’s a better image to capture a rural dive bar, I can’t imagine what it would be.

And if you haven’t read the novel yet, run, don’t walk, to your favorite book purveyor.

(BGB reviews 1 and 2)

Indie Rock Alphabet Party

Yesterday I spent what was easily the best four hours EVER in a children’s book store.  The Little Shop of Stories hosted the book release party for Paste Magazine’s An Indie Rock Alphabet Book.  With this book, Paste has cornered the aging hipster/kiddie book demographic in one shot.

The book is written by Caren Kelleher, Kate Kiefer, and Rachael Maddux with artwork by owen the owen.   The book began, so the story goes, as an in-house project for a baby shower.  Once the  original book was finished (the now completed babies were in the audience), someone realized that there might be other people interested in having a book like this.  And here it is.  The huge crowd at the Little Shop says they guessed right.

The party featured Dale’s Pale Ale for the grown-ups and started off with groovy electronic background music by Judi Chicago to set the mood. Eventually the action shifted upstairs to the reading space.  Terra kicked things off with an inspirational reading of Punk Farm.   Two kids then read An Indie Rock Alphabet in its entirety.  Cute!  Book signing followed with two of the authors and owen the owen.   Back downstairs, Judi Chicago played a few hyperactive songs that wowed the crowd and annoyed the squares at the Starbucks two doors down.

Squares, be gone!

Before the party, I ran into Frank (of the awesome and sorely-missed former music blog That Truncheon Thing) who expressed his disappointment that W was for Weezer and not Wilco.  He must not have seen the entry for U:

You can check out the book in its entirety at Paste.  Rachael Maddux has also posted a playlist based on the book.  Listen with your child to build his/her indie street cred.

Check out video of Judi Chicago rocking the Little Shop here and here.

Monday Must Read

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

The Blue Star

I had gotten turned on to Tony Earley by some earlier posts on BGB, and I read and loved his novel, Jim the Boy.  The Blue Star is Earley’s latest novel and continues the story of Jim Glass.  Not to get too eloquent on you, but holy crap can Earley write.  I loved The Blue Star even more than I loved Jim the Boy, and that’s saying something.

This book picks up when Jim is a senior in high school, still in rural Aliceville, North Carolina, on the brink of World War II.  And while there still aren’t any specific things that cause me to relate more closely to our main character, I guess this book resonated even more with me than the first one because of some of the general themes that I think are somewhat timeless — including the idea of the girl that you want but don’t think you can have — as well as my feeling that this book told more of a story than Jim the Boy did (again, no disrespect for that amazing book). I’ve done this before, and I’m going to do it again — here are a few tidbits from the book that I think represent Earley’s gift for language and metaphor:

The weather was still warm — the days mild, the first frost still days or weeks away — but the world seemed bent on practicing for the coming winter.

and

He could feel thousands of words, everything that he wanted to say to her, piled up behind his teeth, waiting for him to open his mouth so they could storm into the light.

and

The fruit trees glittered like fountains whose water had sprung suddenly from the earth, only to freeze before it touched the ground.

I know that’s not much, but those brief snippets, to me, are just examples of prose so perfect that it borders on poetry.  I can’t give this book anything less than two thumbs up, and I’d give it more if I had more thumbs.

Update:  Previously reviewed on BGB here and here.

My Beef with Crichton

Author Michael Crichton yesterday died yesterday after losing a battle with cancer, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone.  I do have some gripes with the man’s art though.  I enjoyed some of his early novels, especially those featuring dinosaurs.  Over the last few years though, it seemed that he had an axe to grind that I was not on board with.  I wrote a full length diatribe about it two years ago.

Some highlights of my lack of appreciation:

• Crichton wins a “journalism” award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists for his fictional climate change-denying door stop State of Fear
• Crichton settles a score with a critic by making him a child rapist in his novel Next (read this article about the matter to learn the “small penis rule” of libel
• A trend piece about including a bibliography in novels includes this: Readers are often impressed with his bibliography, Mr. Crichton added. “People will often say to me, ‘Oh my goodness, look how many books you’ve read,’ ” he said.

On the plus side, I came across the completely unrelated Strunk and White Elements of Spam while searching the archives for this post.

National Book Award Nominees

The nominees for the titular award (2008) have been announced. Winners will be announced Nov. 19th.

Fiction:

• The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
• Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner
• Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
• Home by Marilynne Robinson
• The End by Salvatore Scibona

Non Fiction:

• The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Meyer
• This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
• The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon Reed
• Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives by Jim Sheeler
• The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order by Joan Wickersham

I’ve read zero of the books nominated, but I did buy Home for my my mom.  She says it’s very good. 

Omnivoracious has a complete list (including Poetry and Young People’s Literature) of the nominees and their current Amazon sale rank.  The Big surprise in fiction seems to be The End.  I may need to check out The Lazarus Project though, based solely on this snippet of the Amazon review: “the novel will remind readers of many great books before it–Ragtime, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Everything Is Illuminated…”

I’ve also been told that The Dark Side is very good by a trusted source.

Our Band Could Be Your Life

Tim previously posted on this one and then lent it to me when he was done with it, and I owe him a huge thanks for that.  I am an unabashed music freak/snob/know-it-all, and the fact that I had never read this book (published in 2001) is a tragedy.  Our Band Could Be Your Life, by Michael Azerrad (subtitled Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981 – 1991) is an amazing book.  It provides a chapter-style, documentary-like, behind-the-scenes history of a dozen or so bands that truly defined what it meant to be an indie or punk band during the 1980′s, with stories and facts that shed such a new light on each of the featured bands that I feel like a dope for thinking I knew anything about them before reading the book.  The fact that such a work could exist (i.e., a book that could provide so much unknown information to someone who thought they knew so much) is attributable in large part to Azerrad’s incredible ability to gather facts and information and then write about them as if he were there to witness what really happened.

The bands he covers (each of whom gets its own chapter) are Black Flag, the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Husker Du, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr, Fugazi, Mudhoney, and Beat Happening (the last of which, in my opinion, was a throwaway that didn’t need to be in the book and must have been included to meet a “total pages” obligation that Azerrad had to his publisher).  In any event, Azerrad’s skill at telling the stories behind these bands and the people who played in them is mesmerizing.  Put it this way:  the book is roughly 500 pages in length, and even with my short attention span, I didn’t think twice about whether I was going to read every page or not — I couldn’t wait to read whatever came next.

As for the guts of the book, the most startling thing is how it’s changed my impression of so many artists that I thought I knew.  So many of these ground-breaking artists were complete and total ***holes.  Henry Rollins, Ian Mackaye, Bob Mould, Steve Albini, Gibby Haynes, pretty much all of the Replacements — these guys do not come across as guys I’d like to have a beer with.  They come across as selfish, arrogant jackasses that I wouldn’t listen to if I’d read this book before I’d heard their music.  But that gave me a completely new lens to look through at these guys, and for that I’m grateful.  And believe it or not, not only did it not make me not want to listen to any of them, I’ve bought a bunch of their stuff because of it.  Go figure.

If you graduated high school (or were at least supposed to graduate) any time between the early 1980′s and the mid-1990′s and have any interest whatsoever in music, you absolutely must read this book.  While it tells the story of bands that truly lived the indie/punk lifestyle, it also sheds a brand new light (not always favorable) on the people in those bands.  Fascinating stuff.

Side note:  Sonic Youth seem like cool cats, and the Minutemen were the coolest band ever.  R.I.P. D. Boon, and Mike and George and Ed, how about a fIREHOSE reunion sometime?

Into the Blue Again

Have I mentioned Rivka Galchen’s excellent novel Atmospheric Disturbances yet?  More times than I can efficiently link to it appears.

I bring it up yet again, because I had to draw your attention to this recent review at Salon.  It’s excellent, but I’m totally jealous that I didn’t come up with the review’s headline myself.  The Talking Heads song referenced is such a perfect accompaniment to the book, that I feel compelled to share it here:

Maybe David Byrne could play the role of Dr. Leo Liebenstein in the film adaptation of the novel.  Get me Spielberg on the horn.

(Here are links to just two previous mentions: my interview with the author and my review of the novel.

Best Ever Summer Reads

The Telegraph (UK) lists the 50 Best EVER Summer Reads.   There are a few books on the list that seem way too academic for taking to the beach, but its worth a look.

Young Adult Land

After Nick Hornby wrote Slam, his first novel for young adults, he discovered the Young Adult section of the bookstore and became an enthusiastic advocate for the books sequestered there. Defending the idea that the Young Adult (YA) readership shouldn’t be limited to teenagers, Hornby wrote in The Believer:

…dismissing YA books because you’re not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you’re not a policeman or a dangerous criminal…

My internet hero, Cory Doctorow, has a new YA book out called Little Brother that is getting great reviews. Doctorow has been a champion of YA novels for years on his blog Boing Boing. The author/tech guru notes:

Living in a space that no one watches too closely is one of the secret ways that people get to do excellent stuff. Science fiction’s status for decades as a pariah genre meant that writers could do things with literary style, theme, and political content that their mainstream counterparts could never get away with (games, comics, early hip-hop, mashups, and many of the other back laneways of popular culture have also enjoyed this status). These days, a lot of the coolest stuff in the universe is happening in the kids’ section of your bookstore…

You can see what he’s talking about first hand by checking out Little Brother for free before buying it. As a PDF file, you can read it at work – if you’re capable of that sort of subterfuge.

Unrelated: Little Golden kids’ books that never made it to print

Good Reads

The National Book Critics Circle have announced their “Good Reads” selections for the Spring. The list is developed by polling the members of the NBCC and tallying the results. (I am a member, and here’s how I voted.) An interesting side note: As imperiled as book reviewing is supposed to be, membership in the NBCC has increased almost 50% over last year. What to make of that? Anyway, here are the Fiction and Nonfiction selections

FICTION

1. Richard Price, LUSH LIFE
2. Jhumpa Lahiri, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
3. Steven Millhauser, DANGEROUS LAUGHTER,
*4. Charles Baxter, THE SOUL THIEF
*4. Peter Carey, HIS ILLEGAL SELF
*4. J. M. Coetzee, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR
*4. James Collins, BEGINNNER’S GREEK
*4. Brian Hall, FALL OF FROST
*4. Roxana Robinson, COST
*4. Owen Sheers, RESISTANCE
NONFICTION

1. Nicholson Baker, HUMAN SMOKE
2. Drew Gilpin Faust, THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING
3. Mark Harris, PICTURES AT THE REVOLUTION
4. Honor Moore, THE BISHOP’S DAUGHTER
5. Susan Jacoby, THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON

Way Ahead of His Time

I’ve been a fan of Don Novello for a long time, and not just because he was born and raised in my hometown of Lorain, Ohio. I, like many of you, thought he was pretty darn cool before I even knew of his impressive origins. For a long time, I knew him solely as the character he created for Saturday Night Live, Father Guido Sarducci; but I somehow came to learn that he participated in multiple ways in all kinds of funny stuff, and so I had to do some digging to see what I could get my hands on.

In addition to recordings of some pretty hilarious stand-up comedy, what I came up with was The Lazlo Letters, a compilation of correspondence that was first published in 1977, but which contains letters spanning the period from 1973 to 1977. Novello’s idea, which he executed in spectacular fashion, was to write letters to various bigwigs from the world of politics, show business, and big business, playing the part of a loyal follower, concerned citizen, or huge fan, and trying to provoke a response.

The prose and punctuation he uses in his letters, in addition to the rather zany ideas presented by them, suggest that he is somewhat of a dimwit; nonetheless, in the interests of good public relations and nondiscrimination against knuckleheads, many of the folks he wrote to actually wrote back. The staffs of President Nixon and President Ford treated these letters as legitimate, and sent personalized responses back to him. Repeatedly.

The genius of this book doesn’t really lie in its content (although there are some pretty funny exchanges documented by these letters); rather, it lies in what Novello did, how he did it, and when he did it. This started over thirty-five years ago! He was writing on what I guess was a manual typewriter, and mailing letters out for ten cents. The time and effort needed to pull off a hoax like this was incredible. And it didn’t come with the sort of immediate gratification that pranking someone on the Internet can bring. While we take the Internet for granted in this day and age, Novello was working on this at a time when you had to work pretty hard to track down information. Even finding the name and address of someone he wanted to write to must have been a chore.

I applaud Mr. Novello, albeit it a couple of decades later than he deserves, for this effort. And now I think we can safely place him up on the pedestal with the other critically acclaimed writers originally hailing from Lorain, Ohio, such as Toni Morrison and . . . uhm . . . uh . . . let me get back to you on that one.

He was robbed!

Robbed! I say.  Our man Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts, was short listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.  Sadly, for Raw Shark fans everywhere, Hall didn’t take home the big prize.  Instead, the winner was Richard Morgan for his book Thirteen (or TH1RTE3N, if you prefer).  Confusingly, the book was published as Black Man in England.  Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog has the scoop on Thirteen straight from the author:

It’s stuffed full of contentious material that, whether you agree with it or not, will give you conversational ammunition at dinner parties for months to come. Shock and Awe your guests with Provocative Genetic Science! It’s my first conscious attempt at a world that is not dystopian–roll up and see a cheery(ish) future society, one you might not actually mind living in for a change. It has a very unpredictable storyline–I know this because I had no idea where my characters were going half the time…

Intriguing.

The Brooklyn Scene

We’ve been kicking around the idea of having a BGB Reading Series event in Brooklyn. No, really. For one thing, a kindly bookstore suggested the idea. Secondly, that’s where are all of the writers that matter live, right? Most importantly, good friends of the Family Got Books, the Journo Pals, recently moved there. Mr. Journo Pal sent this map of literary Brooklyn from The New York Observer to get the ball rolling:

The article references a Colson Whitehead essay for The New York Times Book Review (I Write in Brooklyn, Get Over it) that you should read, too. If you’ve got a good reading series in Brooklyn idea, I’d love to hear it.

Political Dream Team

Sadly, this political dream ticket will never come to pass.

The blog Elegant Variation pointed the way to this sweet, sweet bumper sticker.  If you’re scratching your head, Aubrey and Maturin are the heroes of Patrick O’Brian’s series of seafaring adventures set during the Napoleonic War.  The series features British Navy Captain Jack Aubrey and his “particular friend” naturalist/surgeon Dr. Stephen Maturin.

I was introduced to the series by my brother-in-law a few years back, and I went on a tear through the first 16 books before I had to take a break.  There are 21 books all together, and I don’t want to get to the end.  If you need a well-written adventure fix, start with first book Master and Commander.  And don’t forget to vote.  (In the movie, Russell Crowe pulled off an amazing Capt. Aubrey and Paul Bettany was Dr. Maturin.)

Black Postcards

Dean Wareham’s indie rock memoir, Black Postcards, was reviewed by two big-deal book review sections this past weekend.

The LA Times handed the book a mostly poor review.  The reviewer botched the lyrics to the song “IHOP”, which, of course, makes it easier to reject the entire review out of hand.  The reviewer’s assertion that Wareham seems to have written the book to settle “old scores” just seems flat out wrong to me.

The New York Times, on the other hand, had the good taste to have the book reviewed by Liz Phair.  Liz Phair!  Also a veteran on the 90′s indie rock scene, Phair’s review comes across as very knowledgeable and well written.  I didn’t notice the byline until the end of the (very positive) review, and I was stunned.  I hope that they’ll be sending more work Ms. Phair’s way soon.

You can read my review of Black Postcards at Largehearted Boy.

Marfa Book Company

Add the Marfa Book Company to the Bookstores We Love category.

Everything is cooler in Marfa, Texas. The small West Texas town at the foot of the Chinati Mountains has long been a hotspot for artists and hipsters, and it just looks like a West Texas town is supposed to look. “Giant” was filmed in the vicinity, as were parts of “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood” more recently. Marfa’s is a sparse beauty, but in my book it is definitely beautiful. (If you go, I hope you like landscapes that are thousands of shades of khaki and almost nothing else.)

The minimalist sculptor Donald Judd bought Fort Russell just south of Marfa when it was decommissioned by the U.S. Army in the 1980s. He turned it into the Chinati Foundation, a massive art installation that provided the perfect backdrop for a large collection of his brushed-metal and concrete boxes, along with the works of several other sculptors and painters. It’s probably my favorite place to look at art, and it’s the main reason that Marfa has registered on anyone else’s radar screen. By itself, it created a critical mass of hip art lovers with cashflow–just the sort of folks you’d want around if you opened a great bookstore like this one.

We visited Marfa this past weekend for the first time in about 15 years. It hadn’t changed in fundamental ways since the last time we were there, but there were some obvious transformations afoot. On the downside, the hipsters have driven real estate prices through the stratosphere. But on the upside, they also support the Marfa Book Company.

The MBC has a children’s section that is worlds better than anything available to us in Fort Worth, a city that has, according to my calculations, a population roughly 300 times the size of Marfa’s.

Satisfied customers

It also has an art and design section that’s better than anything I’ve seen in a bookstore outside of Manhattan. (This amazing book in the photography section captured my attention–how had I never heard of it before?) And the best Texas history section I’ve come across in the last few years. Plus perfectly good standard fiction and non-fiction sections. And a really cool gallery space. And hats and t-shirts for sale. All in all, it’s a remarkable place.

Special double bonuses: Just down the street, you can pick up a great cup of joe and a nice used book at The Brown Recluse, which is owned by a poet who happens to be an FOB (Friend of the Blog). Awesome accommodations in Marfa are available at the newly refurbished Hotel Paisano, whose interiors were featured in “Giant,” and the Thunderbird Hotel, which is owned by the couple that runs the award-winning and way-cool Hotel San Jose in Austin. I highly recommend the Indian Lodge, about 60 miles north in Fort Davis. Marfa is about 90 miles north of Big Bend National Park–so make a week of it. You’ll be glad you did.

Sounds like our kind of book

Tonight! Wordsmiths has Anthony C. Winkler reading from his latest book, Duppy. Phil Kloer of the AJC says:

“The Duppy” is more like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. stringing up Mitch Albom’s “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” like a pinata and beating it with a stick.

You should check it out just to see what that means. Details.

Black Postcards

I have a review of Dean Wareham’s excellent new rock and roll memoir, Black Postcards, up today on the Largehearted Boy blog. As a supplement to my longish review, I’ve culled a few songs that are featured prominently in the book. For best results, you might want to get a song going and then open the review in a new window. That’s more of less the way the review was written.

Tugboat – Galaxie 500

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Chinatown – Luna

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23 Minutes in Brussels – Luna

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Black Postcards – Luna

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