I make my living as a university professor—a teacher who also writes books. This semester I’m teaching US History Since 1929, an upper-division course, one of my favorite classes. I like it in part because US History Since 1932 was the one class I took in college that made me want to go to grad school and become a history professor. (Perhaps more to the point, I decided that the professor who taught it, William E. Leuchtenburg, was who I wanted to be when I grew up. More about him in a moment.) I think I like teaching this course because it’s easier for me to imagine that there’s a student like the young me whom I need to inspire in this class than in my other classes.

I put a lot of time into thinking about the books I will assign, the writing assignments, what I’ll do in a given day’s class to stimulate discussion, etc. There is no relationship that I can decipher between the amount of time I put into a given task and how well the students react to it. Some things just work and some things don’t. I slave over some ideas that land with a thud, and I pull some out of my rear end that soar. If enough things work, we’re all happy. When they don’t work, everything can go downhill very, very fast.

Earlier this semester I assigned a book about the 1932 presidential election between Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It’s a good book and I thought the students might engage it because in retrospect the 1932 contest has so many parallels to the 2008 election. They found it a little dry, but I thought it would provide enough fodder for good discussions that even if they didn’t particularly care for it, everything would be OK. That’s what ended up happening. They all wrote their reaction papers and moved on.

Except for one student. I only made it through the first three sentences of her paper. The third sentence just sounded weird, so I typed it into google. Sure enough, she had lifted that sentence and 2 others from her introduction straight from an essay she found on the internet. That’s as cut-and-dry a case of plagiarism as you’ll ever see (when I looked closely at it, I even noticed that the parts she copied and pasted were in 11-point font, and the rest of the paragraph was in 12), so I gave her a 0 and didn’t bother to read the rest. But then that was the last thing I thought about that night, and it was the first thing I thought about the next morning. I was so mad about it I threw up while brushing my teeth.

I emailed the whole class and told them they had to upload their papers to turnitin.com, the site that uses plagiarism-detection software to bust cheaters. Meanwhile, I started having all these thoughts about what a failure I must be that someone would try to pull this on me. Why didn’t I explicitly tell the students that they couldn’t copy and paste their essays from internet sites that aren’t even any good in the first place? What kind of idiot must this person think I am that she thought she could get away with this? I can guarantee you that I spent 100 times as many thinking and worrying about this than the cheater did.

When the student finally ran her paper through turnitin, the software determined that she had plagiarized seven sections of her essay from two sources, which together comprised more than half of her paper. The second source, from which she pilfered an entire paragraph, was an online chapter of The FDR Years, a terrific collection of essays that I’ve assigned in previous iterations of this class. The FDR Years was written by William E. Leuchtenburg, the man who encouraged me to go to grad school and wrote my letters of recommendation.

I had to go to my class the next day and read them the fucking riot act about plagiarism. What I didn’t tell them was that if you plagiarize, I will fail you (and I will take it personally and I will take it 100 times more seriously than you will), but if you plagiarize my mentor, I will hate you. That day the atmosphere in class was as toxic as it could possibly have been. But the student realized soon thereafter that she could withdraw from the class without penalty from the university (because this was the first time she had been caught cheating, even though she’s a senior and I know damn well this is not the first time she’s done it), so she did so. Without her the class has been great. For whatever reason, I feel like I’m doing the best teaching I’ve ever done. It’s funny how quickly the dynamics of a class can turn on a dime.

I’ve reflected a lot over the past couple of weeks about who this student cheated and how. Herself and her family, obviously: her parents paid a lot of money for her to sit in this class for a month and a half and learn exactly nothing and receive zero credit for it. Her classmates, too, including one who timed the delivery of her third child for spring break so she could get her assignments in on schedule and get back to class with as little time lost as possible, and another who told me last week that he’s an Iraq War vet dealing with PTSD. They, of course, managed to turn in papers that they had written. She cheated me, but I guess I get paid in part to deal with that kind of disappointment. She cheated Professor Leuchtenburg; even though she didn’t exactly harm him materially, she stole from him the currency of his profession, his ideas and the way he expresses them.

I’ve thought about what it would feel like to have someone plagiarize from one of the books I’ve written. I’m strangely neutral about it (at least in the abstract; talk to me again if it happens in real life). It won’t be like they’re stealing from me, unless they’re publishing my words in another book without attribution, and even then, there’s so little money to be stolen from authors of academic books that “stealing” doesn’t seem like the right word to use. No, the plagiarizer steals the expectation we have as readers that what we’re reading is real, no matter the context of what we’re reading. The plagiarizer steals from us.

What’s that?  You haven’t read Zeitoun yet?  Of for the love of Pete.  Read this interview with Dave Eggers and get to reading the book already.  Geez…

Check out this article by BGB favorite Dara Horn for an amazing story that would strain credulity if it weren’t true.  Then check out our two (!) interviews with Dara Horn over there in the sidebar.

A year ago, I had my heart broken.

It’s easy to say, in retrospect, that there were signs the relationship was going to fail from the beginning. We spent too much time together from the very beginning, basing our foundation in dreams. When the fallout came, it was long and painful for more than just me-I wasn’t the only one hurt by the dissolution, and by far wasn’t nearly the one who suffered most. If anything, I got out easy, left with a handful of great memories to look back on fondly.

I am, of course, talking about when Wordsmiths Books closed in March 09.

The bookstore, which had made its home in downtown Decatur, GA (for which I’d served as Marketing, PR and events director since its inception, and had, with my friend/boss Zach, seen the project from birth to death)-had been a daily/hourly/to-the-minute part of my life, and the lives of others, for years. This isn’t about those others. It, like everything I write, is about me, and how I flew my book-weary (“weary”’s an easy word, here, “exhausted” is better, “totally damn over it” is infinitely more accurate) heart from Atlanta to New York closed off to the book industry entirely…and found true love.

Let’s be frank: when Wordsmiths closed, it sucked. IT. SUCKED. And it left a lot of people in tailspins. For me, I’d then seen the glitzy, glamorous side of publishing, but I’d also spent, at that point, way too much time nose-first in the filth of the book world and I was over it-over what I viewed as the big publishing houses’ failure to understand retail, and for most indie bookstores to understand that they need to…well, to try harder.

I was burnt out on galleys and grids and Barbara Walters’ stupid string cheese needs & her massive lack of book sales-all of it left me wanting to run as far away from publishing, from bookstores, from caring about an industry made around stupid ideas about monetizing dead trees and stupider ideas to monetize electronic dead tress, as possible.  This would prove to be difficult, partially because my life plans post-Wordsmiths involved moving to New York and partially because the majority of contacts I’d amassed in the years I’d had my head up publishing’s colon were all, well, in the book biz.

But I was damned if I was going to give my heart to books ever again.

Then I came across a little bookstore called Word in a little area of Brooklyn called Greenpoint that reminded me of Decatur, GA done properly, and everything changed.

Like the great poet Kelly Clarkson once said, here’s the thing: we started out friends. The store’s manager Stephanie, basically the world’s most famous bookseller thanks to Twitter-also a friend of mine, also because of Twitter, bless you Twitter-forwarded me a position that had opened doing events at Word right when I was moving. Timing didn’t really work out, but in the process I became intrigued by the bookstore that I didn’t really know.  My first free day in New York, I Hopstop’d my way to Greenpoint. This was way more difficult than it might seem. Queens, where I was living (and still live now), to Brooklyn is a three-train trek, one that I’ve become quite accustomed to now but then? Less than a week into New York, three trains was NOT something I was prepared to navigate. Also, as anyone who knows me can attest, my sense of direction is…nonexistent.

New York requires a lot of its residents in terms of directional navigation.

Three Trains.

Dear Gentle Readers, I got lost on the G train.

As such, hours after I’d left, I arrived in Greenpoint-shaken, sure, but relatively unmolested (HEY Y’ALL THE SUBWAY’S NOT THAT SCARY!).

I came with my heart closed to Word Brooklyn, the bookstore with the name shockingly only two syllables away from that of the bookstore I’d recently seen shuttered. A small corner bookstore in a hip neighborhood not gunning for hipster cache (see: only one Bret Easton Ellis book stocked, which should be a total deal-breaker for me, no Joanna Newsom on the stereo in-store), basically just being itself: trade paperback fiction-focused with a small selection of new-release hardcovers, thoughtfully-stocked sections, a small and smart staff…
Yeah, love was inevitable, wasn’t it?

And it happened, it did-the store’s thoughtful, purposeful existence, the incredible events that have found me, amongst other things, gushing to Kate Christensen about how hot her sex writing gets me, the staff that takes a constant interest in not just hot books, or just important books, but in books. If the Word staff are to be believed, books are the stuff of dreams-a sentiment that a year ago would’ve had me spit on the ground and say “bah, humbug”, but right now? Right now, yeah, I can buy into that, thanks to the friends I’ve made at Word.

A good independent bookstore should do more than sit quietly-it should foster community. Word does just that-beyond book-related events, they have a basketball team, a group Sunday run, cooking events, this awesome date night that involved classic cocktails. Also, they helped me find the perfect Valentines card.

Oh…oh, yeah, about that… I found love, too, on their bookstore matchmaking board, but you can read about that elsewhere.

I may give off the general perception of being callous if not apathetic, but it’s been through the Word Brooklyn community that I’ve come back to seeing the publishing world with new, fresh eyes-eyes that don’t see how much money’s wasted on Stephanie Meyer but rather what falling face-first into a great book, like Emily Mandel’s Last Night In Montreal, can do to alter life permanently. Like the Grinch when whatever it was that made his heart grow ended up happening…yeah. You can read this however you want.

Word Brooklyn celebrates its third anniversary this month, the same month that will mark a year since my last bookstore community, Wordsmiths Books, shut its doors for the last time.  In that time, I’ve made and lost friends, fallen in and out of love, and read books both great and horrible.  I thought I’d given up on being giddy about publishing…and that, too, has changed. And, ok, maybe Word’s not responsible for all of that (as I am, ya know, given to over-romanticizing), but it’s amazing the little part of your heart, and your life that can be filled by the perfect bookstore.

Hey, Word? Thanks for being just that. I love you, you complete me, etc etc. And happy birthday.
Also what’s up I’m your mayor on 4Square.

I geeked out late last night listening to Michael Silberblatt interviewing Patti Smith on KCRW’s Bookworm.  And it’s only Part 1!  Listen to it. It’s at least twice as good as the interview with Terry Gross that kept me in my car a few weeks ago.  Fun fact: The Devil’s opening in Sympathy for the Devil, “Please allow me to introduce myself…”, is from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.  I’m not going to shut up about Just Kids anytime soon. (My review)

Speaking of which, I was enthusing about the book on Monday night with some tasteful and erudite dinner companions who let me know that PBS aired a documentary about Patti Smith, Dream of Life, a few months back.  I had no idea, as is usually the case.

The New York Review of Books examines Publishing: The Revolutionary Future. (Thanks, Dr J.)

The Count goes medieval on Edward.

In the New York Times: The Math of Publishing Meets the e-Book.

To see the new math in action, check out what the new math means for friend-of-the-blog Ben Tanzer.

Check out this comic about why DRM means that checking out an audio book at the library is a simple  22 -step process, and you may agree with this comic that suggests that DRM creates the very thing it tries to control – piracy.

Atlantans, mark your calendars.  There’s a very cool reading in town this weekend that you’ll want to check out. Kathryn Borel will be reading from her memoir Corked on Saturday evening at the Savi Urban Market in Inman Park. There will be free wine.  Free. Wine. And I trust Savi to bring the good stuff.

I first became aware of Borel when Boing Boing posted a video of the author demonstrating how to open a bottle of champagne with a sword.  That’s a skill you can use.  They posted another Borel video titled How to Sample Wine Without Looking Like a Clown.  That one’s fairly self-explanatory.

I’ve been meaning to check out Corked ever since. I was alerted to Borel’s upcoming Atlanta visit by Russ Marshalek, sometime BGB contributor and the hardest working man in books.  Russ sent an impassioned e-mail to his Atlanta friends and associates urging us all to drop everything and check out Borel’s reading.   Well, I’ll let Russ speak for himself…

(Dramatic interpretation of an an original e-mail by Russ M created by the Baby Got Books Thespian Society.)

The reading is at 5PM on Saturday March 6. A Capella Books will be there to hook you up with a copy.  Here are the directions.  You remembered the part about the free wine, right?

True Story:  I was visiting the eye doctor a few weeks back, and I needed to get my pupils dilated to finish the examination.  It takes about half an hour for the drops to take effect, so I was sent out to the waiting room.  Rather than look at old copies of Redbook, I walked two doors down to the local indie bookseller to browse for a while. I came across Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin on the shelf and picked it up.  For reasons unknown to me, I was dead set against  this novel despite it being a National Book Award winner and having garnered near universal rave reviews. With my vision starting to blur, I read all of the accolades on the first six(!) pages inside the cover (and then more on the back cover) and remained unconvinced.  Then I noticed the epigraph, which is a quote from Aleksandr Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (read my review):

All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere.  That is what the world is.

That passage is underlined in my copy of Hemon’s book, and it finally sealed the deal for me.  Then my eyes lost focus with the bonus of my retinas searing from the sunlight streaming through the bookstore windows. It was time to throw some bills on the counter and leave with my purchase.

The prologue of the novel is a brief passage recounting Phillipe Petit’s walk on a high wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center in the 1970s.  That’s him depicted as a stick figure on the paperback version of the book.  From there the novel bounces between the stories of various people of wildly disparate backgrounds living in New York City at the time.  Each of the strands has a connection to Petit’s almost incomprehensible stunt.  Eventually the various strands connect in entirely believable but totally random ways.  Like life.

The high wire act that McCann pulls off with this novel is writing about the September 11 terrorist attacks while barely touching on the act itself.  Invoking the image of the towers before their completion and Petit’s incredible act of artistry is enough for the reader to fill in the blanks for themselves.  The last few chapters of the book hopscotch over the eighties,  nineties, and 2001 directly to present day.

Back to that Hemon quote epigraph.  A central theme of this novel is certainly the richness of life and the many unseen connections that we all have with one another.  The world is made up of people that we will never know and possibilities for ourselves that we may never fully realize or even recognize.  The challenge that McCann lays before us is to find the connections within the breadth of humanity we encounter  in our everyday lives and to look within ourselves for the lives that we could/should be living.  If that’s not as powerful a “message”  as you are likely to encounter in contemporary fiction, I don’t know what is.  If you’ve waited as long as I did to get on board the Let the Great World Spin bandwagon, do it now.

I was driving home a few weeks ago and heard Terry Gross interview Patti Smith about her new memoir Just Kids.  It was one of those interviews where you sit in your car and keep listening well after you get where you’re going.   I picked up the book days later and dove in as soon as I could.  It was the right choice.

Just Kids focuses on the unusual and enduring relationship that Smith had with photographer/artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith, at the age of 20, had set off to New York City to try to make her mark as an artist and poet.  On her first day there, she met Mapplethorpe, himself a struggling artist.  The two eventually developed a romantic relationship and move in to a Brooklyn hovel together.   It’s the Summer of Love, but neither is much into the hippie thing.  They are each preparing for the Next Thing.

Their early New York days are the archetypal starving artist experience: constant struggling to pay rent, going hungry when money is tight (and money is always tight), getting lice from seedy lodgings, etc.  And if that sounds romantic to you, consider this:  Patti’s first hint that her soul mate might be gay surfaces when Robert begins street hustling to help pay the rent.  Even as Smith describes her dismay at seeing her boyfriend go out into the night, she can sense your judgement and offers simply:

Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?

Difficult as it was, Patti and Robert make unlikely and important connections within the art world almost from the very beginning of their life in New York. For example, Patti first met Beat poet Allen Ginsberg when he bought her a sandwich in a Manhattan automat. It turns out that Ginsberg thought that she was a very pretty young boy. Ginsberg would later champion Smith’s poetry and he provided introductions to Gregory Corso and William S. Buroughs.  Corso teaches Patti how to avoid giving boring poetry readings, and Burroughs is among the earliest attendees of Patti’s rock shows at the nascent CBGB’s.  She meets Hendrix and provides relationship advice to Janice Joplin.  After the romantic side of her relationship with Robert runs its course, Patti dates Jim Carroll, Sam Shepard, some guy in the Blue Oyster Cult, and Fred “Sonic” Smith (who she would eventually marry).

The young couple eventually found themselves residents of the famed Chelsea Hotel, all but sealing their fates as artists of renown.  Patti became famous first.  Just as their career trajectories were primed to seriously take off, the pair landed their first and only joint art show.   Patti describes the show:

We chose to present a body of work that emphasized our relationship: artist and muse, a role that for both of us was interchangeable.

And that’s the point of this book.  This is the story of a relationship that was greater that the sum of its parts.  Neither would have realized their artistic potential had the other not been in their life.   Each provided what the other needed in support and nurturing companionship to get through the crisis at hand and strive to create another day.

The book also provides a fascinating look at tortured process through which art comes into the world.  Smith did not set out to be a rock star and Mapplethorpe had less than no interest in the field of photography.  Robert Mapplethorpe took the now iconic cover picture for Patti’s first album (listen to the Fresh Air interview to find out why the record company hated the picture). From there he went on to become a controversial giant of the art world.  The books ends after Robert’s death with AIDS, as it must.  Smith promised Mapplethorpe that one day she would write their story. She has made good on that promise, and it is quite a story.  This is a beautifully written book that is sure to top many year-end “best of” lists.  It will be on mine.

Post Script:

As a fortuitous accident, I read Just Kids not long after finishing Helen Weaver’s The Awakener (see my review), a memoir of Weaver’s relationship with Jack Kerouac.  Between the two books, a picture emerges of the avant garde art scene in New York from the 1950s through the 1980s.  A direct line between the Beats and the punk scene that would emerge from CBGB’s can be clearly drawn, which was a revelation for me.  The two memoirs have notable similarities. Both authors write about transformative relationships with men who certainly had their demons.  Each woman survives their subject’s death – deaths that were caused to an extent by “lifestyle” choices.  Both credit/blame their subject’s Catholicism for important aspects of their personalities.  It’s an interesting comparison and progression through the decades.

But wait, there’s more:

Clearly this a book that begs to have some music to accompany the review. Let’s start with my favorite Patti Smith song that’s not Because the Night.

Patti Smith – Dancing Barefoot
[See post to listen to audio]

I have no idea why that’s my favorite.  It just is.  Another of my favorite Patti Smith recordings is her backing vocals on the R.E.M. song E-bow the Letter.  Her spooky and ethereal keening is so emotive, it kills me every time.  I saw Patti Smith join R.E.M. for a live performance of the song just last year.  If I had any hair, it would have stood on end.

And some songs by singers that were clearly influenced by Patti Smith (according to me):

PJ Harvey – Good Fortune
[See post to listen to audio]

Pretenders – The Adultress
[See post to listen to audio]

Cat Power – Speak for Me
[See post to listen to audio]

Video of 10,000 Maniacs covering Because the Night, a Smith/Sringsteen collaboration

And lastly, I include Sympathy for the Devil since it was mentioned specifically in the text. Smith remembers that Mapplethorpe was completely taken with the song on first listen and seemed to relate to it as he was beginning to explore what he considered the darker side of himself.

Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil (Neptunes Remix)
[See post to listen to audio]

And if you need more, you can tune into the Just Kids station that I set up on Pandora to complete my Patti Smith immersion experience.

I hope Tim is taking notes. This is how it’s done.

One way to get my attention is to begin a book with a vivid murder scene of a little black girl in the 1950’s.  Bernice McFadden, the author of Sugar shocks the reader to attention in the first few pages.  Sugar is a book I wouldn’t normally have found, because I don’t choose my books based on the color of the author – this book can be found way over in the African-American Author section.   In my case, the book literally landed in my lap so I gave it a try, and I was surprised that I didn’t want to put it down.

Pearl lives in a small town in Arkansas.  She is a church-going woman who lost her little girl to a brutal murder fifteen years prior to the beginning of the story.   The day Sugar moves in next door to Pearl is remembered by the entire town:

The storm walked into their small town on two legs in spiked red patent leather heels.  She waltzed right through the main square, blond wig bounding to the rhythm of her walk, a leopard print pocketbook slung over one shoulder, matching suitcases in each hand.

Sugar is a prostitute and is shunned by all of the church-going women in town (which is of course, all of the women).  Pearl ignores the rumors she hears and befriends Sugar.  Slowly and gradually, their friendship grows into a deep internal bond that surprises both of them.  Their friendship is such that after having “words” with each other, they miss each other and quickly forgive because being apart or even the thought of being apart is too hard to imagine.

Sugar helps pull Pearl out of her 15 year depression by introducing her to experiences she has never had.  Likewise, Pearl helps Sugar see a calmer, loving part of life that Sugar has never had.  As their friendship develops, Ms. McFadden seamlessly pulls the reader into each of their painful pasts and develops the characters so completely that we want to help them ourselves.

Ms. McFadden brings us this moving, thought-provoking story that contradicts the Beaver Cleaver/Happy Days image a lot of us have of the 1950’s – she makes it “real.”   June Cleaver certainly never used the F word!  And although this story could happen to people of any color, Ms. McFadden subtly makes us aware that it still the 1950’s with Jim Crow laws in full effect.

The blind man had other one-night gigs to do, the chitlin curcuit was sixty-five nights of giving yourself over to segregated toilets and drinking fountains, and scared white people that suspected your lyrics carried something other than sadness or happiness.  Suspected that maybe those words carried seeds of contention.

Throughout the book, Ms. McFadden reminds us through her characters that horrible things can happen to each of us, but we are all still alive!  We need to appreciate and love those around us.  If we are quick to judge others we could miss an opportunity to come alive more fully, to experience people and places that we never thought we could or would.

At the moment when I thought (or was hoping) that the fairy tale princess ending would happen, Ms. McFadden twists the story another way, then when I really thought I knew the ending, she surprised me again!

Sugar was Ms. McFadden’s first novel ten years ago.  She has re-released it in order to reach a broader audience.   Hopefully the book will reach this audience and can be enjoyed by people of all ethnicities.  Ms. McFadden’s second book is titled This Bitter Earth and I’ll be reading it soon.

The Guardian collects writing tips from an all-star gallery of authors:

Part 1

Part 2

A few highlights:

• Philip Pullman – “My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.”
• Colm Toibin – “Stay in your mental pyjamas all day” and “No going to London.”
• Roddy Doyle – “Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.”
• Anne Enright – “The first 12 years are the worst.”
• Jonathan Franzen – “ Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.”
• Neil Gaiman – “Write.”

I’m not a film fanatic, but I have friends who are.  I don’t dislike film by any means, but I’m not nearly as well-versed as my, well, uhm, well-versed friends.  And any way you slice it, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is rated as one of the best films ever made.  It won the big four Academy Awards — Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress.  Only one film before, and one film after, had won all of those (do your research — it will serve you well on trivia night).

I, however, haven’t seen that film, and took it upon myself to read the book first.  Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, first published in 1962 or 1963 (I can’t tell from this printing that I have) is flat-out astounding.  I’ve read lots of books about power struggles (Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, etc.), but this is the one the one that really struck home for me.  It didn’t resonate with me because of my time on the funny farm (which may or may not have happened); it resonated with me because of the humanity exhibited by our protagonists.

The book is narrated by Chief Bromden, a half-Indian patient in the insane asylum, who everyone thinks is a deaf/dumb/mute.  It turns out that he’s not, but he carries on throughout a good portion of the book maintaining that front.  The main character is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a patient who is sent to this hospital from a prison work camp because of his behavior.  And then the fun begins, as you (and the characters in the story) try to figure out who’s crazy and who’s not, and they wrestle for control of the facility.

There are multiple dynamics at work here, between McMurphy and the other patients (to determine who’s the alpha male of the ward, a/k/a the “bull goose loony”), between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, between the patients and the orderlies, and between patients themselves to figure out what their roles are in the “therapeutic community” model of the ward.  And there are a cast of characters — Chronics, Acutes, and Vegetables — each with their own story and peculiarities.

As much as I want to recount this story, I really don’t want to say anything more about the “field trip” that a group of the patients take, or about the party they throw at the facility.  I assume that many of you have seen the movie.  But when I’ve spoken to people who’ve seen the movie, they undoubtedly don’t recall some of the most critical elements of the book.

If you’ve seen the movie and liked it, you should read this book. If you’ve seen the movie and didn’t like it, you should read this book.  And if you haven’t seen the movie, you should read this book.  I think that about covers it.

I myself can’t wait to see the movie.  While Jack Nicholson can get on my nerves a little bit, I think the role of McMurphy is absolutely perfect for him, and I’m excited to see this story play out on the screen.

The 2010 Atlanta Open Orthographic Meet is this Saturday!  If you are local, you must go. It’s amazingly awesome.

The Obamas stock White House library with socialist tomes. J’accuse!  What?  Oh…oops. Update: Read Carolyn Kellog’s more thoughtful take on this ridiculous story.

And from the Library of the Absurd: Queen Victoria – Demon Hunter

Cory Doctorow christens this year’s Sci-Fi “it” novel.

Before you plunk down your hard-earned on an e-book, know what you’re buying with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s e-book checklist.

Ripped from today’s headlines, Sherman Alexie’s Ode to My Sharona:

Stuart Archer Cohen is the author of three novels, Invisible World, The Stone Angels, and his latest – The Army of the Republic.  Cohen lives in Juneau, Alaska and is the owner of a company that deal sin the trade of wool, silk, alpaca and cashmere in Asia and South America. I posted a review of  The Army of the Republic yesterday.  I noted that the novel stuck with me and raised all sorts of questions.  I am thankful that Mr. Cohen generously agreed to answer my burning questions.

Baby Got Books interview with Stuart Archer Cohen, author of The Army of the Republic

Baby Got Books: Army of the Republic features the activities of several citizen groups that are in opposition to a repressive and powerful Right wing presidential administration. Their responses to the perceived injustices range from protests/direct actions and violent “terror”. Were there particular real world events that inspired you to write this novel?

Stuart Archer Cohen: I was inspired by two things. One was a long-standing interest in guerrilla movements and revolutions in South America. I’ve been doing business there since 1984, and I was intrigued, on a human level, how a bunch of university students and young professionals could develop the will and the skills to take on a corrupt state. I was also acutely tuned in to how the state responds to that.

With the 2nd Bush Administration, I saw our government becoming more and more like Latin America in its corruption, cronyism and absolute impunity. Also, the Right has taken on an increasingly war-flavored rhetoric and stance, where the goal is now to utterly destroy the “Left” and its institutions by any means necessary. I see this as a recipe for political violence, and that made me want to tackle the subject of political violence in a United States setting.

BGB: The recent non-fiction work It Could Happen Here: America on the Brink by Bruce Judson says that a potential political uprising could occur here that would be driven by financial inequality. The events in your book that lead to protests and sometimes violent political action include mass privatization of water supplies, ballot irregularities, domestic use of of a Blackwater/Xe-type contractor for police actions, and the abuse of courts. Are the issues that you raised in your novel the specific powder kegs that you see on our horizon? Or were they more hypothetical?

SAC: I haven’t read that book so I can’t comment on it. The things you mentioned above are all elements that can engender a violent reaction, as they are in the book.

However, I think the real danger is not those symptoms, or even inequality, but rather the constant, dehumanizing propaganda that is being regularly pumped into American society. The non-communist world has never had such a sophisticated, wide-ranging and cohesive propaganda campaign directed against its own people. Psy-ops techniques that we formerly used on enemy countries are now being used against the American people by the Right. The message of Fox News and other hate-speakers is that Liberals are subhuman weaklings, that Left-of-Cheney politicians are liars and traitors, and that we are engaged in a civil war of Right vs.Left, Patriots vs Elected Government. That’s the real powder keg, both because it stokes Right Wing anger, and, more importantly, because it sets up a future Right Wing administration to ruthlessly, violently repress any opposition.

BGB: I read that your research for this novel included conversations with 60’s activists, CIA operatives, and current student protesters. How did you go about locating these people and were they generally open to having frank conversations with you?

SAC: I locate sources in various ways. The CIA people I met through martial arts connections. It’s something that I have in common with these men and it establishes a certain bond beyond politics. The Argentine revolutionaries I tracked down through introductions provided by friends and other sources. Some people I contacted simply as names I saw on the Internet. I hit some dead-ends, too. I’m not so big and famous that everyone is eager to talk to me.

My experience is that people will answer as honestly as they can if you are non-judgmental and they know you won’t embarrass them. Sometimes, it’s what they don’t say that’s most revealing.

BGB: “The Inside Story” on your web site mentions that you were once held under suspicion by the Salvadoran military. How did that experience inform the events that unfold in AOR?

SAC: That experience really enlightened me as to how decent people become caught up in an evil machine. Things came out fine for me in El Salvador because I had an American passport, but Salvadorans picked up there who were equally as innocent as me met some terrible ends.

BGB: The types of reading that you did as research for this novel, books on “how to form a new identity, improvised explosives, surveillance and bodyguarding”, would seem to send up numerous red flags under the “Patriot Act”. Were you concerned at all about ending up a “No Fly” list or experiencing other negative consequences as a result of researching/writing this novel?

SAC: I didn’t really worry about that, although that distributor where I got most of those books was under constant pressure from DHS to surrender his client list. My feeling has always been that I’m just a novelist writing fiction. People like community organizers, lawyers and investigative journalists are a much greater threat to a regime than someone working in a dying field of the entertainment business. When I see those people start to go down, I’ll worry about myself.

BGB: In the book you present a fictional right-wing reactionary television news host called The Hammer who seems all too believable. In the novel, your protagonist Joshua Sands has a discussion about the power of pictures over words, and The Hammer seems to embody the power of the “picture” side of that argument. Why did you elect to tell this story in words (instead of pictures) and what does that say about where you weigh in on the relative merits of each?

SAC: To tell a story in pictures, you need a movie studio, and I don’t happen to have one of those at hand. Also, making a movie is, above all else, a major business venture, and a book like mine, where urban guerrillas are, to some degree, the heroes, isn’t necessarily a good risk for a backer. I did get a film offer on this book but I turned it down because I didn’t like the direction they wanted to go with it to make it more mainstream. It was probably a stupid decision on my part.

That being said, words can convey ideas in a way that pictures simply can’t. That’s why movies are always shallower than the books they are based on. I was an Art History major, so I know well that pictures can be beautiful, and they can convey a lot of emotion and spirituality. But they are in no way worth a thousand words, not if the words are any good. If you want to illuminate deeper, complex truths, there’s no substitute.

My two previous books were optioned, and at one time I thought I might want to write screenplays of my books, both because of the money and because movies are just so damned large. You think you’re large by extension, but you’re really not. You’re still just a guy sitting in an empty room, so you might as well be writing what you want, and not have to take notes from some producer or see your work covered over by some re-write man.

BGB: While reading your novel I had Reagan-era punk songs going through my mind, songs that were relatively straight forward in their left wing militancy. I kept waiting for these kinds of songs and other artistic responses to surface during the Bush 2 presidency, but for the most part they never did. Do you think that Sept. 11 effectively killed what I’ll call the “romanticism” of anti-government action and rhetoric during that period?

SAC: I think Reagan’s 1984-style propaganda was new, so maybe people reacted to it more strongly. I think by the time Bush 2 came around, the Right had massively amplified and perfected its propaganda machine and 9/11 had also enabled them to up the ante. Rove and his gang made it pretty clear that anyone who didn’t support them internationally was an enemy, and domestically, a traitor. I think this was very successful in intimidating a lot of people in and out of government. Look what happened to the Dixie Chicks for making a few comments on stage in London: they were vilified and their records were burned publicly. Artists see that and they don’t want to go down that road. Also, the propaganda machine made the troops sacrosanct, and, by extension, the wars, so it was just uncool for artists to question government policy.

There was protest music, such as Green Day’s American Idiot, but I think people were worn-down by the endless barrage of garbage that was being dumped every day by the propaganda infrastructure. That’s one reason they do it. After a while, I think it’s hard to keep reacting.

I truly don’t understand why no other novelists have taken on the issues that I did in The Army of the Republic. My book was rejected more than forty times by publishers: so maybe all those other writers were right! The only books I’ve seen dealing with the possibility of political violence are racist garbage like The Turner Diaries, or Right-Wing heroic fantasies written by ex-military guys, where heroic gun-owners fight an oppressive Federal Government.

BGB: Does the rise of right wing protests and direct actions (i.e., Tea Parties, attempted bugging of Sen. Landrieu’s office, etc.) surprise you?

SAC: I’m not surprised, because dissatisfaction among that element of the Right was pretty high even in the waning days of the Bush Administration. Those people are doubly angry, both because of the drift of the country and because their illusions about the Republicans have crumbled. Unfortunately, they are so crippled by their own ingrained hatreds, as well as a completely fanciful view of how the world really works, that they’re unable to express their very justified anger in a positive way. Instead, they just want to dig the hole even deeper. They don’t even realize it’s a hole.

I thought it was interesting that the Corporates used these people to harass and intimidate the Democrats during the health care debate, disrupting Town Hall meetings, etc. The Tea Party people would say that it’s not Corporates who are organizing them, but let’s not forget that the main platforms for Tea Party ideologues (Beck, Limbaugh, Palin) are Corporate platforms like Fox News and Clear Channel. So, yes, to a great degree, this already is a Corporate-backed movement.

If the Tea Party people succeed in gaining real or ideological control of the Republican Party, and the Corporates decide to fully back them, we will be on the fast track to authoritarian government and political violence.

I actually would like to see the Left working on organizing them, because they have the potential to help change this country for the better.

BGB: As an author whose work was recently caught up in the Macmillan/Amazon feud with the result of having your book become suddenly unavailable from the world’s largest bookseller, what do you make of the situation?

SAC: I don’t know all the ins- and outs: it has something to do with electronic rights and e-books. My general impression of Amazon is that they’re always looking for a new way to pick the publishers’ pockets, and I guess the authors just got in the way this time. My advice is: try www.Powells.com or your local bookstore.

Need more? Check out Cohen’s blog post about the Revolution from the Right.

The first thing that struck me about Stuart Archer Cohen’s The Army of the Republic was it’s Banksy-like artwork.  The image captures a man in what appears to be a politically motivated act about to launch himself along a violent arc.  As it turns out, it is an image that perfectly captures the essence of the words within its cover.   The conflict between words and images turns out to be a central theme of the novel, so it’s an interesting choice on that level as well.

The Army of the Republic takes place in a dystopian United States that some would say didn’t seem all that unlikely just a few years ago.   A right-wing administration operates under its own interpretation of the laws of the land.  A  judiciary stacked by the ruling party seems unlikely to enforce laws detrimental to the Administration.  Questionable electronic voting returns threaten to eliminate the power of the ballot.   National security interests serve as a smoke screen to all manner of shady dealings.   The use of mercenary forces (think Blackwater/Xe) for hire by both the government and corporations ensures that the non-governmental security forces are effectively answerable to no one.  Right-wing talk shows serve as an echo chamber for the Administration, reinforcing their message through repetition of sound bites and artfully edited images

Lando (not his real name) is a young a young idealist who has decided that enough is enough.  He belongs to a secretive organization known as The Army of the Republic (AOR).  The AOR aims to disrupt the information flow of the Administration and highlight the injustices of their corporate cronies by conducting high profile direct actions, which have recently come to include violence, destruction, and general mayhem.  In other words, the AOR wants their own images on the evening news to counteract the story lines of corporate news services and the Administration’s talking points.  As the AOR’s campaign begins to ramp up, support for their tactics and their cause begins to grow, and a showdown with the administration seems imminent.  However, Lando’s view of the world (and justice) as black and white becomes clouded when his parents become engaged in the looming conflict – on opposite sides.

A fascinating part of this novel is the glimpse into the operations of how extreme shadow organizations of the left and right are organized and operate.  Cohen also does an excellent job of highlighting the many ways that news and information become distorted on its way to consumers.  (In a brief comic note, the news coverage of the action of a riot is called by what amounts to a play-by-play man and a color guy.) It’s enough to make a reader extremely paranoid.  The novel stuck with me, and I had lots of questions floating around my head.  Luckily the author was  gracious enough to submit himself to an interview by the likes of us. Come back tomorrow to check out my interview with Stuart Archer Cohen.

Audio Bonus: The whole time I was reading this book, the soundtrack in my mind was playing the political punk songs of the late seventies and early eighties – songs by bands like The Clash, Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, etc.  But the song that seemed to get at the ethos of this novel the most was this one:

[See post to listen to audio]
Red Rockers – Guns of Revolution

Have teenage vampire romance novels finally run their course?  From the looks of this, at least one YA author hopes so…

In other news, an Emory University professor with an awesome/incredibly unlikely last name has made an incredible Faulkner discovery.

This item at McSweeney’s notes the passing of Timothy McSweeney, explains who he was, and why their literary journal was called Timothy McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern.

Somehow, I’ve found myself well into February still writing about books that I’ve read in 2009.  Maybe I should just let it go, but for some reason I’ve become obsessive about writing about ALL OF THE BOOKS that I read over the year.  So to satisfy my OCD, I’ll try to wrap up last year in as few posts as possible.  I was particularly slack in writing about the comics that I read last year for two reasons: (1) my approach to comics is completely haphazard, i.e., I pick things up that look interesting without much forethought and (2) I don’t know how to write about them.  Here, allow me to  highlight item number “2″ for you:

Fables 1 and 2

This series came highly recommended to me from various comics aficionados.  The series kicks off with Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile. We learn that the characters of our childhood fables are real and they have been driven from their world into ours.  Unsurprisingly, they live among us in New York City where they are able to keep a mostly low profile. Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf, etc. are real people with very human shortcomings.  It seems those fables were an idealized version of these troubled souls.  In Fables Vol. 2: Animal Farm, we learn that the non-human fables (like the three little pigs) are forced to live apart from their human counterparts on a farm up-state.  This doesn’t sit well some of the animals.  And that’s as far as I’ve gotten.  The day that I went to buy the next edition, my comics dealer was sold out of Volume 3’s.  I haven’t felt the need to overcome this surmountable obstacle.  This is one of the problems that I have with comics series: how long do you continue on the potential of a story line before you call it quits?

Cecil and Jordan in New York

Cecil and Jordan in New York was a comic of a completely different stripe.   Think of a collection of wry short stories about life for twenty-somethings in NYC and you’ll have a good idea of what Cecil and Jordan offers.  These are fresh and interesting stories that somehow were meant to be told with the assistance of pictures.  My only complaint is that the slim volume is over too soon. I picked this one up while visiting the bookstore of the comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly.  If you find yourself in Montreal, don’t miss this store for any reason.

A Drifting Life

A Drifting Life is the comics memoir of “the godfather of Japanese alternative comics”, Yoshihiro Tatsumi.  It is also a doorstop weighing in at 800+ pages.  This is a fascinating look at a man and comics movement that I knew absolutely nothing about.  It also provides an intriguing glimpse of daily life in post-war Japan and its relationship with the US. One of my issues with comics in general is that the medium tends to set limits on the length of the stories that can be told.  However, A Drifting Life, decades in the making, provides a near immersion experience.  It took me a week or so to make my way through this excellent book.  It’s staggering to think about how many hours of work must have gone into this.

Exit Wounds

I’d say that of the comics discussed in this round-up, Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan was my favorite.  A terrorist’s bomb in a busy market brings a strange young woman into the life of Koby Franco.   Franco’s long-estranged father may have been among the victims of the blast, and the young Russian woman at this door says that she was his lover.  The officials say that Koby’s father was killed in the blast, but his girlfriend has her doubts.  The unlikely pair set off to learn the truth, and each brings their own expectations and baggage to the search.  Exit Wounds masterfully depicts modern Israeli life while telling an intriguing story.  Thumbs up.  I picked this one up at Drawn and Quarterly, too.

Nemi (Volume 3)

Nemi is the anti-Cathy.  She is a goth.  She’s Norwegian.  She drinks and swears.  And she’s not putting up with any crap from you.  Nemi is presented primarily in the traditional 4-panel style of the funny pages.  I have not read Volumes 1 or 2 of Nemi’s adventures, but Volume 3 is charming and funny in that sassy, goth, Scandinavian kind of way.

See? All over the map.  I have been comic-less so far in 2010. If you’ve got some titles that I should check out, leave your suggestions in the comments.

Tim sure has been quiet lately.

In all seriousness, I wonder how any father of a son, much less the father of a newborn son, much less a native New Orleanian who’s rooted for the Saints all his life, could have watched this without melting down completely.

I don’t even like the Saints under normal circumstances, but that video gave me almost as many chills as this one did the first time I saw it. (I have a thing for the receiver.) Now I love those guys!

I’ll admit up front that I listened to this book on CD.  I usually have two books around that I’m reading and one in the car for listening during my horrendous Atlanta commute.  My car books are usually books I would never admit to reading but this time I waited over 150 days to get Shanghai Girls by Lisa See from the library.

I’ve been interested in reading Lisa See for awhile but her books are popular and there is usually a long wait at the library.  However, after learning more about Ms. See herself I was encouraged to wait it out.  Ms. See is part Chinese and has traveled extensively throughout China for her research.  For one book she was only the second Caucasian person to have visited a particular remote village.  Currently, I am very interested in Chinese culture and history since my daughter is enrolled in a Chinese-centric school and learning Mandarin.  So in addition to educating myself with bi-racial topics for my daughter, I’m doing my best to learn all I can about China too.

Again, I was hesitant about this author who is read by the masses, but I truly enjoyed listening to this book and would have enjoyed reading it as well! It is read by Janet Song who has a soft Asian-influenced accent which lends even more credibility to the story.  If China doesn’t interest you at all, this book would not be a good choice.

It is about two sisters May and Pearl in Shanghai, China, 1937.   Narrated by Pearl, everything is wonderful in China during this time.  Pearl and May are “Beautiful Girls” who pose for artists who paint them for advertisements.  The International District is full of Americans, English and Japanese and everyone is happy.  The girls’ father owns a lucrative rickshaw business and they are doing quite well.  The girls, who even have American names, don’t pay much attention to Chinese traditions but it’s all ok, life is great!

Oh but happiness never lasts.  Father loses company. Father loses daughters in bad gambling debt. Father disappears. The Japanese invade China. Girls must get to Los Angeles, California to join arranged-marriage husbands.

It is quite an adventure.  I loved this book because in addition to a tear-wrenching tale about their voyage from Shanghai to Hong Kong and then to Los Angeles, it is also a story about sisters and the love sisters have for each other that can never be torn apart.   During their journey their love for each other and their Chinese traditions are tested many times. Pearl is a dragon sign and May is the sheep. Throughout the story Ms. See frequently shows the reader how each girl demonstrates the characteristics of her birth sign, a very important aspect of Chinese culture.  Ms. See beautifully weaves many more Chinese traditions into this story.  Historical fiction at its best.

The journey from Shanghai to Los Angeles is one that probably none of us will ever experience.  Once they arrive at Angel Island in San Francisco the reader is reminded how much the United States discriminated against the Chinese.  Like many immigrants throughout the years, Pearl, May and their new family receive unbelievable open hatred directed toward them.  But what is their alternative really?  They can’t go back.  After the Japanese, the Communists take over.    Pearl and May sit for months in Angel Island and their sisterly bond is strengthened due to the experience on the island before being released to their husbands.   Like most immigrants learn, America isn’t exactly how it was described.  Instead of a big house with a big garden, the entire extended family lives in a little apartment in Chinatown. The Louie family works hard, sends their children to school and tries to be the best American citizens they can be.  American government officials are continually hanging out in Chinatown to catch Communist sympathizers and illegal immigrants. Life is hard. They work a lot, there are family secrets, and tragedies fall on the family all the while they are trying to raise a little girl to be American.  Or Chinese in America?  Another challenge for the family they did not expect.

I don’t want to give any more of the story away.  It satisfied everything I want in a book: great story with a lot of emotion and for me, a wonderful historical picture of China and Los Angeles from 1937 until the 1950’s.   I think the wait for another one of Ms. See’s books is 200 days and I will wait it out.

Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips was an interesting read for me because it was one of those books that I didn’t embrace until I was almost half-way through it.    The first half of the book is mostly character driven while the second half is much more plot driven.  This novel focuses on six characters living in West Virginia in the 1950’s.   One of the characters, Corporal Robert Leavitt,  is stationed in Korea in 1950 and his story takes place during the No Gun Ri massacre.  The story goes back and forth between each character and at the beginning I had a difficult time seeing how they all tied together.

Lark, a seventeen year old who has spent most of her childhood taking care of her disabled brother, is the most interesting character.  In one sense, she is completely naive and selfless and assumes her care-giving duties as a gift rather than a burden.

I’m so used to being with Termite, he feels like alone to me.  He’s like a hum that always hums so the edge of where I am is blunt and softened.

But by the end of the novel, she becomes the only character who takes charge of her life and makes a significant decision to improve her and Termite’s life.  Along the way we learn that she has been sexually involved with her neighbor from a young age and that she is much more aware of what is going on around her than you initially think.  What is most striking about Lark is the amazing sibling bond that she feels with Termite despite the  imbalanced relationship.

Termite, who is severely disabled,  is the character that I had the most difficulty with.  Phillips did an amazing job in writing Termite’s thoughts and feelings into the story from a first person viewpoint but I found it to be almost too esoteric.

Sudden morning air floats low to the ground amid the small houses like fragrant evaporating mist, a cool bath of dew and shadow and damp honeysuckle scent.  He gasps and hears the sharp grass under them move its fibrous roots.

You get the picture……Since I am much more of a “realistic” reader, I sometimes got lost in the endless metaphors of Termite’s voice.  From the reviews that I have read of this book, Termite’s portrayal was one of the triumphs of the book but I found it was a little too “lyrical” without moving the book forward enough.

The other characters include Lola, Lark and Termite’s mother, who abandoned them for reasons we learn at the end of the book; Nonie, the no-no-nonsense aunt who raises them and has borne the brunt of the mistakes her sister and lover made; Corporal Leavitt who is the father of Termite and in my opinion was included solely to show the atrocities of war and finally Charlie, who is Nonie’s lover and becomes a more important character as the book progresses.

As language driven as this book is, it is very suspenseful and there were many twists and turns along the way.  When I finished the book, I almost wanted to go back and re-read it because I felt that there were so many symbols and underlying themes (such as ghosts) that I probably glossed over.

It is only upon reflection of this novel that I realized how expertly Phillips conveyed the classic American themes of family, small-town life and war.  Lark and Termite was a National Book Award finalist and if you are interested in the use of language and style and how it can define a character, you won’t be disappointed.