White Readers Meet Black Authors

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.

The End of Oldies Radio

Over the holiday, I read Michael Chabon's new book, which has in it a very poignant essay about (among other things) oldies radio — how one day the songs you grew up with are now oldies, while meanwhile the the songs that used to be your oldies, like Elvis and doo-wop, are falling away from radio forever. In today's radio culture, a song like Ben E. King's "Stand by Me," a baby-boomer favorite that had resonance for the generation of two after the boomers because of of the movie Stand by Me and, moreover, because it's a great song, is now lumped together with all the way old crooner stuff, the Como and Sinatra, the Rosemary Clooney, which, while it has its own merits, is for the boomers and all the rest of us basically grandmom's music. Even early Beatles don't really make it onto FM radio much any more — if you remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, then you almost sixty or even older, which is to say a small percentage of the radio listening audience. And not a demographic advertisers care about (unless they are advertising prescription drugs). What does this all mean for me? Only that today, driving back from New York City with my 3-year-old fast asleep in the back seat, I flipped through the radio until it landed on the sublime "Super Freak," the 1981 hit by Rick James.

I grooved through the last minute or two of that song, it faded out, and then I was hit with "Ventura Highway," the 1972 bit of lite Americana by the band America.

Now, I love both "Super Freak" and "Ventura Highway," truly. They are both catchy and lyrically memorable, and they both have the power to evoke a certain time in one's life. Now, the times they evoke in my life never really happened, but rather seem as if they must have happened — but it's a special kind of song that has the power to do that, too. BUT, and this is the point, they are two songs with nothing in common artistically, thematically, or culturally. They have been yoked together by some radio programmer out in ClearChannelLand only because they figure some guy in his forties (or maybe in his mid-thirties, but with an affinity for both music of his own time and the lite fare of his father's time) will remember and enjoy them both.

In other words, if one thinks that a radio station ought to have a character, then this is a purely cynical programming move, putting "Super Freak" and "Ventura Highway" together. Which is another way of saying that nobody really expects radio stations to have a character any more. DJs don't get to make playlists, and radio stations don't serve meaningful communities of listeners.

To that latter point: there used to be a New Haven DJ named Vinnie Penn, who worked the morning show on WKCI ("KC-101"), a Top 40 station broadcasting out of Hamden, one town to the north of New Haven. Vinnie — who also had the honor of working with Glenn Beck when Beck was a crappy New Haven–based morning jock — wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but he was beloved by others. He could be crude and juvenile, to say the least, and at times could be quite smart. Anyway, what I liked about him was that he was a New Havener. His show was peppered with references to real New Haven hangouts, to what New Haven was like in his 1980s childhood, to stereotypes of surrounding towns in Connecticut, etc. In other words, he was our neighbor: Our Neighbor Vinnie.

After he resigned/was fired/was forced out, he was replaced by this dude with the fake name Mike Maze. (To be fair, Vinnie Penn was a shortened, so fake, name too. If I ever stalk the airwaves, it will be as Mark Oppenheimer, as in "Oppenheimer," the song by the Old 97s.) From what I can tell, Maze isn't the biggest moron on the air, but he is no New Havener, nor do his ClearChannelBosses seem to have any expectation that he be. His show could come from anywhere, and it seems to go nowhere. It has no grounding, except in the pop-culture reality-TV ether. For some reason, the idea behind a lot of morning shows now is to re-hash the TV of the night before.

I miss the way radio used to be. I came along way after the heyday of free-form. I never knew a time when DJs had any real power over what they played. But at least they weren't playing "Ventura Highway" after "Super Freak."

Stranded with Stories

Kevin Daniels’ oneman show, El Hablador: the Storyteller keeps butterflies, ending its 3-day run tonight at the Yale Cabaret, involves several conceits that blend together to create a unique theatrical experience. First of all, “el hablador” (the storyteller) features the notion that the main character -- Daniels, a young black man in a suit, barefoot -- is stranded on an island where his need to tell stories is fulfilled by messages in bottles.  These hang from the ceiling, and the storyteller selects one or another, seemingly at random, and offers it with friendly gestures to an audience member who then reads aloud the message inside.  Addressed to the storyteller, the messages present occasions for a story.

Another conceit comes into play through the storyteller’s name: Dante, an illusion to the famous poet who catalogued the inhabitants of hell in its various circles.  Indeed, the stories El Hablador tells dramatize social hells of our contemporary world for four protagonists in interrelated stories.

Yet another conceit could be said to be the form of the stories themselves: delivered in highly rhythmical, allusive, visceral raps, the stories are offered as spoken both by and about the character in question.  The most effective, to my mind, was the tale of an African-American father trying to flee the crisis of Hurricane Katrina with his family; the story provided a convincing sense of other characters in the man’s life, as voices or ghosts pursuing him from the disaster.  The story of a young man trying to articulate his relation to his own sexuality was deft in its use of dramatic, confrontational soliloquy.  The other stories, of an Hispanic drug-dealer victimized by the ‘no exit’ like space of his ghetto upbringing, and of his white former girlfriend who moved to Vegas to become a stripper, while full, like all four monologues, of wonderful verbal riffing and expressive outbursts that were almost show-stopping in their brilliance, seemed to trade more on certain cliches of ‘the life’ than the other two monologues did.

Still another conceit that was perhaps the most striking was that the storyteller -- who was a childlike, ingratiating mime-figure when speaking in his native language -- ‘became’ the character in the monologue as if possessed by the voice, or as if he were a machine into which the ‘track’ had been inserted.  This was signaled by the breakdowns into repetitions and slowing speed as monologues drew to an end.  It was an effective transition device which, because of Daniel’s precise sense of rhythm -- matching physical and verbal contortions in expressive combination -- never seemed forced.  Rather it was unnerving each time, as if watching a puppet with Tourette’s Syndrome crash under the calamitous force of having to articulate such passionate, victimized lives.

Not being someone for whom rap has had much allure, I have to say that Daniels' monologues impressed me with the scale to which the form can be stretched, combining the strengths of spoken word poetry, with allusions and metaphors piling up quickly, of dramatic monologue, in which a true self is revealed by choice of expression, and of oral storytelling, in which choice of incident and detail gives reality to scenes we “see” only in words.

El Hablador provides a commanding performance and gripping theater.  The space of the Cabaret was very effectively used through placement of the action, lighting the space to include the audience readers, and the scenic quality of hanging bottles like stars in the sky, each a story.

Saturday, Jan 16 @ 8 and 11pm:

http://www.yalecabaret.org/home.php

Sweets to the Sweet

Katharine Weber, True Confections, Shaye Areheart Books, 274 pp, $22 Katharine Weber’s True Confections takes the form of an affidavit by Alice Ziplinsky, née Tatnall, aka Arson Girl, a New Haven resident who has become the de facto head of Zip’s Candies, through a series of events -- both mishaps and good fortune -- that make for a sprawling, juicy tale in a relatively small compass.

Weber’s fifth novel is Alice’s first person account, offered for legal reasons, of her employment at Zip’s Candies, of her marriage to Howard “Howdy” Ziplinsky, and of her involvement in the family business, and, like the candies Little Sammies, Tigermelts, and Mumbo Jumbos that are the legacy of founder Eli Czaplinsky, Alice’s narrative creates textures that tantalize, tastes that surprise, and a memorable “mouthfeel.” Alice is intelligent, humorous, informative, but also slightly askew, perhaps even actionably unreliable.

Along the way, Weber furnishes engagingly deft sketches of New Haven and environs -- she has a feel for the city in its town and gown dichotomy, and provides glimpses of the city that used to be through evocation of the fortunes of the fictional, but highly realistic, Zip’s Candies.  In the tale of a little, local company that must compete with the big name, real companies -- like Hershey and Mars -- Weber finds an apt figure for the fortunes of small businesses and small cities in the 21st century.  We often find ourselves in a detailed subculture -- the world of candy manufacture and marketing -- that Weber, in the voice of Alice for whom every aspect of the business fascinates and who has “perfect pitch for the candy business,” delivers with great gusto.

Weber also provides a lot of fun by, as it were, peeking through Alice’s narrative with material that the narrator seems not too comfortable with, or perhaps may even be distorting for her own purposes.  What is the true story of the fire, blamed on Alice, that burned down a schoolmate’s home in 1975?  What exactly were the problems with her marriage to Howdy and why did he run off to Madagascar?  And what of the alleged intrigues against Alice by her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law Irene?  How sympathetic do we find Alice, the gentile in the Jewish family business, who becomes, by her own insistence, the one most concerned with the family legacy and her fond, deceased father-in-law’s wishes?

Loyalty is the key.  The successful candy bar is supported by a consumer belief that he or she is honoring family traditions, so that loyalty is all bound up with nostalgia for childhood experiences either actual or longed-for.  Ideally, too, the consumer has a sense of entitlement to self-indulgence driven by an ambivalence toward guilty pleasure.  I mention all these things because my knowledge and experience in the candy manufacturing business in general, and with Zip’s Candies in particular, should be above question, but they have been questioned . . . The questions Weber raises through Alice aren’t all simply personal either.  Should we, today, consider a candy line founded on characters in Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo racist?  Is Alice painfully naive when she doesn’t think of the ramifications of packaging two chocolate Sammies on either side of a white chocolate Susie?  Or is it the world -- Weber gives a quick glimpse of the blogosphere and its ability to create urban legend at will -- that has gone askew?

The book is at its best when Alice is delineating, with story-within-story spirals, her relations with the Ziplinskys -- particularly revealing are her dealings with Sam, her father-in-law, and the way she brings her and Howdy’s children into the business.  The story of Eli’s brother Julius and the Nazi plan to ship Jews to Madagascar is fascinating but somewhat intrusive into the narrative, as Julius is a character who is never “real” to Alice, since she never meets him, and the story, ostensibly told to explain why the Ziplinskys have holdings in Madagascar where their cacao and other ingredients come from, seems material that could have been worked into a gripping novel in its own right, but which seems a bit outside the range of Alice’s voice, despite her admission that she is largely inventing what she can’t reconcile with those few facts she knows.

It’s largely the voice and direct experience of Alice that are the winning ingredients here, for she is the one who makes of her immersion in the candy business the basis for all there is to know about life, a way to take charge of the past, the family, the business, and, ultimately, the future.  As Weber’s inscription from Anne Sexton would have it: “Even crazy, I’m as nice / as a chocolate bar.”

Katharine Weber will be appearing at Mitchell Public Library in Westville at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 13th, and at RJ Julia Booksellers, in Madison, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, January 21st.

May I ask...

I’ve recently received the four volume set of The Paris Review Interviews. These books, colorful inside and out, are a pleasure to look through and laugh or cringe at the pith and wit of the 20th century’s best writers. Here are some noteworthy excerpts from my morning skim: Interviewer: Are there any authors you’d like to have known but haven’t? Harold Bloom: No. I should like to have known fewer authors than I have known, which is to say nothing against all my good friends. Interviewer: Are there any characters you would like to have known? Harold Bloom: No, no. The only person I would like to have known, whom I have never known, but it’s just as well, is Sophia Loren.

*

Interviewer: Do you ever think about where your creations are coming from while you’re in the process of writing? Stephan King:Once in a while, something will declare itself so obviously, that it’s inescapable. Take the psychotic nurse in Misery, which I wrote when I was having a tough time with dope. I knew what I was writing about. There was never any question. Annie was my drug problem, and she was my number one fan.

* Interviewer: Was your adolescence a calmer time?

Elizabeth Bishop: I was very romantic. I once walked from Nauset Lighthouse-I don’t think it exist anymore-which is the beginning of the elbow (of Cape Cod), to the tip, Provincetown, all alone. It took me a night and a day. I went swimming from time to time but at that time the beach was absolutely deserted. there wasn’t anything on the back shore, no buildings. *

Interviewer:Have you ever drawn from those years (childhood) for story material?

Dorothy Parker: All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine, you wouldn’t want to sit in the same room with me. Interviewer:What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work? Parker: Need of money, dear. Interviewer: And besides that? Parker:It’s easier to write about those you hate-just as it’s easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.

*

Interviewer: What tools do you require? Ted Hughes: Just a pen. Interviewer: What do birds mean for you? The figures of the hawk and the crow-so astonishing. Are you tired to death of explaining them? Hughes: I don’t know how to explain them. There are certain things that are just impressive, aren’t there? One stone can be impressive and the stones around it aren’t. It’s the same with animals. Some, for some reason, are strangely impressive. They just get into you in a strange way...

*

Interviewer: a Blackjack? Jack Kerouac: It’s a blackjack. Bill says, “I pulled out my underneath drawer, and underneath some nice shirts I pulled out my blackjack. I gave it to Danny and said, ‘Now don’t lose it, Danny’-Danny says, ‘Don’t worry I won’t lose it.’ He goes off and loses it.” Sap...blackjack...that’s me. Sap...blackjack. Interviewer:That’s a haiku: Sap, blackjack, that’s me. You better write that down. Kerouac: No.

I don't read poetry.

For someone who's made a living for a long time talking about books and being looked at as a wide, eager reader, an odd reality is the fact that no one has ever believed me when I've tried patiently to explain that there are entire categories of writing I truly never think about. Whole genres are of basically no interest to me. I might know a little about them, be able to recognize some big names, might even be able to steer people who're into a particular genre toward something that they might like -- while I myself never go near the stuff. In general, I do not read mysteries or science fiction or fantasy; I don't read military or political history or self-help books; the only travel writer I've ever read willingly is Bill Bryson, who hardly counts, in my view, since I think he's really a humorist; and I don't read poetry. I don't even think of poetry as being important most of the time. It's an indulgence. Usually a whiny indulgence, I feel. It's navel-gazing, I think to myself in my nastier moments. And usually so humorless, and undisciplined. Who needs it? (Don't try to argue with me; just chalk it up to personal taste and move on; the point of this is really not to debate the value of poetry or poetry reading, just to make it clear that, ok, I've got this bias, it's ugly, and I admit it.)

There are some poems I am attached to, though, and there are a handful of mystery novels I love and read over and over again. I've yet to find a science fiction novel that interested me, though. And military history? Um.... no. Hasn't happened for me yet. But you never know; I was thinking I might read Charlie Wilson's War some day, and even thinking that thought was a major step.

That said: I am a huge, huge, huge fan of Nicholson Baker, and have been since his first book came out in the late 1980s. I was a clerk at Atticus when The Mezzanine came out, and I read it (god knows what brought it to my attention, but I bought it, and I read it over and over again). Since then I have devoured almost all of his books. Some of them are on my yearly re-read list. I admit I couldn't get through Checkpoint, and I was never able to spring for his book on newspapers, and I haven't read Human Smoke (the subject matter didn't really appeal to me, but maybe I'll get it to it someday). Otherwise, though, my rule of thumb is, If Nicholson Baker's left his fingerprints on something, I want to get my hands on it as soon as possible.

So my perfect husband gave me The Anthologist recently -- Baker's new novel. I had planned to save it to read while on vacation next week. However, I was unable to wait and I'm now closing in on the end of the book, reading it in snips when not traveling or preparing for a New Year's Eve shindig or cleaning up and recovering from said shindig. And here's what blows my mind about this -- I am tearing through this book even though it's about poetry. It's about poetry, for god's sake. I don't give a crap about poetry. And I really don't give a crap about poets who write about nature, possibly my least-favorite subject in the world - yet Nicholson Baker has managed the impossible, which is to get me to utter the following sentence: "I think I might read some Mary Oliver one of these days."

I'm now packing for my vacation and selecting the books that will come with me -- only a few, as the place where we're going has bookstores I plan to peruse at length. But we'll be taking The Anthologist with us on the trip -- my husband (another Baker fan) is going to read it as soon as I'm done.