The Book Shopper

Brian Dettmer’s Exhibit at Saltworks Gallery

Don’t despair if you didn’t see the Salvador Dali exhibit at the High Museum before it left town. (If it makes you feel any better, I rated the Dali exhibit up there with the Leonardo Da Vinci “doodles” from the previous year, but I am no critic— strictly a poseur, and not a very good one at that.)

But if you are interested in books as art objects or more specifically sculpture, there is still time for you to see Brian Dettmer’s New Worlds to Conquer exhibit at the Saltworks Gallery (located near the west side Six Feet Under).  The exhibit closes Saturday, January 15th. 

Dettmer, who lives here in Atlanta, takes hard-cover books—older books with elaborate illustrations (e.g. Military Preventative Medicine, Encyclopedias of World Travel)—and carves through them page by page, pulling out words and pictures from the book. This creates a stunning visual and reminds us how the richness of books can convey new meanings beyond just reading them. A better description and interpretation of Dettmer’s work and technique can be found at the Art Critic Atlanta website.

Shown here is Dettmer’s carving of the book, The War on All Fronts (photo courtesy of Brian Dettmer and the Saltworks Gallery), but photos really don’t do the work justice. As mentioned earlier, it’s the perfect exhibit for those who like books and for those who don’t like books—I guess it can be one of those 101 Uses for a Dead Cat type of experiences.

Grant Jerkins: A Very Simple Reading

I’ve heard a few well-known authors read this year—Jonathan Franzen, Anne Lamott, and Nick Hornby—all of them read for what seemed like an eternity (over a half an hour). I much prefer a quick reading—20 minutes tops. After all, I can read the book myself and I often drift off in thought during oral presentations. By the time I refocus, I’ve usually lost the plot line.

There are quick readings and then there are nano-quick readings and if you went to the water fountain at the wrong time Tuesday night, you missed most of first time novelist’s Grant Jerkins' book launch at the Decatur Public Library.  (Only the late E. Lynn Harris’s reading was shorter. See here or details. )

It’s not like Jerkins didn’t warn us. “I will have you home in time to watch Glee,” he quipped, before he read just a couple pages from his crime novel, A Very Simple Crime.

Set in Atlanta, A Very Simple Crime is the story of a man accused of murdering his wife by placing his violent and developmental disabled son in a position to allegedly bludgeon his wife (his son’s mother) with an ashtray. Jerkins puts his 10+ years of experience working with developmentally disabled adults into the narrative. The book also approaches the murder from the perspective of a junior deputy prosecutor who struggles to redeem himself from a child molestation case he botched years ago.

Jerkins fielded questions about the origins of the book and how it began as original screenplay he had written over a decade ago. The book has been optioned as a movie by director Barbet Schroeder (Barfly, Reversal of Fortune), but Jerkins explained that whether the movie will be made depends largely on financial support.

Nick Hornby at the Highland Inn

  

Novelist, essayist and now song lyricist Nick Hornby was in Atlanta promoting the paperback release of his latest novel Juliet, Naked and his current work with singer/musician Ben Folds on the release of Lonely Avenue, a collaborative album of short stories. Hornby’s reading on Monday, October 18 was the kickoff event for the A Cappella Books’ Ballroom Bash. 

Hornby read three excerpts from Juliet, Naked for about 40 minutes, before taking questions from the packed house for another half hour.  The crowd wasn’t shy about asking questions, and Hornby used his storytelling ability to answer them.

Here are my notes—not everything is verbatim, but it was a dark room (I don’t how Hornby read so flawlessly from his book) and so my notes --like my photography aren’t crystal clear. Here’s the gist of what Hornby talked about:

On Juliet, Naked

“This book (which centers on the legacy of an aging reclusive singer-songwriter – not necessarily Bob Dylan, but a composite figure of songwriters of that era) represents the split within me as a music fan, an author and an artist."

 On Collaborating with Ben Folds

 Hornby told the story of how he met Ben Folds after he wrote an essay about the Ben Folds Five song, “Smoke” in his 2002 book of essays Songbook, which is a great book about the many ways we relate to music. (Both Rube Ambler from ATLalist and I brought our original copies, which Hornby graciously signed.) Apparently this was the beginning of his current working friendship with Folds, which has included along the way, trying to write songs for—get this—the actor William Shatner. (For more on Ben Folds and the William Shatner Gonzo Ballet, I must refer you to other sources.)

 On When to Quit Writing

 “One of the most profound questions about the arts is when to decide to quit. You’re convinced you’re a genius, but that doesn’t really help either. I’ve come to the conclusion that artists are childish. Once you grow up, you realize that you are not that special. But all the famous ones didn’t grow up.”

 

Thomas Chatterton Williams Meets Killer Mike

 

It’s not often do go to a reading and a Grammy-award winner makes a guest appearance, but on June 1 at the Decatur Public Library, Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture ended up sharing some of the spotlight with Killer Mike  (aka Mike Bigga), an award-winning rapper who is based in Atlanta.

The well attended reading of approximately sixty people got a little more than just Williams reading his book, which is a personal account of the author reconciling a double life of “keeping it real,” which meant playing hoops and not appearing to be successful in school and his parallel journey to be a learned man – the  result of a determined father who oversaw his son’s education. Losing My Cool began as an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that Williams wrote in 2007 as a graduate student at New York University.

After the mild-mannered Williams finished the reading, (the less mild-mannered) Killer Mike–who sat in the front row–introduced himself during the question and answer session and almost commandeered the reading.  (Williams who was familiar with the rap star’s music skillfully prevented the takeover.)  For several minutes, the two men debated articulately about the use of the phrase “hip-hop culture” in the subtitle of the book. Killer Mike felt that it was “disingenuous” for Williams to use “hip-hop culture” in a negative connotation that ignored the poetic, intellectual and social roots of the music form, which originated in the South Bronx  around 1977.  Williams admitted he didn’t necessarily embrace the subtitle of his book, but defended using “hip-hop culture” because black culture and hip-hop are usually (though erroneously) perceived as being the same. Williams believes that while “Black street culture is authentic, it should not be the end all and be all,” noting that blacks should be familiar with the works of Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, to name but a few.

 

The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Midwesterner’s Perspective

 

At his well-attended reading on February 3rd at the Decatur Public Library, Thomas Mullen provided insights that were helpful in understanding his new book The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, a novel set in the Midwest during The Great Depression. The main plot of the book centers around Jason and Whit Fireson, two notorious bank robbing brothers (and the women who loved them) who steal from not only banks but from death itself—by being able to be resurrect themselves even after being perforated by bullets.

One question for readers of the book is whether they can buy the supernatural premise “of crooks that death cannot hold,” which pushes Firefly from a historical novel similar to Mullen’s first book The Last Town on Earth (which I wrote about earlier) more towards the zombie genre.

 Perhaps since I grew up in the Midwest, (near a small city that bank robbers allegedly avoided because the railroad trains prevented quick getaways), I noticed there was little texture of the Midwest. I just found myself wanting more details and anecdotes than just a laundry list of towns and bank jobs – things like the weather and terrain, the crops (corn is king), the iconic radio stations, and examples of the dry humor of the no-nonsense rural types who inhabited my childhood.

 After attending a couple of  Mullen’s appearances and emailing with him,  I do believe the hard-working author is capable of reaching that next level of writing that he professes to admire -- that of the literary page turner  (books like Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union).   But with Firefly Brothers, he’s just not there—yet.

P.S.: Mullen’s publisher Random House provided me with a review copy of Firefly Brothers. Coincidently, this week’s photo comes from the movie Road to Perdition. I happened to be in Chicago on the day they were filming some street scenes.    

 

T.C. Boyle at the Margaret Mitchell House

Last week (Feb. 2),  T.C. Boyle, the writer formerly known as T. Coraghessan Boyle,   drew a crowd of about two hundred loyal readers—mostly middle aged types like Boyle himself, except he was the only one wearing a red Valentine’s Day suit. After quipping about the suit—noting that it was a fashion statement akin to Tom Wolfe’s white suit—Boyle did twenty minutes of one liners, followed by a half hour reading of the story, “The Lie” from his latest book Wild Child and Other Stories.

Boyle admits to his reputation as a showman, “I love to perform stories aloud…a service of turning people on to literature.” Patterning himself after a middle school teacher that he admired, Boyle performs like an amateur actor, reading expressively and constantly gesticulating. However, thirty minutes is a long time to be read to, and unless someone gives me milk and cookies and a mat I can lie down on, I get restless and bored no matter how good the prose.

Boyle followed his reading with a lengthy Q & A. He respects and appreciates his readers, including the woman who caught him off guard when she pointed out that one of the characters in “The Lie” appeared in one of his earlier stories. I guess if you write long enough like Boyle, who published his first book of short stories, Descent of Man, in 1979, (a book now available for pennies and still worth reading) you are bound to repeat characters.

 

Michael Gates Gill in Atlanta: A Preview

 

 Michael Gates Gill, author of the bestselling How Starbucks Saved My Life will be in Atlanta on Monday, January 18th. Gill is on tour to promote his new book How to Save Your Own Life: 15 Lessons on Finding Hope in Unexpected Places.

Gill’s New York publisher Gotham Books/Penguin has been so proactive in promoting his new book that they’ve even supplied small-tater bloggers such as myself with advance copies of the book. Always a sucker for a free book, I obliged.

Gill’s new book picks up where I assume (no one gave me a complimentary Starbucks book) where his last book left off, with Gill at retirement age happily working as a coffee barista. He’s apparently much more satisfied serving people 20 ounce Starbucks Venti White Chocolate Mochas (580 calories and 15 grams of saturated fat) than he was as a corporate advertising executive at J. Walter Thompson, his former life of wealth and prestige that he reminds us of many, many times.

Gill’s new book is a response to the thousands (yes, thousands) of people who have sought his advice (including the actor Michael J. Fox). Thus inspired, Gill has boiled down his advice into 15 lessons/chapters of wisdom that he has gleaned over the past couple of years. Some came from his family like his famous writer-father Brendan Gill of The New Yorker.

In each chapter, Gill keeps his teachings simple with a lot of one-sentence paragraphs.

But if the topic is complicated ---such as what it means to be a late bloomer -- he might expand his thoughts to two or even three sentences. A good example is when he explains that the term late bloomers originates from “the garden term used to describe flowers that bloom late in the season.”

If you still can’t get the message, Gill drops in a few helpful adages at the end of each chapter such as “Your life is like the weather: You can talk about it a lot, but in the most profound way, you can never completely control it.”

Gill has a kitchen-sink, percolating writing style as he tosses in passages from the Bible, verses of songs, verses of songs that he wrote himself, the poetry of William Butler Yeats, lines from James Joyce’s Ulysses,  and proverbial clichés such as “laughter is the best medicine.” I am guessing his scattershot prose style can partially be attributed to his taking advantage of one of his employee “perks” (his quotes, not mine) that include a weekly free pound of high octane coffee.

Two Local Readings: Rita Mae Brown and Padgett Powell

 

Last week I attended two readings:  Rita Mae Brown at the Margaret Mitchell House on October 27^th, and Padgett Powell two days later at the Decatur Public Library.

Part One: Rita Mae Brown

 I’m still mad at myself for not asking Rita Mae Brown my stock-in-trade question about Southern books, which goes something like this: “If William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor are the twin pillars of Southern literature, where does that leave Margaret Mitchell?”

It’s not an unfair question for Ms. Brown who offered some strong opinions about literature in her 1988 book, Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writer’s Manual. Ms. Brown, who was promoting her new book, Animal Magnetism My Life with Creatures Great and Small (Move over James Herriot) spoke to an older crowd of approximately 50 pet lovers, who were content to ask questions like “How do you name your pets and do you ever eat them?” (Actually the latter question was framed more like: “Are you a vegetarian?”)

The energetic, self-winding Ms. Brown (I should have used a high speed film to capture the movement of her hands) riffed on an array of subjects: Growing up in the South, the sophisticated forms of communication between animals (when dogs wag their tails that’s good; when cats curl their tails that’s bad), the broken contract between humans and domesticated animals (millions of pets are euthanized each year), 10,000 years of patriarchy that define human history (men’s efforts to control female sexuality),  and the how we’ve become more intolerant because we don’t ride the bus and mingle with other people. (I take the train, but I keep to myself.)  It’s pretty safe to say there was no discernable thread to all of Ms. Brown’s observations, (not to say she isn’t observant and witty).  I don’t think it mattered to the majority of attendees who paid for the opportunity to join the stampede at the book signing table afterwards for a brief chat with an author either about pets or perhaps to express their continued appreciation of Ms. Brown’s most influential book, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973).  

 Part Two: Padgett Powell 

Like Rita Mae Brown, Padgett Powell goes all over the place, except with Powell he was reading from his new “experimental” novel The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? – a 170+ page book written entirely as a series of seemingly unrelated questions. Of course to the uninitiated like myself, (admittedly unfamiliar with his work) what may seem random and disjointed at first, may upon further investigation reveal a theme or pattern to this work. (My unasked question to Mr. Powell was: How should a reader approach this book?)

Field of Dreams Fanatic

 

Mention anything about the movie Field of Dreams and I am there. So when Brett Friedlander stopped by the Opal Gallery on Moreland Avenue last Thursday to talk about the book he co-authored, Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams’ Doc Graham,  I showed up to swap FOD  trivia with the North Carolina sportswriter. (In case you haven’t seen the 1989 movie a dozen times like me, Doc Archibald “Moonlight” Graham was the character played by Burt Lancaster. In the movie and in real life, Graham played in one major league game, but never got to bat.)

Unfortunately for Friedlander, I was one of the few non-family members in attendance. But a supportive, friendly family is nothing to sneeze at (ask Ray Kinsella) and for a moment I found myself wishing they’d invite me along for a celebration burger at the nearby Vortex. Instead of a full, aching stomach, here’s what I did take home with me from his presentation:

• After being banned from playing Major League Baseball, Shoeless Joe Jackson (one of the main characters in FOD) continued to play baseball, barnstorming through small towns that included Graham’s adopted hometown of Chisholm, Minnesota, where they played against each other.
• Graham met Ted Williams in an exhibition game while Williams was a minor leaguer playing in Minnesota in the 1930s.
• The author W. P. Kinsella (FOD was based on his book Shoeless Joe)declined to write an introduction to Friedlander’s book, having retired from writing after a debilitating accident.
• The town of Galena, Illinois (hometown of Ulysses S. Grant) was used as a location for filming instead of Chisholm, Minnesota.

 If you’re interested in learning more – and you may be because the FOD phenomena should not be underestimated – see a review of Friedlander’s book at the California Literary Review.