Baby Got Books

There are a lot of cool things that can happen when you have your own lit blog.  For example, you could post something about the artist Shepard Fairey and lament that one of his books was temporarily out of print.  Then your mother might read that post and find a signed copy on the internets and hook you up for your birthday. That’s pretty cool.  

I really have no idea how to review a large format retrospective book on an artist’s career.  I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading Supply and Demand: The Art of Sheprard Fairey.  I am a fan of guerilla art, and I’ve enjoyed Fairey’s art in particular for a long time.  I was reminded that I had yet to post on this amazing book when I stumbled across across an article about Shepard Fairey’s work for the Obama campaign in Wired magazine.  If you’ve seen those “Hope” posters, you know the guy I’m talking about.

This book also got me thinking that, for now at least, this is exactly the kind of book that the Amazon Kindle would fail miserably at translating.  Large format art books may be the last refuge of print.  If you enjoy this sort of thing, I highly recommend Supply and Demand for your coffee table.

Thanks, mom!

The Wren’s Nest, Atlanta’s favorite author house museum and friend of the blog, is hosting a fund raising gala on September 27th. It’s going to be a swell night under the stars, let me tell ya.  First of all, they have Big Mike and Kingsized - and boy do they treat.  I’ve seen Kingsized roughly a million times, and they are always spectacular.  Guaranteed fun.  Food will be provided by Taqueria del Sol.  Which is nice.  I can eat my entry fee in tacos, no problem.  There’s also a cash maguerita bar, and we love the margueritas.

But check this out:  Executive Director guy Lain Shakespeare is throwing in FREE DRINKS for anyone who purchases a table (ten tickets).  Here’s the plan.  I am going.  You’re going.  All we need to do is round out the table and cocktails are free.  You were planning on going, right?  Well now all of our drinks are free.  The catch: the tickets have to be purchased by the 22nd to qualify.  Here’s how to buy tickets: Call The Wren’s Nest (404-753-7735) and say, “I’d like to buy a ticket for the Baby Got Books table, please.”  Say it with authority, and don’t let them give you any jibber jabber either. I’ll see you at our table. It’ll be the one with all the free drinks on it.  (And some portion of the ticket is tax deductible, too.  I don’t know how much.  Ask your accountant, Scrooge McDuck.)

Here are the particulars:

It must be said: the cover you see below of Martin Millar’s novel Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me is hideous. According to me, anyway.  My eyes!  If you can make it past the cover, inside is a well-written novel that surprised me with its depth and its humor.

The novel is the semi(?)-autobiographical coming of age story about a boy, Martin, trying to make sense of the usual adolescent angst.  Martin is a nerdy kid from the nicer part of Glasgow whose only real friend, Greg, joins Martin in Tolkien-esque fantasies of slaying drgons.  Cherry is the nerdy girl that Martin and Greg mock to make themsleves feel better.  Suzy is the beautiful girl they have no shot of dating because she is the girlfriend of the über-cool older guy, Zed.  Zed inexplecibaly befriends Martin and Greg and steeps them in the lore of Led Zeppelin.  That’s high school.

The story is told from the perspective of the present day.  Martin is an aimless writer who suspects himself to be something of a fraud.  His best friend, Manx, is a single mother battling post-partem depression.  To cheer her up (and himself as well), Martin tells Manx The Led Zeppelin story, which over time becomes The Led Zeppelin Book that he is working on.  Martin’s adult reflections on a bittersweet past provide the perseptive and depth that make the book more than just a high school drama.

The backdrop of the novel is a real Led Zeppelin show that occured on December 4, 1972 in Glasgow, Scotland.  Led Zeppelin was arguably at the height of their powers, having just released Led Zepplin IV.  The show was played in Green’s Theatre, an impossibly small venue for Led Zepplin to find themselves in at this point, seating only a few thousand.  And the price!  £1!  Inconceivable.  Two friends of mine managed to get into the Led Zeppelin reunion show last year in London - let’s just say that they paid more.  

Millar’s descriptions of the anticipation of the show, the amazing show itself, and the show’s lasting impact on Martin’s life are some of the best writing about music that you’ll come across. More than that though, Suzy, Led Zeppelin and Me is a great coming-of-age story for those that already have.  If you’ve ever felt, like Dewey in The School of Rock, that the perfect rock and roll show could change your life forever, then you might need to check this out post-haste.  If I lost you at Led Zeppelin, you may want to skip this one.

And finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, ah,
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, ah,
We come from the land of the ice and snow,
From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.
The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands,
To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!

Immigrant Song (features prominently in the novel)

Also: Check out the author’s web site to see a ticket from the fabled show and the author wearing an Afghan coat (which feature prominently in the book) to read at the book’s launch party.

And:  Read the review of the 2007 London show that my friend Huey somehow filed for The Washington Post.  That’s 35 years later than the Glasgow show if you’re keeping score at home.

My podnah Frank is doing his best to make me a George Saunders fan.  He actually sold me on Saunders some time ago.  I don’t let on though so that he’ll continue to forward me links to brilliant essays like this one in that Élite publication, The New Yorker, by regular guy Saunders.  Here’s an excerpt.

Sarah Palin knows a little something about God’s will, knowing God quite well, from their work together on that natural-gas pipeline, and what God wills is: Country First. And not just any country! There was a slight error on our signage. Other countries, such as that one they have in France, reading our slogan, if they can even read real words, might be all, like, “Hey, bonjour, they are saying we can put our country, France, first!” Non, non, non, France! What we are saying is, you’d better put our country first, you merde-heads, or soon there will be so much lipstick on your pit bulls it will make your berets spin!

Genius.  Thanks, Frank, and keep ‘em coming.

Helpful hint for politicos: Bobby Kennedy, Jr. recommends that when you select an author quote to support your idea of the moral superiority of small town values, you should maybe pick someone who was not a fascist, racist, and advocate of his father’s murder.

The self-inflicted death of author David Foster Wallace has left many scratching their heads and wondering “why?” over the weekend.  The team at Very Short List uncovered this nugget from Infinite Jest that may explain DFW’s view of the matter - or not:

“The person in whom . . . agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise.”

Eulogies and memorials have been written in newspaper book sections and lit-blogs everywhere, but you can always count on Machiko Kakutani to provide a steely-eyed assessment of the author’s work that avoids sentimentality,

Umberto Eco will be in Atlanta October 5, 6, and 7 presenting a series of lectures and readings at Emory University.  There is no cost, no need to make reservations, and all events are open to the public.  Naturally I will be out of town all three days.  Grrrrrrr.  Someone please go check out one or more of these events and report back to us.  And bring some of my books to get signed.  Thanks!

What’s more awesome than the Large Hadron Collider?  It’s a trick question.  Obviously the answer is nothing.  Who can think about books when the LHC is out there doing its thing?  

A round-up of my favorite LHC links:

• LHC Home Page
• The National Geographic’s article and photo gallery from March 2008 are brilliant.
• This XKCD cartoon is chuckle-worthy.
• Straight outta Geneva! Don’t miss the LHC Rap featuring the world’s funkiest PhD physicists
• Wired’s pictures
• The New York Times‘ article and interactive feature
• PhD Comics drop some LHC science on you in comic form
• As we now know, the world was not consumed by black holes when the LHC was fired up.  Whew, right?  But who has time to continually monitor the situation?  Check in with the helpful web site Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet throughout the day to stay up to date regarding the world’s current status. 
• I survived the LHC t-shirt

Gotta run.  I’m keeping an eye out for a Higgs boson.

Neal Stephenson’s Anathem is not like most books that you come across on the bestseller list. (I’m pre-supposing that this novel will perform as well as Stephenson’s recent books.)  It has a glossary of book-specific words.  It contains detailed discussions of philosophy, abstract physics, and religion. It includes three appendices of detailed mathematical concepts (with figures).  It comes with a CD of specially commissioned monastic chant music.  It’s 960 pages long.  I couldn’t put it down.

Anathem is tough to summarize, but I’ll give it a go.  The novel takes place on a planet (Arbe) that is similar to, but different from, our own.  Groups of men and women (The Avout) live in geographically (and philosophically) diverse cloisters known as concents.  The avout live a monastic (”mathic” in the parlance of the book) lifestyle dedicated to keeping ancient knowledge alive and protected from the outside world  (”extramuros” - which is a new favorite word).  The avout are not religious, however, and are generally suspicious of the religions of the extramuros crowd. 

At the center of the concent of our protagonist, Erasmus, is an elaborate mechanical clock that marks not just the hours of the day, but the years, decades, and the millenia that mark the frequency that various strata within the concent are allowed to have contact with the extramuros (and with each other).  Things get exciting for the avout and the extramuros world when avout astronomers observe strange phenomena in the night sky that leads to an unprecedented mixing within and outside of the walls of the world’s concents.  To say more about the story would be a disservice to future readers, so mum’s the word.  

Stephenson has plenty of room to explore weighty themes and ideas in Anathem.   Among the Big Ideas in the novel:  the imponderable march of time, technology as a source of good/evil, communication, community, isolation, any number of theories on the relationship between religion and science, reality, quantum mechanics, government, relativity, and our place on the continuum of existence.  Stephenson has also mentioned in an interview that the mathic/extramuros dichotomy was a means for examining the differences between the literate and the aliterate, which he defines as those who can read but choose not to.  That’s just one of many differences between the two groups.  This is the kind of book that you are thinking about when you’re not busy reading it.  

As weighty as the philosophical and scientific discussions can be between the avout, the novel is also a great deal of fun.  Stephenson packs genuine adventure into the story from page 1.  (The first line reads: “Do your neighbors burn one another alive?”)  Given the length of the novel, I was near panic-stricken to realize that the novel would be a page turner.  ”I’ll never sleep again!” (And I didn’t.)

Stephenson’s use of language to describe things in the similar world of Arbre is at turns deeply insightful and just plain funny at others.  Most of the created language is a play on familiar words or are based upon combinations of words.  A humorous example of Stephenson’s lexicon is his term to describe a frowned upon rhetorical device that is sometimes employed when the avout engage in their formal, Socratic-style dialog:

Bullshytt: Speech (typically but not necessarily commerical or polictal) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said.

There’s a timely definition.  

The ideas of “story” and “narrative” as forces in our lives are featured prominently in the novel.  Here’s Erasmus waxing philospical on how the extramuros people live their lives:

So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives.

Anathem is a novel for people who want more story in their lives.  It is a rollicking non-stop adventure loaded with humor and Big Ideas. I loved, LOVED, this novel.  It is ridiculously good.  You may want to check it out even if the mere mention of science fiction brings out your gas face.

Other opinions: Although I loved this book, it’s clearly not everyone’s cup of tea. Take Michael Dirda at The Washington Post, for example, who says that the novel is “ultimately grandiose, overwrought and pretty damn dull.”  Boo!   Salon has a more suitably enthusiastic review.

Also: Stephenson was inspired to write parts of the novel by a real organization call The Long Now Foundation that is commited to thinking about problems from the very long term perspective.

Remember that time that we co-sponsored Brock Clarke’s reading of An Arsonist’s Guide To Writers’ Homes in New England along with Wordsmiths Books and The Wren’s Nest?   Do you remember this awesome poster for the event?

Yeah.  That was cool.  Anyway…the designer of the poster is J Trav, friend of the blog and guitarist/singer dude for the band Sealions.   I mention all of this because the German publisher thought that the design was pretty sweet and bought the artwork from J Trav.

So if you’d like to be the next Chip Kidd, you could do worse than by donating your original artwork to our cause.

The Man Booker Prize folks have announced this year’s shortlist for the 2008 prize.  The shortlist looks like this:

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency
Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole

I have not read any o fthese books.  I’m feeling slack-ish.  Not making the list?  “Not good enough” Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland - aka the two books that I had heard something about.

Don’t forget…

Tonight, Baby Got Books is co-sponsoring a booktastic event at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur.

Ben Tanzer will be reading from his new novel, Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine.

The evening also features story-telling by Benji Carr and Will Young, who both performed to “applause and red-faced hilarity” at Tanzer’s last visit to Wordsmiths.  Musical guests The Extraordinary Contraptions round out the evening’s program with some tasty funk.

The evening begins at 7:30 @ Wordsmiths on the Decatur Square.  As usual, there is NO cost.

Check out video of Clay Shirky presenting a talk entitled “Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus.” Cognitive surplus may be my favorite idea of 2008.

I reviewed Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody over here.

Tom McCarthy’s Remainder won the 2008 Believer Magazine Book Award.  The novel was also featured prominently (alongside personal fave The Raw Shark Texts) in an essay by Joyce Carol Oates about amnesia lit.  The novel seemed to be a mandatory addition to my “to be read” stack, and receiving a copy as a birthday present sealed the deal.

Despite its inclusion in Oates’ insomnia article, the unnamed protagonist in Remainder does not have amnesia per se.  He remembers everything about his life except for the details surrounding an accident that caused him serious injury.

I have images, half-impressions: of being, or having been–or, more precisely, being about to be–hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colors; being held above some kind of tray or bed.  But who’s to say that these are genuine memories?  Who’s to say my traumatized mind didn’t just make them up, or pull them from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap–the crater–that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things.

As a result of the accident, our narrator is forced to undergo extensive physical therapy to relearn how to perform virtually all motor functions.  Learning how to move requires “rerouting” his brains connections.

Rerouting is exactly what is sounds like: finding a new route through the brain for commands to run along…the physiotherapist had to route the circuit that transmits commands to limbs and muscles through another patch of brain–an unused, fallow patch…

These new connections, necessarily different from the original, leave our narrator feeling as though he were a stranger in his own body, as though his actions are not his own.  Occasionally though, an action or a sound will spark a feeling within him that feels genuine and seems to be a brief glimpse into his past.  And here’s where our novel gets strange.

Our narrator has received an enormous cash settlement - one of the largest in the history of England -for his injuries.  Having a huge sum of money at his disposal and nothing else to do with his time, the narrator begins to stage events in the hope of catching glimpses of his former reality.  These reenactments are absurdly resource intensive, at times involving the purchase of an apartment building filled with actors, cordoning off city blocks, building detailed models of real city blocks inside of a warehouse, etc.  As the recreations become ever more elaborate, the narrator’s connections to the real world become increasingly diminished.  The narrative becomes almost mechanical as our narrator distances himself more and more from reality.  McCarthy follows the narrator’s actions to their logical, and terrifying, conclusion.

I enjoyed Remainder, but I feel hesitant to recommend it to others whose reading interests I don’t know very well - if that makes any sense.  It’s an unusual and unsettling book, as any book in which the underpinnings of reality and identity are realistically questioned must be.

Audio bonus: While writing this, a song that fits our narrator perfectly popped up in my iTunes:

The National - Secret Meeting

After this week’s near brush with disaster on the Gulf Coast, it seemed like the perfect time to dig into Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge. The novel is touted as THE definitive Hurricane Katrina novel.  For the record, I thought that James Lee Burke’s Tin Roof Blow Down was pretty rock solid, too.  Piazzahas also written an excellent non-fiction account of Katrina and its aftermath, Why New Orleans Matters.  I’ll be back soon with the full report on City.

Also:  check out my podnah Richard Fausset’s account of riding out the storm (Gustav) in the L.A. Times.

And finally, this week’s musical selection:  For my buck, nothing sums up the relief of this week’s disaster that wasn’t (relatively speaking) than the joyously ramshackle stylings of the Black Lips’  - O Katrina.

Did you know that Sarah Palin is the little sister of Month Python’s Michael Palin?  Neither did I - until I read the Atlantic’s interview with noted Alaskologist, Michael Chabon.

Next Tuesday Baby Got Books is co-sponsoring a reading that you need to come down and check out. Consider it tapping into your cognitive surplus.  Once again we’re partnering with our podnahs at Wordsmiths Books, this time to bring you Ben Tanzer who will be reading from his new novel, Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine (which is also the name of a track on Bob Dylan’s 1966 LP Blonde on Blonde if you’re keeping score at home).  A brief overview of the novel goes something like this:

It is a story about fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the value of friends, the reason its best to go out for coffee on first dates and what exactly defines being on the rebound. The characters riff on their favorite books, channel Yoda and Bob Dylan, deal with siblings and try to make sense of a world that shouldn’t be as confusing as it seems to be. They also seek greater self-awareness and debate why Dallas will always be superior to Knots Landing, even as they find love, lose it and find it again. 

I can get on board with that.  But wait…there’s more.

The evening will also feature story-telling by Benji Carr and Will Young, who both performed to “applause and red-faced hilarity” at Tanzer’s last visit to Wordsmiths. 

The evening will be capped off by a performance by local funksters The Extraordinary Contraptions.

Put that all together and you’ve got yourself a happenin’ Tuesday night.  As usual, there is NO cost.

We usually try to steer clear of politics, but it seems to getting harder and harder to do so. This time, it’s actually book-related though. Librarian.net points the way to an interesting piece of political reporting:

[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

Say, just in time for Banned Books Week!

Just before Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizing was released, the UK publisher (Penguin) offered free advance copies to bloggers of all stripes.  I checked with Penguin US to see if they had a similar deal going - I’m assuming that their lack of a reply meant “no such luck”.  It is too bad, this book should be mandatory reading for bloggers everywhere.

Shirky’s book is an examination of the revolution (his word) that we are currently experiencing in our ability to communicate with one another in a way that is unprecedented in human history.   Shirky says:

The current change, in one sentence is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.

If you’ve been around an internet lately you know this, of course.  What Shirky’s book does is explain the scope of the change, the significance of the change, and where the change may be leading us. 

The book also provides a needed perspective.  For example, Shirky compares the magnitude of our current changes in communication to the world before and after the printing press. Shirky says that the Web 2.0 revolution has exploded that old saw about freedom of the press being limited to those who own a press.  Unfortunately for those who make their living with a press, we all own a press now.

The most intriguing part of the book is Shirky’s examination of why so many people have been willing to freely contribute to participatory projects online (i.e., blogs, WikiPedia, social networking sites, etc.).  The surprising answer is a little squishy:  love -

We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Now, though, we can do big things for love.

If you blog or participate in an online community with any frequency, surely you’ve had a friend (or twelve) that has questioned your enthusiasm and has asked the vaguely insulting question,  “That’s cool and all, but where do you get the time?”  Please direct those friends to this excellent essay by Shirky about the less-squishy concept of our collective “cognitive surplus”.

Cognitive surplus is the time that we have available inside our own heads when we are not working, taking care of the kids, etc.  Shirky argues that the power of this surplus has been masked for the past sixty years or so with television.  I won’t say that this newly tapped potential is always put to good use – I have it on good authority that most blog posts and Facebook updates happen in the quiet hours of the night — but it is certainly more active than absorbing television.  Turning the question around on your busier than thou questioners: The question is not where do you get the time, but what are they doing to take advantage of their cognitive surplus.

If your mind is blown on a daily basis by the tools that are suddenly available to one and all, you have to read Shirky’s book.

BGB will return to its regularly scheduled programming when I am able to stop watching the Weather Channel for news from Louisiana.

Visit the Red Cross if you’d like to help those in need.