The Thin Red Line

Part of me feels guilty for posting about a second memoir by a second Los Angeles area librarian within less than three months, but Quiet Please   Dispatches from a Public Librarian was just barely too good to pass up.  Scott Douglas’ memoir of his career with the Anaheim library lacks some of the pizazz of Don Borchert’s Free For All  (reviewed here)  but the crisp writing and the creatively Dewey-numbered chapters go a long way with me, though to be perfectly honest at times I found this young man’s outlook and worldview a bit appalling.  

(more…)

Share This

When I first started this blog I remember hanging out on Blog Catalog and it always seemed I was talking to people who were facing writers block or unable to think of topics to post about and generally struggling to regularly publish a blog.    And I would look at the huge stack of books on my couch and think to myself, ‘at least I don’t have _that_ problem.

And let me say right off that my stack of books is as tall as ever,  so I can’t really use that as an excuse for my recent lack of posts.   Honestly I don’t know why I have been spending my time lately playing games and watching television and even reading books rather than posting and promoting my blog.   Sometimes, I suspect, you just need a mental break.  Having recharged my inner batteries I hope to on Monday resume my five posts per week and thought I would ease back into things by posting today about three great books I’ve read during my hiatus.

(more…)

Share This

I have to confess, right off, that there is no theme, no connection no rhyme or reason behind today’s book selections.   These are five that just caught my eye and found their way home with me and each is just so unusual and interesting that I just had to share it.    Ranging from a huge 10 inches tall by 14 inches wide to a squat and chunky 6 inches square, from the Duba plains in Botswana (Africa) to the foot, err feet  of Texas, from the islands of the South Pacific to the crayon factory, these five books are just All over the map.

(more…)

Share This

If you are not already a Robert Heinlein fan, Grumbles From The Grave is Not the place to start. A collection of Heinlein’s private correspondence edited by Heinlein’s widow Virginia, Grumbles is an extraordinary glimpse into the life of an exceptional author and a no-holds-barred look at the Business of writing.

Fans of Heinlein’s fiction may not be surprised to learn that the character he most resembled in real life is Jubal Harshaw in Stranger In A Strange Land, the unsentimental writer who makes a very comfortable living giving his editors and readers Exactly what they Want. From his very first efforts writing for Heinlein was first and foremost a business. He quickly developed a canny understanding of what editors want and will pay for and he Always gave them exactly that. He sold a Lot of books and made a Lot of money from writing which is something that is not easy to do. (Much like in the performing arts the huge money superstars like Heinlein are the rare exception to the sad fact that most writers and artists earn very little for their efforts, even when they are good.)

The flower power generation for whom Heinlein’s books and particularly Stranger, which became a kind of bible to them, were a rite of passage must read may be disappointed to learn that all of his writing about sexual liberation and plural marriages was written because it was a story they would buy and not because Heinlein particularly believed in it. By all accounts he had a very conventional and faithful marriage which bore much resemblance to the sort of marriage good boys from Missouri around the turn of the century were expected to make and keep to, rather than any of the muti-amorous arrangements with emotional depth that Heinlein was so noted for in his later works of adult science fiction.

In addition to hard core Heinlein fans this book is Highly Recommended to aspiring writers, those who are interested in earning an income from writing rather than those who write as art. While the publishing scene today is certainly very different than that prevailing when Heinlein wrote this correspondence with his various editors and agents, this inside look at how Heinlein handled the Business of being a writer can provide a number of invaluable lessons to anyone trying to earn money by typing words on a screen.

Share This

If you loved Bordain’s Kitchen Confidential, relished How I Learned To Cook and Don’t Try This At Home and never miss an episode of Hell’s Kitchen, you will almost certainly enjoy reading Phoebe Damrosch’s gossipy behind-the-scenes memoir of her experience working at Per Se, the glamorous New York restaurant opened by Thomas Keller– the chef/entrepreneur behind The French Laundry, a storied California restaurant known for its “tasting menu”.

Damrosch, who had previously waited tables at two other restaurants in New York while trying to decide what to do with her Masters of Fine Arts degree relates what sounds a bit like a love affair that began with ogling The French Laundry Cookbook in bookstores, progressed to buying a copy and ogling the pictures and recipes, continued through trying first with disastrous results then with increasing success to make at home Keller’s signature amuse boche, a tiny savory ice cream cone filled with creme fraiche and topped with salmon tartare, and culminating with her being hired among the initial group of employees for Per Se.

The memoir is well written and I did enjoy it, though as I have previously mentioned the elaborately extravagant extremely chi-chi frou-frou highly styled food for which Keller is a high priest and his restaurants a temple is not at all my culinary cup of tea. If at some point previously in reading Bordain or watching Hell’s Kitchen you reached a point of feeling you know all you’ll ever want or need to know about life behind the scenes in glamorous restaurants, you can certainly skip this one. But if you are the sort of hard core foodie who’s always up for another serving of restaurant industry dish, head over to 647.9509 and check out Service Included.

Share This

I was a high school senior in 1981 when John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire was first published. I remember reading the first chapter or so while standing at a display in the entrance way of a bookstore at Lakeside Mall in Metairie Louisiana, sometime in the fall and putting the book at the very Top of my Christmas list.

In those days we celebrated on the 25th with my father’s side of the family, then on the 26th we piled into the car and drove about two hours to Baton Rouge to celebrate with my mother’s side of the family, where we did the entire presents galore and grand banquet routine all over again. Christmas two days in a row. Those were the days.

And so it was as the bloated company settled onto couches to watch football or nap, I dived into the present I had been waiting for and by the time dusk fell and it was time to begin the drive back home I had read fully half of Irving’s tale of the believably bizarre Berry family from Dairy New Hampshire who convert an abandoned school into a hotel, then toss aside their lives to move to Vienna, Austria to operate a hotel with a blind Jewish animal trainer who knows Nothing about the hotel business. And thus began a love affair with John Irving’s fiction that endures to this day.

Recently I was shelving in Biography when I happened upon a copy of Irving’s memoir The Imaginary Girlfriend, which somehow despite being an Irving fan I had never seen before. It’s a light and short read, at most the third the pages and emotional heft of an Irving novel. Many circumstances and settings disclosed in Irving’s memoir have strong parallels in his fiction, his own struggles with dyslexia as a faculty brat at an elite prep school mirror much of the narrator’s struggle with dyslexia and his friendship with the odd scholarship boy, Owen Meany and his year abroad in Vienna clearly foreshadowed that city’s major presence in both Hotel New Hampshire and The World According to Garp.

If Hotel New Hampshire was the book where I discovered John Irving the storyteller, The Cider House Rules was my introduction to John Irving the passionate and eloquent advocate. The story of Dr. Wilbur Larch, an idealistic young obstetrician sent by the Maine Board of Medical Examiners to establish an orphanage in remote rural St. Cloud is in my opinion the most sustained and eloquent argument for allowing women Choice in the matters of pregnancy. While Larch and his staff sometimes refer to "the Lord’s work" and "the Devil’s work" to distinguish between operating rooms being used for deliveries (an orphan) or abortions but privately they all agreed that it was All "The Lord’s Work". For they had all seen the horrible and often deadly and irreparable harm from back alley and DIY abortificants women turned to when they didn’t have the choice of taking the train to St. Cloud’s and asking for the orphanage.

All of rich and detailed characterization and finely detailed plotting that characterized his earlier work was still there but now he is channeling Dickens inveighing against work houses and the novel succeeds as both as art and as political treatise.

Irving’s blending of art and advocacy reached its apex in my opinion in A Prayer For Owen Meany, a long and eloquent answer to the Vietnam War, as well as a novel rich in themes such as childhood, loss, faith and friendship. The story of John Wheelright, the Torronto English teacher at a religious girl’s boarding school and the earlier years of his life, back when his life had evolved around his very unusual best friend, Owen Meany growing up in Gravesend New Hampshire in the 1950’s and coming of age in the Vietnam War era.

As always, Owen Meany is richly plotted with more twists and turns than you would ever expect in a prep school company town. Or maybe you would. I never went to prep school so I don’t really know. I do know that John Irving is one of the great novelists of our era who will in time be properly mentioned in the same breath as Dickens and Mark Twain when the subject is great novelists in English.

If you’re already a fan, do yourself a favor and re-read a John Irving, you’ll be agog all over again how good it is. And if you haven’t already read these books. GO! TO THE LIBRARY!! NOW!!! and get started. Not To Be Missed.

Share This

Kevin Clash and Elmo

Most of the time a book’s genre dictates its format. Mysteries typically begin with murder followed by investigation and then solution. Cookbooks start with appetizers and end with dessert. And biographies usually take a birth to death (or birth to present) approach. But Kevin Clash, the man behind (or more accurately when performing on Sesame Street beneath) my favorite Muppet is different. The chapters in his biography, My Life As A Furry Red Monster, are arranged by emotional virtues: Love, Joy, Creativity, Tolerance, Courage, Friendship, Cooperation, Learning and Optimism.

More often than not when books step outside the established format, they fall flat on their faces. But this one works. Largely ignoring chronology, Clash relates anecdotes of growing up in a small house in Baltimore filled with kids, love and laughter as a shy child obsessed from a very early age with creating puppets and performing with them for the neighborhood kids, then later at local events and on a local television show and finally with Jim Henson’s team on the mega-hit PBS children’s show with each vignette illustrating the chapter’s particular theme. The tone is light and engaging and the less than 200 page book is a quick, easy read. Recommended.

***

I’ve recently added a few new site to my blogroll on the right and am proud to recommend:

Eavesdrop Writer by Vienne is a wonderful blog in which the author relates snippets of over-heard conversations as grist for the creative writing mill. Her powers of observation are remarkable as is the skill with which she presents scenes she has witnessed in public. Her blog features a very active Comments section in which Vienne is charming and truly gracious to all of her visitors.

Jim Bashkin is a scientist and book-lover whose blog Nearly Nothing But Novels focuses mostly on crime fiction with a few literary classics thrown in. Jim’s detailed book reviews are intelligent and informative, his site well worth a daily visit.

And finally, Jim Murdoch is a novelist whose blog The Truth About Lies features observations on language, literature and the writing life. His tone and style are very engaging. I greatly enjoyed his posts about owning 27 dictionaries and musing on the assignment of gender to neutral nouns in the romance languages. A real treat.

Share This

Hope it was a Happy Labor Day. I celebrated my paid holiday by staying home and doing not much of anything apart from reading and watching most of the fifth season of The West Wing on DVD. Yesterday I had a follow up doctor’s appointment. My blood pressure is improved, though still too high and they are starting me on a statin drug and a second BP medicine, though I will not be able to fill the scrips and start taking them until pay day on Thursday.

Meanwhile an e-mail from Earthlink indicates that our phone service will be switched over and our DSL turned on on September 1oth, which we are all looking forward to.

Homo Domesticus is one of Ron’s selections that I ended up reading as well. David Valdes Greenwood, a writer and writing teacher in the Boston area has penned a memoir of his marriage to his husband, Jason and their adoption of a daughter, Lily. The writing is quite funny at times, though Ron seemed to laugh out loud at it rather more than I did. It was nice to read a first person account of one of the few legal gay marriages, though frankly I got the impression that even if I were still living in Boston (shudder) this is not a couple I would care to hang out with. They are of a younger generation who talk a great deal about being "sex positive" but seem to have very little actual sex. They also seem to be the sort of new parents who talk of little other than their new baby, which is really only interesting to others in the same circumstance. Half heartedly recommended for some of the humor and the historical value.

I’m not quite sure how I managed to previously miss reading Fast Food Nation, which was published several years ago, though I believe I may have confused it with a book I read about the (lack of) nutrition in fast food. While this book certainly did talk a great deal about the poor nutritional value of fast food and the resultant world wide impact on health, it is a thorough examination of the subject including a detailed history of the industry and a behind the scenes look at how the fast food industry has transformed other industries such as meat packing and potato farming. The chapter detailing the author’s visit to a slaughterhouse was almost enough to dissuade me from ever eating another hamburger. This book was especially timely for me in that Ron and I have been attempting to eat more along South Beach Diet lines since I have resumed treatment for diabetes and are indeed avoiding fast food.

In the course of checking in and shelving books at work I frequently come across slim, hardcover Young Adult titles devoted to some drug or another and am just as frequently appalled by the propagandist "Reefer Madness" tone these books invariably seem to adopt. So I was pleasantly surprised at the genuinely balanced treatment this YA title brings to the highly emotional and controversial issue of legalizing drugs.

I have long been thoroughly convinced that the "War On Drugs" is a misguided mistake (look at how well alcohol prohibition worked out in the 1920’s) largely pursued by crass politicians (who can never seem to keep their own kids from trying drugs) and implemented by police, lawyers and "treatment" providers who are pursuing their own economic benefits rather the oft-repeated non-sense about "protecting the children".

None of the reporting about the negative consequences of pursuing this "war", nor the arguments and activism of legalization proponents was news to me, but I was very impressed by Meryl Loonin’s ability to explain the reasoning and motivations of the drug war proponents who are not economically benefiting from the "war" which had previously quite escaped me. If nothing else, having read this book will serve me well the next time I find myself in one of those utterly exasperating arguments that inevitably can be reduced to the logical fallacy "drugs are bad because they are illegal and drugs are illegal because they are bad".

(Climbing down from my soap box and hoping the DEA won’t be soon knocking at my door to punish my perfidy in believing that questions of what drugs people take should be a matter for individuals and their doctors and that the police truly have more important things to do.)

Share This

I vaguely remember reading, not too long before I left New Orleans in the mid–late eighties of the arrival of Andrei Codrescu, though I don’t recall hearing anything of him since and had not previously read anything he wrote. So there were the dual pleasures of discovering Codrescu and seeing Codrescu discover N’awlins. The included essays were written over a 20 year period or so and thus cover the author’s becoming a New Orleanian. Most of the pieces are of a very short form written as weekly newspaper column and even the longer pieces are still fairly short and for the volume of it, you’d think this would be a quick read, but it isn’t. I found many of the stories required savoring and digesting and in the end they proved just too rich and filling to have more than two or three at a sitting. Recommended.

Share This

Feh. It seems disingenuous to keep on about how much I detest DDGFBFGF (Dan-David-GoodFag-BadFag-Gerrold-Friedman) and then keep blogging about his books every day. Though I can honestly say that I disliked this one.

Partly it’s that I heard him tell many of these stories on Compu$erve way back when (and was not much impressed then, either). Partly it’s that when removed from the constraints of a novel he tends to go on and on about himself like the pompous self-absorbed ass he is. Partly it’s the self-congratulatory tone that reeks from the pages (eau d’ego).

I found myself remembering some of the more vicious observations and speculations made at the time by people who (believe it or not) detested this man even more than I do. I found myself wishing I had stayed up late re-reading Metzger’s Dog or Crazy In Alabama instead of this. I find myself wanting not to remember my own history with this man and his story. And I find myself suggesting that this is a book you may want to skip.

The interview went well. The supervisor for the new position seemed to like me and I feel I made a good case. She promised to call Friday or Saturday to let me know one way or the other if I got the position. Time will tell.

Finally, on a much more upbeat note, today Bev has composed some delightfully hilarious limericks about her blog and a few others, including this one. Check it out on her blog, Funny The World.

Share This

Sometimes, while checking in books and marveling at some of the crap that people actually read, I come across a book that is odd enough to spark my interest. So it was that yesterday I brought home a copy of Dishwasher, subtitled "One man’s quest to wash dishes in all fifty states."

I confess that while I would never, ever, ever want to work in a restaurant myself, I have at times quite enjoyed reading about the lives of people who do. A few years back I remember thoroughly enjoying Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, although as with another recent review I concluded in that instance that the author was an insufferable jerk even though I liked the book. (I see a theme developing here.)

Jordan says his first dish-washing job came about while working at a Jack In The Box to pay college expenses. He was surly with a difficult customer and as a punishment the manager sent him to the back to wash dishes, presumably until his attitude improved to a sufficiently customer servicey one. Far from feeling chastened, Jordan found that he liked being left alone in the back where he was free to goof off, read, cadge food and generally not do much of any work, which seems to have been his defining ambition.

Jordan felt that he had found his calling in a job that was most always easy go get, more or less impossible to get fired from and required no skill or commitment whatsoever. After a time he hit upon the ambition of working as a dishwasher in all fifty states and began publishing a zine, titled appropriately enough Dishwasher. The zine lead to correspondence with lots of other "pearl divers" (as dishwashers are wont to call themselves) as well as to contacts throughout the country (useful for lining up couches to sleep on and referrals to new gigs) and a bit of publicity which included an appearance on the Letterman show, where Jordan allowed a friend to go on in his place and stayed back in the green room snarfing up free food.

Jordan’s dish washing odyssey takes him to all sorts of unlikely places from an oil rig platform in the Gulf of Mexico to a commercial fishing camp in Alaska, a dinner train in Rhode Island, the Lawrence Welk resort in Brandon Missouri and a Chinese restaurant in Merridian Mississippi. Along the way he manages to throw in tid bits about famous people who busted suds at some point in their lives, including Gerald Ford and George Orwell.

The memoir is well written and entertaining, though I often found myself aghast at the young man’s attitude and world view. In the end Jordan abandons his quest in South Carolina, state #34, to get married and settle down. He and his new wife end up moving to Amsterdam where he is surprised to learn (when finances get tight) that he can’t even get hired as a dishwasher in his new home: minimum wages laws in Europe are tied to age and no one is willing to pay adult wages for a job that can be done adequately by less expensive teenagers. In the end it is unclear what kind of life and career await a man who spent his twenties and thirties drifting around in what is officially listed as the lowest paid occupation in the career statistics.

I can’t go so far as to recommend that anyone rush out and buy this book, but if a copy should come your way be assured it is good for a couple of hours of entertaining reading.

Share This

Gary Geddes is a poet, editor and teacher in Vancouver, BC who is fascinated by stories of Huishen, an obscure Buddhist monk said to have fled persecution in Kabul, Afghanistan circa 450BC, traveled across China via the Silk Road then across the Pacific to the Americas, returning to China 40 years later.

(more…)

Share This