After so much anticipation, I didn’t hate it but I didn’t love it either.  Apparently another case of me not being the target audience for this sort of thing.  What *sort of thing* you ask? Comic books and the often-revisited madness of WWII.

The one thing the book certainly has going for it is Michael Chabon’s writing style, the way he construct sentences, the voice he gives to some of his characters, the perfectly timed comic line here and there.  On that account (the technical side of things) I really like it though I grew a bit irritated by some passages with just way too much description, too much details for some objects, settings, that just wasn’t necessary for the scenes.

The title of the book is fitting and at the same time misleading on two counts, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but for all the WWII imagery and superhero comics that Mr. Chabon dresses the story with, the book really has not much to do with those two subject other than provide a convenient background to tell the story he’s really interested on telling, that of the lives of cousins Sammy Klayman and Josef Kavalier, but that’s not entirely right either. On the surface it seems like it is the story of these two boys but in reality it’s only the story of Josef.  He’s the real superhero in this comic and Sammy plays the token sidekick, a metaphor that can’t even be called a metaphor for it is explicit on every line, right there on the page.

This wouldn’t have been a problem have Josef not become so unlikable (my opinion) as the story pushed forward and then he did some things I just couldn’t forgive him for it.  Chief among them is his treatment and abandonment of Sammy and more to the point, Rosa his girlfriend.  To me his actions weren’t completely justify by the story, he was always this sort of aloof, cold, distant character I just couldn’t sympathize with and since the book is really about him, I couldn’t love the book.  Then, by having everyone just love him no matter what he would do or say or react because of his past/background etc., was just more confirmation (to me) that Mr. Chabon was just interested on Josef and didn’t really care much for the other characters he populated Josef’s life with. The focus on Josef and by having Josef be such a cypher in many ways, I felt as though the story lacked a heart, because though he seems to care for lots of things, ultimately his feelings just rang a bit hollow.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay sounds like this would have much more….well, adventure but it isn’t that type of novel.  This isn’t a commercial novel where there’s lots of conflict and a central problem that would get resolve in an intense climax towards the end. This is the type of novel where things happen, just not that much; it is mostly just about the not so adventurous or fantastic lives of two kids, or again, a kid and his sidekick. A coming of age story, one of those “a day in the life” that stretches from youth to mature, adult life. It is all about the characters, their feelings, their coping with the twists and turns of life and becoming men. So anyone looking for actual adventure would be sorely disappointed, though Mr. Chabon makes it (almost) work because he truly is a talented writer.

It makes so much sense that this novel dealt with comic books and their growth into “graphic novels” and was itself one of them in a way, because like movie adaptations of graphic novels such as:  300, Watchmen, Sin City, the result is technically flawless but emotionally lacking.  Grade: B-

Katie Roiphe has written a truly splendid article entitled “The Naked and the Conflicted” in the Sunday Book Review section of The New York Times (online).  If you’ve ever read a book, or plan on reading one, you really should read this sharp, thoughtful, well-written article.  Of course, if you have no idea who the authors mentioned in the title are, you could always just read our previous post and, prolonging your, hmmm, choice, avoid the link to Roiphe’s great article.

nothingisinvisible@live.fr

This short and engaging work is subtitled a “a story of detection” and indeed it follows a detective solving a mystery in 1944. The main character is never named but it is clear from the start that he is Sherlock Holmes, an extremely old Sherlock Holmes who has long since outlived his few friends and retired to the countryside. But although as the title implies Holmes comes briefly out of retirement to solve one last mystery, the novel is not too concerned with the mystery. The situation Holmes unravels is a clever enough little construction, but it’s straightforward and not especially interesting. Although published as a standalone book, this is really a novella not a novel, so there’s not enough space to spin a more typically convoluted web.

While the author isn’t particularly interested in the mystery, the “story of detection” label remains accurate. Holmes was defined, both for us and in his own mind, by his mental powers, but he feels these slipping away. The aches and pains of his joints are unwelcome reminders of the more subtle decay of his mind. Meanwhile he finds himself in a world that has moved on from the one he knew. He may be able to solve one last mystery, but he no longer can fully understand what happened and why.

As a premise for a novel this is a little thin, so it’s fortunate that Chabon stuck with a shorter format. The Final Solution makes its points and gets out before it outstays its welcome. It makes me wish more prominent authors were willing to aim for brevity.

I first heard the Chicago clarinetist Frank Chace on 1951 broadcast recordings from Storyville (issued on Savoy records and reissued in the late Seventies) where he held his own alongside Wild Bill Davison, Ephie Resnick, and a loud rhythm section.  (Later, Frank would tell me that he was half-deafened by Davison’s habit of blowing into the clarinetist’s ear.)  Chace impressed me as having absorbed Pee Wee Russell’s style without exactly copying Pee Wee.  Years later, I thought that he was to Pee Wee what Buck Clayton was to Louis — a loving reflection, a distillation.  But in the early days of my vinyl-searching, there was no other Chace to be found on record. 

in 1986, when I began corresponding and trading tapes with John L. Fell – film scholar, amateur clarinetist, and erudite jazz collector – he sent a cassette of private Chace performances: some with Marty Grosz, others with the guitarist / cornetist Bill Priestley.  On this tape, I heard thoughtful questing that had only been hinted at on the Storyville recordings.  And I wanted to hear more.  After asking all the collectors I knew (among them the late Bob Hilbert and the still-active Joe Boughton, Wayne Jones, Gene Kramer) to dig into their Chace holdings, I had a good deal of music in settings where he felt comfortable enough to explore, from 1951 duets with Don Ewell to a Marty Grosz nonet and various small groups.  Frank’s brilliance and subtlety — his willingness to take risks — moved me greatly.  I iamgine I was also intrigued by his elusiveness: his name appeared in none of the jazz reference books; his issued recordings were out of print, except for a Jim Kweskin session on Vanguard. 

Quite by accident I learned that he was still playing.  WBGO-FM broadcast live remotes from the Chicago Jazz Festival over the Labor Day weekend.  In 1997, listening idly to the proceedings, I heard the announcer say, “Up next, the Frank Chace Quintet.”  I scrambled for a new cassette, and, feeling as if the heavens had opened to let divinity in, heard Frank play, marvelously, including a bossa nova and LITTLE MAN, YOU’VE HAD A BUSY DAY.  This gave me hope that he was alive and well, and I imagined that I might see him play sometime or have a new Chace recording to study. 

Because I had spent much of my academic life as a literary detective, poring over unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, I became fascinated by Frank as a subject for study.  I knew that he lived in Evanston, Illinois, and when I had his address confirmed by the Chicago musicians’ union, Marty Grosz, and John Steiner, I felt bold enough to proceed by writing to him.

I don’t have my letters to Frank, although his friend and executor Terry  Martin tells me that Frank saved them, but I am sure that I introduced myself as an admirer, someone who would like to write about him (I had been reviewing CDs for the International Association of Jazz Record Collectors Journal and was soon to start writing for The Mississippi Rag).  In this post, I present his side of the correspondence.  I have omitted only a few telephone numbers and addresses of individuals; otherwise I have left the letters intact.  I have guessed at the placement of the few undated items; readers are free to do their own reshuffling if my logic offends. 

I must have sent him some Pee Wee Russell cassettes, and addressed him (politely) as Mr. Chace:

12 Apr 98

Dear Michael,

     A hasty note of thanks for the astounding packet.  Golly, Pee Wee was even better than I thought.

     I had no idea anyone was tracking my transgressions.  If I recall, some of those pallid Pee Wee-ish peregrinations are even lousier than others.

     You still think I should be interviewed?

     I wish Hilbert had looked me up.  I might have filled in a few spaces, e.g. PWR for Jack T. at Curley’s in Springlfield IL Oct 93 [sic], et alia.  Five glorious drunken nites. 

     My father was from Mayville, N.Y.  Any relation?

Cordially, Frank.

P.S.  I’m Mr. Chace only to the IRS.

Frank’s opinion of his playing here is positively sunny.  “Hilbert” was Robert Hilbert, who had written a Russell biography and compiled a discography.  Later, Frank told me that the Curley’s gig was meant to be a Jack Teagarden quartet — Teagarden was by then appearing only with Don Ewell, a bassist Frank remembered only as “Pappy,” who was derisive about the other players, and drummer Barrett Deems.  When Teagarden took sick, Pee Wee filled in for him, and Frank remembered long explorations of each song that would end with many choruses of eight-bar and four-bar trades among the quartet.  Don Ewell was his great friend and musical mentor.  And “Mayville” is a mild joke; I was living in Melville, New York.

Encouraged by his response, I sent Frank a photocopy of my then amorphous Chace discography:

 20 April 1998

Dear Michael,

     I’ve entered some guesses along with one or two certainties.  I recall some of these sessions vividly, others not at all.

     As for the penultimate entry on the reverse side, if you send a cassette I might sort it out.  But aside from a few tunes with Marty [Grosz] and a bassist [Dan Shapera] from the Chi. Jazz Institute’s Jazz Fair in Jan. 1984 I haven’t listened to myself since before 1982, when I stopped drinking.  Too grisly.  (Except for a few S[alty] D[og] ensembles, below*.)

     There was a 1968 session (at John Steiner’s, like many of them) during Marty’s brief affair with electricity: Lullaby in Rhythm, Exactly Like You.  These should be around, God knows, if the rest of this stuff is.

     Birch Smith sent me a CD “Selty Dogs 1955″ last year.  He finally issued them (Windin’ Ball) but so far as I know distributes from his home, only.  I’d make you a dub but don’t know how.  (I have only a Sony Diskman for playing.)

     Do you have the 1961 Jabbos?  Lorraine Gordon issued [a] two-LP boxed set around 1984.  Sure enough, we didn’t try any Jazz Battles or Boston Skuffles, but we thought Jabbo was wonderful seapite reviewers’ demurrers.  I never had other than a tape dub but gave it away 30 years ago!

Cheers back atcha,

 Frank

I don’t remember when I asked Frank if we might talk on the telephone; he agreed, although our conversations were intermittent at best, usually on Sunday evenings.  Once I interrupted him when he was about to eat some soup; other times I would let the phone ring twenty or so times before giving up.  I now assume, and Terry Martin agrees, that Frank was at home — as he aged, his mobility was limited by illnesses — but did not want to talk. 

I do recall his amusement when I asked his permission to record our conversations for a profile of him; he was both flattered and puzzled.  He had said that he didn’t write to me as often as he would like because he lacked paper and pens; ever enterprising (or overbearing?) I sent him some.  Now, I think he was being polite and evasive; I was more interested in interviewing him than he was in being interviewed.  Gene Kramer, who had co-written a book on Don Ewell, had sent me a collection of Pee Wee rarities, which I copied for Frank:            

24 Aug 98

Dear Michael,

     It’s yet unclear how churlish I can get — might at least have sent a thank you card, but didn’t think I had any stamps.  (NO — please don’t send stamps – I found some.)

     *I haven’t listened to it all so far — it’s easier to replay the marvelous alternate Ida.  Marty once opined that PW’s style came to fruition only around Home Cooking time, but it seems PW was annoying and perplexing his colleagues years earlier.  And, how those other guys could play B I Y O Backyard.  I’m reminded again of hos much I love Max.

     *I’ve wondered for a long time how the US got this way — a week ago at the N[orthwestern] U[niversity] library I read NSC 68 (to be found in “Foreign Relations of the United States,” 1950 Vol I page 234).  Example: “We seek to achieve (our values) by the strategy of the Cold War.”  The whole thing is absorbing.  Books I might have mentioned to youare The Frozen Republic by Daniel Lazare and Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948 by Frank Kofsky.  If you’re interested.

     Later.  it’s to hot and humid for now.

     *The “I” violated your code.

     SPPFL = Society for the Preservation of Pete Fountain’s Legacy.

 Love, Yakov, master of the ocarina.

The “Ida” was an alternate take of the 1927 Red Nichols recording.  In retrospect, this letter mirrors our phone conversations.  Frank was articulate and well-read.  Although he could be wheedled into talking about himself (briefly and grudgingly) and the musicians he admired, his real subject was the downfall of the United States.  I was much less well-informed about global history, and this seemed to exasperate him.  I shared some of his views, but his gloom and rage were far deeper.  I suspect now that he humored me when we spoke of jazz, but that it struck him as almost irrelevant.  His comments about “I” and the “SPPFL,” which he had written on the envelope, need explanation.  Frank disdained players he thought “synthetic”; Fountain was one.  And I had mock-apologized in a letter for beginning several paragraphs in a row with “I”; hence his asterisks.

I didn’t hear from Frank until the end of the year, when a Seasons Greetings card arrived. 

  Dear Michael,

     A bacterial infection put me in the hospital (out cold) Sept 14 – Oct 13 and Rehab Oct 13 – Dec 4, but I recover apace.  Sorry about the hiatus.  Hope you are well and prospering in this psychotic Republic.

[undated]

Dear Michael,

     Hoping all’s well with you.  You wanted a picture.  All I’ve unearthed so far are pix from Aspen, where Marty got me a few weeks with The Village Stompers.  The wide angle shot shows Alfie Jones, a dandy Toronto trombonist, greeting Lou McGarity.  The others you know or are listed.

     I’ve been out of touch with Sandy Priestley, Bill’s younger son, the one most interested in his dad’s music.  He one told me that Avis, Squirrel [Ashcraft]’s daughter, had rescued some stuff from the Evanston Coachouse and needed ID’s for some of the players.  He, Seymour, lives in or near Milwaukee.  I don’t want to put him in touch with you without your permission.  The 1951 tracks with Nichols and Rushton, and Bill’s anthem Isn’t It Romantic might interest Sandy and Avis a lot, but it’s been a while . . . . This makes me miss the old “Club 55″ (Lake Forest).  John Steiner, too.  The old order passeth.

Cheers anyway,

As ever, Frank.

I had sent Frank a private tape (original source possibly John Steiner, the great archivist of Chicago jazz) of a 1951 Squirrel Ashcraft session featuring Red Nichols and Joe Rushton.

2 Feb 1999

Dear Michael,

     I only just uncovered your Prima cassette amidst four cases of accumulated mail, mostly junko.  I had never even known of the enhanced orch. of side B.  PWR’s chorus-long trill on Dinah has me confounded.  Never knew him to do the circular breathing thing.  Prima clearly exhilarated him.  Egged him on.  Exhorted him.  PWR IS SUPERMAN.

     I (hereby disobeying your paragraph rule) never replied to your probe for an 8 x 10 glossy.  Fact is, I never had one.  The J D Salinger of the clarinet.

     Yet another fellow, a Brit, has written about doing a piece on me for IAJRC publication of Miss. Rag.  I’ve come across his note ten times, but now can’t find it.  Name of Derek Coller from County Berkshire if I recall.  Do you know of him?  I might never find his address.  I am less churlish than lazy and disorganized.

     Your cassettes are better for me that Wodehouse’s BUCK-YOU-UPPO.

Cheers,

Frank

Frank was referring to the Brunswick recordings Pee Wee had made as a member of Louis Prima’s band, which show off Prima as successfully ouis-inspired, and Pee Wee responding with great enthusiasm.  Ironically, Derek Coller (a fine jazz scholar) and Bert Whyatt did finish a long essay on Frank for JAZZ JOURNAL — in 2009 — and an accompanying discography for the IAJRC Journal in the same year.  Like Bix and some of the Austin High Gang, Frank loved P.G. Wodehouse.

9 March 1999

Dear Michael,

      You Leave Me Breathless.  What?  No Simeon too?  Do I not play like Simeon?  Beale (Billy) Riddle thought I played like Simeon.  Possibly not like him on”Bandanna Days” tho.  Beautiful. 

      Your encomiums had me groping for my blue pencil, but I won’t query you less’n you want.  The finale, or coda, “inspired improvisation,” is a dandy.  STET.  I told you I was fighting for my life.

     As for your S[umma] C[um] L[aude] submissions, they only fortify my esteem for those guys.  How competent they are.  The medley, stitched together with modulations ouf of Easy to Get, seems an outstanding ploy.  Signature segues.  The Miff unissued V-Disc: I heard Peg O’My Heart at Nick’s, then on Commodore, but PWR is positively SEIZED on this on.  And on what you call “Notes on Jazz,” see if you don’t identify Mel Powell.  The Bushkin right-hand grupetti, the fleeting salute to the Lion.  And if Bert Naser is Bob Casey, why?  AFM?  And Joe Sullivans, I’d never heard these.  No wonder [Richard] Hadlock’s fixation. 

     And Swing It.  Priceless.  My undying gratitude is yours.  I’ve watched it only once so far, perhaps refusing to believe it.

     And that fool Brunis.  (Ending tape segment.)  PWR phoned from the hotel upon arriving [in] Chicago with McP (MaFathead) for that NPR thing (Oct. 67?).  I said, “Pee Wee!  You called me”!*  He said, “Who would I call, Brunis”? (Georg was his lifelong tormentor.)

     I found the Coller letter and replied saying that the recounting of my legendary career had been already besought, but omitting your name and address.  If you care to write him . . . .

     Instead of dredging out my apartment I did so with my wallet and found the enclosed.  It’ll have to do.  Soon I’ll be “a tattered coat upon a stick.”  Whence the quote?

Love and XXX,

Frank

*I have to watch my punctuation p’s and q’s, Prof.

P.S.  My regards to [Gene] Kramer.  We’ve got out of touch.

Have you read “the Ends of the Earth” by Robert D. Kaplan?  An outstanding travel book.

Frank admired the Fifties John Coltrane, and “You Leave Me Breathless” was one of his favorites.  I had written an exultant review of the 1955 Salty Dogs CD to the IAJRC Journal and sent Frank a copy.  Since it infuriated him when people assumed he was imitating Pee Wee, I made the point that Frank had reinvented many of the classic clarinet styles — Dodds and Noone among them.  Beale Riddle was a jazz fan, amateur drummer, and recordist who had captured an early trio of Frank, Don Ewell, and himself for posterity.  “Bandanna Days” was recorded by “the Carnival Three” in 1947 for Disc — Simeon, James P. Johnson, and Pops Foster.  I had sent Frank airshots of the Summa Cum Laude Orchestra (with Kaminsky, Gowans, Pee Wee, and Bud) from the Sherman Hotel in Chicago in 1940, as well as an unissued V-Disc performance of “Peg O’My Heart” by Miff Mole, Pee Wee, Stirling Bose, and others.  “Notes on Jazz” captured a number of Condon concert performances — before the Blue Network series began in 1944 — for distribution to South America.  I had been given thirty minutes of this material by John L. Fell; the announcements were in Portuguese.  I had also sent Frank a videocassette copy of the Thirties film short subject SWING IT — featuring Pee Wee and Louis Prima at their most lively, and may have included the 1967 JAZZ ALLEY television show with Hodes, McPartland, and Pee Wee.  (Frank was in the audience, and remembered that Pee Wee offered McPartland five dollars to change places with him onstage.)  Richard Hadlock continues to be an active West Coast jazz historian and reedman; he did a good deal for an aging Joe Sullivan in the Sixties.  The quotation was from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which Frank knew I knew.  Still looking for a picture to send me, he had found an outdated bus pass in his wallet and enclosed it, which I still have.  Obviously he was in a happier mood.  And I was thrilled to be purveyor-of-jazz-treats, sharing pleasures.

28 June 99

Dear Michael,

      I went straight to the Marty-Ephie music.  Was there ever a one-man gang like Mart?  And Effie’s dry wit.  I can’t always tell whether he’s trying to be expressive or funny.  And he can play anything, sometimes all at once. 

     Grateful too for the Dodds stuff.  It seems the Harlem hot-shots foreswore mocking him musically – let’s hope they didn’t do so personally.  Terry Martin suggests he probably could hold his own in eiher context, Ewell’s fears notwithstanding.

     I never dreamt the Ashcraft stuff had been orgaznied and documented like that.  Pee Wee, guesting at Priestley’s in 1967, calimed he could identify Joe [Rushton's] clarinet anywhere.  So far I’ve heard only a little from these cassettes.  Speaking of bass sax I have from the lib. “ART DECO” Sophisticated Ladies (Columbia, 2 CD’s set).  Ella Logan sings I Wish I Were Twins, with Adrian [Rollini], Max, Bud, [Carl] Kress, [Roy] Bargy, [Stan] King.

     It’s raining on this sheet.  Grateful to know someone who connects with my frame of reference.  Must run for cover.  WITH THANKS                      

FC

This time, I had sent a duet recording of Marty Grosz and trombonist Ephie Resnick, as well as the Decca sides pairing Johnny Dodds with Charlie Shavers, Pete Brown, and Teddy Bunn.  The Rushton recordings are informal duets recorded at Squirrel Ashcraft’s – Rushton on clarinet, Bob Zurke on piano.  Whether then or at another date, I had sent Frank a collection of other informal sessions at Squirrel’s: on the telephone, he told me that a prized listening experience was hearing Pee Wee on a 1939 or 1940 “Clarinet Marmalade.”

 27 Mar 00

Dear Michael,

     Don’t get a paper cut from these sheaves.  Not that these observations from K. Amis’s memoirs are new to you.

     I love the references to Hodes, with whom I played off and on between 1957 and 1984.

     Young J. Dapogny introduced me to Lucky Jim.  I evened up by playing him Tea for Two by one T. Monk, of whom he’d never heard.

As ever,

Frank   

The pages were excerpts from Kingsley Amis’s memoirs:  Amis, like his friend Philip Larkin, revered Pee Wee and especially the 1932 Rhythmakers sides.  In 1947, moving into an apartment, Amis glued to the wall “an over-enlarged photograph of the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, with a typed caption adapted from the last stanza of Tennyson’s poem, ‘To Virgil’: I salute thee, Pee Wee Russell, / I that loved thee since day began, Wielder of the wildest measure / ever moulded by the lips of man.’  Frank also took pleasure in Larkin’s dismissal of Hodes: “he sounded as if he had three hands and didn’t know what to do with any of them.”  When I see James Dapogny (now Professor Emeritus) I will ask him if the Monk anecdote is as he remembers it.

17 Jan 00

Dear Michael,

     I write this on my lap in front of football TV, having no surfaces owing to apt. mucking-out, and having no pen I like andneeding to buy six encased in plastic to find out.

     So this should be short – a mercy considering a sentence like the above.

     Nice to hear Jack [Gardner or Teagarden?] again.  An altogether agreeable cohort.  And such exciting Lester and Fats. Listening to that radio announcer makes my blood run cold.  I hate this f…..g country. 

     In that vein I’m reading Frances FitzGerald’s America Revised.  My high school’s history text was Charles Beard.  Reading him now suggests the textbook was seriously bowdlerized.  No wonder we’re all so ignorant.  Oh by Jingo.

     Do you have, I mean do you know, Bud’s I Remember Rio, done latterly in Chi?  Typical Bud.  He’s like a favorite uncle.  

     At the library I check[ed] out the 2 CD Art Deco, Sophisticated Ladies on Columbia.  I Wish I were Twins: Max, Bud, Adrian, Kress, Ella Logan? 1934.  You Go To My Head unusual sunny Pee Wee yet controlled.  Nan Wynn?  Lee W.[iley] and a flock of canaries w/ nice acc.

     I hear of a complete Django – might buy.

     Ask me sometime about who I thought  (whom, Prof.) was Jerry Winter — turns out to be Jerry Winner who hung around North Brunswick, NJ in 1951-2.  Nice cl. With Raymond Scott 1947/8.

     Also ask about the Victory Club.

TaTa,

Frankie

P.S.  I used “nice” 3 X, C-.

Terry Martin tells me that Frank discarded nothing and hoarded things in stacks and piles.  Were the frequent references to desperate cleaning real or merely rhetorical?  What incensed him so much in this letter was a live 1938 broadcast Fats Waller did from the Yacht Club — infamous for a condescending racist announcer who persists in calling Fats “boy.”  Frank loved football but was aghast at the way the announcers spoke: he told me more than once of a famous sports figure, trying to sound polished, making a grammatical error.  Now, this letter seems to combine politeness and impatience: I did not get the opportunity to ask  about the subjects he threw in at the end.  He had told me that as a young clarinetist, he failed to get involved in the rivalry of Goodman and Shaw; he cited Winner as someone he admired.

29 June 00,

Dear Michael,

     I never expected that fooling around with a clarinet would fetch me such bounty as your books and cassettes.  This Buddy Clark sure had accurate pitch, is it not so?

     As for your Salty Dogs (Saline Canines: MOG) inquiries, as far as those of D. Coller about [Tony] Parenti, [Bill] Reinhardt and [Jimmy] Ille, I wouldn’t know what to say.

     Did I ever tell you of my European summers (‘51 and ‘52) with the Amherst Delta Five?  Their clarinet player preferred to sell used cars in Utica.  One “Bosh” (Wm. H.) Pritchard came along on guitar (‘51) which h’d never played.   Someone showed him how to make a G7 chord.  Some girls on board ship told him he sounded like Eddie Condon.  Protchard became Henry Luce Prof. of Eng. at his alma mater.

Hastily,

Frank

I had sent Hilbert’s Pee Wee biography.  The Buddy Clark session was an oddity — for the Varsity label in 1940, where he is accompanied by a version of the Summa Cum Laude Orchestra, with Freeman and Pee Wee taking surprising solo passages.  “MOG” is Martin Oliver Grosz.  I hope that the story of Prof. Pritchard is true.

2 January 01

Dear Michael,

     Glad to have your letter, but saddened indeed at news of your mother.  Please accept my condolences.  What good is it to know that it happens to most of us before we depart, and that there’s always regret at what we failed to do or say in time.

     As for me, I’m trying to emerge from the Nov. – Dec. blahs — respiratory congestion followed by the BLAHS of SNOW and cabin fever.  Yes, I played a couple of gigs in Nov., just down the street really at Pete Miller’s Steakhouse, a last refuge of cigarette smokers.  I paid for it.  [Bob] Koester showed up both times, and Paige Van Vorst, and someone named Jerry (a friend of Bill Russell of Am. Music) and an OTIS who is a P. W. fancier.  A katzenjammer quartet: [mandolinist  / guitarist Don] Stienberg, [Mike] Waldbridge, me, and an EAGER but blatty trumpet player.  Later, Paige sent me a year’s worth of  Miss. Rag.  Don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

     Koester keeps wanting a record session and I keep demurring.  As for your discography and entries I question the Jazz At Noon dates as to my presence, my having been absent with a misdiagnosed biliary tract infection.  I was in hosp. during the assassination of Fred Hampton.  The Oct. 18, 1968 date shows an odd title inversion suggestive of Steiner: “Pick Yourself Up” is really Let Yourself Go.

Hang in there,

Frankie

My mother had died, at 85, a few months before.  Frank’s comments transcend formula, I think.  And I take it as indicative of his worldview and political awareness that he should recall his hospital stay because of Fred Hampton:  the head of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, killed by police at the direction of the FBI.

02 Nov 02

Dear Michael,

     Terry Martin sent me a photocopy of D. Coller’s thing on Floyd O’Brien.  Takes me back, if not quite aback. 

     Here’s hoping you are somewhat restored to the quotidian world, the humdrum, what an Army buddy and I referred to as the drab mundane.  Meanwhile, I thought you might be bemused by the enclosed pic, from 1978 I think under a wedding-reception tent in Priestley’s backyard. (Lake Forest, IL).  Bill, left, has his back to the crowd as was his wont, duels with Warren Kime.  Your congenial leader is at back, looking like Bergen Evans.  Not shown: Bob Wright, piano; Joe Levinson, bass; Bob Cousins, drums.  Nice gig.

     I’m looking for a cassette to send you: a string of tunes from the Chi. Jazz Fest, Jan. 1984.  Doubt that you’ve heard them.  A trio: Marty, me, Dan Shapera, hass.  Last time Mart and I tangled.  Trying to get my apt. under control – I’m not exactly a fussy taxonomist.

As Ever,

Frank

I will share this photograph in a future posting. 

18 Dec 02

Dear Michael,

     So you laughed out loud at M[ichael]. Chabon – I coarsen myself listen to the enclosed examples of obtuseness, banality, and dead-ass playing.  I wrote Price and Thompson thanking them for the check and rhapsodic blurb, respectively.  Also mentioned that I was both terrified and pissed off throughout.

     Thanks anyway, but I can’t listen to Braff.  Musically, verbally and in print, he is, for me, a prototype of The  Boston Asshole.

     I really must learn to curb my expressionism.

     As Marty once abjured me, For Your Eyes Only.  I continue to rummage for that cassette – my housekeeping is execrable.

Ever,

Frank

The remarks above may offend, but at this late date I prefer candor to ellipsis.  I had sent Frank a copy of a Braff CD I particularly liked; he sent me the 2-CD set of his live recordings from 1967 with Jimmy Archey and Don Ewell – an odd group of players, their styles rarely coalescing.

This is the last letter from Frank — and my Sunday evening attempts to call met with no response.  I assumed he had fallen ill or no longer wanted to talk or correspond.  Thus I was greatly surprised to receive a package months later — that long-promised cassette, with a scrawled note on a tiny scrap of paper, which read something like, “Sorry, man — I’ve been sick with ascites (?)”  That was the last I heard from him.

Frank’s letters were always leavened to some extent by his wit, even when it was extremely dark.  I don’t, however, know if he would have written to me at all if he didn’t feel the need to thank me for the things I sent him, which he did seem to appreciate. 

Talking to him on the telephone, however, was often a depressing experience as conversation wound down.  I found Frank’s mixture of annoyance, contempt, and sadness sometimes difficult, often frustrating.  I wanted to celebrate and gossip about the older music (a fan’s ardor); he wanted me to listen to Coltrane.  But more, he wanted to vent his rage at United States imperialism and the decline of the West.  In retrospect, we had little to talk about.  Someone listening in might have considered our sonversations as little dramas, with each of us wanting to make things go his way, succeeding only briefly.  I know that musicians and non-musicians are often separated by an invisible wall, but these conversations had even greater barriers, although we were enthusiastic about the same things. 

But Frank often seemed as if he was going through some elaborate set of motions; whether he wearied of me, an enthusiastic correspondent who attempted to ply him with cassettes, whether he wearied of talking about what was now the receding past, whether he was weary of people, I do not know.  That enigma, still fascinates me, although the possibilities are saddening.       

Thus I was surprised when I heard from Terry Martin, perhaps in 2006, telling me that Frank was ailing (which did not surprise me: the long spaces between calls or letters were often the result of hospitalizations) and that Frank had mentioned my name to Terry as someone he wouldn’t mind speaking to.  I feel some guilt about this now, but I told Terry I couldn’t attempt to restart the conversation.  I was going through a difficult period and Frank’s darkness was too much to face.  Terry, to his credit, understood.  The next news I heard was that Frank had died at 83.   

I consider myself fortunate that I had these exchanges, and that we can hear him play on recordings.  Frank had something to tell us, and he still does.      

Frank Chace: July 22, 1924 – December 28, 2007. 

A postscript: when I was attempting to interview Frank for a profile, I amassed five or six pages of transcriptions of those taped conversations.  In the spirit of Frank’s housekeeping, these pages have vanished.  However, I recall a few fragments.  When young, Frank was initially intrigued by the sounds coming from the apartment below – a neighbor was a symphony flautist.  When he began to take up the clarinet (moved to do so, of course, by a Pee Wee Russell record), he listened to “everything” and thought it was his responsibility as a musician to do so.  He recalled with great glee a recording with  Don Ewell in the house band at Jazz Ltd: the band was playing the SAINTS, a song Don loathed, and he kept playing MARYLAND through his piano chorus.  (The details may be awry, but the intent is clear.)  When asked what recordings he particularly liked, Frank eventually called to mind the Mezzrow-Bechet OUT OF THE GALLION, Bud Jacobson’s BLUE SLUG, and expressed a special desire to hear Pee Wee’s solo on the Commodore Muggsy Spanier Ragtimers SWEET SUE, which I did not have, but acquired through Gene Kramer.  When Frank heard it, he remembered that he and Marty played it many times, their verdict being that Pee Wee’s solo “scraped the clouds.” 

But he saved his most enthusiastic words for two extremely disparate recordings: Coltrane’s YOU LEAVE ME BREATHLESS and Jerry Colonna’s comic version of EBB TIDE.  Since Frank’s death, I’ve heard both, and was much more impressed by the Coltrane.  Colonna’s version of that pop song has the singer nearly drowned by sound-effects waves — surely an acquired taste.   

Frank had seen my hero Sidney Catlett in concert once (a wartime presentation by Deems Taylor); he had played alongside Bobby Hackett once in an informal session, probably at Priestley’s.  But there were almost no contemporary musicians he admired, and fewer he could see himself playing or recording with: Marty Grosz certainly, Dick Hyman, possibly.  He was sure he was able to play a whole session and that he didn’t need to practice.  Terry Martin and Bob Koester have first-hand experience with Frank’s reluctance to record.  In fairness, few of the recordings he did make usually do not find him in the most congenial settings: he felt comfortable alongside Ewell and Marty and some of his younger Chicago friends, but such congeniality was rare. 

Frank deserved better, but it is difficult to make him into another jazz-victim-of-oppression, as his stubbornness often got in the way of musical opportunities.  I offer these letters and recollections as tribute to a great musician and enigmatic figure.     

COPYRIGHT, MICHAEL STEINMAN AND JAZZ LIVES, 2009
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Michael Steinman and Jazz Lives with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

In her essay “The Naked and the Conflicted,” published in today’s New York Times, Katie Roiphe suggests that “we are awfully cavalier about the Great Male Novelists of the last century. It has become popular to denounce those authors, and more particularly to deride the sex scenes in their novels.” By the Great Male Novelists she is, of course, referring to Norman Mailer, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow. She continues: “Even the young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be the heirs apparent have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors.” Roiphe picks a relatively slim sample of “young male writers” to prove her thesis, including David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, and Jonathan Franzen. Slim sample, but still, quite representative. Her big claim: “The younger writers are so self-­conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex.” Hmmm . . . Perhaps. Makes us think about how writers like Dennis Cooper, Wells Tower, Junot Díaz, or Stephen Elliott might fit into this scheme . . .

From five years old to fifteen (when girls, booze, and pot took over my life) I had my Reading Tree.

My Reading Tree

As you can see, it sits in the P’s backyard, limbs formed into a cone-shape, which nestled my awkward, adolescent body quite comfortably.  There had even been a hole in the trunk deep enough to squirrel three books (and later, two issues of “Barely Legal”), much to the chagrin of Charley the Squirrel, who lived in our backyard, and found his cubby full of useless square, bound pieces of parchment.

Charley, Dealing With Homelessness

Useless pieces of parchment? Oh Charley, if you only knew.

Those books, my Reading Tree, the solitude of being away from my family and my painful adolescent world, teleported into 1840’s England with Pip, Joe, and Mr. Wopsle I cannot even begin to explain to you now the impact the Magic of Books had on me.  I’d zip through three hundred pages in an afternoon, completely enthralled by the worlds opened up to me by these great (and sometimes not very talented–I read a lot of John Grisham and Hardy Boy’s books too) writers.

Now, though, I’ve found that books have lost their magic hold over me.  Why?  Could it be that modern writers do not have the skill of enrapturing readers?  No, I don’t think so.  Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, Richard Russo, George Pelecanos, all have a skill level as great as Dickens, Fitzgerald, Lee.

No, books have lost their magic for me because of two reasons. The first reason aligns with my decision to become a Writer of Great Importance.  Somehow, I flipped a switch and could no longer read books without using my Critical Eye.  And you know what I found?  Where I used to read five to ten books (there were some marathon summer sessions) a week, I now struggle to read fifty pages in a sitting.  Reading has become a punch-in and punch-out job, an ingredient in the recipe to become a W.G.I.

I spend more time trying to study writing technique, mentally critiquing each scene–well, she made the decision to do this, but that doesn’t support the allegorical subtext she’d been building up to this point; purple description there; how does this scene advance the plot, build tension, grow character; wow that’s a fascinating description, how can I steal (ummm…borrow) that one–that I lose what drew me, as a child and adolescent to books in the first place. And that’s sad.  Don’t you think?

That in my life, books have become TPS Reports.

The second reason, I think, is common even for non-writers.  I blame the educational system (great, just what the public schools need, more fault for crushing the innocence and freedom of children).  I remember when I was a kid teachers would hand-out a Summer Reading List, which I’d devour during the first week of summer, loving every second of reading the recommendations of my teachers, who at that time, I didn’t loath.  It wasn’t until high school, for me, when book reports and pop tests in English class drove me from the bound texts of “popular classics” to the abridged yellow and black Cliff’s Notes.  Once teachers made reading a necessity for a good grade, it seemed only natural I’d find the most productive way of achieving this requirement.

I mean, isn’t that what forming us into proper worker drones is all about?  Productivity?

Now, I’ve noticed, book reports and/or worksheets with study questions begin in grammar school (maybe earlier by now, preschoolers getting handed both a bottle and a Q/A sheet).  By the time kids reach high school and plot and structure and character are being deconstructed on a grand scale, long gone is the innocent magic of novels, the free pleasure of reading, replaced by the necessity to become a literary mechanic, getting under the book’s hood to determine how the plot engine and characterization transmission work in tandem to motor the car.  This might work for some teens (the ones desiring to be book mechanics, IE, lofty, high-society literary critics), but for most of us, taking apart the guts of books, seeing the innards, the tricks, the technique, causes the magic of the bound parchment to evaporate.

No wonder the next generation gravitates to Internet and movies and TV.  They aren’t being bashed over the head with study questions and analysis requirements on “Grey’s Anatomy” (course, what is there to study? McSteamyDreamy’s pouty face and how it speaks to 21st Century sex mores?), they can just sit back and watch the magic show.

So, I’ve decided to try my best to return to the purity of reading.  Not thinking, analyzing, deconstructing; just reading for the entertainment of the thing.  It has been hard, to click off my “professional brain”, to disconnect years of technician training, but I’ve found the more and more I read, the better I’ve become at doing this.

Can you believe that?  A thirty-year-old man relearning how to read. Well, that’s me.  You can now find me nestled in my Reading Tree with Chronic City, Lowboy, The Great Gatsby.

No goals, analysis, criticism, evaluation, or agenda.

Just Reading.  Wow, what a novel idea.

Sorry Charley, but your burrow in the Reading Tree has been reclaimed.

"Aw nuts! I hope he gets my favorite book."

Charley's Favorite Book

From five years old to fifteen (when girls, booze, and pot took over my life) I had my Reading Tree.

My Reading Tree

As you can see, it sits in the P’s backyard, limbs formed into a cone-shape, which nestled my awkward, adolescent body quite comfortably.  There had even been a hole in the trunk deep enough to squirrel three books (and later, two issues of “Barely Legal”), much to the chagrin of Charley the Squirrel, who lived in our backyard, and found his cubby full of useless square, bound pieces of parchment.

Old Charley, Dealing With Homelessness

Useless pieces of parchment?

Oh Charley, if you only knew.

Those books, my Reading Tree, the solitude of being away from my family and my painful adolescent world, teleported into 1840’s England with Pip, Joe, and Mr. Wopsle; I cannot even begin to explain to you now the impact the Magic of Books had on me.  I’d zip through three hundred pages in an afternoon, completely enthralled by the worlds opened up to me by these great (and sometimes not very talented–I read a lot of John Grisham and Hardy Boy’s books too) writers.

Now, though, I’ve found that books have lost their magic hold over me.  Why?  Could it be that modern writers do not have the skill of enrapturing readers?  No, I don’t think so.  Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, Richard Russo, George Pelecanos, all have a skill level as great as Dickens, Fitzgerald, Lee.  No, books have lost their magic for me because of two reasons.

The first reason aligns with my decision to become a Writer of Great Importance.  Somehow, I flipped a switch and could no longer read books without using my Critical Eye.  And you know what I found?  Where I used to read five to ten books (there were some marathon summer sessions) a week, I now struggle to read fifty pages in a sitting.  Reading has become a punch-in and punch-out job, an ingredient in the recipe to become a W.G.I.

I spend more time trying to study writing technique, mentally critiquing each scene–well, she made the decision to do this, but that doesn’t support the allegorical subtext she’d been building up to this point; purple description there; how does this scene advance the plot, build tension, grow character; wow that’s a fascinating description, how can I steal (ummm…borrow) that one–that I lose what drew me, as a child and adolescent to books in the first place.

And that’s sad.  Don’t you think?

That in my life, books have become TPS Reports.

The second reason, I think, is common even for non-writers.  I blame the educational system (great, just what the public schools need, more fault for crushing the innocence and freedom of children).  I remember when I was a kid teachers would hand-out a Summer Reading List, which I’d devour during the first week of summer, loving every second of reading the recommendations of my teachers, who at that time, I didn’t loath.  It wasn’t until high school, for me, when book reports and pop tests in English class drove me from the bound texts of “popular classics” to the abridged yellow and black Cliff’s Notes.  Once teachers made reading a necessity for a good grade, it seemed only natural I’d find the most productive way of achieving this requirement.  I mean, isn’t that what forming us into proper worker drones is all about?  Productivity?

Now, I’ve noticed, book reports and/or worksheets with study questions begin in grammar school (maybe earlier by now, preschoolers getting handed both a bottle and a Q/A sheet).  By the time kids reach high school and plot and structure and character are being deconstructed on a grand scale, long gone is the innocent magic of novels, the free pleasure of reading, replaced by the necessity to become a literary mechanic, getting under the book’s hood to determine how the plot engine and characterization transmission work in tandem to motor the car.  This might work for some teens (the ones desiring to be book mechanics, IE, lofty, high-society literary critics), but for most of us, taking apart the guts of books, seeing the innards, the tricks, the technique, causes the magic of the bound parchment to evaporate.

No wonder the next generation gravitates to Internet and movies and TV.  They aren’t being bashed over the head with study questions and analysis requirements on “Grey’s Anatomy” (course, what is there to study there, McDreamy’s pouty face and how it speaks to 21st Century sex mores?), they can just sit back and watch the magic show.

So, I’ve decided to try my best to return to the purity of reading.  Not thinking, analyzing, deconstructing; just reading for the entertainment of the thing.  It has been hard, to click off my “professional brain”, to disconnect years of technician training, but I’ve found the more and more I read, the better I’ve become at doing this.

Can you believe that?  A thirty-year-old man relearning how to read.

Well, that’s me.  You can now find me nestled in my Reading Tree with Chronic City, Lowboy, and The Great Gatsby.

No goals, analysis, criticism, evaluation, or agenda.

Just Reading.  Wow, what a novel idea.

Sorry Charley, but your burrow in the Reading Tree has been reclaimed.

"Aw nuts!!!! Hope he buys my favorite book."

Charley's favorite book.

People tend to ask me what my favorite book is a lot. it’s one of those standard questions – what’s your favorite color, what music  do you listen to, etc., etc. It’s really hard for me to pick one specific book as my favorite, since my favorites tend to change every month. But here are the best books I’ve ever read, books I read over and over again  and recommend to my friends and give to people as gifts. In no particular order:

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Ariel is the book that originally turned me onto poetry. For most of my life, having been force fed lots of crappy children’s poems and Robert Frost (oh, how I despise him), I found poetry to be a useless genre. But, the summer before my junior year, I read Ariel for a class assignment, and it was nothing like any poetry I’ve read before. Sylvia Plath’s poetry is beautiful, dark, and (most importantly) brief, never overstaying its welcome, and this is undoubtably her finest work, and my favorite book of poetry.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I love this book so much, I can’t even tell you. Oh, it’s about books and the magic of books and it’s about Germany during World War II, and it’s about unlikely friendships.  Really, anything by Markus Zusak is effortlessly wonderful, but this book really takes the cake. Oh, and it’s narrated by Death.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Two of my favorite authors combine their powers to produce the funniest book about the apocalypse you’ll ever read.  If you like Discworld, or the Sandman comics, or anything else by these two, you’ll love this book. I love how their two different styles effortlessly combine, the irreverence with which they treat Armageddon, and the characters. The characters really make this book shine.

The Odyssey by Homer

I read an expurgated copy of this in high school, and didn’t think much of it. But if you’ve read The Odyssey before and didn’t like it much, it’s because you were reading the wrong translation – try the one by Robert Fagles. This book has something for everyone

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

A wonderful book about World War II and the early comic book industry. A story of two cousins struggling to make it big in the funny papers business. This book is an especially delightful read if you’re a big comic book fan, as there’s tons of references to familiar characters and creators. Superman comes out looking like kind of a dick, though.

The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Woolf

I don’t know how popular or famous this book is, but I love it. I stumbled across it when I was in middle school on a trop to visit some family friends in Kentucky. I’ve never seen anyone else read it or talk about it (I can’t even convince my little sisters to pick it up), but The Mozart Season is a stunningly good young adult novel about a gifted young violinist’s summer. While practicing for a competition she’s entered, she learns about her family’s past. I reread this book once a year.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

The Martian Chronicles is a set of interlinked short stories about (what else) Mars – its early exploration, the people who settle there from Earth, and the long lost Martian civilization. Elegiac and kind of heartbreaking, this is one of the books that turned me onto science fiction in the first place.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Of course, I had to put something by William Shakespeare on here. There’s nothing about Hamlet that I could possibly say that a hundred wiser people haven’t already said. All I can say is, if you studied Shakespeare at all in school, do yourself a favor and go watch someone actually perform it. My senior class went on a field trip to watch a college perform Hamlet, which was enormously fun, though Gertrude had a really weird accent that I couldn’t quite place. That still bugs me. Anyway, I went and watched the Kenneth Branagh version after that, and it’s fabulous.  While the words on the page are magnificent, they really come alive when someone speaks them. At least, someone who’s not your seventy year old half cyborg AP English teacher.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is simply incomparable. The first book I read of hers was The Handmaid’s Tale (mostly because one of my English teacher’s recommended it to us with the addendum to not say that she’d done so, as it would upset our parents – after that, what teenager could resist?), but The Blind Assassin is my favorite of Atwood’s work because of the structure and a plot twist that I really did not see coming, though I probably should have. It’s the story of two sisters, intercut with letters and newspaper notices and passages from a pulpy old school science fiction book.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

This is the best book on writing I’ve ever read. Half autobiography, half instruction manual, Stephen King presents no nonsense advice that’s helpful to anyone who’s thinking about writing fiction as a career. I reread this sometimes when my writing gets particularly awful (in fact, I’m probably due for a reread right now), and I always take something new away. Read it regardless of whether you care for any of Mr. King’s usual fare – you won’t regret it.

Everybody’s doing it, so why not me? Top 10 lists are always fun, so I present to you my completely biased, non-authoritative lists of my top 10 books and top 10 movies of 2000-2009.

Books

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
3. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
4. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
5. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
6. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
7. Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
8. The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
9. The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
10. Blue Angel by Francine Prose

Please note that 8 of these books could comfortably be classified as science fiction/fantasy. One is nonfiction (Omnivore’s Dilemma), and one is literary fiction but it’s about writers, one of my favorite subjects, if done well (Blue Angel).

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order): The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz; The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen; Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh; Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill; Just After Sunset by Stephen King; Mystic River by Dennis Lehane; No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy; The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger; 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley

Movies

1. No Country for Old Men
2. The Children of Men
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
4. Zodiac
5. Little Miss Sunshine
6. Mystic River
7. Adaptation
8. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
9. Unbreakable
10. There Will Be Blood

Honorable Mentions: Donnie Darko; Red Dragon; Serenity; Napoleon Dynamite; The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Star Trek; The Dark Knight; The Royal Tenenbaums; Memento; Brokeback Mountain; District 9

Amazingly enough, 7 of these movies are adaptations of favorite books of mine. Usually, they don’t get the book to film thing right.

What were your favorite books of the year? (Books that were new to you in 2009, if not necessarily published this year.)

This year, I started The Literary Omnivore. I’ve been a voracious reader for years, and I decided book blogging would be a wonderful creative outlet for me somewhere in October, after a presentation at my school about “e-portfolios”. The book blogging community has been more than welcoming- thank you, ladies! It’s been one of the best things about this year, up there with the inauguration, Dragon*Con, and my first semester of college.

In order to answer this question, I’ve put together a top ten list of the books I read this year. I try to read widely, but I must admit- I have a predisposition for fantasy and strong female characters, which shows in this list.

10. Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
(Review)

We start with Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth, the recommendation for which I picked up on my senior trip to England this year. Labyrinth entwines the story of Dr. Alice Tanner in the modern day and Alaïs Pelletier in the thirteenth century, both women who suddenly find themselves crucial to the Holy Grail. The reason this is only number ten is because of Alice- she’s largely superfluous, and a lot of events occur in her life simply because they mirror Alaïs’. The reason this is number ten is because of Alaïs, a worthy and realistic heroine for her time. She’s stubborn and capable, and her story is fantastic. If only Alice weren’t involved…

9. Atonement
(Review)

After the film came out, I was quite interested in reading Atonement, and I’m glad I did. The only reason this isn’t placed higher on the list is because it’s absolutely heartbreaking. The execution is perfect, especially how scenes overlap each other- Cecelia tosses a dress to the floor, which Briony trips on later, for instance. This isn’t a book for rereading, but it is an amazing novel.

8. The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
(Review)

In September, I caught up to the rest of the world and read The Other Boleyn Girl. Unsurprisingly, I loved it. Gregory manages to make a story to which we know the outcome suspenseful, and gives Mary, the other Boleyn girl, a quiet dignity to contrast with her scheming, cunning, and thoroughly delightful sister, Anne. Tudor life is dealt with frankly, especially women’s sexuality and how it was viewed. While I’m told it’s not entirely historical accurate, I can’t quite bring myself to care. The story of Mary Boleyn is that good.

7. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
(Review)

I’d never read Michael Chabon before, and now I know I need to. While The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay has a wandering portion in the middle of the novel, the adventures of Sammy and Josef, cousins and comics men, are fantastic. Michael Chabon includes his research in the subtlest of ways, and he covers a lot in his novel, from World War II to Levittown.

6. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
(Review)

Footnotes and meticulous world building add up to a marvelous alternate history novel about England’s history of magic. The plot’s just as intriguing as English magic, and everything- and I mean everything- is properly researched, but you never feel like Clarke is simply unloading research on you. The novel is split into three volumes, and while Volume I is very good, Volumes II and III blow it out of the water. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is very long, but also very worth it.

5. Sunshine by Robin McKinley
(Review)

Sunshine is misrepresented as a “tale of supernatural desire”. Ignore that silly copy and enjoy the plot- small town baker is captured by vampires, where she meets a vampire who, of all things, needs a mortal’s help… It’s suspenseful and Rae, the baker, is a wonderful character- obviously vulnerable in her new crowd, but determined to succeed and retain her normal life. McKinley’s world of vampires and other supernatural creatures is one of the best I’ve encountered in the past few years.

4. Rampant by Diana Peterfreund
(Review)

One of the first books to be featured on my Tuesday feature, The Literary Horizon, Rampant caught me with its amazing premise- killer unicorns and the virgins who hunt them. I was hooked. While the beginning is a bit slow, when Rampant takes off, it takes off. I was gasping out loud and eschewing waking up at a reasonable hour the next day just to find out what happened.

3. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
(Review)

Alternate history literary detective fiction. Yeah, you’d love it too. With plenty of delightful wordplay, a very human main character in Thursday Next, and plenty of interesting plots, schemes, and gadgets, The Eyre Affair was just delightful. Read Jane Eyre prior, though- it’ll definitely help your appreciation of the novel.

2. Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest
(Review)

This is a book I hunted for after I saw it in Publishers Weekly. It takes an amazing plot to make me like zombies, my eternal foe (you’d think I’d more scared of, oh, I dunno, fire), but Boneshaker definitely delivers. Its steampunk world is fascinating, and Briar Wilkes is a marvelous protagonist. I adore the device of using a young character’s parent as a protagonist in young adult fiction- it allows for more variety in main characters. I definitely look forward to more adventures in The Clockwork Century.

1. Graceling, by Kristin Cashore
(Review)

An accessible, interesting fantasy world and a wonderfully prickly main character who grows as the political intrigue does? Kristin Cashore, you have a loyal reader from now until eternity. (Or you publish something as pointless to your overall story as A Lion Among Men. Which you won’t, I know.) There’s romance, political intrigue, interesting world building, and, most of all, there’s Katsa- a marvelously prickly female character who doesn’t compromise an inch for anything, even love. It’s amazing.

Well, Happy New Year’s Eve to everyone! May the new year bring you many blessings, and many more good books besides.

Every now and again I like to read something quite different from my usual diet and this one fitted the bill.

It’s an alternative history which has Sitka, Alaska as the Jewish homeland instead of Israel. The lease on the land is running out and with possibly as few as 1 in 5 of the inhabitants being allowed to stay on there, they are all having to apply for permission.

The book is a murder mystery which follows the tried and trusted formula of the hard drinking detective, with a failed marriage in the background.

I would have liked a glossary as there were lots of Jewish/Yiddish words bandied around and I sometimes had to guess at their meanings. I suspect some of them were made up. I used to know a lot of Jewish words as I read a lot of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chaim Potok and such as a youngster, but I’ve forgotten a lot. They always had a glossary.

There were characters called ‘boundary mavens’ who rigged up poles and strings along the neighbourhoods so that Jews worried about breaking the Sabbath when they carried things or walked their dogs could get around the Jewish rules. This strikes me as being so typical of the religious zealots who always seem to spend a lot of time bending rules to fit their consciences. Well, I found it funny.

The novel got rave reviews, which is a bit of a mystery to me. It was entertaining but it wouldn’t be on my – one to read again list.

I quite enjoyed this book except for the odd bit of – what can I say?
Schmaltz.

Gentlemen of the Road is a Michael Chabon book so obviously it’s about Jews. Fun thing about this one is that it’s a pretty much straight up adventure tale about Jewish vagabonds in the oh let’s say 1100s up the Caspian Sea. In the afterword Chabon talks about how his working title for the book was Jews With Swords, but no one really took that seriously. The story is good adventurey stuff and uses a setting that I haven’t read a million billion times, which is good. I don’t really have much more to say about it than that. There are plenty of sword fights and horse-thieveries and elephants.

Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley.

Published May 2009 by McClelland and Stewart.

ISBN: 978-0771017322

The Recommend:

A loving and heart-rending memoir about what it was like to grow up with two larger than life parents, the distinguished conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. and the Vancouver-born Manhattan socialite Patricia Taylor Buckley.

It is smart, witty, charming, and sometimes frank.

*

*

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon.

Published September 2009 by Harper Collins

ISBN: 978-1554682058

The Recommend:

Chabon investigates what it is to be a man, a son, brother, father, and husband, in a series of essays that make up a marvelous collection of insight, humour, pathos, and memory.

*

*

*

Not Yet by Wayson Choy

Published May 2009 by Doubleday Canada

ISBN: 978-0385663106

The Recommend:

Choy discusses being suspended into half-consciousness after being induced into a coma after suffering from a near-fatal heart attack.

It’s a pensive journey to his past, through the ghosts that haunt him, and to the reality of his life with people around him who care.

It’s a book about love, really.

*

About Joeseph Planta

*

Joseph Planta is editor at thecommentary.ca where he features audio interviews with unique and diverse guests from renowned bestselling and prize winning authors, Canadian newsmakers and political figures, internationally known print and broadcast journalists, prominent academics and public intellectuals, as well as noted artists and personalities.

For over 450 interviews and five years now, the Planta: On the Line interview program continues as a forum for engaging, informative conversations on current affairs and a wide variety of subjects.

I’ve long thought college life to be a great subject for fiction writing, but until recently I never knew that there is a recognized ”college novel” genre. It was first brought to my attention two weeks ago when a library patron asked me for an old book called The College Novel in America by John O. Lyons. Unfortunately, after she pried it from my hands she checked it out, so I can’t tell you much more about it. However, I found a recent reference work on the subject at neighboring Hillman Library called The American College Novel by John E. Kramer, and I can tell you about that one and some of the hidden treasures it reveals.

Kramer provides annotations for 648 American college novels divided into two sections: student-centered and staff-centered. Some student-centered titles include End Zone by Don Delillo; The Paragon by Jon Knowles; Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis; Big U by Neal Stephenson; Continuing Education by Dorothy Weil; and Hippies by Peter Jedick. In the staff-centered category you’ll find The Human Stain by Philip Roth; The Temptation to Do Good by Peter Ferdinand Drucker; Straight Man by Richard Russo; Japanese by Spring by Ishmael Reed; Intimate Enemies by Caryl Rivers; Unholy Loves by Joyce Carol Oates; and Breakers by Martin Walser.

If you don’t want to sift through 648 books to decide where to begin your college novel reading, no worries, Kramer provides a top 50 recommendation list that includes Fanshawe by Nathaniel Hawthorne; The Women’s Room by Marilyn French; Fall Quarter by Weldon Kees; Rookery Blues by Jon Hassler; The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy; A Friend in Power by Carlos Baker; Stepping Westward by Malcolm Bradbury; and Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon.

Kramer also supplies an index that allows you to find titles based on a character’s staff position at their respective college setting, and yes, there are some that include librarians and archivists as main characters. Four to be exact: Alamo House by Sarah Bird; Lusts by Clark Blaise; The Devil in Texas by Wolf Mankowitz; and The Archivist by Martha Cooley.

Anglophiles, fear not: There is another book I stumbled across here at CLP called The English University Novel, by Mortimer Robinson Proctor, that features critical interpretations of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night, and many more.

–Wes

PS. You might have noticed that some of the titles in this post weren’t linked to the catalog. That’s because those titles aren’t available within our library system and will need to be obtained through our Interlibrary Loan service. Unfortunately, Interlibrary Loan was drastically affected by this year’s state budget cuts to library services, resulting in less access to materials by patrons, and increased costs to deliver those materials. Let’s not forget that in 2010 we need to sustain our advocacy efforts to ensure an increase in library funding in next year’s state budget.

1. The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier & Clay
2. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
3. The Road
4. Gilead
5. Middlesex
6. The Book Thief
7. Blankets
8. The Year of Magical Thinking
9. Everything is Illuminated
10. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
11. Me Talk Pretty One Day
12. Slavery by Another Name
13. Atonement
14. Harry Potter series
15. Fast Food Nation
16. Netherland
17. Let’s Talk About Love
18. Blue Like Jazz
19. The Tipping Point
20. Killing Yourself to Live

I had FOUR books out from the library.  And I’ve been trapped under at least 20 inches of snow at the new place, with only the one book I have to read that’s NOT a library book, for the past couple days.

About halfway through Kavalier and Clay now.  Ehhhh.  I thought I’d like it more the second go around because I’m more of a comic book person than I was (well, a reader, anyway) but there’s less comic stuff than I remember.

Otherwise, all recapping books and such aren’t here either.  Borrringggggg, reader-wise.

Boyfriend’s dad is making him bookshelves that will take up an entire wall.  I have a picture from the other day of them as they are right now, nowhere near finished, and I’ll put that up when we get the pics off the camera.  IDK, between him and me (and maybe the kid–not sure if she’ll just have her own in her room, because she has little IKEA bookcase at the end of her bed, and a small one against one wall, and probably a tall one against the other wall when I pick up the screws from the old place) I think we’ll fill the heck out of these suckers.  But I expected to have LESS books as the year goes on, not more, as I read the possibly hundreds that I haven’t touched yet.  I mean, I can’t enjoy ALL of them, right, so I’ll probably end up trading them at a used store, 4 for 1.  Diminished piles.  I can live with that.

What I’m having problems living with is being stuck in this house.  WHO DOESN’T HAVE A SNOW SHOVEL?  I hope we can get out today.  We’re supposed to be moved in two days.

SOUNDTRACK: BLACK SABBATH-Sabotage (1975).

Sabotage seems to be somewhat forgotten (maybe because of the creepy cover art 0f Ozzy in a kimono and fascinating platform shoes, Bill Ward in red tights with a codpiece (and visible underwear on the back cover), and Geezer and Tony’s mustaches).
But this album rocks pretty hard and heavy.
“Hole in the Sky” is a sort of spastic rocker with Ozzy screaming vocals over the top of the rocking track.
“Don’t Start (Too Late)” is the by now obligatory acoustic guitar piece.  But this one is different, for it has some really wild and unpredictable aspects to it.

“Symptom of the Universe” is another classic Sabbath track, a blistering heavy fast riff with the wonderful Ozzy-screamed: “Yeaaaaaahs!”  It then surprises you by going into an extended acoustic guitar workout for a minute and a half at the end.

“Megalomania” is a slow ponderous piece. Unlike the psychedelic tracks from the previous records, this one moves along with a solid back beat. It also has a great bridge (“Why doesn’t everybody leave me alone?”). They definitely had fun with the effects (echoing vocals, etc.) on this one.  And, like their prog rock forebears, this song segues into another rhythm altogether when we get the wonderfully fast rock segment.  And the humorous point where the music pauses and Ozzy shouts “Suck me!”

“Thrill of it All” is a pretty good rocker, which after a  pretty simple opening morphs into a slow, surprisingly keyboard-fueled insanely catchy coda.  “Supertzar” is a wonderfully creepy instrumental.  It runs 3 minutes and is all minor-keys and creepy Exorcist-like choirs.  When the song breaks and the bizzaro Iommi riff is joined by the choir, you can’t help but wonder why no horror film has used this as its intro music.

“Am I Going Insane (Radio)” is a very catchy keyboardy track.  It clearly has crossover potential (although the lyrics are wonderfully bizarre).  But it ends with totally creepy laughing and then wailing.    “The Writ” ends the album. It’s another solid rocker and it ends with an acoustic coda with Ozzy’s plaintive vocals riding over the top.

Sabotage has some truly excellent moments.  It’s just hard to fathom the amount of prog-rock tendencies they’ve been throwing onto their last few discs (we’ll say Rick Wakeman had something to do with it).

Black Sabbath made two more albums before Ozzy left.  I haven’t listened to either one of them in probably fifteen years.  And my recollection of them is that they’re both pretty lousy.  Maybe one of these days I’ll see if they prove me wrong.

[READ: December 16, 2009] McSweeney’s #7

This was the first McSweeney’s edition that I didn’t buy new.  My subscription ran out after Issue #6 and I never saw #7  in the stores.  So, I recently had to resort to a used copy.

This issue came packaged with a cardboard cover, wrapped with a large elastic band.

Inside you get several small volumes each with its own story (this style hearkens back to McSweeney’s #4, but the presentation is quite different).  7 of the 9 booklets feature an artistic cover that relates to the story but is done by another artist (not sure if they were done FOR the story or not).  I have scanned all of the covers.  You can click on each one to see a larger picture.

The booklets range from 16 to 100 pages, but most are around 30 pages.  They are almost all fiction, except for the excerpt from William T. Vollman’s 3,500 page Rising Up and Rising Down and the essays that accompany the Allan Seager short story.

KEVIN BROCKMEIER-”The Ceiling” [cover by Eric White]
The basic plot of this story is quite simple: a large black square appears in the sky one day.  Slowly it sinks towards the earth, growing larger and larger.  Despite the somewhat Stephen King-like nature of the premise, the story is really all about how people live their lives: specifically, how one man’s family acts during this crisis.  I enjoyed the story quite a bit.

However, I was confused by the beginning.  The opening scene is at the son’s  birthday party.  There’s a lot of detail given, but it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the rest of the story.  It begins with the son telling a fictional tale about himself in a hot air balloon with the father noting, on a separate line: “This is a story.”

It seemed like this was all a set up for something special.  And I’m just not sure how that ties together with the rest of the story.  But I’m not too worried about it as I enjoyed the piece as a whole.

ANN CUMMINS-”Red Ant House” [cover by Tim Bower]
I really enjoyed Cummins’ story in McSweeney’s #6, so I was excited to read this one.  The red ant house is a house down the block that is infested with red ants.  A new family moves into the house and the daughter of that family immediately latches on to the narrator of the story, Leigh.  Leigh is one of 6 kids whose mother is pregnant again.

The new girl, Theresa Mooney, lives with a man who is not her father and a woman who is her mother.  The man seems to have families all over the place.  None of this is good news for Theresa Mooney, especially when Leigh and her siblings decide to point it out to her.  Despite her best intentions however, Leigh and Theresa become friendly, and their bonding is complete when they dare each other to do something risky.

This story didn’t blow me away as much as the previous one, but there was something oddly affecting about it.

A.M. HOMES-”Do Not Disturb” [cover by Melinda Beck]
This is a very prickly story.  It can easily be summed up by the exchange: “You knew I was a bitch before you married me, say something original.”  In the story, a man and his wife are quite obviously falling apart (as individuals and as a couple).  Before the evening’s events, the couple had yet another huge fight.  And he thinks, yet again, of leaving her.  But that night, during dinner, she becomes gravely ill.

Since she is a doctor, she is reluctant to go to the ER, but after several hours of agony, she relents.  She is diagnosed with cancer.  But this diagnosis, rather than softening her, as everyone suspects, just makes her more prickly, more demanding, even less compassionate.  But he can’t leave a cancer-riddled wife can he?  Even if she pushes him out?  This was a very dark story, but it was very powerful.  And, as with all of A.M. Homes work that I’ve read, it was very good.

MICHAEL CHABON-”The Return of the Amazing Cavalieri” [front & back covers by Chris Ware]
I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay when I read it a few years ago.  I was delighted to discover that this story (the cover art suggests it is an “Un-Told Tale of Kavalier and Clay”) was included here.  Sadly for me, I don’t remember too many details of the novel (it was like ten years ago, right?).  Happily for me, they are not relevant to this story.

This piece concerns Cavalieri himself.  He is walking to school with his nephew and the fear and dread he had during grammar school is rushing back at him.  Cavalieri’s nephew has promised his class that The Amazing Kavalier will perform some magic tricks (maybe even escape from a safe!) for Sharing Time.  Cavalieri susses up the class and decides that they are at the perfect age to be simply skeptical.  He grows more nervous as Sharing Time approaches.

He proceeds to perform his simple tricks, but when he suspects that the kids are not all that impressed, he attempts one grand feat.  I enjoyed this story immensely and it makes me want to re-read Kavalier and Clay (or at the very least Maps & Legends, which is sitting on my bedside right now).

The cover art by Chris Ware is, of course, fantastic.  The front cover is designed to look just like a comic book.  And the back cover is even more fun (in a sick and twisted way) as an ad for how much your life will suck if you have a baby.

HEIDI JULAVITS-”Little Little Big Man” [cover by Elizabeth Kairys]
This is, frankly, a bizarre story.  It involves a tiny man named Big who works for a rodeo.  And beyond that the story is full of what I can’t decide is fantasy, magical realism or just hallucinations.

Big becomes involved with a large woman who carries him over her shoulder (his face getting caught in her skirt ruffles as it bumps against her behind).  This part was very funny.

They become serious and settle down.  He grows unhappy and winds up spending a lot of his time climbing into her uterus to read the graffiti that her six children have written in there.

[Pause for people to digest that sentence].

So I’m not sure what to make of details like that.  There are questions of impotence, unfaithfulness and pseudo-bestiality.  And while I understand what happened plot-wise, arriving there was a very bizarre path.

J.T. LEROY-”Harold’s End” [cover by Sharon Leong]
Of course, now we know that J.T. Leroy is a fraud or a pseudonym depending on your opinion of the author’s stunt.  It makes it hard to read this for the first time without having the author’s reality impinging on the story.  I’m not sure if I would have been quite as cynical about the story if I didn’t know what I know about Leroy.  But I an inclined to think that I would have been at least suspicious of the details of the story anyhow.

The basic premise here is that a man approaches a group of kids on the street.  They are suspicious of him (is he a cop, a social worker, a john?), but when they see he is handing out free needles, they relent.  He singles out one boy and invites him back to his house, where they shoot heroin and hang out for an extended period of time.  A single event (that I will get to in a moment) happens which causes friction between them and the boy is asked to leave.

I was immediately suspicious of the story because the kids seem completely unreal.  I’m not even sure how old they are supposed to be.  They hang out on the curb but it’s unclear if they are trying to score drugs, if they are trying to score dates or what.  The only thing we know is that they all have pets (a rat, a pit bull and a boa constrictor)  hanging out with them.  And, the kids tell the man that all of their pets have pedigrees (in far more exacting detail than one might expect a kid to know).  The title of the story comes because the boy who the man brings home did not have a pet.  Along with the heroin, the man gives the boy a snail named Harold as a pet that he can take care of himself.

So, despite the fact that the man is in the role of chickenhawk for this young boy, nothing sexual ever happens between them, except for the event that causes the friction (which is wholly unexpected and really rather disgusting).  But it’s not even entirely apparent afterward why the man is upset (because it didn’t work? was he just embarrassed?).  The whole scene from start to finish seemed unbelievable.  Finally, as the story ends, we see the boy is too squeamish to clean out the snail’s poop, yet moments later he willingly dives into a dumpster (not to mention the disgusting scene above).  It just doesn’t add up.

The whole story rang false to me.  Maybe it was meant to be over the top; maybe it was meant to be surreally funny.  Maybe it was a hyperreal or fantasy look at kids on the street.  But I don’t think so.  It was just creepy.

COURTNEY ELDRIDGE-”The Former World Record Holder Settles Down” [cover by Katherine Streeter]
This is one of the longest stories that McSweeney’s has published.  It’s 75 pages.  And, what is so great about it is that it never feels like a long story.  And what’s even better is that the story goes through many twists and turns to end up in a sad but interesting place.

I loved the fact that the story begins by talking about the narrators’ husband.  And he is a bowling dork.  He loves bowling, he bowls all the time, and he has even gotten the narrator–a hipster New York woman who only thought of bowling ironically–to enjoy bowling.  As well as other sports, too.  He gets her to watch and enjoy baseball (and she develops a mad crush on Don Zimmer (!)).

But back to bowling.  Her husband, Joel, gets very mad at himself if he doesn’t bowl well.  And his mood stays dark for quite some time.

But.  He’s not the titular record holder.  The world record of the title comes as a complete shock (and I won’t reveal it).  But once we learn of the record, everything in the story changes (except they still love bowling).

As the story progresses, we learn more and more about the narrator and how much her father’s disappearance had affected her.  And how much she hates to talk about her past.  And how much she loves her husband for not pushing things about her past.  Until he does.  And then things comes to a head.

There’s so much going on in this story, and it all starts so simply as a bowling tale.   It was a great, great story.

WILLIAM T. VOLLMAN-”The Old Man:  A Case Study from Rising Up and Rising Down“
This is a 100-page excerpt from Vollman’s 3,500 page study of violence called Rising Up and Rising Down (which I will never read).  This excerpt is a case study, written in 1995 and concerns Muslim terrorists in Thailand.

The excerpt reads like a real-life version of Apocalypse Now.  Vollman is in Thailand trying to get an interview with The Old Man, the reputed head of PULO, the Pattani Unification Liberation Organization.  Vollman interviews (with his faithful translator D.) citizens of Thailand and Malaysia as well as political figures and former members of PULO.

The main problem I have with the excerpt is that the context is left out.  We never learn who D. is or how he met her.  And, we have no context for WHY he wants to do this.  He spends days and days negotiating with bureaucrats, thugs and taxi drivers only to ultimately end up right where he started from.  Is it all in aid of this book?  I’m not entirely sure.  I’m sure that the full text covers this, so it’s not really a compliant.  I just wish I had a little context  for this daunting piece.

As for the piece itself although it is a look at only one instance of violence, it is still fascinating to hear people involved in this organization (the quotes are direct in broken English, lending credence to the authenticity).  And it is fascinating to see the kind of security that this man, the head of a terrorist organization, has and yet doesn’t have (and the difficult in actually finding the man).  And to hear how much is hidden in plain sight about members of the organization is rather surprising.

No answers are forthcoming about the why’s of terrorism (maybe they are answered in the big book).  But Vollman is a dogged investigator and an excellent writer.  And although I don’t want to say I enjoyed the excerpt, I’m glad I read it.  (But I’m still not going to read the 3,500 page version).

ALLAN SEAGER-”This Town and Salamanca”
Seager is a once-revered writer whose work has largely gone out of print.  This booklet contains this short story as well as some commentary from others.  The three nonfiction essays attached add a lot of backstory, and certainly allow the reader to learn a lot more about his work and about Seager himself.

I didn’t think I would enjoy the story all that much.  They way it opened, I feared it was going to be a travelogue.  But as it progressed I found it really enjoyable and surprisingly deep.  The premise is that in his youth, John was a world traveler.  He built a boat and sailed to Cuba.  He joined the army to learn how to fly, and then he left the army and then he rejoined the army once again.  He learned to fence in Italy and France.  And then he returned from Salamanca to settle down in “this town.”

The story is really about the other residents of the town and how they more or less hung their hopes and dreams on his journeys, since none of them would ever leave the town.  They relish his stories when he returns and ask for as many details as they can get.  And his details are juicy and quite delightful.

But when he settles down in his home town, everyone is a little disappointed that their wanderer has stopped wandering.  It is a simple no-frills story, and was quite effective.

JOHN WARNER-”Allan Seager: An Introduction”
Warner provides a brief sketch of Seager’s life: his rise to fame as a short story writer (and the numerous places that have published his work: Esquire, The New Yorker, Playboy) and his eventual loss of recognition.  He also fills in details about his personal life (and health).

JOAN FRY-”Colorless in Limestone Caverns: a remembrance”
As a student, Fry set out to seduce Seager.  She was ultimately successful.  But their relationship proved to be a terrible hindrance to her creative writing (although she wound up being the impetus for one of Seager’s own stories).  She spent much of their time together trying to get away.  I actually found this true story to be slightly more compelling than Seager’s short story itself.

STEVEN CONNELLY-”Man is Born For Sorrow as the Sparks Fly Upwards: a remembrance”
Connelly was a student of Seager’s.  His essay here describes how autobiographical “This Town and Salamanca” is.  Seager also traveled the world and then settled down in his home town to write.  It also describes him as a wonderful teacher, who knew as much about James Joyce as anyone.  Seager was inspirational for Connelly as well as many other students.

~~

McSweeney’s #7 is another great collection of stories.  It was absolutely worth tracking it down.

Michael Chabon – The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

This was a really cool book. It’s kind of a combination of Mordecai Richler and Raymond Chandler, a hard-boiled detective story set in a Jewish settlement in Alaska in it’s end times, before it reverts back to the US and it’s population is kicked out. Meyer Landsman, a dectective imploding into his own vices tackles a murder that takes him deep into conspiracies, a sect of orthodox Jews looking for a messiah and dwarf police chief who rides a 2/3rd scale motorcycle.

While Chabon could have easily let this book  become a parody of pulp lit – Bukowski fell into this trap – his work doesn’t even feel like a tribute, just something that is what it is. It’s wisecracking, stuffed with memorable characters – Berko, the Jewish Native is a standout – and clever wordplay and is compulsively readable.

Hip: The History – John Leland

Leland’s book doubles as both a narrative history of what is hip in America and as a look at how race, language and culture have intermingled to become known as hip over the past century. Hip, argues Leland, runs almost right through from novelists like Herman Melville to performers like Notorious BIG, with stops along the way in Beat and Jazz culture. Leland’s account is detailed, although he tends to move around from topic to topic, and at times almost feels like a textbook.

Still, he does a great job cataloging just how language and ideas are redefined and pushed to extremes, letting the mainstream come to them before they push out again into uncharted waters. For one interested in how and why the culture of America is pop culture, Leland’s book is a must.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung – Lester Bangs

A sampling of Bang’s work as a rock critic, the bulk of it in the 70s for Creem, this collection is decent, if a little uneven. As a critic, Bangs wasn’t afraid to call a band or an album bullshit, which is an admirable enough trait. And he wasn’t afraid to rave about what he did like, either: this book has fantastic reviews of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Van Morison’s Astral Weeks.

Bangs was also a pretty good feature writer too: his pieces on travelling with The Clash, on racism in the punk rock community and his infamous interview with Lou Reed are worth the price of admission. And while some of his pieces drag, usually when he writes the kind of self-aggrandizing bullshit that Hunter Thompson used to specialize in, overall it’s an interesting collection.

And finally, the last of our “Best of 2009″ lists: nonfiction. This year’s picks include a little of everything, with an emphasis on memoir—it was a good year for getting personal.

Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith
Lit by Mary Karr
Louisa May Alcott by Harriet Reisen
Stitches by David Small
Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
Googled by Ken Auletta
Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon
The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
Home Game by Michael Lewis
The Secret Lives of Buildings by Edward Hollis

As always, share your picks in the comments. Is there something we missed?

a successful choice

Every year I treat myself to a book for Christmas. An avid user of the library, Camomile Street library to be exact, its nice to splash out on a brand new book once in a while.  Browsing the dark shelves of Waterstones, I usually gravitate towards the big tomes. The size of choice is somewhat ironic given that Christmas is the one time of year that I probably have the least time to read. But there is something so comforting about sinking into an absorbing tale that is cosy its its depth and festive in its extravagance. Kavalier and Clay was a big success – wintry Prague and a comic book saga. Little Dorritt was not so successful as I’ve lost my classic book discipline. This year its another American tale. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Our Library recently spoke to Brendan Gullifer about his novel, SOLD, which has been selected as one of 10 notable books for The Summer Read, an initiative of the State Library of Victoria, presented at Our Library from 1 January to 26 March.

SOLD is a fast-paced and highly entertaining satirical novel, which examines the underbelly of the real estate industry. You will have the chance to meet Brendan Gullifer at Hastings Library on Saturday 30 January.

Don't miss the chance to meet Brendan Gullifer at Hastings Library on Saturday 30 January

In the lead up to his visit, Brendan Gullifer spoke to us about his writing practice, the cathartic nature of writing and the transition from working in journalism to writing fiction.

SOLD is your debut novel, however, you have worked as a journalist and an editor and you have also written the non-fiction book, The Pocketbook of Aussie Patriotism (2007). Was it difficult to make the transition to fiction? Or was this something y0u had dreamt of doing for a long time?
Back in the early nineties, I was in a job that involved a lot of travel. I would spend nights in hotel rooms writing fiction. My dream, my goal, was to write a novel and get it published. It was also to write a novel that did so well commercially I could make a living from it. (That part hasn’t happened yet.)

So writing fiction has been a passion for a while now.

I have been a professional writer, however, for most of my working life. I’ve worked as a newspaper journalist and editor around Australia and overseas. I’ve also worked in advertising and magazine publishing.

Additionally, I taught English as a second language so have a good theoretical and practical grasp of grammar and the rules of language.

But I came to realise that writing fiction requires a different set of skills to any other sort of writing. It requires different muscles, if you like.

While I read a lot of books about the craft, the first fiction classes I took were not until 2002. It was a workshop where people passed around and critiqued work.  Most of the other members were much younger than me.

And they were tenacious, unbounded in their enthusiasm to destroy the writing of fellow classmates.

Often I would go home feeling battered and despondent.

But looking back, it was strangely healthy (in a masochistic way).

It helped me to develop a thick skin, which is important. I also became adept at discovering which people and which criticism were actually helpful.

I developed an ear, I think, where I could pick through the dross and take on board what was really beneficial.

I later did a Masters in Writing at RMIT University in Melbourne. This was much more collegiate and supportive.

When you’re on this journey, there’s nothing better than hanging out with people who get you, and who get what you’re trying to do.

Writing fiction is a long and solitary process. If you wish to get published, it will probably mean a lot of rejection. (More than 300 agents and publishers in Australia and the US rejected my first novel, still unpublished.)

So it’s vital to hang out with people who are on the same journey, who understand what you’re trying to achieve and who are willing to provide support.

The Pocketbook of Aussie Patriotism by Brendan Gullifer

The Pocketbook of Aussie Patriotism was a detour. I was pitching ideas to Melbourne publishing company Black Inc. back in 2005. I told them about a compact guide to English history that had done very well in the UK in 2004. (I’d read about it on the net.) I suggested they do an Australian version. And they asked me if I was interested in compiling it.

That was a surprise. The only history I had studied was at school.  And I was an appallingly disinterested student.

So I dropped my fiction writing and worked on it almost full-time for a year. It did reasonably well and gave me insight into the author-publisher relationship, and how the book industry works.

After it was published, I did more than 30 radio, press and TV interviews and gave more than 50 speeches. So it helped me get comfortable with that side of the publishing business as well.

You worked in the real estate industry for around 18 months. Was SOLD conceived while you were an agent or did you decide to write it at a later period?
I’ve come to realise that one of the things that drives my storytelling is a sense of catharsis. I want to take dark periods of my life and make something positive out of them through writing.

Prolific American writer Stephen King says he sees his writing as a revolutionary act, raising his fist to the world. I’m not a big fan of the horror genre but I love that.

SOLD by Brendan Gullifer. Sleepers Publishing. ISBN: 9781740667340

Writing SOLD was a long process but it happened after I’d left real estate. I was trying to find my way back after 18 very stressful and not particularly successful months. Professionally, I had failed. My health was bad. I had gone backwards financially.

My first novel had been rejected by just about everyone. So I started tinkering with SOLD, and it grew from there. I started taking writing classes, and tried to develop productive writing habits (i.e. writing every day, or almost every day).

Did you consciously decide to write a satirical novel or did it slowly evolve?
It definitely evolved.

I wanted to lift the curtains on the real estate industry, to convey an emotional truth about people who work in it, their motivations, their thinking, how they operate, why they are like they are.

It later surprised me that people found the book funny. (I’m used to telling jokes around the kitchen table and having my teenage kids roll their eyes.)

But I definitely wanted to write something that would be a “good read”, and a page-turner.  There are so many options for our leisure-time these days. I wanted the book to be engaging, to carry readers on a journey.

So I was always conscious of raising the stakes, of lifting the reality of it.

But I never set out to write satire.

I was partly inspired by the Australian television show Frontline. Many called that satire. Having worked in the media, I thought it was very close to the truth.

I know of real estate agents who have bought my book because they feel it accurately reflects what goes on.

But writing the book was a process. It probably went through a dozen drafts. There was a whole section that looked at the rental industry. On the advice of my publishers, I cut that out.

I covered the lounge room wall with little yellow plot-point cards, and spent a month shifting them around, trying different combinations.

One version of the manuscript had about six other characters in it. They never made it into the final cut.

In short, I grappled with every aspect. For most of the time, it felt like pulling teeth, or scratching about in the dirt.

And the final manuscript was 50,000-60,000 words shorter than an earlier version. I became tenacious at cutting stuff out, because every time I did so the work felt intrinsically stronger.

How would you describe your writing practice?
Eclectic. Trying to write fiction every day is the hardest thing. Life interrupts. I’ll do anything not to begin. But if I don’t do it every day, I become restless.

I have had periods where I have written fiction full-time, and that sort of existence had an unreal, otherworldly feel. I hadn’t been published then so it also felt indulgent, and eccentric, like tilting at windmills. Practically anything else felt more important, more grounded, more productive.

Now that I have a full-time job, I would certainly welcome a good clear six months to complete my current project. (The grass is always greener, I guess.)

So now I just grab periods when I can: late at night, sometimes in the morning, at airports. Even if I only write a couple of sentences, it can feel complete, and satisfying.

Always, the hardest thing is starting. Sometimes I tell myself I’ll just open the laptop and “play” around for a couple of minutes… re-read the last few sentences I wrote, add a word here or there. Then I get hooked into it and two or three hours can whizz by.

The less pressure I put on myself, the more relaxed and consistent I am, the better the outcome.

This is a new experience for me. In the past, it was a painful battle against writer’s block and self-doubt. Now I just sit down and do it. I’m less judgmental, and more accepting that writing is a process. The first draft will be lousy. But the work will improve with work.

Where do you usually work?
Anywhere I can. My laptop goes with me everywhere. I write in bed, in cafes, on the lounge, at the kitchen table, still in hotel rooms. I’ll be first in line for a computer I can safely use in the bath.

What made you want to write when you started out?
Being an artist of any sort in this country is very challenging. There’s not much support. You can spend years not getting paid for your efforts, with little or no recognition.

And even when you do break through a bit, it’s seen as peripheral to things, not part of the mainstream, a kind of indulgence.

Even now, friends and acquaintances are far more interested in my day job (I now work in politics) than anything to do with my creative writing.

So the act of writing fiction is a deeply personal thing. It’s hard for me to articulate what drives me.

When I work on a really difficult passage, when I chip away at it and finally get it right, I get such a surge of delight I feel I could dance around the kitchen (and sometimes do).

Which writers have inspired you?
Dirt Music by Tim Winton is a favourite. So is CJ Koch’s Highways to a War. It is one of the most evocative and moving books. I dive into it and I can smell Asia. It is the past I wish I’d had. It is the novel I most wish I had written.

I also love Morris Lurie: a wonderfully angry old man, a splendidly good writer. Flying Home is just marvelous.

George Johnston’s My Brother Jack and Clean Straw for Nothing brilliantly capture the ambivalence of the writer’s life, and the ambivalence of being a writer in Australia.

While studying in America, I was introduced to James Salter. Many consider him a writer’s writer. I love his work. I also love Richard Ford and Philip Roth. John Le Carre is the grand man of thriller writing. I’ve been reading him for years.

I like Michael Chabon. Jonathan Franzen is devastatingly clever. Richard Russo (Empire Falls) has an ability to create a sense of controlled chaos, which I aspire to.

I once went into a bookshop and bought every Elmore Leonard they had.

And off the web I recently obtained a second-hand copy of The Graduate by Charles Webb: such tight, sardonic prose, such succinct and brilliant dialogue.

What are you currently working on?
I have three things that I tell people who wish to write fiction. Read a lot. Write as regularly as you can. Work on a story you are burning to tell.

After at least a dozen false starts on a second novel, I have gone back to the beginning. I have pulled out that first project from the bottom drawer.

I can’t let go of it. It won’t let go of me. I have to work it out of my system.

I can see now why it was rejected. It was gawky and badly written. Too few flashes of radiance with too much indulgence. But it won’t let me go. It has called me back. So I’m working on that. Again.

Don’t miss the opportunity to meet Brendan Gullifer!
Meet the author: Brendan Gullifer
Saturday 30 January, 11am
Hastings Library, 7 High Street
Bookings essential: hastcirc@mornpen.vic.gov.au

In addition to our Aught-themed Sunday Book Review, which we began last week, NPI is presenting a more general look at fiction of the decade in which we look quickly and some of the most significant works of literature published during this decade. This is Part I of a two-part series.

2666 — Roberto Bolaño

 The epic of the Aughts (so long as we’re not counting The Wire), 2666 affords Bolaño the posthumous chance to opine on death in all its forms: from the corporeal to the metaphysical. His characters are deep even when they are fleeting, and his style (in Natasha Wimmer’s translation) ranges from florid to hard-boiled. In contemplating his own legacy, Bolaño pretty much ensured it. 

–Tim

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon

I’ve already expanded on my high opinion of Michael Chabon’s novel about the Golden Age of Comic Books; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay presents a compelling portrait of what it’s like to create fantasies in an era of global turmoil—a particularly resonant story of the Aughts, even if Chabon’s novel came out in 2000. While he deals with themes like evil and fantasy, however, Chabon is adept at depicting a rich setting of New York City in the 1930s.

– John S

Atonement — Ian McEwan

After finishing a novel that started out so promisingly only to veer off into long, overly detailed musings on the value of a good story, I joked with a friend that Atonement is the only book I’ve ever read whose title accurately describes what it’s like to read it. Like its title noun, there’s some worth in McEwan’s investigation into the process of guilt; it’s just not a whole lot of fun getting there.

–Tim

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao –Junot Diaz

The sexiest tale of a virgin you’ll ever read, Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize winner validated the acclaim of his mid-90s short story collection, Drown. Diaz is a shrewder editor than Bolaño, leaving his work—every bit as epic in its ambition to portray Oscar’s family history, from the DR to the Jersey suburbs—more condensed and, occasionally but not ultimately, unfulfilling. But that might be the only flaw: that Diaz’s allusion- and Spanglish-infused style leaves us wanting more.

–Tim

The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen’s story about the Lambert family may be the best novel of the Aughts. Spanning several generations, multiple cities and different continents, The Corrections always remains a well-grounded story of a Midwestern American family. Franzen’s ability to depict members of the Greatest Generation, modern middle class suburbia, the urban elite and contemporary academia with both empathy and incisiveness makes the book both provocative and touching. And despite being published on September 1^st, 2001, Franzen somehow managed to foresee the dominant cultural and historical themes of the entire decade: globalization, financial and political instability, and even terrorism. The sense of the universe “correcting” itself, for the mistakes of the past that appear to catching up with those who committed them, applies starkly to the Lamberts, but could just as easily be applied to anyone who lived through the Aughts.

– John S

The Kite Runner — Khaled Hosseini

While its predominantly Afghan setting may have been what lifted a novel published in 2003 into the national consciousness, it’s Hosseini’s investigation of relationships—so heavily influenced by class—that makes The Kite Runner such a memorable read. Don’t expect a thesis on multiculturalism so much as a simple and adventurous tale of friendship and redemption.  

– Tim

No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy has been writing novels for 45 years now, but the Aughts brought him into the American consciousness in an even new way, as three of his novels— All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road—were adapted as films, with a fourth—Blood Meridian—in development. No Country for Old Men saw McCarthy apply his simple, dark prose, often described as Biblical, to a story that is, essentially, a thriller. Nevertheless, McCarthy lends the story a great degree of depth, creating the villain Anton Chigurh, maybe literature’s most fearsome character of the decade, even before Javier Bardem and the Coen Brothers brought him to the screen.

– John S

Pastoralia — George Saunders

George Saunders has a Kurt Vonnegut-esque (and if you know me, you know what high praise that is) ability to combine images that are both hilarious and haunting. Pastoralia, his second short-story collection, is a short but telling example. He writes about male strip-clubs and human zoos in a way that is both absurd and comical, and at the same time depressing. But Saunders skill with language—particularly with dialogue and the way speech patterns can develop characters—lends power to these brief stories.

– John S

I'm heading to Kuumba Lynx after giving snippets about my recent reading.

Today got away from me a little bit, and I’m heading shortly to the annual fundraise for Kuumba Lynx, the hip-hop youth organization on whose board I serve.

I have been doing a decent amount of reading this week.  I will go into more depth on some of these in the future, and here are the thumbnail sketches for the three most recent.

Manhood for Amateurs and Gentlemen of the Road, by Michael Chabon.

These are the first two books I’ve read by Chabon, who is dear friend Steve Kantrowitz’s favorite novelist.  The former is an uneven collection of essays comprised of Chabon’s takes on being a husband, father and son.  It does have some moments and is notable both for his efforts, sometimes succesful, to write lyrical endings and his (very) high self-regard.   The latter is a pulpy adventure story that I enjoyed much more.

What Obama Means by Jabari Asim.  This is the second book I’ve read by Asim, editor of The Crisis and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.   In this book, which is one of many about the meteoric rise and cultural meaning of our president, Asim blends together references to Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, Jay-Z and Barbara Jordan in assessing what Obama has meant to our society and social landscape.