A couple days ago, I finishedCharles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer-- an excellent novel set in England largely in the 1920s, in which on the first page we learn that an up-and-coming composer killed his wife, her lover and himself the night before his opera was set to open -- and then we look back as to why it happened. It's written by Wesley Stace, who is better known as the singer John Wesley Harding, and it's very assured and well-written: We keep returning to certain events with new knowledge, learning more and more of what actually happened.
It's his third novel, and I'll be seeking out his others. Stace gave a reading at our local bookstore a couple months ago, and he performed the folk song, "Little Musgrave," that's at the heart of the novel (and the opera) -- it was really a magic moment. I found the song later on iTunes, on one of his live albums, and have been listening to it a lot.
Both the song and the novel are worth seeking out. In fact, here's Stace singing "Little Musgrave" on Sound Check.
I don't have time tonight to get into what I did in Puerto Plata, so here's what I read there (and since):
Riding the Rap. An Elmore Leonard novel about Raylan Givens, now best known for being the lead character of the new show on FX, Justified. The novel was terrific (I expect no less from Leonard), and there were a lot of elements taken from it used in Episode 4: "Fixer."
Last Words: My brother gave me George Carlin's autobiography for my birthday last year, and I finally got a chance to read it. I planned on reading a chapter or so and then start another novel, but it was so engrossing that I'd finished it by the time were were stateside again. There aren't many showbiz biographies I'm interested in, but Carlin's a hero of mine. He didn't disappoint.
The Book of Three. The first book in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain series. I've read this a number of times. Inspired by Welsh mythology, these books are to me what Tolkien's are to most of my friends. They're the fields of fantasy I played in as a kid, and they've only gotten broader and richer since I've returned. Next up is The Black Cauldron.
Power Girl: A New Beginning. I missed the first six issues of Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray & Amanda Connor's Power Girl comics, so I'm happy to see the book I've dug since issue 7 started out so strong. Every character Connor draws is filled with such personality and life, and Palmiotti and Gray provide her with playful scripts that never paint the hero is a real, flesh-and-blood person... and give the book great New York flavor, as well.
And rounding things off with another gritty crime drama, there's Daredevil: Cruel and Unusual, an well-done five-issue sequence which starts with Matt Murdock at a psychological low point, until he's confronted with a chance to defend a career criminal on death row...but who didn't do the crime he's going to die for. So why'd he confess? By Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, Michael Lark and Paul Azaceta.
Jeri Smith-Ready's new novel, Shade -- her first young-adult book -- is available in bookstores and online today, and it's a hell of a read. Picture this: Ghosts are real, and suddenly, they're commonplace and visible... but only to kids aged 16 and younger -- people born after a mysterious moment dubbed "the Shift." For this new generation, the world is very different, and immeasurably more complicated. Especially when your boyfriend dies and comes back as a ghost. Is it okay to start seeing other flesh-and-blood people?
And -- well, look, Jeri's put up a description on her website that says it better than I could, and, more importantly, gives away only the plot points she wants given away. So let me just say that the premise of the book, where no one over a certain age can see ghosts -- is a deft allegory for how all generations see the world differently from the ones that precede them. The story isn't about this generation gap -- it's a more personal story than that -- but it takes place in a world with a chasm that separates young from old more efficiently than technology, the way we do it in our world. (No, I don't have a Tumblr account.) In Shade, nature has made that divide crystal clear, and, as ever, parents just don't understand.
I've read all of Jeri's books, and this is my favorite. Jeri writes with confidence and charm, and opens a new world to us where death is not the end, but only teens can see what's next. (Shade also got a fantastic review from Publisher's Weekly. I don't think a direct link to the review is available online, so Jeri's reprinted it on her site. If you need a convincer, it'll do the job nicely.)
Rob P.S. Had a great time at Lady Jane's Salon last night, where Jeri read from Shade, along with Christina Britton Conroy, who read from One Man's Music, and Leanna Renee Heiber, who gave a delightful reading of The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker, a Victorian haunted romance that promises a lot of spooky, proper fun. Also, we hung out in a glass room full of comfyness, including leopard-print beanbag chairs, with some of Jeri's other friends -- one of whom I'm blanking on her name* (beer was involved, and it's best not to guess), and the other of whom a check of Twitter reveals is Kate Milford, whose debut novel The Boneshakerhits the shelves in three weeks, and looks phenomenal. Congratulations to you, too, Kate.
*UPDATE: Thanks to Twitter, I was able to find out/confirm her name, too, and it's what I'd have guessed -- Julie! Although there's no reason for you to believe me. But the fact is, I has considered doing a little parenthetical John Edwardy type thing (not schtupping a woman who's not my wife, that's John Edwards with an S; I mean the cold-reader phony-baloney "psychic"). So I would have been all, like, "I'm getting a "J" and hope that someone would chime in with Julie, and then I'd say "Yes, Julie, I knew it all along." I was like 85% Julie, 12% Judy. And 3% Yuengling, but that was the beer talkin'.
Naturally, I'm in a fine mood about Heath Care Reform being signed into law (fingers crossed for the reconciliation fix), but I'm not quite ready to talk about that. Instead, I wanted to look back at an idiom that I've had in my vocabulary since high school.
Sometimes, you just gotta Paint the Mother Pink.
Here's a commercial for a contest MTV ran in 1984, the MTV Party House, in which they gave away a house in Bloomington, Indiana, and, in honor of Bloomington native John Cougar Mellencamp's song "Pink Houses," everybody would get together and "paint the mother pink," as Mellencamp says at the end of the commercial. And because he says it so distinctively (and also, because calling anything a "mother" was rare on TV in 1984), it became a catchphrase of sorts.
The thing is, it also kind of merged with another phrase, extrapolated from Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Here's a passage about the Somebody Else's Problem field, which lets people ignore problems that aren't their own, since they conflict with reality as they expect it:
The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else's Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.
And lo, someone -- a buttonmaker at a sci-fi convention, no doubt -- shortened all that to "Paint it pink and call it somebody else's problem." And "Paint it pink" has sort of stuck around in that context, but among the first MTV generation? It's "Paint the mother pink."
Anyway, maybe that's why this is coming to me today. Healthcare reform has been signed into law, which, as Joe Biden reminds, us, is a "big fucking deal." And perhaps the biggest part of that big fucking deal is that, suddenly, for all of us who have health insurance that we're currently happy with, there are 30 million soon-to-be-insured Americans who are, astonishingly, no longer pink.
As I mentioned on my previous post, I'm not on the Twitter. And I still buy CDs, rather than downloads. It's not that I don't know how to download music -- that's easy enough. The Avett Brothers offered a free track off their new album to mailing list subscribers about a month ago, and you better believe I jumped on that.
But music I buy? I want to make sure I can keep it. I don't want it to be lost in a system crash, or be unable to transfer if I decide to upgrade my computer (or heaven forbid, swithc platforms!), or prevent me from lending it to a freind. (I'm not a big filesharer, but it's really nice to hand someone a CD of a band I like and say "check this out.")
I'm the same way with books. The Kindle looks cool as hell, but a book is a book. Not all reading has to come from books, but I'm not quite willing to make the leap. Because who knows what could happen -- I want to own the books I own.
Case in point: As the result of a publisher deciding it didn't want to offer electronic copies -- some of which had already been sold -- Amazon reached into everyone's Kindle and plucked out two books: George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. (They credited the customer's accounts for the deletion.)
Sure, doing this with Orwell books is poetic irony at its finest. But it doesn't make me any more likely to buy a Kindle, that's for sure.
Jeri Smith-Ready's novel Wicked Game just won (and by "just", I mean she announced it on Facebook about a half hour ago) a PRISM Award for Light Paranormal Romance. The awards are presented by the Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal Chapter of the Romance Writers of America. The news is too fresh to actually have a link to yet, but here's a list of this year's nominees.
I should also mention that I just finished the sequel to Wicked Game, Bad to the Bone (which you can still see a link to on the upper righthand corner of the blog, for another week or so, at least). First of all, it's just plain fun to read, and I spent most of Monday afternoon finishing it. The characters and the environment (vampires pyschologically frozen in the era they "died", hiding in plain sight, spinning tunes at a vampire-themed radio station) progress in interesting and entertaining ways, as we start to see how romance with a vampire is one thing, but day-to-day living with him is another. It's got a satisfying plot, some great snarky dialogue, and a lot of blood-fueled rock-n-roll fun. Plus a Big Honkin' Cross that's more dangerous than it seems.
But the main thing is, Wicked Game won. That's huge. Congratulations, Jeri.
So Jeri was tagged with a meme – “Forever 15” – in which she was asked to list 15 books that will stay with her forever. She had 15 minutes to come up with the list.
So I gave it a try. I know there are other books that should be on here, but these are the first 15 that sprang to mind.
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller Slaughterhouse-5 – Kurt Vonnegut Madeleine’s Ghost – Robert Girardi Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets – David Simon Songs of Innocence – Richard Aleas (Charles Ardai) The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald The Chronicles of Prydain (specifically The High King) – Lloyd Alexander The Razor’s Edge – W. Somerset Maugham The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee Sandman – Neil Gaiman & Various Artists The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler The Stand – Stephen King The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood Travels with Charley – John Steinbeck
I’ll take a cure from Jeri and just mention one of them: There’s a scene in The Great Gatsby that kills me every time. If I remember it correctly, Tom Buchanan has just discovered his wife Daisy has been having an affair with Jay Gatsby. Now, Tom’s a creep. He’s been carrying on his own affair with another woman, and if I recall correctly, even blackened Daisy’s eye at one point in the book. There is nothing to like about Tom.
And yet, as Gatsby urges Daisy to tell Tom she never loved him, try as I might, I always feel sorry for him. He’s so wounded, so crushed. He asks Daisy about a specific moment of tenderness between them; I can’t remember what it is, but he asks, “Surely you loved me then?”
And when he asks that, so afraid of the answer he’ll get, I feel this great wellspring of pity for the man. He gets what he deserves, but it gives me no joy to see it. In fact, it may be one of the saddest things I’ll ever read.
Rob (Needless to say -- though I've gone ahead and edited the post to say it anyway -- if you feel like sharing your own list, feel free to post in the comments.)
This interview with Tom Folsom on last night's Daily Show made me wonder if his book The Mad Ones might be the Most Perfect Book in the World. It honestly seems like it has everything I could ever want.
In case you didn't notice the little doohickey on the right side of the blog (I'm talking to you, one-eyed Pete), Jeri Smith-Ready's Bad to the Bone is finally shipping on Tuesday. It's the sequel to Wicked Game, in which a group of time-stuck vampires have established a radio station playing music from their various eras. (Jeri's actually got an online radio station set up for the vamps... she really goes all-out.)
Anyway, the new book's coming out on Tuesday, and for once I haven't read an earlier draft -- so I'm going to be just as surprised as you are when I first crack the spine. But here's what I've got to go on -- this glowing review from Publisher's Weekly:
In Smith-Ready’s espionage farce sequel to 2008’s Wicked Game, Ciara Griffin and her vampire DJs face another threat to their Maryland radio station 94.3 WVMP, the Lifeblood of Rock ’n’ Roll. When the Family Action Network (FAN) disrupts WVMP’s Halloween broadcast by pirating their signal and jamming it with antivampire rhetoric, Ciara swears revenge. Under the aegis of the International Agency for the Control and Management of Undead Corporeal Entities, Ciara turns spy and infiltrates the cult’s fortress, armed with her wits and her vampire-healing “antiholy” blood. Aiding her are a crew of hip vamp buddies and vampire dog Dexter, whom she rescues after finding him chained to a cross outside a FAN enclave. Smith-Ready pours plenty of fun into her charming, fang-in-cheek urban fantasy, which frequently skirts the edge of parody.
A vampire dog, man. That's badass.
So do yourself a favor and bring Bad to the Bone to the beach or pool this summer. Anywhere there's lots of sun. Because if there are vampire dogs, I think you pretty much have to watch out for anything.
I've been reading My Boring-Ass Life: The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith for a while now, mostly when I'm on the toilet. I tell you this because, well, nearly ever diary entry so far begins with Smith's trademark candor: "I wake up around five, take a dump, let the dogs out, and check the boards and email." Or some variation thereof. And because of my own circumstances as I read the book, I'm beginning to feel a certain kinship with Smith that I haven't felt before, even though we're about the same age, we're both geeks, and his movies always crack me up.
In short, I feel like we're on the same poop schedule. It's kind of creepy.
The audiobook of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, with its laconic descriptions, unclear-who's-speaking-at-first conversations and all-around elliptical nature, is maybe not the best thing to be listening to while driving at night after a filling pasta dinner.
And when you do pull over at a rest stop, try to remember to take your foot off the brake when you take that catnap. Otherwise, when you wake up, it might seem at first that you dozed off in motion, and you're careening headlong into a populated visitor center.
A local bookstore whose name I have a hard time spelling, The Raconteur, is presenting a live performance of The Maltese Falcon as a radio play tonight at 8. Which is awesome in and of itself, but complementary wine seals the deal.
Today on the boards, we were having fun with "impossible collaborations" -- basically mashups of artistic works by two disparate creators. I had some fun by suggesting things like The Oldest Living Confederate Widow in King Arthur's Court (by Mark Twain and Allan Gurganus) and Se7en and the Ragged Tiger (by David Fincher and Duran Duran), and even a toy like Mike Mignola and Children Television Workshop's Tickle Me Hellboy. But where I really had fun was thinking about how other people's suggestions would play out.
For instance, LimeCoke's notion of the Legion of City Slickers inspired this exchange:
CURLY: "You know what the secret of life is?" (He holds up one finger.) "This." MITCH: "Is that a flight ring?"
He also suggested John Hughes and John Ostrander's The Breakfast Suicide Squad:
"Dear Mrs. Waller, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in Belle Reve for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to send us on covert ops on enemy soil. You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions, according to our various sentences. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain... ...and an athlete... ...and a basket case... ...a princess... ...and a guy who throws trick boomerangs.
Does that answer your question?
Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Suicide Squad."
But so far I've had the most fun riffing on Mike Parnell's proposed collaboration between Garrison Keillor and James Ellroy: Lake Wobegon Confidential.
"It's Christmas time in Lake Wobegon, and Edna Biddle would be spritzing the last few ounces of brandy on her signature fruitcakes, if she hadn't be cut down in a brutal murder at the cozy little diner she ran with her husband Carl. Carl made the best apple cobbler in town, and was a heck of a good poker player, even if he did chase an inside straight more often than was good for him... Last night Carl was found in a pile of corpses in the back of the Biddle's diner, so I guess Phyllis Wylie now makes the best apple cobbler in town."
Style-wise, Keillor's laconic prose is the polar opposite of Ellroy's staccato jabs of words, so there's really no good way of merging their styles. But when you get down to subject matter, small towns and multiple homicide go together like peanut butter and ice cream.
Was asked if I was trying to drown myself in one of those hot tubs. (I wasn't; I was just tired of listening, and put my ears underwater.)
Played Magic: The Gathering.
Watched a ton of That 70s Show.
Saw Tropic Thunder. (Lots o' fun.)
Rode my bike around Corolla, NC.
Ate the best chicken I have ever had the pleasure of tasting. Oh good god, more please.
Cooked pulled pork. Cooked lasagna.
Took a kayak wildlife tour in the northern outer banks.
Rode in a SUV over miles of beach.
Saw lots of wild horses.
Recognized that we really need dunce caps to take things to the next level.
Camped.
Drank.
Started to learn how to play "Cruel to be Kind" on the guitar.
Participated in a campground version of The Dating Game. Claimed my special porno talent was "deep sea diving." Lost, but got a free condom anyway.
Lost a free condom. Possibly in the wash.
Tried honey whiskey, against a magic eight ball's advice.
Saw Steve Earle kick ass onstage. And Kenny White, and the Felice Brothers, and so many more.
Threw my nephew around a pool.
Explained the physics behind shotgunning beers to my niece; briefly regretted it.
Borrowed my mom's car, making the North Carolina drive much better than it would have been otherwise. (Thanks, Mom!)
Missed pretty much all of the Democratic National Convention.
And the Olympics. Though I did see one Ethiopian runner pass his countryman at the last minute to take the bronze medal in the marathon. That had to be one uncomfortable flight home.
Swam in some pummeling waves at the beach. Bodysurfed to exhaustion.
Played beach volleyball.
Read Little Girl Lost, The Way Some People Die, Songs of Innocence, and The Thin Man.
Hung out with friends.
Hung out with family.
Bought more fudge than I should have.
Saw the Wright Brothers Memorial in Kitty Hawk.
Ate a dozen raw oysters.
And more, I'm sure... but it slips my mind at the moment.
The other day I went to the Borders at Madison Square Garden to pick up some novels to read in North Carolina. I intended to get another crime novel (because they're the juice for me right now) and a science fiction or fantasy novel for a change of pace. Immediately I picked up Songs of Innocence, Richard Aleas's sequel to Little Girl Lost, which floored me by how good it was. But as I walked the SF/F section, I simply couldn't pick one. Their covers all looked the same. or rather, they looked three different ways:
1) Hard SF: Big technology, maybe in orbit over a planet.
2) High fantasy: Serious-looking people in impractical armor.
3) Contemporary urban fantasy: Sexy women with half their faces showing.
I don't know much in the way of current SF writers -- and even less about fantasy writers. I know enough to know that I don't want to support Orson Scott Card, no matter how good Ender's Game is supposed to be. I thought I read a Dan Simmons book years ago (a vampire novel called Children of the Night, I believe), and nearly picked upIlium, because it was one of the few covers that attracted me and I'm a mythology geek. But it was crazy long, and it looks like it has a sequel, and... I'm tired.
So I walked around the Lit section for a while, nearly picking up Possession and Lonesome Dove (which again was longer than I'm looking for, simply because I'm still harboring the illusion of reading Ulysses). But eventually I returned to crime.
And picked up Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, unquestionably something I'll enjoy. But I was really hoping for something a little more out there. If only the covers in the SF section had a bit more panache, I might have gotten it.
I just wrote another post as I lurch my way through Ulysses. Not that my comments are illuminating in any way, but at least they're there, and I can move on to chapter 4 now.
After a summer of putting off reading Ulysses (what the hell is wrong with me?), I finally read Wicked Game last week, and it's even sharper than I remembered -- and you might remember that I expected really, really good. What I wrote about it a couple months ago still stands -- it's exciting and funny in all the right places, and is a rollicking good yarn. The dialogue is sharp, the protagonist is likable (and hey, everyone likes con artists; she muses about this herself), and it builds to an exciting climax. Plus there's a host of groovy, distinctive vampires and shout-outs to great rock 'n' roll. And the sequel, Bad to the Bone, is forthcoming. Jeri Smith-Ready's blog is the place to go for updates.
So yesterday saw me haunting a bookstore once again. I was looking for one of Donald E. Westlake's Parker novels (written as Richard Stark; the first one is The Hunter, which Mel Gibson's Payback and Lee Marvin's Point Blank are based on). I wanted murder, and I wanted it in large quantities. And I wanted it Now.
Problem is, those books are out of print, and are being re-released next month. Which is fine for Future Rob, but what about me?
I went with Little Girl Lost, by Richard Aleas (Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai's contender for Best Pen Name Ever), which starts out with a murder and ladles on the guilt and noir atmosphere. I've wanted top read it since Greg pointed out Ardai's interview on Fresh Air a few months back. I also picked up The Way Some People Die, by Ross MacDonald. (Man, there are titles and there are titles.) I've never read any MacDonald (always confusing him with John D. MacDonald, whose Travis McGee books I love), but I've heard great things. So it looks like I've got a week full of sex and murder.
Sounds like a vacation to me!
Rob (Kathy sez: "Can you limit the sex to just me?" Will do. "And the murder?" Only drifters, honey. Only drifters, and I'll bury them deep.)
I feel surrounded by inevitability, and the weight of history. Or at least, that’s what my entertainment is telling me.
For the past few days, I’ve been watching The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 film by Gillo Pontecorvo (who also directed Burn!) about the Algerian uprising and war that eventually drove the French from the country. It’s shot in black and white, and looks almost like a documentary. The movie is more concerned with the movement of cultures than characters, and what is essentially the birth of terrorism as we know it.
Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to The Archivist’s Story, by Travis Holland, about a disgraced professor in 1939 Russia—a man charged with destroying the unpublished manuscripts of blacklisted and imprisoned writers, who smuggles a short story out of the prison walls.
Both stories have a hopelessness and an inevitability about them—Algiers on a global level, and Archivist on a personal level. The archivist, Pavel, is essentially the lead in a prison drama: Even though he leaves the prison every night, the whole of his country has become a police state, and he can’t even have dinner with a friend without paranoia. Beyond that, his personal life is deteriorating. His wife is dead and her remains are missing in the bureaucracy, his best friend (and father figure) is heading for dire political trouble, and most tragically, his mother is beginning to have blackouts and showing signs of neurological problems. Nothing, it seems, will come to a good end. He has a burgeoning, tentative romance with his building manager, another damaged soul. Maybe, maybe, he’ll be able to draw a little joy from this. But how can he trust anyone in this place? Maybe the only thing he can trust is the words he has risked everything to smuggle out.
In The Battle of Algiers, nothing seems to slow the growing cycle of terrorism and retaliation, sometimes misdirected. French police are shot. An off-duty captain gathers some men and blows up a suspect’s house. The Muslim section of town (called “The Casbah”) is cordoned off. In the most riveting scene of the film, three women have dyed their hair and westernized their outfits, in order to pass the checkpoints more easily. They’re given destinations, and bomb components for their handbags. They meet an explosive expert in a warehouse, who sets up the devices and tells them they have a half hour to set them. And off they go, to a bar, to a teeny-bopper hangout, to an airport.
The woman at the bar is beautiful; a man offers her his chair. She sits, sipping a soda, looking around the bar. There are businessmen there, and couples on dates. A little boy licks an ice cream cone. You can see her realize—or maybe I’m just projecting, but it’s an easy projection to make—that she is moving from revolutionary to murderer. And there’s something heartbreaking about her standing up and leaving, sliding her handbag under the bar with her foot. It’s like history hinged on that moment—that fictional moment, or fictionalized, at least—and since then there have been no choices.
Of course, that’s an illusion. There are always choices to make, and so many of us make the right ones. But when we fall, the earth quakes beneath us.
