Guernica: A Novel

I finished "Guernica: A Novel" by David Boling last night, in a mad 75 page dash to the finish complete at 3 in the morning (gotta love the hours of this freelancing thing!). This historical novel tells the story of three generations of a Basque family, in and around the city of Guernica. I knew nothing of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian planes with the cooperation of Franco-run Spain in 1937 except for Picasso's mural of the same name, but this book gives a very real face to what the citizens of this city must have experienced at that time. Love, war, smugglers and resisting fascists in Spain: I'm down. I've got to get this part of the world on my next trip to Spain.

While some of the plot turns were predictable, and the characters archetypes you've seen before, the story was an enjoyable and interesting read. Recommended.

The Pet Dragon

...is a cool-looking new children's book from illustrator Christoph Niemann told partially with Chinese characters. You may have seen Niemann's work on numerous covers for The New Yorker. (Link via Print.)

David Foster Wallace Dead

I was shocked to read this evening that writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on Friday at his home in Claremont, California. While I didn't like everything he did, his books of essays, including A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again are great reads. He was an absolute real talent, and in passing, a tangible loss to American contemporary literature.

Knockemstiff

Fifty-three year old Donald Ray Pollock's debut collection of short stories, Knockemstiff, is for you fans of Harry Crews or Chris Offutt, and it's deadly. The stories semi-intersect in small community in Southern Ohio about 75 miles southeast of my hometown and run along that rough country line that veers on disturbing. With 18 stories in 200 pages, and a couple hours straight through before bed, the images dug in my skill and altered my dreams. While not light summer tales, they are powerful and stunning. Rentable from your local branch of the BPL.

Words of the Day

Two new words I like:
SPLINE: the thin rubber stuff that roll into a small gap to keep screens in their frames.
EGRESS: a way out; exit.

After the Flood

I received a copy of this gorgeous, 10 pound Steidl (of course) produced book this week. Containing more than 500 pictures taken by Robert Polidori between September 2005 and April 2006 in the aftermath of Katrina, the book is a haunting record of the lives washed away in New Orleans. Does total destruction become art? Eerie and powerful. Some sample images below.

Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

This series of posts on Paris from The Morning News, written by one of their co-editor-in-chiefs are very entertaining. The guy is really good with a turn of phrase. Funny, and sometimes gorgeous stuff.

The Big Oyster

I'm really enjoying The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky right now. Full of useless facts that will help me dominate Trivial Pursuit, and old ephemera including maps, recipes, photos, drawings, this title traces the history of New York via the rise and fall of the oyster. The author also explores how NYC began to lost touch with the waterways that surround Manhattan Island, in tandem with the dwindling, poisoned and rapidly depleted oyster population. Did you know that in the 1600's, New York Harbor was estimated to hold HALF of the world's oysters? And that the Lenape Indians, Manhattan's first inhabitants, loved oysters as much as the encroaching Europeans, as evidenced by the giant centuries-old shell piles (called middens) found all over the five boroughs? Damn. What a loss. Imagine being able to buy some fresh ones down the street right now: All you can eat for 6 cents on Canal Street.

On that note, Spike Hill up on Bedford now has a 5-8 Happy Hour special with oysters selling for a buck a piece.

Book Club

Was fortunate to have enough sitting around time while traveling in the past few weeks to rip through some books. Brookland was by far the best one, although the last third of the book gets a little heavy into bridge construction. I read most of The Great Bridge by David McCullough (and liked it a lot), and you know what? I'm not enough of an math geek or engineer, to really care about all the intricacies of building the Brooklyn Bridge, especially in my fiction. (McCullough always spins a good tale, though.) The bridge holds me up: 'nuff said. That said, Brookland is worth a read.

Moved on to Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda. This book was a huge bestseller in France--I got roped into reading it after being drawn in by the good-looking cover design at the fantastic McNally Robinson. Only okay, it's a a bit too sentimental "chick-lit"-ey for me, telling the story of three roommates who bond together to create their own family. I often found the writing banal with lots tired images, although the three main characters were interesting and decently portrayed. Claire Danes in the main female role in the movie? Sure to be an Oprah pick.

Then I checked out The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova after a friend mentioned the title in passing. I would love to read a good historical novel that actually works and doesn't embellish facts, but this piece of shit does neither of those things. A page turner, written in the best blockbuster style, with truly awful writing and a plot line that barely holds itself together as the story travels all over the world in search of the still-alive 'Dracuyla.' I have never understood the vampire fascination, all that Anne Rice shite back in the early 90s in SF, yuck...This must be being made into a movie with Angelina Jolie and Ralph Fiennes.

Brookland

Emily Barton's novel Brookland has been keeping me company the past few days. I'm not a fan of all historical fiction, for it often seems like everyone in the story knows the three famous people of that era (see: the Alienist). This one is good enough that it's completely engrossing: a perfect at-home-sick book.

The story is set in late 18th century Brooklyn, and tells the story of woman who runs her family's gin distillery on the shores of the East River while dreaming about building a bridge that will connect her town to Manhattan. Her main characters seem very modern for the 1790s although they do make for a good read. Sprinkled with last names that are now streets: Luquer, Schermerhorn, Boerum, Livingston, and Remsen, Barton probably takes her liberties with history, but halfway in, I'm completely captivated by the story of Brooklyn as it once was.

Paper Memories

I've been sorting through a few boxes of old letters and papers that I moved from my Mom's house when she moved in December. It's pretty wild how many letters I used to write and receive: phone calls were expensive then. My best friend Trish literally sent me three letters a week during my first year of college--and we were only living 45 miles apart. And there are letters from amazing friends who were my life and soul as a 17-year-old, but who have since disappeared with time, and growing up and apart.

My family sent me lots of mail: postcards from my brothers, letters from my grandma. During the first few months on my own in the fall of '86, my parents wrote me a few terrific, supportive letters. I've always claimed they didn't approve of anything I did, but maybe that came after I left Xavier, catholicism and my volleyball scholarship behind. One three-page tough love letter from my Dad that did nothing but encourage me to become everything I could possibly be simply dissolved me into tears.

I found papers from my first couple of boyfriend-types: one was the first ever musician in my life (and btw, thanks for starting that trend). His band, Rhino 39, played around Dayton covering "Rebel, Rebel" and R.E.M., along with some originals. He took me to the home of punk rock in Cincinnati, the infamous Jockey Club, and into a recording studio for the first times. Another boy was a short, blonde skateboarder who chased me forever, and covered his letters with the logos of hardcore bands and pictures he drew of our friends. And summer letters sent by the bass-playing classmate from Omaha I met during my first year at Xavier, but never confessed my huge crush on. He sent me 10 lovely, personal letters during the summer of '87, when we were both young, afraid and stupid. All of it makes me think about how much, and how little, I've changed in the past 20 years regarding such matters.

A couple stranger pieces of ephemera: I forgot that I used to write to bands I liked, for it was the only way to find out anything about them or hear their music. I have no memory of liking them nor a single album by the band, but apparently I wrote to the Sheffield, England-based Pulp in 1986. Jarvis Cocker wrote me back to send me tons of flyers and buttons along with a chatty letter. I also wrote to Drivin' n Cryin' right after Scarred but Smarter came out, and had a two letter correspondence with Kevn Kinney. I remember meeting him years later in Brooklyn when my friend Shanie was dating him, and possibly scaring him by telling him that I wrote him fan letters 15 years earlier.

Bartender's Lament

Nice piece in today's Times written by someone who I must assume is a bartender at Sunny's in Red Hook.

The Mix

Can't stop listening to Bob Dylan's NY Blood on the Tracks, Patty Griffin's "Moon Song," and two songs mentioning the apparently drug-ridden Bonnie Brae section of LA, Neko Case's "In California,"(this song is KILLING me right now) and The Twilight Singers "Bonnie Brae."

Currently reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty. Shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker prize, it follows a bi-racial family as it changes in both the UK and a fictional Massachusetts college town. As much I'd like to dismiss her simply to run contrary to overriding public opinions (example: Dave Eggers' output of crap-o-rama), she's such a great and funny writer that I'm enjoying it almost as much as I did her first, White Teeth.

NYPL

Because I am a book dork, I am completely fascinated by the New York Public Library, most especially the Main Library on 5th/42nd. I love the fact that the stacks of books at the main library run all beneath Bryant Park. I love the pneumatic tube system that whisks away the paper with your book request, issues you a number, which you then exchange when your books show up about 10 minutes later on the other side of the desks. I love the main reading room, where I sometimes have gone to do some half-baked research, just so I can sit in that cavernous, hallowed room with the wood tables and green-shaded lamps. I love the two lions, Patience and Fortitude that sit guard on 5th Avenue. The historical exhibits they have upstairs are always book and paper based, and incredibly interesting. And I don't really like Ghostbusters, but I even like the fact that some it was filmed there.

A tour is available of the stacks one time a year with a $40 contribution as a "Friend of the Library". See some pix of the miles of stacks beneath the park here.

Book Club

David Mitchell's Ghostwritten is brilliant. I bought it a few years ago after hearing rave reviews, but never cracked it until this week. Comprised of 9 stories that intersect through random passings in eight modern cities, the tales start and end in Tokyo. Characterized by wonderfully imaginative and deeply funny writing, it's a challenging read and takes some time to fit the pieces together, but is well-worth the effort. Although I'm still not entirely sure how it ended, definitely highly recommended.

Traveling and eating are about letting things happen...

...So says Mr. Anthony Bourdain, the best-selling author of Kitchen Confidential, among other titles. As much as I want to dislike his arrogant puss, the man talks some serious sense about food. Arrogance is always more tolerable when the person is dead-on about their topic. His No Reservations show on the Travel Channel is always entertaining, high on the gross-out factor (sharing a still-warm raw baby seal in Northern Quebec with an Inuit family), and highly recommended.

How America Eats

Taste of Home, a cooking magazine with the median age of readership around 60, has a circulation of 3.4 MILLION. (!!!) This blows my mind. For comparison's sake, V is 30,000 copies; This Old House is 1.2 million; Martha Stewart Living is 1.9 million, and things like Time and People have a circ around 3.5 to 4 million copies.

So there's this magazine primarily dealing in recipe exchanges that covers the canned soup/jello salad arena that ALSO has one of the top 15 circulations in America. It's impressive. As much as I'd like to think food habits have changed in America (with a wider variety of produce and known ingredients available everywhere, for starters), seeing these actual numbers show what the reality really is. Bottom line: people who cook at home like food that's convenient and simple to cook.

Check out their website for great pictures of the contributing cooks.

Quotes I Have Liked

Hallmark card portion of the program. Sometimes things I have read stick with me. Go figure. I guess it has to happen sometimes. Skip this post if it's all too deep and shit for you.

We are the same people, only futher from home.
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Stop leaving and you will arrive. Stop searching and you will see. Stop running away and you will be found. --Lao Tzu

I thought that in New York, the charming eccentricity of someone in his twenties can become a grotesque deformity when he enters his fifties, since this is a city where no one conforms to a general, civilized code of behavior... --Edmund White

(Banville) conveys the narrator's anguish, as he comes to an understanding that 'we are defined and have our being through others;' and must realign ourselves when those closest to us disappear
--from some book review in the New Yorker

Recently

I really don't know where I've been, but how have I never read anything by Edmund White?? Currently whipping through "The Farewell Symphony", which is more or less his memoir of gay life from the 60s to the 90s. White fucked his way through these years with a few thousand partners, while struggling to be recognized as a writer. Taking place alternately in New York, Rome and Paris, this book serves as an elegy to the exuberant and joyous gay world that was destroyed by the onset of AIDS. His turns of phrase are gorgeous, the images fresh, and his prose simply slays me. I haven't read anything in awhile that excited me as much as his writing does. And not just because of the super-graphic sex scences.

Back to Montreal on Monday night for a few days. I am determined this time to actually see something of this city besides the inside of a printing plant, and the crappy restaurants in Boucherville (i.e. the suburb where the plant is located 20 minutes outside of the city). I keep reading about Montreal and hearing nothing but fabulous things. This month's Gourmet magazine is devoted entirely to the city, and got me all worked up about experiencing it properly. Thus, me staying an extra day in a schmancy hotel with a fireplace en suite in Vieux Montreal... Me and Montreal: we have a crush on each other, but we don't know each other that well. My elusive lover and I are gonna get busy this time around.

I went on an internet date with my friend last night as a last-minute escort. It was her first time meeting someone from the online, and while she was fine going alone, I happened to tag along at the last minute for the hell of it. He seemed like a very nice, pretty hot boy. I had to keep my mouth shut because I was trying not to ask too many questions of him -- after all, it was her damn date! Anyway, it was a success and they will be going out again (sans the escort service.) I've done the internet dating on and off for a few years, where I try it for a while, get horribly annoyed/disappointed/indifferent, get off line for a few months to just "live my life" and meet someone "normally", then realize that since I don't hang in bars so much any more and am older that it's harder to meet someone, get back online, etc. etc. repeat cycle indefinitely...Frankly, it's a lot of energy and work to meet someone, and I want it to be easier. Fat frickin' chance. The internet dating makes sense to me intellectually, and I know that it has worked for plenty of friends, but in practice I find it a real pain in the ass. Ah well. Of course, I have plans for a date with another new one sometime next week....

Big excitement over here on Calyer St, as The Haas makes her way back to residency on this block, specifically on the 4th floor of my building starting April 1. Am very excited to have her as a fully moved-in upstairs neighbor, instead of just as the de facto mayor of Franklin Street, and the offical cat/house sitter for Apt 1L, (plus the rest of Greenpoint.)

Could Dolly Parton be more genius? Probably not. And for that matter, how about Ray Charles' Genius + Soul = Jazz album? Dug this gem out of the vinyl yesterday, after not hearing it for a few years. Damn. Brother Ray will always be THE Genius.

Ol' Charlie LeDuff

I've been reading terrific, first-person reports from the seedier-side-of-life by Charlie LeDuff in the New York Times for the past ten years. He had a brilliant column in The City section during the late 90s entitled "Bending Elbows", which essentially involved Charlie going to NYC dive bars and writing about whoever he met. I always wondered how he got that job, and assumed he was some old codger who conned his editors into publishing his drinking tales after working for years at the Times.

I liked his book Work and Other Sins, and even with a photo on the cover, and knowing he had won a Pulitzer Prize, I still thought he was some old boozebag on his last legs.

Imagine how surprised I was last night when I flipped on the Discovery Times (don't ask, I didn't know it existed either) channel and found that ol' Charlie has his own show called "Only In America." Imagine how much more surprised I was when it turned out that he's 39, and kind of a fox. His show presents a brand of Hunter S. Thompson "participatory journalism," where Charlie immerses himself each week into a subculture of America such as New York modeling, gay rodeos or arena football. The show is pretty funny, but veers dangerously close into being ALL about Charlie instead of about the story. Additionally, he's been accused of plagarism on several occasions. What's that saying - don't let the truth get in the way of a good story??

At any rate, he's certainly charismatic, and I bet in person, you'd either love him or want him killed instantly. P.S. I think he might look a little like Vincent Gallo.