On Friday night, your correspondent went to the opening night of Detritus, a new bookstore at 71 Orange Street supported through the city of New Haven’s Project Storefronts program and curated by Alexis Zanghi of The Dirty Pond. Detritus aims to be a bookstore that reflects both the local literary scene and the eclectic taste of its curator; it also aims to be a place where literary events of many, many kinds can occur, making the bookstore as much a performance space as a bookstore, a place where New Haven’s writers and readers can go to not only read each other, but see each other, hear each other, meet each other. And if the energy of its first evening is any indication, it will succeed. For the opening was crowded, the wine flowing, people standing around the sidewalk outside laughing and smoking cigarettes, as if it were a club (hooray!). And inside, your correspondent, who is not a talkative man by nature, could not stop talking to people—writers, readers, critics. Zanghi declared that the opening would last from 6 pm to 8 pm and had to shoo people out the door. We should make sure she has to keep doing that, for Detritus appears both to be filling a niche that New Haven needs and offering a different, and highly intriguing, model of what a bookstore can be.

One of the abiding pleasures of writing books, and being lucky enough to have them published, is the way in which they have led me to discover parts of the literary world I may not have discovered otherwise. Among them is a brand of science fiction and fantasy that’s been given all kinds of labels—my favorite is the New Weird—but basically boils down to books in which many strange and interesting things happen, and in which the writing is really, really good. My running favorite author in this group, which makes him one of my favorite living authors, period, is Jeff VanderMeer, a prolific and vastly talented writer perhaps best known for his books about a fantastical, decaying, and distinctly postcolonial city called Ambergris. In these books, VanderMeer displays not only an astonishingly rich imagination, but also a pretty ridiculous command of numerous fiction styles, from quasi-Borgesian to hard-boiled noir. His books are social, political, personal: everything I want in fiction. If I were the competitive type, I’d say he’s the man to beat.

Which is why when Matthew Cheney—an NHR contributor, among many, many other things—asked me if I’d contribute to a series of reviews on VanderMeer’s new short-story collection, The Third Bear, I was all over it.

I said before that one of the things I like so much about VanderMeer’s writing is his deft mixture of the social, political, and personal. “The Goat Variations,” which Kevin Brockmeier singled out for praise in his blurb of The Third Bear, accomplishes this to great effect, as the leaders of a nation falling apart at the seams catch wind that a calamity is coming, but don’t know how to stop it. Oh, right—this story also involves alternate realities and time travel, which makes for a really heady mixture. Conceptually, VanderMeer sets up a very difficult task, that of writing directly about George W. Bush without hitting us over the head, and yet still giving the story teeth. He might not quite get away with it; there’s still a sense that VanderMeer’s too close, that there hasn’t been quite enough time to digest it all. I say this with humility, though: I would have been a bit frightened to even attempt to write a short story like this, and certainly wouldn’t have done as well. And the story still has plenty of teeth, as I find myself returning in my mind to VanderMeer’s vivid image of George W. at the beginning of his administration, bludgeoned by catastrophe, the world as he knows it ending all around him, and him just not knowing what to do.

And then there’s “Three Days in a Border Town,” which is one of the best pieces of short fiction I’ve read in years; it’s no wonder it showed up on awards and best-of lists when it was published in 2004. In it, a sharpshooter moves through a dusty border town in the middle of a desert, looking for her husband, but it’s about so much more than that. It’s about devastating loss, hovering just beyond the horizon; it’s about figuring out how to move on. Matthew Cheney has said why this story is amazing as well as anyone, and he’s right. It’s Beckett, it’s the better end of Dennis Lehane (particularly the short story “Until Gwen,” with which it shares a narration written, with wild success, in the second person), and it’s VanderMeer at his best, precise and luminous, transporting and transfiguring. “Three Days in a Border Town” is the kind of story that seems to take in the whole world, to be about everything at once, and it shows that when VanderMeer’s writing at the top of his game—which is pretty much all the time—it’s foolish to talk about beating him, because you can’t.

I was delighted to come across the utterly appropriately titled blog White Readers Meet Black Authors, “your official invitation into the African American section of the bookstore,” maintained by novelist Carleen Brice. There is little I can say about this blog that Brice hasn’t said already, from the video she has on the blog itself to the piece she wrote in December 2008 for the Washington Post. When she started the blog, New York Magazine viewed it as a publicity stunt, and it is that. But Brice is also getting at something very real about the book market; just read the blog and see if you don’t agree with her. But more importantly, read the blog for the books she champions.

Thanks to White Readers Meet Black Authors, I’ve been devouring Victor LaValle’s The Ecstatic, and his latest book, the very well-reviewed Big Machine, just might be next. I bought both at the same time at McNally Jackson, and the woman behind the cash register smiled.

“Going on a LaValle bender?” she said.

“It looks that way,” I said.

She nodded. “You won’t be disappointed.” I believe her.

A response to Donald Brown

Donald Brown’s comment on Philip Roth’s nomination for the UK Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award got me thinking, about that award, about writing, and about what ever happened to all the fun in the world. See, every year prestigious literary prizes come and go—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Man Booker Prize—and I can’t shake the feeling that they’re, well, sort of boring. Not the books, mind you; the awards, for all the reasons that critics of those awards criticize them. I realize that they lead to great things for those who win them, and they draw attention to books in general, and these are both wonderful things. But somehow the race itself—that period of time between when the nominees are announced and the awards ceremony—doesn’t really fire. It’s more like a stately procession, like a parade without a band. There are plenty of spectators, obviously, but they’re not making a lot of noise. The same cannot be said of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

The award was created in 1993, ostensibly “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” I don’t buy this for one second. This award is, first, a terrific publicity stunt, drawing coverage from several major UK outlets. Second, it routinely does the thing that you wish more major awards would do much more often: It pits newcomers against old pros, and sometimes, but only sometimes, the newcomers win. Third, the qualification for the award rests solely on the quality of the writing. Plot? Characters? Who cares? This award is about how well people can put sentences together, period.

And maybe it’s just me, but the first thing that hits me when I read the excerpts is: This writing isn’t bad. (Those of you who might think so have never laid your eyes on cheap pulp smut, such as that collected in the NYU Library—look at the titles under “Sexuality” and you’ll see what I mean. And this isn’t even getting at what the prose is like.) The worst that can be said about them is either that they’re funny (which is not even remotely a bad thing, and in any case, it seems clear that the authors almost always intend it to be so) or that they’re mildly appalling (which, again, often appears to be the author’s intent). And in every case, you can judge for yourself: It is ironic to me that the runup to the award involves excerpts from the various texts that are longer than what appears in most serious outlets for book reviews. If I were drunk right now, I would argue that the judges of the Bad Sex Award actually care more about good writing than the people at the National Book Award do, but thankfully for you, it’s 10:00 in the morning on a Friday.

Most of all, though, the Bad Sex Award is fun. It’s noisy and alive. It reminds us how books can stay vital and real without sacrificing fantastic prose, great ideas, and all the things that avid readers feast on. It makes you wonder if there can be other awards like it—Best Fight Scene Award? Worst Funeral Award?—that pull us in, make us laugh, and then make us read.

The Dirty Pond’s second issue is now up, with work from Christina O’Connor, Greg Maurer, Patricia Dickson, Ryan Cyr, Derek Leka, and yours truly (though don’t hold that against them). The Dirty Pond is New Haven’s newest literary outlet, dedicated to showcasing the talent that New Haven harbors and creates. Submit to it, support it, but most of all, read it.

This weekend’s New York Times had a great article about the New Haven Improvisers Collective, an awesome—and extremely welcoming—group of musicians who gather on the last Monday of every month at Neverending Books on State Street to explore the range of possibilities that improvised music has to offer. As the NYT article rightly points out, improvised music is most closely associated with jazz, but that genre doesn’t have a lock on improvisation; one of the real pleasures of playing improvised music, in fact, is to explore the ways in which musical genres can be bent, broken, combined, or, in some magic moments, superseded.

(Those with a keen eye will notice that I’m on the list of members of the collective. In the interest of full disclosure, this is because I played with the group for a few weeks in 2005 to write a story for the New Haven Advocate about the collective and their encounter with improvisational conductor Butch Morris. I haven’t been back, for a variety of reasons that will all sound like excuses now, but I’ve been wanting to return for a long time—now that I’m a better musician and almost have the right gear. I learned more about music in the weeks I spent with them and Morris than I had in a couple of years, and I’m still to this day drawing from those lessons.)

The NHIC and Firehouse 12, a terrific club and jaw-dropping studio that routinely puts on shows of non-mainstream jazz and other music that defies categorization, deserve every bit of praise that the article heaps on them. But they’re also emblematic of a larger characteristic of New Haven that I’ve found myself repeating many times over to people who ask me what it’s like to live here.

As just about everyone who’s lived in this area for longer than a year or so knows, New Haven labors under a reputation that is probably about ten years out of date. Many people outside of New Haven think of the place and imagine a city in trouble. But we know that it is not so. New Haven has its share of struggles, of course—and I do not mean to belittle those troubles at all, or perhaps even worse, aetheticize them—but it is a positive thing as much as it’s a problem. It energizes the place, makes it vital. It makes the people who live here give a damn about it. And right now, New Haven is that wonderfully unstable combination of interesting and affordable. It is ethnically and culturally rich, thanks to both the town and gown sides of things. It is economically diverse. And it’s a place where something like Firehouse 12 and the New Haven Improvisers Collective can exist without having to fight, every single minute, for survival.

The month or so before CBGB closed, you may remember, was a great time to write an article about a) the death of New York City as a vital cultural force or b) the inability of American pop culture to replicate anything like the heady heyday of the late 1970s. Obviously both of these statements dramatically overstated things. But nestled within the hyperbole is a kernel of truth: It is difficult to innovate and take chances—artistically or otherwise—when the cost of simply living is too high. God help me, I can’t find the interview, but if I remember right, a reporter asked Chris Frantz of the Talking Heads if New York could ever produce another CBGB. No, said Frantz, it was just too expensive to run a business in New York and book bands the way Hilly Kristal, its owner, did (Though Brooklyn club Barbes challenges that assertion). Then he said something really neat: The next influential club, he argued—the one that incubates the bands that go on to have a strong effect on pop music—was probably going to be in a strip mall someplace, away from a huge urban center. I saw what he was saying. I thought of The Space, nestled in an industrial park in Hamden; it helped build an audience for the Providence-based band The Low Anthem, which led to their signing to Nonesuch. And I thought of Firehouse 12, providing a home—and a gorgeous home at that—for music that has trouble finding a stage. Based on the consistent tastes of their owners, both clubs have managed to develop scenes, and audiences. They’ve created that crucial vibe whereby people will go to see a show of someone they’ve never heard of simply because they trust the club to book someone good. This speaks a lot to Steve Rodgers (of The Space) and Nick Lloyd (of Firehouse 12) as excellent club owners. But it’s also the town that they’re in, full of people who want to hear good music—and make good music—and don’t have to go broke to do it.

As the title of this post suggests, now and again we at the NHR get a piece that is perhaps too long for the blog, or too timely for our glacial twice-a-year publishing schedule, or just too much fun to keep to ourselves for long. Just in time for Halloween, greater New Haven-area novelist and critic Gregory Feeley regales us with a thoroughly original reread of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” I know, I know, you think you know everything there is to know about this shopworn piece of early American fiction. Think again. Feeley’s first order of business: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” isn’t even a Halloween story.

Download the paper here. You’ll never think about Ichabod Crane’s nose the same way again.

I am not a blogger. That sounds defensive, but what I really mean is that I don’t have the mind for it, the same way I don’t have the mind to be a beat reporter: I don’t see a story wherever I go; I don’t see something every day that makes me want to write five to six hundred words about it. Now that sounds condescending, but I don’t mean it that way. There are people who have proven to be outstanding bloggers—people whom the form suits almost perfectly, which suggests, to me at least, that blogs really are a new kind of literature, even if its conventions haven’t been fully defined. It is thrilling to be alive at its creation, to see humans find another way of expressing themselves, and I’m a little envious that I don’t have the mind for it.

But there are certain aspects of blogs that I don’t like. Yes, there’s all the yelling, but hey, that’s part of the fun. I’m actually more annoyed at the sort of blog post espousing a shaky yet strongly held opinion that seems designed solely to piss people off in order to get them talking, because for a website looking at its hit count, I guess there’s no such thing as bad publicity. There are lots of egregious examples out there, but I’m more interested in talking about the phenomenon in its moderate form. My example: Jody Rosen’s October 12 post on Slate’s Brow Beat about NPR’s supposed DORF matrix, i.e., its assumed taste in black music. (Yes, I’m aware that I’m about a week late to this party. See above re: not having the head for blogging. I’m also aware that I’m totally falling for it by talking about it. I’m trying here, folks.)

For those of you who don’t want to read the original post, Rosen argues that NPR, and All Songs Considered in particular, “maintains a strict preference for black music that few actual living African-Americans listen to.” Instead, it seems to like its black musicians dead, old, retro, or foreign. Hence, the cute acronym. Rosen uses the DORF matrix to mock NPR listeners for being too white, but also throws in a little political angle. “Who are the progressives again—the public radio crowd or the Top 40 great unwashed?” he asks.

Here’s what I don’t like about Rosen’s post. First, as a surface-level comment, he’s basically pointing out the obvious. Why comment on it at all, except to piss off NPR listeners who consider themselves to be progressive? (Full disclosure: My musical taste could easily be described as DORF, except that it would apply equally to musicians across racial and ethnic lines. I suppose this makes me ultra-conservative. Or whatever.)

Second, given how obvious Rosen’s premise is, it’s a surprisingly shaky one. Rosen himself points out a few exceptions to NPR’s taste in his own post—Mos Def, Danger Mouse—that he writes off as the exceptions that prove the rule. Has that argument ever really worked? But the shakiness runs way deeper than that, especially given the political angle Rosen throws in.

Assuming something about someone’s politics based on their music taste is a dangerous game. In suggesting that Top 40 listeners are perhaps more progressive than NPR listeners, does Rosen really mean to suggest that being a big Lil’ Wayne fan indicates that you’re liberal? I’ll just let that question lie. More oddly, Rosen essentially argues that NPR’s taste in black music simply reflects its white, college-educated listeners’ taste in music. (Again, full disclosure: I donate money to NPR, and am both white and college-educated. Too much, really.) But there’s another explanation for it that has not that much to do with politics, and as much to do with creating taste as reflecting it: As one of the only nonprofit forces on the radio dial, NPR has the opportunity to play music that isn’t popular, and it takes that opportunity to play artists that otherwise don’t get radio play—like many college radio stations do, or other forms of radio, like Bridgeport’s own WPKN. Would Rosen—who, as a music critic, I assume is a big fan of lots of different kinds of music—prefer that NPR cover the same small set of artists that commercial radio covers? I’m guessing not. But then what is the point of the post? Aside from making fun of NPR? (I know, I know: generating hits for the website. But isn’t there another way?)

In truth, I have no idea how NPR determines which black musicians it decides to pay attention to. But here’s my point: it doesn’t seem like Rosen does, either. Now, I know that blogging and journalism are two different things, but Rosen could have added a bit of substance to his post—the kind of substance that, say, a twenty-minute conversation with someone at All Songs Considered would have provided—and still made his point that contemporary African-American musicians are woefully underrepresented in NPR’s music programming. Perhaps Rosen did have this conversation. If he did, though, it doesn’t show. Which means that the argument never gets past whether NPR’s taste in black music is lame or not. Which is, in a nutshell, one of the things I don’t like about blogs. Even when I’ve been guilty of it myself.

The Dirty Pond, New Haven’s newest art and literary journal, has published its first issue, and you are mightily encouraged to check it out here. It contains contributions from the Dirty Pond editors—Anelise Chen, Philip Lique, and Alexis Zanghi—as well as art and poetry from David Larsen, Paul Panamarenko, Katie Yates, and the NHR’s own Donald Brown. Congratulations to all involved!

In a mission that is near and dear to our hearts, The Dirty Pond is dedicated to creating, in their own words, “a home for work by New Haven-affiliated writers and artists, with an eye towards curated gatherings in the near future.” One of these days, we’ll have to party together. And in the meantime, Greater New Haveners of the writerly and artistic persuasions, submit to these fine people. Show them what you’ve got. And keep an eye out for Issue 2.

By Banning Eyre (Temple University Press, 2000)

Journalist Banning Eyre is one of Connecticut’s great unsung musical treasures; he and Sean Barlow are the driving forces behind Afropop.org, one of the best sources I’ve come across to learn more about Africa’s various styles of music, as diverse as they are infectious. But Eyre is also a stellar guitarist in his own right. He has recorded with Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited, perhaps the biggest band to ever come out of Zimbabwe and certainly one of its coolest (and Zimbabwe has a lot of cool bands). And he has performed with the Super Rail Band, one of Mali’s greatest acts. The latter, however, is for a more direct reason: Several years ago, Eyre effectively apprenticed himself to Djelimady Tounkara, the lead guitarist in the Super Rail Band. He spent the better part of a year in Bamako, learning as much as he could from Djelimady about Mali’s musical traditions, and venturing out to meet—and hopefully play with—as many other musicians as he could find.

The written result of his exploits is In Griot Time, a book that’s part travelogue, part character study (of Djelimady and the many other musicians Eyre meets), and part love letter to the music that Eyre went to Mali to learn how to play. In the course of the book, Eyre freely acknowledges his debt to John Miller Chernoff’s African Rhythms and African Sensibilities, perhaps one of the best books ever written about African music for a Western audience. The parallels between Eyre’s experiences and Chernoff’s are many. Both went to Africa—Eyre to Mali and Chernoff to Ghana—to learn to play music. Both knew that playing the music well required them to understand something about the culture and history that created the style in the first place, and both strove hard to immerse themselves as much as they could. Chernoff’s immersion was perhaps more successful: He emerged from his experience with a book that reads in parts like a Rosetta Stone to understanding Ghanian drumming in particular and African music generally. As a musician myself, I am still learning from Chernoff’s book, and it’s been ten years since I read it.

Eyre’s book, by design, doesn’t have that kind of insight. Unlike Chernoff, he doesn’t dwell on how the music is put together so much as what it was like for him to learn how to play it. While it seems clear that he played music for at least a couple hours a day, most of the book is about what happens to him when he’s not playing music—the conversations he has with people, the things he sees and does, the other musicians he hears—all written with a clear eye, an astonishing sensitivity, and a willingness to wrestle with some difficult questions about cultural frictions and the legacy of colonialism. The result, I believe, is a much more accessible book than Chernoff’s. Where Chernoff’s book is perfect for people who already love African music—particularly other musicians who are trying to figure out how to play it—Eyre’s book is just the thing to make people who don’t know much about African music want to learn more about it. Its own effect on me has already been profound. Chernoff’s book in some ways scared me away from trying to play African music even as it made me want to all the more. But it was Eyre’s book (and Eyre himself, who I finally took a lesson from) that finally made me pick up a guitar and try to play. I know that I’ll never play like either Chernoff or Eyre—let alone the African musicians they have played with—but In Griot Time gave me the courage to play with the required humility, and evident joy.