Where did I go? "Remember, no matter where you go, there you are."

Housekeeping (but not vs. the Dirt) and with continued apologies to Nick Hornby: In addition to falling behind with my reviews, I have changed my photo, as regular readers might noticed. My wife felt that the old photo represented a much younger me, so in the interest of "truth in advertising", a more recent pic has been swapped in. I'm the one on the left.

I have been writing a moderate amount on my environmental blog, http://greenchemistry.wordpress.com/, though I wish there was more good news to report or discuss. That writing, plus writing for work, has inflamed tendinitis in my right thumb, so it's a good thing I'm not hitchhiking anywhere these days. It's always the mouse that does me in. Do you have similar issues?

Politics: my local State Representative, Democrat Maria Chapelle-Nadal, is up for re-election. Maria has been a tireless supporter of the arts, education, social services, and logic.

Please note that this is unsolicited and unpaid advertising for Maria, and I receive no compensation of any kind: there are prizes for top individual fund-raisers, but I have asked not to be considered for one. If you wish to make a contribution, the following is important:

Individual contributions may exceed what is considered a small donation (usually under $100), but are limited to a $325 maximum for each individual contributor under state law. Checks should indicate your profession and employer (this guards against corporations making stealth contributions via their employees).

Mail Contributions to:

Citizens for Maria Chappelle-Nadal

7133 Dartmouth Ave.

University City, MO 63130

Books and Music. The latest issue of The Believer is an excellent read, as expected. See also the Oxford American's music issue (I always enjoy these): read about jazz genius Thelonius Monk and much more, including:

"Sean Wilentz tells the story of Bob Dylan's all-night recording session in Nashville for Blonde on Blonde".

Added later in the day: for more on T. Monk and his Southern roots, see NPR. Monk is responsible for some of the quirkiest, most original and sometimes humorous jazz compositions.

p.s. That's Oxford, Mississippi, a literary center in the US, for you Oxonians and Cantabrigians (and Cantabridgians, for that matter) in the crowd.

I'm interested to hear more about readers' favorite music references in fiction. Any comments?

The title quote is, of course, from that modern classic:
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension

© James K. Bashkin, 2007

Technorati Tags:buckaroo banzai, oxford, oxonian, cantabrigian, mississippi, blonde on blonde, nashville, thelonius monk, nick hornby, housekeeping vs. the dirt, oxford american, music, dylan, believer, green chemistry, maria chapelle-nadal
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More missing links now appear

When I started writing on September 1, 2007, I had trouble with certain links. They appear in my composition and HTML windows in blogger but are otherwise invisible. I have addressed this for Sept. 1 by adding a slideshow of recommended books, music, and DVD's (at the bottom of the right-hand column).

Technorati Tags:nick hornby, believer, the wire, taj mahal, edgar allan poe, high fidelity, fever pitch
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All posts have been updated- more links and text

Please note that I have copy edited all posts, improved content and added promised links (along with new-found links). Thanks for all the continued feedback. I guess blogs don't really work this way, so I'll have to start getting it right the first time, but given the state of things, there will be a few more global updates. The Skull Mantra (Eliot Pattison) and The Murder Room (P. D. James) and Nick Hornby's reviews remain the only work that has received long(ish) treatment, with text added on Robert Wilson, Philip Kerr, David Lodge and Lawrence Durrell, among others.

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Sympathy for Authors and Independent Bookstores

It's a hard world out there, Charlie Brown, and then you get recycled. Here is something every critic should read, kindly provided to me by cousin Leo in NY, and published in the NY Times Review of Books:

No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov

By DAVID OSHINSKY
Published: September 9, 2007

A trove of rejection files from Alfred A. Knopf Inc. includes dismissive
verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”) and Sylvia
Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”).


Lest we forget (or lest I forget, anyway), it is easy to criticize and hard to create. I've only had one* small piece published that wasn't a purely technical article on science, and that was a science editorial (called DNA enzymes: New-found chemical reactivity). Note that a Google link points only to a mediocre HTML version pulled from Current Biology; normal searches will find the article if your institution (typically a Research University, Medical School, etc.) has a subscription to the journal. The article was a short review coupled with opinion, and was largely in my comfort zone, though it wasn't easy to write. The editor helped a lot, as did the poet Doreen Salli, Director of the Writing Center at Washington University in St. Louis (a University where I once worked).

This blog is giving me an outlet to write for myself and self-publish, but today, about a week after Labor Day in the USA, I offer thanks to all those who keep the printed work alive as a profession. Those people include writers, editors, typesetters, publishers, and of course independent bookstore owners and employees.

I have to admit to using local independent bookstores less and less in recent years, but things were different for me not too long ago, when I spent way too much (time and money) in them. I seem to live on the computer, and you know what that means! Also, the day seems to have shrunk, shutting out many pleasures like browsing in a bookstore, but I spent a bit of time in the used bookstore today (Booksmarts) and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I also didn't buy anything, an important triumph of will for an acquisitive person whose house is overflowing with books. My resolution is to read up my stock, send the best books to family members, donate the other books where they might be of use, and hope nobody sends any of them back! While keeping a core library intact, of course!

I am in my smallish house, for the long haul, which doesn't suit all of my personality traits. However, I'm starting to get to the books I bought because I felt I should read them, which is going well so far, but will I be able to stay the course? Or at least stick to the that plus the public library? Can Nick Hornby be my guide (given that The Moon and St. Christopher are taken)?

Can any readers answer these questions from above?

From time to time, I'll post links to a few independent stores that I know personally. In St. Louis, Missouri, USA, the now-departed Library Ltd. and Paul's Books (we miss you) and the active Left Bank Books (LBB) were/are the places to go for choices that weren't made by computers and accountants, but by people who love books. Luckily, we still have LBB!!! You can support them at the Friends of Left Bank Books Literary Society, or of course by visiting!

*Well, how could I forget! I also published an article on my community track & field team, the UCity (University City) Xplosion, and our invitational track meet in Missouri Runner & Triathlete in perhaps 2005. The editor was kind enough to venture out in 100 degree F weather to take photos of the event.

literary criticism independent bookstores rejection by publisher

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Murder in Scotland, Spain, Portugal, West Africa and Berlin

We have to add key books and people to the discussion right away, so I'm publishing without all the links that should be added (I'll edit them in later):

1. Ian Rankin, whose Inspector Rebus novels like Fleshmarket Alley (Fleshmarket Close in Britain) are truly excellent. I can't say the same about the Jack Harvey novel Blood Hunt- I found it to be pedestrian. But, nobody is perfect, and we should be thankful that Rebus is on the prowl in Scotland. I also know too much about the chemical and agricultural issues that formed the foundation of the crimes in Blood Hunt to find their treatment very satisfying in the book. But, hey, this just shows the danger of too much learnin'. Read it and enjoy! Perhaps enjoyment, or at least suspension of disbelief, will be easier if your aren't an industry insider.
   
   
2. The Blind Man of Seville, A Small Death in Lisbon, The Company of Strangers and The Vanished Hands represent one type of Robert Wilson's work, the intricately plotted, remarkably dark stories of murder, family, betrayal, pride, patriotism, spying, manipulation, secrets, weakness, love and pain. Pretty good territory for a rainy day, eh? These are works of literature,* though I wouldn't lend them to my kids. The Vanished Hands seemed to me a little weaker than the others, but it was married to political and social messages about repression in South America (by South Americans and the US) that needed to be published, so I give it some leeway. The first three I listed here are strong stuff, and are nothing short of brilliant. Rarely do I react as viscerally to the printed page, and rarely am I so engaged in the puzzle, as when I read this side of Wilson's writing.
   
   The other part of Wilson's work that I am aware of is the series of Bruce Medway novels, including The Big Killing, A Darkening Stain, Blood is Dirt, and Instruments of Darkness, all of which should be read. Soon. These books are less ambitious than the first set is some ways, and somewhat less satisfying, but still excellent. Although frequently violent and filled with betrayals and much sadness, there is a bit of optimism in these books, if seen through the boozy haze. The brotherhood of mankind has not completely broken down. Also, with the books being shorter, the characters are less fully developed (we don't know about three generations or more for each person's family, including all lateral genealogy, nor all GPS waypoints in everyone's lives for the past 85 years- just teasing a bit, here!), and the depths of depravity are somehow slightly less horrifying than in, say, The Blind Man of Seville.
   
   I'm not complaining about the characters at all: Medway and Co. form a terrific ensemble cast that sometimes stays a step ahead of crooks, sometimes a few steps behind, but mostly survives, to drink too much, another day. They ply their trade in West Africa, which is fully as foreign to me as any distant locale.
   
   Actually, it is a difficult to decide why the violence is less horrifying here, in Medway's world, than say in Inspector Falcón's world, because it really isn't. I hope the different affect is because somehow everything is less personal, life being painted with a broader brush in the Medway books, making events easier to accept and move on (to one's own life). However, it must be difficult to craft a great read in one third the number of words of the other books, so I'm not trying to be a jerk here, because they are great reads, and we should all know more about West Africa (at least where I live). It's not that I don't respect the Medway books in the morning, it's that I don't think about them as much in the morning, or find myself haunted as much by them at night, as I do with Seville, Lisbon, et al. "Bruce Medway"
   
   I strongly recommend reading each subset of Wilson's books in the order of their publication, given that aspects of character development can carry over from one story to another. I believe that the books are written by the same person, but the two have really nothing in common. That both sets of novels are very successful is impressive.
   
   
   *Did I just break a Nick Hornby rule? Or am I about to? See here. "Nick Hornby"
   
   
3. Philip Kerr is a cypher to me, or perhaps not, maybe I grok his fullness. What I can say is that he has written some of the best murder mysteries ever (see Berlin Noir), but he seemed to "go commercial" a while back and I don't connect too well with him any more in a consistent manner, though I don't deny the man his right to make a living. So where do I draw the line and why? I guess on another day."Philip Kerr"
   
   
   Question: is Philip Kerr coming back into the fold?

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I'm a Believer: what books and magazines to read and TV to watch, Sept. 1, 2007

Over the past year I read two excellent collections of essays by Nick Hornby (more on these another time; I'll just say now that they often made me laugh out loud, and often didn't, and generally at the right places). The essays were taken from his (nearly?) regular articles in the magazine Believer, leading me to an increasing frenzy to hunt down a copy, and I just bought my first (8/07)- a very good use of about $8. This first blog of mine is as much an open letter to Mr. Hornby as it is an attempt to widen the audience for his great work, for Believer, and for some very tangentially-related music.

You can find individual issues of the magazine at the links above and subscribe there or via amazon.com:

Nick Hornby's interview of journalist-turned TV writer/producer David Simon in the latest Believer is simply great. If you don't know who Simon is, I didn't think I did, either. He wrote Homicide (later the television show Homicide-Life on the Street) and created The Wire, which he produces and co-writes with other great writers of Baltimore, Maryland (no, Edgar Allan Poe was not available- I think he is under exclusive contract with Modern Library).

The rationale behind The Wire as described in the interview is brilliant. I mean brilliant in the American sense, perhaps defined as "truly intelligent and impressive without necessarily showing off", not the British sense of brilliant, which in my experience roughly translates to the Californian "Dude!". Just reading Simon's comments, as elicited by Nick Hornby, renewed my faith in something. I'm still deciding what, ... perhaps that intelligent writers of today are self-aware and consciously bucking the schlock-machines in a manner that is viscerally and intellectually thrilling, while being financially successful, without a lowest common denominator in sight.

I only saw a few episodes of The Wire, during an early season when I happened to be travelling and found it in hotel rooms on HBO. I have no access at home, but I felt hooked immediately and definitely suffered separation anxiety that nearly "pierced me to the heart" when my somewhat random exposure to the show stopped (this was made up for by ending the anxiety of random separation from my family).

So, here are my recommendations for the day: The Wire on HBO, Believer magazine, David Simon's writing and other TV work, and of course, that occasionally-censored but always compelling contributor to The Believer, Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity and Fever Pitch (both below), the two books of essays (The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt) mentioned above, and numerous other "things"- hint, he is great on books and music, sometimes simultaneously, as well as on certain obsessions (fictional and nonfictional).





Yes, Nick, your fans are legion, tell your editors I said so (all 168 of them)! Also, Mr. Hornby, before you feel put out that I have not fleshed out your work in any detail today, and am defining you largely by a couple of your most popular books, I feel your pain, and I'll relate the following anecdote that you, if nobody else, might find relevant: I heard Taj Mahal say, approximately, in response to early 1980's concert requests for Corrina and She Caught the Katy,

"I made 22 albums between the years of 1968 and 1981, and I refuse to be stuck in the first three, though I appreciate the sentiment."

Anyway, Mr. H., I hope you'll forgive me for primarily, if temporarily, defining you by a fraction of your work, but, more on you in a later post (and no, your writing never caused me to receive a bad grade in a course, though it has kept me up on more than one night, probably making me late for work, or in this case, late for Labor Day, of all things).

P.S. This just scratches the surface of the August, 2007 Believer.

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