More Books I've read in 2009

Religion. Art. Sex. The Arab-Israeil conflict. Politics. Marriage. Terrorism. And - oh yeah -- the end of the world. Tom Robbins had some heavy stuff on his mind when he wrote "Skinny Legs and All" and that's good cuz, unlike most people who get either depressed or confused when pondering such weighty matters, TR loves thinking about that stuff. So deep and palpable is that joy he felt writing that you can literally feel it when you read his words. I think I had a smile on my face the entire time I was reading this book. I was certainly in no hurry for it to end when his asides are as enjoyable as they are -- I mean Tom Robbins throws away lines that other writers would kill for. All along I thought the book was headed for a big showdown in the Promised Land, but that was an illusion. Where Robbins was actually going was so much better than that. And speaking of illusion, the ending where Salome does the dance of the seven veils -- removing one by one the misperceptions that keep us blind, broken and bound is just an astonishing 13 pages. The removal of the religion veil by itself was worth the price of admission:

Religion was an attempt to pin down the Divine. The Divine was eternally in flux, forever moving, shifting shape. That was its nature. It was absolute, true enough: absolutely mobile. Absolutely transcendent. Absolutely flexible. Absolutely impersonal. It had its god and goddess aspects, but it was ultimately no more male or female that it was star or screwdriver. It was the sum of all those things, but that sum could never be chalked on a slate. The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could come to definition. . . The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a knowable quantity with which mortals might efficiently deal, to pigeonhole it once and for all so that we never had to reevaluate it. With hammers of cant and spikes of dogma, we crucified and crucified again, trying to nail to our stationary altars the migratory light of the world.
Thus, since religion bore false witness to the Divine, religion was blasphemy. And once it entered into its unholy alliance with politics, it became the most dangerous and repressive force that the world has ever known.

Read this book. Now. Then read it again.

I am so happy that I live on the same planet as Tom Robbins.

Total eclipse of logic

I mentioned how much I enjoyed the literalism of seeing Mick Jagger sing "I'm just standing in a doorway" while he's just standing in a doorway, and that has led me to the discovery of literal videos. If you've never heard of literal videos check this out. Hilarious:

Stuff I've saved.

When I was weaning myself off of diet sodas, I drank a lot of Honest Tea. I liked them because they taste like real fresh-brewed tea, and they're "barely sweetened" which is the way I like my tea. (And yes, I'm sure you're wondering what I'm doing in the South, the land of disgustingly-sweet tea, but there you go.) I also like that their bottle caps always had an interesting quote to ponder while you were enjoying one 0f their delicious beverages. One of these caps I saved and keep it in my desk. It's a quote from Henry James:
"Three things in life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."
I love this quote because I think if you distilled my beliefs that I've gathered from 51 years of living on earth down to their bare-bones essence, this just might be it.
Sadly, I have at least as much logician in me as poet, and I can't help thinking, "You know, Henry, that's really only one thing."

More Books I've read in 2009

I've waited too long to be able to give these books anything like a proper review, but I did read:

"Heroic Meaures" was a free download from Oprah.com, and it was a lot less ponderous and depressing than a lot of her book choices. An aging couple in Manhattan tries to sell their apartment during the same weekend that a terrorist is on the loose and their dachsund is having surgery. I believe this sub-genre is known as "domestic thrillers" and although I fel no need to rush out and buy this book so I can get a warm nostalgic glow every time I see it on my bookshelf, I enjoyed it enough.

I enjoyed the first half of Elizabeth Berg's "Open House" in which a woman who finds herself unexpectedly divorced draws on a deep well of wit to cope, but it got all serious toward the end with a miscarriage and denouement that was obvious from miles away.

Seth's graphic novel "It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken" is one of my favorite book titles ever and the story about the author-artist's search for information about an obscure cartoonist -- ostensibly anyway, it's probably more a search for a simpler time -- is pretty good too. This is one of those works that I own in more than one form -- in this case, the original issues of the comic book "Palookaville" that they appeared in and the book collection. I'm trying to thin out some of my duplicate literary works and I was hoping that I could get rid of the comics and keep the book on my shelf, but they did not include the original covers with the book collection and it's smaller and harder on this aged eyes of my mine so I'm keeping the comics -- and the book too, cuz I love looking over there and seeing the words It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken over there. A similar scenario occurs just about every time I try to winnow down my collection.

Thrift Store Find

We just got back from four days in the North Carolina mountains. Had a great time swimming, hiking, visiting the wildlife center and just enjoying air that's neither hot nor humid. But it wasn't all outdoor activities, either. That part of the country has more thrift stores than any place I've ever been, and Kim and I hit a few of them in Hendersonville and Brevard. We got a bread-maker for three bucks, a Batman cap (for me) and a Supergirl girl cap (for Kim) some clothes of course, including a pair of shorts that are dark purple with large stripes of even darker purple.
Kim was aghast when she saw this last item. "What are you going to wear those with?" she asked.
"Please, I'm a guy, I don't worry about stuff like that."
I also found this book and I cannot get over how cool it is. It's called "Making Love: the Picador Book of Erotic Verse." Which is cool enough, although I have other volumes of erotic verse and I might not have spent the whole dollar it cost me to purchase this volume were it not for the cover. Check this out:

I'm not sure if you can see it but that dove has a silver strand of something in his beak. I can't tell if it's plucking out this sleeping beauty's gray hair or trying to build a nest in her nose.

But that's not the best part. Here is the back cover:

Now that is a lush explosion of pubic hair there. This book was published in 1978 and back then we weren't afraid of our body hair. It is after all what makes us mammals. (Well that and the breast milk.)

And even that's not the best part. Check out the spine:

Can you see that? Nipples on the spine? how cool is that? I've never seen anything or anybody with nipples on their spine before. You know, just because I wear purple pants doesn't mean I don't care about aesthetics. This book is going to look great on my bookcase.

Nipples on the spine. Wow!

Happy Birthday, Mata Hari

Mata Hari will live forever in crosswords, but if all you know about her is that she was a spy, well then, everything you know is wrong. She was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (and if she'd kept that name she'd probably never have shown up in a single crossword puzzle ever) in Leeuwarden, Holland. She invented the whole Mata Hari (Malayan for Sun) persona, claimed to be from the mysterious land of Java, raised by temple priests, et cetera. None of it was true, of course, and neither were any of the espionage charges pressed against her. Her prosecutor, André Mornet, stated without apology in an interview forty years later: “There wasn't enough evidence to whip a cat.” And a German general concluded: “Innumerable tall tales were concocted about the German secret service … like the one about the unfortunate Mata Hari, who, in reality, did absolutely nothing for the German espionage effort.” She just happened to be in the wrong place at the time when France needed a scapegoat. She was executed by firing squad -- she refused the blindfold -- in 1917. I understand she's always going to be around, and I'm fine with that, but can we please stop besmirching the poor woman's reputation? She was a fascinating woman and she had morals that shocked the French who are notoriously lenient in that department, but she wasn't a spy. With a little luck, Mata Hari would have been 133 years old today.

Yep, we're doomed.

Happy Birthday, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley is most famous for the poem "Ozymandias" but that was just the tip of this man's creative iceberg. He also penned the poems "To a Skylark" and "Ode to the West Wind" as well as entire plays in verse such as "Prometheus Unbound" and "The Cenci" and novels like "Zastrozzi". He inspired everyone from Browning to Byron in poetry and his acts of civil disobedience were copied by Gandhi. He managed to get himself kicked out of Oxford for writing a pamphlet entitled "The Necissity of Atheism" and refusing to recant any of it. He was a radical reformer too, campaigning for better treatment of the lower classes and for animal rights (before there was even an idea of animal rights.) He did all this and more before dying by drowning at age 29. He also married Mary Woolstonecraft, the author of Frankenstein, and she must have liked him all right since she retrieved his heart from the cremation pyre, kept it with her all her life and had it buried with her when she died. Even though his name was Percy, he was much feared by the conservatives of his day, hated too. One of them eulogized him thusly: "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is a God or not."


One thing Shelley does not get credit for is for creating the absolute best pick-up line ever.

"Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle
—Why not I with thine?"

Had he taken better care of himself, Percy Shelley would have been 217 years old today.

Ozymandias

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Pips, get it??!

So, there's this guy named Craig Frazier. He's a cartoonist. And he's working on a project called "Drawords" where every week he posts a new drawing and invites people to submit captions, publishes what he considers the best along with several runners-up. Eventually it's going to be collected into a book, I think. I enter most weeks, and I've gotten runner-up a couple times but I've never won. And I'm starting to think I'm never going to. Not because I'm not funny. No-ho. Because I'm too funny and too sophisticated for Drawords.
Big ego? Maybe, although I prefer "healthy self-esteem" but maybe I'm right. I mean, check out this last week's cartoon: a couple guys dressed like dominoes on a train of some kind.

As you can see, most people went for simple dominos-fall-down gags. A few people expanded just a tad on the domino theme -- bringing in Fats Domino and the Domino Theory. (And kids, the domino theory was something the powers that be kept using to scare us into sending our young people to die in Vietnam. Supposedly, if we let Vietnam go commie than Laos and Cambodia and eventually Canada and the US would fall like dominoes to communism. Ridiculous, of course, but considering how many people gave their lives for this theory, I don't find anything amusing about it.) One person made a simple pun based on the fact that dominoes are sometimes called "bones." There were two basically identical Domino's pizza jokes. And a casual Friday joke that makes no sense. (Or maybe it's another guy way too funny and sophisticated for Drawords and the gag goes over my head.)

My caption was "On the way to audition for Gladys Knight." And that, my friends, is funny.

Don't give me that blank look. You get it. You're smarter than Craig Frazier. You know that Gladys Knight's backup band was known as the Pips, and that pips are also what the spots on dominoes are called.

You may now clutch your side, slap your knee and roar with laughter.

More books I've read in 2009

Nowadays cosmos-spanning comic book epics are a dime a dozen, with some big industry-wide "event" with dozens of temporary deaths taking place several times a year. But back in the early 70's when Roy Thomas wrote the Kree-Skrull war in the pages of "The Mighty Avengers" we were seeing something we'd never seen before. How well does it hold up? Well, despite the fact that two vast universes are at war and earth is about to be destroyed just because it's in the way, what most people remember about this saga is when the tragic-romantic android the Vision is shot down by three cows (actually shape-changing Skrulls, a dangling plot thread from an early issue of Fantastic Four, nobody wrapped up loose continuity better than Roy the Boy) and then Ant-Man's fantastic voyage through his high-tech body, and that was really more of a digression from the main plot. Something I appreciated this time that probably went over my thirteen-year old head was the way Thomas drew a corollary between the politician who wanted all Kree and other aliens off our planet with Senator Joseph McCarthy and every other xenophobic, racist jerkwad who's followed in his footsteps (and we are certainly awash in them). Here are some words of wisdom from the Vision (before the cows attacked him):

"If first a man of the Kree can be detained for no reason, then detainment of androids will follow, next of mutants,then giants until, ultimately a left-handed man would fight a right-handed man to the death for the remains of a bombed out planet!"

Which reminds me of this poem by Pastor Martin Niemoller

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then... they came for me... And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

There's an interesting in-depth look at McCarthyism, and Witch-Hunts Through Captain Marvel Comics here.
So, there's a lot going on here, sometimes too much, and the war seems to come to an abrupt end -- by way of a deus ex machina, no less; I mean I still have no idea how Rick Jones was able to pull all those obscure comic book heroes of the 40s and 50s out of his brain and into reality. But even when the thing makes no sense, you've still got the stunning Neal Adams and John Buscema artwork. (Well, in the first few chapters you've got art by Sal Buscema, who evidently got a job as an artist based on the fact that his last name was Buscema.)


Kyle Baker can be funny ("Plastic Man" and "The Bakers" and the still-controversial, still-hilarious "Letitia Lerner, Superman's Babysitter") and he can be serious ("Truth" "Nat Turner") on "King David" he shows he can do both.
This is a retelling of the story (mostly from the books of Samuel in the Old Testament) of King David, his struggles with Goliath, King Saul, the Philistines as well as his own human frailties. This book is beautiful and I suggest you go here and take a look at it. Baker does mix direct Bible quotes with a lot of slapstick and borscht-belt comedy, which may not be everyone's cup of tea -- works for me, though. Actually what bothers me about this story has nothing to do Kyle Baker. It has to do with how David was idolized for being basically a mass murderer. "Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands" was what the Israelites said of David and it made Saul feel inadequate. And it's only after he falls in love with another man's wife, impregnates her and -- of course -- kills the husband, Uriah the Hittite, who for my money is the real hero here, if there is a hero in this book -- that he falls out of God's favor. Which seems to lay the groundwork for our whole ultra-violent, sexually repressed modern Christian American society?
Or am I reading too much into this?

I also read (reread maybe, I'm not sure) "The Partly Cloudy Patriot" by Sarah Vowell I first became aware of her for the work she did on PRI's "This American Life" but I think I like her even better on the page than the airwaves. These are personal essays, historical essays, and personal-historical essays. Vowell is a history nerd and although she calls it being partly cloudy (rather than a sunshine patriot, in the words of Thomas Paine) I think all true patriots love their country the way Vowell does -- not blindly right or wrong, but with anger and disappointment when America falls short of her lofty goals, and pride when she actually mananges to come up to a few of them now and then.

Happy Birthday, Zelda Fitzgerald

Happy birthday to Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Queen of the Flappers, ballerina, artist, novelist, playwright and muse, Daisy to Scott's Jay. She would have been 109 today if she hadn't perished in a fire at a mental institution in Asheville NC in 1948.

"Why should graves make people feel in vain? Somehow I can’t find anything hopeless in having lived.” Zelda Fitzgerald

One Artist

**Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people you like and include me. Try not to repeat a song title. It's harder than you think.

Pick an artist: The Ramones

Are you male or female: Spider-Man
Describe yourself: I Believe in Miracles
How do you feel about yourself: Got a Lot to Say
Describe where you currently live: This Ain’t Havana
If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Garden of Serenity
Your favorite form of transportation: Rocket to Russia (Cheating just a little, since that’s an album, not a song, so sue me.)
Your best friend is: She’s a Sensation
What's the weather like: California Sun
Favorite time of day: Chasin’ the Night
If your life was a tv show, what would it be called: The Job That Ate My Brain
Feelings on high school: Teenage Lobotomy
What is life to you: I'm Not Afraid of Life
What is the best advice you have to give: Bop Till You Drop
If you could change your name, what would it be: Surfin’ Bird
Your favorite food is: Every Time I Eat Vegetables, it Makes me Think of You.
What did you do last night?: Makin’ Monsters For my Friends.
What're your plans for tomorrow?: I Wanna be Sedated.
How you would like to die: Somebody Put Something in my Drink
Your present condition: My Brain is Hanging Upside Down.
Your thoughts on your love life: Something to Believe in
Your motto: Learn to Listen

Happy Birthday, Tom Robbins

Happy birthday to Tom Robbins, born exactly 73 years ago today in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. I can honestly say that his books (specifically "Jitterbug Perfume" and "Still Life With Woodpeckers") changed my life for the better. Robbins' writing has always been a fascinating mixture of the polished and the freewheeling. He does not outline or revise, but he shines each sentence until it's perfect before going onto the next one. Some sentences take days. I can't imagine this method working for many other writers but it works for Robbins.

More Books I've read in 2009

Lately the books I've been looking forward to the most have disappointed me. Some of my favorite writers -- Jonathan Carroll, Mil Millington, Russell Hoban -- all had new books come out recently and none of them lived up to my expectations. Maybe that's my fault. Maybe my expectations are unrealistic. Maybe I need to pick up books without any expectations. I'm not sure how to do that with authors I like, but I had no expectations of "Whale Music" by Pauk Quarrington. I just picked it up to have something to read at the beach. It's a novel about Desmond Howl, who had a string of hits in the 60s about girls and cars, but lost his mind somewhere along the way, now living alone, spending a lot of time in his swimming pool and working on a pie-eyed project. If it sounds a lot like Brian Wilson that's not an accident. Brian Wilson himself has stated “Whale Music is the best book written about the Beach Boys”. But to me it's less of a story about music and madness and family and art, and mostly a love story. A young woman dealing with some psychological issues of her own makes some progress at drawing Desmond out of his cocoon, and he realizes he loves her right about the time he finally drives her away. Here he conquers his agoraphobia and asks a bartender if he's seen her:

"(She) has long golden hair. Her eyes are green, except for when she is angered, at which time they become tinged ever so slightly with a steely gray. Many people would call her mouth oversized, her lips too full, but this is a matter of taste, I myself would differ. She is slight of build, small-breasted, well-proportioned."

"Haven't seen her," Pete snaps.

"Her name is Claire."

"Means nothing," says Pete.

"Imagine a wheat field. A hot summer's day. Overnight a carnival has arrived, a Ferris wheel and hot-dog stand. A clown races around doing pratfalls."

"Oh, yeah," nods Pete. "She was in the day before yesterday."

I loved this book so much I was tempted to start it over and reread it as soon as I finished it. (I didn't only because I didn't want to hear all the teasing my sister, the Literary Terminator, would give me.) The only criticism I have of the book is that the female characters did not seem as three-dimensional to me as the male characters. Other than that, the only thing that bothered me was a minor nitpick. There's a guru character in the book named Babboo Nass Fazoo, and I just can't believe nobody ever said anything about the fact that his name would be pronounced the same as "Babboon Ass." Other than that, a magnificent book. I am now actively seeking out more of Quarrington's work. I'll try not to have any expectations of it, however.

More books I've read in 2009

I've enjoyed every Tom Perrotta book I've ever read, and it's a testament to how good a writer he is that not a lot happens in his books and still you keep turning the pages because he makes you care about his characters. In "The Wishbones" 31-year old Tom Raymond is still living with his parents, still playing in a band that's going nowhere except to the Holiday Inn for another wedding reception, still delaying growing up. One night he proposes to his long-time girlfriend almost by accident and immediately starts trying to sabotage it when she accepts. To me, this boook had a lot to say about love, growing up and music's ability to keep you young. My favorite scene in the book didn't involve the main characters but Buzzy, the happily-married, possibly-alcoholic bass player. Realizing he's never going to make it as a rock star but unwilling to completely relinquish those fantasies he tosses a 13-inch television out of his bedroom window, in a suburban homage to Keith Moon et al's hotel escapades.

More books I own in 2009

Continuing our tour of my bookshelves. We've gone from Art books to autographed art books. (And actually I need to back up for a second. When I mentioned how much I enjoyed the book "The Pinup Art of Dan DeCarlo, I said there was a second volume of Mr. DeCarlo's pinup art available that I would love to have, and then on Father's Day look what my daughter gave me:

Thanks, Leah. This volume was just as entertaining as the first one. I doubt there will be a third though since a lot of the cartoons in here are unfinished -- well, the art is finished and that's all that matters, but some have no captions and some have a couple of possible captions that DeCarlo was considering.

Okay, on to the autographed art books:

Frank Cho used to do a great comic strip called Liberty Meadows. Then people noticed that (unlike most modern comic artists) Cho could actually draw and Marvel backed a truck of money up to his house and got him to draw the Avengers and some other superhero stuff and Frank Cho became a lot less interesting. But in these sketchbooks he's free to draw whatever he wants to. And like most great artists what he wants to draw is dinosaurs and apes and beautiful girls in various stages of undress.

By the way, there's a fourth volume out if anybody feels as generous as Leah.

Gene Colan was my favorite silver age artist and although I didn't know it till the other night when we were playing a game and I had to answer the question "Who was your favorite artist of the 20th century?" much more than that. His art always seems so real, so textured and vibrant you feel like you could step right into. His run on Tomb of Dracula is one of the highwater marks in sequential art. Just unbeatable.

There's not a lot of art in "Shop Talk" mostly casual interviews the great Will Eisner (creator of "The Spirit") did with other comics greats. Eisner passed away in 2005 but his innovations are everywhere in comics today.That's all for now. More later.

More Books I've read in 2009

Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet.

Don't feel bad, I had never heard of Bernarr Macfadden before either, but every American who lived in the first half of the 20th Century knew who he was. He was the more muscular of those turn of the century health reformers like Kellogg, Post and Graham, although like them he was obsessed with his bowels -- he even used to eat sand, figuring if it was good enough to clean glass bottles, it ought to be good enough to clean his innards. In addition to basically inventing American body building and strength training directly -- through his long-running magazine Physical Culture, his Healthatorium -- and indirectly (he inspired among others, Charles Atlas, Joe Weider and Jack LaLanne) he also can law claim or take the blame for creating tabloid journalism (his New York Evening Graphic, where Walter Winchell got his start is widely considered the worst newspaper ever) and inspiring reality television -- although it was reality magazines at first; Macfadden published True Story and True Confessions among dozens of other magazines. He was a millionaire, a mover and a shaker, friend of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, but he died broke and -- as you know -- is today largely forgotten. His obscurity is undeserved however. I don't read a lot of biographies but this one was fascinating. The author ever guinea-pigged himself out with some of Macfadden's more bizare health and fitness regimens with mixed (but often hilarious) results.

Happy Birthday Library

It was on this day in 1731 that Ben Franklin founded the first circulating library, a forerunner to the now ubiquitous free public library. He started it as a way to help settle intellectual arguments among his group of Philadelphia friends, the Junto, a group of civic-minded individuals gathered together to discuss the important issues of their day.Each of the 50 charter members bought an initial share into the company (40 shillings), which helped fund the buying of books, and then paid a smaller yearly fee (10 shillings) that went to buying more books and maintaining the library. In exchange, the members could borrow any of the books. Donations of books were gladly accepted.They called their charter the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the next year, Franklin hired America's first librarian, Louis Timothee. At first, the books were stored at the librarian's house, but by the end of the decade, they were moved to the Pennsylvania State House, which is now known as Independence Hall.

More books I've read in 2009

Despite what my sister the literary snob will tell you I do still read and enjoy books. I just haven't had a s much time to read since I changed jobs. (I used to do most of my reading at work, on company time.) And now I have even less reading time since I've started working out during the free time I have.
But I do still read and here are a few books I've finished recently.
ICON: A HEROES WELCOME Back in the early 90's Milestone became the first all-black comics publisher. I liked some of their stuff -- like Static -- but I loved Icon. He had a lot in common with Superman, I guess, he was from another planet and all. But he was also a shapeshifter and when he landed on earth in the 1840's to a family of slaves, he altered his appearance to look like his adoptive parents. Now he's a wealthy lawyer. A poor girl named Raquel convinces him he needs to use his powers to help people -- and also take her on as his sidekick, which he does. Thus was born Icon and Rocket. I remember trying to convince people to give these comics a try back on those early internet forums and people always assumed I was black cuz I read these comics, despite the fact that I've been caucasian all my life. I just love great comics.
I wanted to see if Icon was as great as I remembered, and I'm happy to report it holds up very well. As usual my favorite part of the series is not about the superheroics but about the relationship between the characters, specifically Icon and Rocket, and how they help each other grow. Icon gets her to see how much growing up she has to do and she shows him that his conservative views about the world are not how things are in her reality. Dwayne McDuffie is one of the best writers in comics today and I'll pick up anything he writes. Even this early in his career he was a master at getting you to empathize with and relate to his characters. This is the page right after Raquel tells her boyfriend -- the inaptly named Noble --- that she's pregnant, and he says "How do you know it's mine?"
I read Dai Sijie's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" a couple years ago and loved it. It was such a powerful look at how important books are, and why people willingly risk their lives and their freedom to read them. It was also a love story with an unexpected twist.
I had high hopes for this one by the same author but I only liked it. A Freud-obsessed young Chinese man who has been living in Paris returns to China to try to get the girl he's a had a crush on since college out of jail. Her name is -- no kidding -- Volcano of the Old Moon, and she got in trouble for selling a photograph to a western media outlet. A bribe to the judge doesn't work -- he wants a virgin, and Muo sets out to find one, but there aren't many and he travels around interpreting dreams to finance his search. This was a satire on Chinese justice (if you can call it that) and since I don't know much about China and I found the main character hard to relate to, I didn't love this book.


I always have high hopes for a new Russell Hoban book, even though "Linger Awhile" didn't do much for me. Neither did "My Tango With Barbara Strozzi". A woman with some major issues -- most pressing an abusive ex-boyfriend -- tries to begin a relationship with a writer, but she keeps breaking up with him to return to her creepy old art professor, and even though the two are together again at the end, I have no reason to believe that they will be for long. As usual, plenty of great asides about art, literature and music make this book worthwhile even though the narrative is a disappointment.

Bare feet and black oaks

Everything reminds me of something else.

I wanted to write about my first concert, Black Oak Arkansas at Charleston County Hall in the Summer of '72. Then I remembered that it wasn't actually my first concert, that distinction belongs to B.J. Thomas, whom I saw with my Dad at a high school auditorium in Wilmington, North Carolina. I don't remember much about it, other than being shocked at one point when Thomas took off his jacket and said "All right, time to raise a little hell."

So, thinking about the first concert I went to sans parent got me to thinking about WCSC radio and their brief trip underground. Back in those days of course there was no FM -- much less XM or Sirius -- your choice was between staticky Top 40 and staticky country and western. WCSC was a top 40 station, never as popular as the other top 40 station WTMA. And for a while in an attempt to lure listeners they did what they called "going underground". When the sun went down, they put away the Osmonds and Jackson 5 records and started playing Led Zeppelin and Uriah Heep. Still staticky of course. I think I may have been the only person in Charleston who listened to this underground AM station, and I say that because before the Black Oak Arkansas concert they gave away a BOA picture -- no free tickets, no other cool swag, just a picture. All you had to do was answer the question "How many guys are in the band Black Oak Arkansas?" I had seen a picture of them somewhere and I ran to the phone, called, got through and said, "Six."

And the DJ said, "That's the correct answer, but it's not the answer I'm looking for." So I hung up, sat down and tried to figure out how the hell that was possible. It took me a couple minutes but I eventually remembered that earlier the DJ had said something on the air about there being "twice as many as a trio" in the band in question. So I called back, got through (probably woke the guy up) and said "Twice as many as a trio." And he said, "You win."

(Maybe the reason I was the only person who listened to this station was because they made you jump through hoops to win a crappy unframed picture.)

Anyway, that was not the only piece of BOA memorabilia I owned. I read in either Circus or Creem magazine that if you wrote to the Oaks they would send you the deed to one square inch of land in Arkansas, which I of course did. And that was when I learned that being a landowner did not impress the ninth-grade ladies.

So, I went to see Black Oak Arkansas at County Hall, which led to a fight with my father cuz I wanted to go barefoot like my friends Bruce and Buddy; he wanted me to wear shoes. He drove us to the show and I had a great idea. He was going to pick us up too by which time it would be too dark to see my feet, so I shoved my shoes up under the back seat intending to retrive them on the ride home and be properly shod by the time we crossed our threshold.

How was the show? Eye-opening. In my neck of the woods, over the ear was still considered long hair. These guys had long-flowing manes that they swung around like nothing I'd ever seen before. They also played things I'd never thought of as musical instruments -- like washboards.

Tom Waits's voice has been described as sounding like "(H)ow you'd sound if you drank a quart of bourbon, smoked a pack of cigarettes and swallowed a pack of razor blades. . . . Late at night. After not sleeping for three days." And if you screamed at the top of your lungs with a voice like that you'd sound like Jim Mangrum, BOA's lead singer. I honestly don't know if I liked the concert or not. But I do think now that these guys don't get near the credit they deserve. They basically invented southern rock and paved the way for Skynyrd and everybody else. (Don't even talk about Gram Parsons or Poco or the Eagles that's not southern rock; that's Southern California rock.)

And of course my Dad was a lot smarter than I gave him credit for. I should have wornm shoes cuz I stepped on a lit cigarette and blistered my foot. Then when I got back in the and reached up under the seat my shoes were gone. He'd taken them out of course. My punishment -- besides the burnt foot -- was that I was not allowed to go to the next concert which just happened to be the greatest concert ever in Charleston. I'll tell you about that some other time.