BEYOND BOOKS: The 12th Annual Edwardian Ball

Beyond Books is based on the premise that “leading a literary life” is not only about reading and writing and editing and solitude; it’s about complete cultural immersion and exploring the language of every lived experience.

San Francisco freaks and geeks who like to play dress-up and waltz beyond the midnight hour celebrated the macabre cartoon fantasies of Edward Gorey this past weekend at the 12th Annual Edwardian Ball. This year’s spectacular multidisciplinary tribute — featuring music, dance, theater, video, painting, sculpture, fashion, installation art, aerial acrobatics and absinthe-rootbeer cocktails(!!!) — was inspired by the cult author-illustrator’s The Iron Tonic (Or, A Winter Afternoon in Lonely Valley). What follows is a parody of the Gorey text with photos from the show.

 

The Eternal Balm
(Or, A Winter Night in San Francisco)

The tinies at the Gorey Ball
Danced brightly till they hit the wall.

Those who could not twirl stood upright,
Leather corsets binding most tight.

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World Book Night Wants You

If you’re reading this, chances are you won’t be receiving one of the 1,000,000 books World Book Night is giving away. But you still can (and should) take part.

Everyone has a friend who doesn’t read (or doesn’t read enough), and those are the people World Book Night is targeting. On April 23, WBN will be working with thousands of volunteers, libraries, and bookstores to distribute books by hand to “light or non-readers” After last year’s successful launch in the UK, WBN is coming to the states.

Here’s the story from Carl Lennertz, the Executive Director and sole employee of World Book Night, U.S.

World Book Night is printing hundreds of thousands of special free paperback editions, and they are looking for thousands of volunteers to go out on one day and give books out across America. … You pick the place: hospital or diner, school or … well, lots of possibilities. Be creative. … yes, there are some rules and regulations. But no cost, except for your time, love of books, and caring for your community.

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From P-Town… A Salon Grows in Portland

1. A smoker’s view of SE Mall Street around 7:45pm. 2. The kitchen meets the dining room at the intersection of Dunbar and Coffelt.

 

On Friday, If Not for Kidnap, a living room poetry series curated by Donald Dunbar and Jamalieh Haley, brought Kevin Sampsell, Edward Mullany, Chloe Caldwell, Bryan Coffelt and The We Shared Milk to Dunbar’s house in Southeast Portland. Only one of the above is a poet, unless you count the band.

SE Mall Street is not well-lit compared to the glare of an iPhone’s Google Map in the hands of my passenger; however, we obtained a visual of what appeared to be several band members carrying amps and equipment headed towards a large house. After initiating pursuit we were led straight to Dunbar, who was greeting guests from his porch in front of a one-smoker audience. I was unable to get a usable picture of Dunbar at this point and waded through the people who like to stand in the kitchen towards a table with cold beer and book donations for Crow Arts Manor to get a better look at the crowd.

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Interview with Victoria Patterson, Author of This Vacant Paradise

In 2008, I was just a lowly undergrad at UC Riverside, finishing up my senior year. I was a creative writing major, and I had Victoria Patterson for one of my craft classes. Patterson was awaiting the publication of her first short story collection, Drift (Mariner Books), which she had worked on while in the MFA program at UCR. She quickly became one of my favorite professors, due to her assigning us really devastating novels (The House of Mirth, Revolutionary Road) while still managing to maintain a sense of humor about it all (see this example).

Since then, I’ve kept tabs on my former professor. Drift received glowing reviews for its stunning portrayal of outsiders in the gleaming, cutthroat town of Newport Beach, and the collection was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2009. Drift was followed by This Vacant Paradise (Counterpoint), Patterson’s first novel, which told the story of Esther, a beautiful-yet-flawed thirty-something living in Orange County in the ‘90s.

Having grown up in Southern California, never feeling like I completely fit in, the book really resonated with me. Patterson is an author who writes about what I’m thinking, taking a scalpel to the golden façade that is life in Southern California and exposing it for what it really is: contradictory, complicated, and brutal, but still sometimes beautiful.  Esther, for all her faults, was someone I empathized with and related to, with her simultaneous entanglement with the world of designer clothes and marrying for money, while searching – and hoping – for something more. In the end, This Vacant Paradise is a novel that is just as devastating and multifaceted as the books she taught us in class.

The novel was released in paperback earlier this month, and so I was delighted to do an interview with my former professor in celebration.

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REVIEW: The Tender Hour of Twilight by Richard Seaver

The Tender Hour of Twilight
Richard Seaver
FSG
480 pp / $35

We usually eat up memoirs of public figures, past or present, loved or loathed, because their lives, quite simply, are more interesting than ours.  Take George W. Bush’s Decision Points, for example (presently loathed): the 43rd president argues that all the decisions he made in the White House, though largely unpopular with the general public, were all “correct.”  Let’s not go there.  But even the staunchest liberal reader must concede that they’re interesting decisions regardless.

Occasionally, however, memoirs are indeed written by “regular” people.  Richard Seaver, for example, isn’t George W. Bush – he was never even president.  But like Bush, Seaver made decisions that affected, and will affect, millions of people.  Like his decision to publish Beckett’s short works in Merlin, Seaver’s upstart French avant-garde literary journal, which catapulted the Irishman to the top of the world literature heap.  And his decision to push Naked Lunch, Story of O, and Last Exit to Brooklyn, among others, through the ignorant hands of the censors ultimately diminished their sway.  And, finally, his decision to record his life in vivid detail (which his wife Jeanette posthumously compiled into The Tender Hour of Twilight Seaver’s vast and intimate memoir), will lead to new insights and new appreciation for the literature that captivated Seaver so very much.
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Why We Need You, Blue… Tom Agnotti at Bluestockings

1. $1 for a cup o’ Joe. 2. Angotti standing behind his bookcover (not to scale).

 

 

Sitting front row, with a book authored by Fidel Castro to my left and murmurings from book buyers to my right, I knew I was in the welcoming-yet-active atmosphere of Bluestockings located at 172 Allen Street. If you haven’t been yet, you have to get there, it’s one of the best bookstores in the city. It’s a volunteer ran “bookstore, activist center, and free trade café” that’s occupied mostly by veterans of the occupy movement (see posters hanging from the ceiling).

Bluestockings usually features nonfiction but this time, fiction writer Tom Agnotti celebrated the premier of his newest story collection, Accidental Warriors and Battlefield Myths. His multi-genre short-story collection features illustrations by Sofia Vigas and, throughout the reading, the images were projected onto a nearby screen. The illustrations, which remind me slightly of Jamie Hewlett’s work, bookend each story with a haiku and foster a layered take to the collection.

REVIEW: The Death of Arthur by Peter Ackroyd

The Death of King Arthur: The Immortal Legend
Peter Ackroyd
Viking
336 pp / $26.95

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail – a touchstone for any contemporary retelling of the Arthurian legends – knightly valor and violence are reduced (or enhanced, depending on your sense of humor) to Arthur’s encounter with the Black Knight.  “’Tis but a scratch,” the Black Knight says after one arm is lopped off.  “It’s just a flesh wound,” he again protests as blood begins spraying from both shoulder sockets.  There is no better modern example of the impossibility of chivalry in a time marked by violence and certain death.

Peter Ackroyd calls his The Death of Arthur a “retelling” of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur.  Here, Ackroyd seeks to rewrite Malory’s tale for current audiences, aiming to render Malory’s version in modern English with greater conciseness and clarity.  Besides simply translating Malory’s late Middle English, Ackroyd does a great deal to reconcile the inconsistencies in Malory’s rambling original.  The “Tristan and Isolde” section, for example, is markedly, and thankfully, shorter.  Ackroyd also adds subheadings to the chapters: “Read of a contest for love” (in “Tristan and Isolde”) and “See a great slaughter” (in “The Adventure of the Holy Grail”). The origins of “see” and “read” seem dubious, but the subtitles do serve to orient the reader when the narrative jumps, as it often does.
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NEENER, NEENER – Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet at BookCourt

1. The cheery cover art for Ben Marcus’ “lighthearted comedy.” 2. Sam Margevicius, a photographer, was more interested in looking at that dope David Lynch book than at me. I don’t blame him.

 

What I love most about BookCourt in Cobble Hill, besides it being one of the best all-around bookstores in Brooklyn, is its interior design– the open backroom is expansive enough to hold a large crowd, yet it retains the intimacy of a much smaller room, which doubly renders any reading more penetrating and effective. So as I’m on my way to see Ben Marcus read from his new novel, The Flame Alphabet, having only read interviews with him discussing poisonous language from the mouths of adorable children, I’m getting really excited to go in totally blind and hear him read.

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JAMES KIRKWOOD: mythical…but maybe not murderer

The story of James Kirkwood demonstrates how easily and inexplicably the acclaimed can fall off the critical radar.

In 1975, he had two shows playing on Broadway, while his latest novel Good Times/Bad Times saw reviewers comparing him to Saul Bellow and Joseph Heller. One of those shows – A Chorus Line – won him a Pulitzer Prize for his co-writing contribution. Yet the reaction of most people today to the mention of Kirkwood’s name would be a crinkled brow. Almost none of his works remain in print.

Kirkwood became my favourite writer in the 1980s. I was enchanted by the vulnerability and effervescence of novels like Good Times/Bad Times, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead! and Some Kind of Hero, and even more by the fact that neither of those qualities ruled out streetwise grittiness in his prose. Yet though he was my favourite writer, he for a long time remained a myth to me. His books were not in print in my native UK and for an impoverished young man were only obtainable by scouring second-hand shops, a veritable tilling-for-gold process that produced indescribable joy on the rare occasions when an out-of-print or imported paperback turned up. In those pre-internet days, I could discover nothing about Kirkwood beyond what was conveyed on book flyleaves and covers. The first time I ever saw his name mentioned in a British newspaper was in a list of AIDS fatalities. Needless to say, I hadn’t known he was dead.

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Return of the Nerds: FSG’s Work in Progress presents Nerd Jeopardy! at McNally Jackson

1. Einstein formulates the theory of how nerds have fun. 2. FSG Online Marketing Manager, host and charmer Ryan Chapman, who’d been drinking all day.

 

I’m on the F en route to McNally Jackson to cover FSG’s Work in Progress’ awesome Nerd Jeopardy, wondering, “Why am I more excited to attend this event rather than seeing these guys or these guys?” Yes, despite the fact I have no knowledge of Nerd Alex Trebek’s (a.k.a. FSG’s Online Marketing Manager and all-around charming fellow, Ryan Chapman) musical talents and there will be no live music or rock show eye candy, there IS the chance to win sweet, expensive prizes (even if you don’t compete on a team!), get drunk for free, heckle, and mingle with really, really good looking nerds. I covered this event again for these reasons, but mainly because it’s pure fun. Allow me to be a bit of blowhard when I say it’s sort of a celebration of everything awesome about nerds, that dismantles the myth established by this guy.

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