The CRACK in Everything

 

Reportage has always  been the fundamental task of journalism (the rough first  draft of history.) And so it remains, notwithstanding the enormous acceleration of news and information dissemination. Winston Churchill, who famously opined that gossip travels around the world before the truth has time to put it’s boots on would not have envisioned a world of endless (24/7)delivery of news or the next level, social media platforms…

 

As a consumer of the daily buzz and bloom of life, I am inclined by wide-ranging interest and possibly the endemic and emblematic affliction of modern times, an ever shortening attention span (about which I would worry, if it were not still  able to read 1000 page books). That it seems like more things are happening and that we are almost inescapably told of these events now requires, in addition to editing , a curatorial aggregate of various forms of news distribution. Anecdotal, video, broadcast, web-based, newspapers and magazine, social media platforms battle for our attention  (thus the chimerical ‘attention’ economy) measurable in new units of measurement. One of the first journalists I thought grasped this transformation of news media was  Glen O Brien, editor in the 80’s of Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, the paradigmic hip  downtown life style tab. O’Brien has a column in each issue which was amusingly and informatively digressive and mildly transgressive

O Brien, who passed on recently was a prototypical denizen of the Manhattan’s hipoisie and the headline that the slick fashion magazine W ran  with an homage “Glenn O Brien Could Do Everything Except Live Forever” is a clever way of pointing the man’s many talents and accomplishments. If you think that to be hyperbolic have a look at O Brien’s cleverly annotated  CV*. Or the W article.

 

Glenn’s facility as a writer and ability to meet multiple deadlines a week could be intimidating. I couldn’t keep up with all the magazines he was involved with: Artforum, Purple, the in-house Bergdorf Goodman magazine, and Bald Ego, his own journal with the poet Max Blagg. This was in addition to his work as creative director of Barney’s and other commercial jobs that employed him to name perfumes or write commercials (remember Brad Pitt for Chanel?). In 2000, he landed at the Cannes Film Festival, where he debuted Downtown 81, a movie he made in 1981 with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Glenn was one of the first to recognize Basquiat’s talent. He wrote, produced, and appeared in the movie, too, directed by photographer Edo Bertoglio. Somehow the soundtrack was lost, only to be miraculously rediscovered two decades later. It’s a genuine artifact, a document of a time and a place no longer visible.

 

 

Sometimes it’s the small things that grab us  David Shield’s who’s  body of work stretches over a wide swath of subjects (even an Ichiro Suzuki chapbook) has a new tome out entitled Other People. The epigram he chose  from Philip Roth’s American Pastoral has long been a  favorite of mine:

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to came at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick: you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them: you get them wrong while you’re with them and then you get home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims?  Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we are alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.

 

Don Winslow’s new opus, The Force (referring to the NYPD) leads off with a citation from Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely

“Cops are just people, ” she said irrelevantly.

They start out that way, I’ve heard.”

 Brian Doyle self Portrait

 

Lake Oswego Oregon writer Brian Doyle, who among other things was was the editor of Portland magazine passed on to his greater glory recently. He was 60 years old. Author of 14 books and a contributor to The American Scholar and other smart journals, apparently Brian didn’t warrant an obit in the New York Times (which says more about that paper than about Doyle) I chanced to discover him through his wonderful novel Mink River. And the last story in his collection Bin Laden’s Bald Spot: & Other Stories  solidified my continued interest in him. especially the final story**

 

In “Pinching Bernie,” an account of the crimes of Bernard Francis Cardinal Law, the unnamed narrator describes the archbishop’s past achievements, including a deal “where Episcopal priests who were married with kids could work in Catholic dioceses, which was how something you hardly ever see happened here and there, a priest making out with his wife on the beach, and barking at his kids that he would stop this car and turn around if there was any more fighting in the back seat!” In sharp contrast to the more whimsical tone of other stories, “Pinching Bernie” is extraordinary for the seething rage expressed by the narrator at Cardinal Law’s criminal negligence in the many cases of child molestation by Boston parish priests. Cardinal Law is “the slime bag’s slime bag, an all-pro slime bag” who escapes prosecution by flying to Rome and getting named to the Basilica di santa Maria Maggiore, where he is beyond the reach of justice. Up to this point, the story adheres to actual events (the real-life Cardinal remains ensconced inside the Vatican). But in “Pinching Bernie,” the narrator’s friend Jimmy goes to “see a guy about a guy” and “basically from this point on Bernie’s goose is cooked.” As it turns out, “it’s easier to pinch an archbishop than you might think.” The archbishop’s fictional redemption (wherein he’s returned to a life of monastic servitude in Boston) is far more fitting than its true-life counterpart.

Bin Laden’s Bald Spot encompasses worlds of absurdity and quotidian reality in the voices of ordinary citizens. Underneath the surface is a tenderness and attachment to life that makes the best of these stories really and truly sing.

A small nugget from the Doyle archive:

 “So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end — not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words ‘I have something to tell you,’ a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.”

Rest in Peace Brian Doyle

 

 

I find the funniest comedies those that don’t have jokes. Which is why I am not drawn to stand up comedy (excepting Richard Prior, Barry Crimmins, David Chappelle) Sarah Silverman as many are the few originals we are blessed to have live among us, is her own category.Of the many mordant obsrevations found in her new ‘special’

 

“Yeah, we’re Number one. We’re number one in juvenile diabetes”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I met  Thomas Beller when he was a youngish literary bon vivant***, editing a fine New York literary magazine Open City, gifting the internet his Mr Beller’s Neighborhood and publishing a book or two along the way. Beller is now ensconced in New Orleans teaching at Tulane University. Among other things Beller writes on the National Basketball Association for the New Yorker. Now if you follow the once and future Great American Pastime( baseball) but do not necessarily find the New Yorker useful ,you ultimately get around to references  to the oracular Roger Angell, who has been contemplating and commenting on hard ball since time immemorial. I’m thinking , admittedly based on a small sample, that Professor Beller may achieve the same beatified status. Here from his  report on  NBA All star guard  Cleveland Cavalier/Boston Celtic Kyrie Irving:

One of my favorite basketball anecdotes involves George (Iceman) Gervin sitting in the locker room, sometime in the late nineteen-seventies, after hitting a game-winning shot. Journalists crowd him asking locker-room questions: “How did you do it?” “How did it feel?” “What were you thinking?” After a brief pause, Gervin responds, “The world is round.”

I have always loved this line for its lordly belligerence (“You bore me,” it seems to imply) and because I feel it holds a profound truth about the game. There are lots of sports that involve a round ball, but basketball is the most cosmic and planetary. The ball itself, often seen spinning on the tip of a finger, is the size of a globe. The climax of every play involves a sphere, usually in rotation, entering a circle, its own brief eclipse. The most popular style of play in the N.B.A. these days is referred to as “pace and space.” A player with the ball in his hand is his own solar system of gravity and velocity.

One way to illustrate basketball’s cosmic, planetary nature would be to describe the game as played by the point guard Kyrie Irving. He has a center of gravity somewhere just above his knees and the coördination of a jazz drummer. He is an expert low dribbler, and in the middle of his moves, especially when he puts the ball behind his back, he sometimes seems to sit for an infinitesimal moment on an invisible chair. During the clannish, gossip-filled family reunion that is All-Star Weekend, I heard the theory that, among all N.B.A. players, Irving’s skills are the most envied. This is a category I had not previously considered—not M.V.P. but M.E.P. Irving’s moves with the ball are like physics problems that culminate with extremely high-profile clutch shots. He excels at humiliating the opponent. Maybe that’s what is envied…

 

Some of the very few bright moments (comparatively) in the this nightmare time  are the writings of a handful of journalists and dissident scholars. I am guessing Matt Taibbi is holding the Hunter Thompson/William Greider chair at Rolling Stone (the entertainment magazine). He manages to  add a measure of hilarity to what Charle Pierce has called Camp Runamuck or Taibbi’s own  coinage, Trumpsylvania. Here he points out *****the incongruity of the vulgarian POTUS’s scapegoating the commercial media

 

 

The craziest part of Donald Trump’s 77-minute loon-a-thon in Phoenix earlier this week came when he rehashed his shtick about the networks turning off live coverage of his speech. Trump seemed to really believe they were shutting the cameras off because “the very dishonest media” was so terrified of his powerful words.

“They’re turning those lights off so fast!” he said. “CNN doesn’t want its failing viewership to see this!”

Trump is wrong about a lot of things, but it’s hard to be more wrong about any one thing than he was about this particular point.

No news director would turn off the feed in the middle of a Trump-meltdown. This presidency has become the ultimate ratings bonanza. Trump couldn’t do better numbers if he jumped off Mount Kilimanjaro carrying a Kardashian.

This was confirmed this week by yet another shruggingly honest TV executive – in this case Tony Maddox, head of CNN International. Maddox said CNN is doing business at “record levels.” He hinted also that the monster ratings they’re getting have taken the sting out of being accused of promoting fake news.

“[Trump] is good for business,” Maddox said. “It’s a glib thing to say. But our performance has been enhanced during this news period

By the way, Taibbi has a book forthcoming, I Can’t Breathe, lucidly unpacking the tragic Eric Garland killing.

 

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* http://glennobrien.com/site/#/bio

**https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/king-of-the-losers/

***http://www.identitytheory.com/thomas-beller/

****http://www.newyorker.com/news/sporting-scene/maybe-the-earth-is-flat-if-you-are-kyrie-irving

 

*****http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/taibbi-blame-media-for-creating-world-dumb-enough-for-trump-w499649

Let me come at it another way…my kind of town

 

On my recent hegira to the geography of my youth, Chicago Illinois (fly over zone or Heartland, depending on whether you hail from the Golden Corridor USA ), I chanced to discover the reason for the ( four six-pointed red stars [the six points symbolize transportation, labor, commerce, finance, populousness, and salubrity] on the official City of Chicago flag which was adopted in 1917. They represent major historical events: the advent of Fort Dearborn in 1831, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933–34.

A reasonable assumption (for those of us aware of the passage of time since the mid 20th century) would be that a number of events should be candidates for additional stars. And in fact there have been regular proposals to do so. Of those making it into urban folklore purportedly a letter to the Chicago Tribune opined that the city flag honor “Chicago’ s place in the history of the nuclear age.” A star was also  proposed to honor  Harold Washington, the first African-American mayor of Chicago. And following the so-called Chicago Flood of 1992.

Chicago being Chicago and Cubs fans being long suffering the notion has previously been floated to honor the eventuality of a Cubs’s World Series (which of course after 108 years would more accurately called a long shot. Enter whiz kid Theo Epstein and field mentor Joe Madden and. well, let’s just say that the odds have changed

“Once you’ve come to be a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” — Nelson Algren

Coincident with my recent visit and refreshment of my  warm feelings for Chi town  I came across Brian Doyle’s new opus Chicago. As is the case with much of what makes up my reading diet a few years ago I chanced to pick up  Brian Doyle’s novel, Mink River and have stayed on the lookout for his writings  ever since—which include short stories, memoirs  essays and novels , Doyle who edits Portland magazine at the University of Oregon is a card carrying Catholic  but clearly not an apologist for the Church as the opening of his story “Pinching Bernie”  (from his collection  Bin Laden’s Bald Spot)

Bernard Francis Cardinal Law , archbishop of Boston for  almost 20 years during which probably a thousand kids were raped by priests and Law knew about it but kept shuffling the rapists around from job to job and denying everything and writing letters  that were total bullshit about how he knew  these guys real well and saw into their hearts and their hearts were pure  as driven snow, this was while  they were raping kids in sacristies and chapels and hospital rooms and classrooms and basements and cellars and billiard rooms and rectories and cabin son lakes and cars and the house of prominent donors and beach cottages and the backs of school busses and once even in a convent, well, finally Bernie gets ridden out of town. on a rail you know, the people of the archdiocese weren’t going to take this evil crap anymore, and Bernie has to vamoose from his palatial residence so fast that the coffee was still warm when the cops got there…

So, it was with gleeful anticipation that I dove into Chicago. Being a expatriated Chicagoan this tome contains a double dose of joy as the city of big shoulders, home of Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren, fabulous small Jews like Joe Epstein and Karl Shapiro, Dick Gregory, Mike Royko and  Slats Grobnik, Ernie Banks and Walter Payton, Minnie Minoso and Mike Ditka and Muddy Waters and Curtis Mayfield, Oscar Brown Jr. and on and on, remains my sweet spiritual home.. As befits the

Doyle wastes no time indulging his playfulness  citing three epigrams by Mark Twain ,Sun Ra and this by Rudyard Kipling

I have struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago… Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.*

 

 

As has become something of a Doyle trademark conceit (see Mink River ‘s philosophizing crow and Martin Marten’s pine marten), one of the main characters in Chicago is  Edward “a wise and personable dog of indeterminate breed.” While an engaging ensemble of characters,the residents of the Northside  building in which the unnamed narrator resides, join Edward,

Self Portrait, Brian Doyle

the main protagonist is the city itself—presented in all its glories from the great inland sea, Lake Michigan,  that marks its eastern border  to the vibrant music culture to the great green spaces of the park system that runs the length of the city. Chicago’s narrator finds happiness playing basketball and  spending much of his spare time dribbling his worn down ball up and down the Lake Michigan shore as well as exploring the villages that comprise this big hearted metropolis. He also manages to touch upon Chicago’s dark side, playing in  edgy pickup games involving two rival Chicago gangs.

The unnamed  narrator in Chicago, a recent Notre Dame graduate is an entry-level staffer at a Chicago-based Catholic magazine who spend 15 months  in the city in 1979.  Coincidentally he becomes a fan of the (Southside) White Sox,  the year the Chisox fielded the best outfield in the major leagues —though it its something of an anomaly for someone from the city’s Northside to prefer the Southside team to the Northside Cubs. 

 

 Steve Nathans-Kelly opines

Doyle’s Chicago is a determinedly quiet book about a noisy city that sketches a vast cityscape but deals narratively in miniatures… One gets the impression that Doyle, an award-winning journalist, editor and author of multiple novels, has wanted to write this book for a long time. It’s to his credit that he didn’t let his immense feeling for Chicago and the brief time he lived there induce him to make this modest and winsome story bigger than it is.

 

 

* Some additional epigrams on Chicago

“Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years”— Carl Sandburg

“Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring”—Nelson Algren

“Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.” — Norman Mailer

“It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago-she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.” — Mark Twain

UNFORTUNATELY IGNORED or TRAGICALLY OVERLOOKED?

Adult onset solipsism can be distinguished from the youth version of self centeredness by the admission that,as Van Morrison croons in The Meaning of Loneliness, “it takes a lifetime just to know yourself.” Thus the one is beset with constant instances of self doubt and self interrogation. One coping mechanism or technique I have employed to gain a foothold on serenity and enlightenment is to regulate or gate-keep my intake of information, allowing my intuition to guide me. For example I am prepared to make decisions on what to investigate further past a snappy headline or synopsis. As in my immediate disinterest for going any further in the text when I encountered this fatuous mandate at Arts and Letters Daily—”Undergraduates should be kept away from theory at all costs,” says —— ———-. They should read Kael, not Derrida….” Immediately sensing its syllogistic unsoundness, I saw this bit of grandiloquence as the kind of Tourette’s outburst one might encounter at faculty meeting or party. Of course, one of the joys of engaging this form of short form journalism (web journalizing) is the opportunity to engage in such orotund pronouncements.

Some Ignored Titles (photo: Robert Birnbaum

Ok, for the longest time I had an aversion to lists, viewing them as a lazy journalistic ploy to contribute to the ongoing dumbing down of everything (uh, I still think I am correct about that). On the other hand I can see some creative usefulness in lists— Umberto Eco creates some that interesting. And then there is Paul Zimmer’s poem Zimmer Imagines Heaven where in his recording of it introduces it as a “list” and encourages people to make their own lists:

I sit with Joseph Conrad in Monet’s garden,
We are listening to Yeats chant his poems,
A breeze stirs through Thomas Hardy’s moustache,
John Skelton has gone to the house for beer,
Wanda Landowska lightly fingers a clavichord,
Along the spruce tree walk Roberto Clemente and
Thurman Munson whistle a baseball back and forth.
Mozart chats with Ellington in the roses.
Monet smokes and dabs his canvas in the sun,
Brueghel and Turner set easels behind the wisteria.
the band is warming up in the Big Studio:
Bean, Brute, Bird and Serge on saxes,
Kai, Bill Harris, Lawrence Brown, trombones,
Klook plays drums, Mingus bass, Bud the piano.
Later Madam Schumann-Heink will sing Schubert,
The monks of bendictine Abbey will chant.
There will be more poems from Emily Dickinson,
James Wright, John Clare, Walt Whitman.
Shakespeare rehearses players for King Lear.
At dusk Alice Toklas brings out platters
Of Sweetbreads à la Napolitaine, Salad Livonière,
And a tureen of Gaspacho of Malaga.
After the meal Brahms passes fine cigars.
God comes then, radiant with a bottle of cognac,
She pours generously into the snifters,
I tell Her I have begun to learn what
Heaven is about. She wants to hear.
It is, I say, being thankful for eternity.
Her smile is the best part of the day.

So, here’s a list (of sorts) I created. I thought to offer reasons for my choices but I decidedto rely on your good opinion of me and your curiosity. Additionally, I asked some bookish acquaintances for their recommendations of overlooked books that come to mind( they are pretty much reprinted as I received them). Onward:

Dog Boy by Eva Hornung

Dog Boy by Eve Hornung

Burning Marguerite by Elizabeth Inness-Brown

Burning Marguerite by Elizabeth Inness-Brown

BULLET HEART by MICHEAL DOANE

Bullet Heart by Micheal Doane

MRS IVES’S XMAS by OSCAR HIJUELOS

Mrs Ives Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos

MORNING BY WALT WETHERALL

Morning by Walt Wetherall

COUNTRY OF WOLFES by James Carlos BLAKE

Country of Bad Wolves by James Carlos Blake

Once Upon The River by Bonnie Campbell

Once Upon A River by Bonnie Campbell

Redemption Falls by Joseph O Connor

Redemption Falls by Joseph O’Connor

The Dog of War by Don Winslow

The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow

Darkest Jungle by Tod Balf

Darkest Jungle by Tod Balf

Valley of Bones by Micheal Gruber

Valley of Bones by Micheal Gruber

Elizabeth Cox</strong> novelist, Night Talk (Random House)

Hey 
 One overlooked novel I would like to add to the list is The Iguana Tree  by Michel Stone. My husband  (Mike Curtis) edited that novel and it is a good story…

The Iguana Tree by Michel Stone

David Rieff, author, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (Simon & Schuster)

Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution

Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell

Robert Stone, novelist, The Death of the Black Haired Girl(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt):

     Off the top of my head, I recall only one, and I’ve forgotten the author’s name. There was a novel about a man in  Maine published some years ago, called HARBOR LIGHTS. It was reviewed in IN BRIEF in the NY Times Book Review. A short, excellent novel…

HARBOR LIGHTS
By Theodore Weesner.

Katherine Powers, literary personage, author, Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life (FSG)

So, I don’t know about “tragically,” and by “overlooked” I would mean that most people haven’t heard of these–and they are all A+:
“20,000 Streets Under the Sun” – Patrick Hamilton
The Armstrong Trilogy – Roy Heath
“in Hazard” – Richard Hughes
“The Golovlyov Family” – Shchedrin

20,000 Streets Under the Sun by Patrick Hamilton

Richard Russo,award winning novelist Elsewhere (Knopf), screenwriter (Ice Harvest)

But for my bookseller daughter Emily’s recommendation, I doubt I’d have come across A Marker to Measure Drift . You might want to check to see if it did better than I imagine, but sense is that it slipped into oblivion, and the last scene in the novel is as brutal and breathtaking as anything I’ve read in a long time.

A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik

Ron Rash , novelist, The Cove (ECCO)

With by Donald Harington –Harington is America’s Chaucer.

With by Donald Harington

Edwidge Danticat novelist, Claire of the Sea Light (Knopf), humanitarian

I’d say many of Percival Everett‘s novels including Erasure. Everett is as a brilliant at creating narratives as he is at bending genres. He has one of the least classifiable careers, but one of the most brilliant, in American letters.Everett’s 2001 masterpiece, “Erasure”–a parody of the African-American urban novel, offers a lyrical critique of a publishing establishment which continues to pigeon hole writers, particular African-American writers. Everett is also a respected poet and painter. His previous honors include: ThemPEN Center USA Award for Fiction, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction and the Dos Pasos Prize.

Erasure by Percival Everett

Joseph O’Connor ,overlooked Irish novelist, Where Have You Been? (Harvill Secker)

Tragically Overlooked Novels? Well, all of mine, for a start. But: do you mean Tragically Overlooked Novels from 2013 or in general? …In my view, DEATH AND NIGHTINGALES by Eugene McCabe is one of the great novels of the late 20th Century. It’s a story of thwarted love set in 1883 in rural County Fermanagh, on the border of Ulster and what is now as the Republic of Ireland. The events of a single day in the life of Elizabeth Winters provide the plot, which is so utterly gripping that you can’t stop reading. But McCabe smuggles in all sorts of darkness and depth. This is a truly brilliant book about racism, gender politics, and political rage, but the subtle (and supple) language weaves you into the story with such fierce and clever grace that you never feel you’re attending a lecture. It’s got touches of Coatzee and Faulkner but a mesmerizing smolder all its own. If you’ve ever doubted the novel’s power to express realities that politics can’t reach, you need to read this magnificent thing.

DEATH AND NIGHTINGALES by Eugene McCabe

Stuart Dybek ,author, Northwestern University mentor,(forthcoming)Paper Lantern: Love Stories (FSG)

I don’t know how “overlooked” Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga is but i saw it on no lists whatsoever when the millennium nonsense was going on & i don’t think there’s been a change since.

Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen

David Thomson, cultural encyclopedia,author
Moments That Made the Movies (Thames & Hudson)

Troubles by J.G Farrell. If you don’t think it’s overlooked then The Purchase by Linda Spalding.

The Purchase by Linda Spalding.

Darin Strauss ,author,Half a Life: A Memoir (McSweeney’s), NYU mentor

i don’t know what counts as forgotten anymore. THE FIXER, by–which is tough and beautiful and unsentimental in its treatment of something awful? MOMENTO MORI, which I just read, and which taught me about the consoling half-thoughts and cruelties, the passing cruelties of stupid people. (In other words, most dumbasses will act dumb and assy and never feel bad about it—will come up with reasons, in fact, to feel good about the immoral way they act.) Or maybe THE STATEMENT by Brian Moore, which is a perfect thriller, a smart philosophical treatment of evil and racism, a fun read, and about an afternoon’s read?

THE FIXER by Bernard Malamud

All of the above?

BRIAN DOYLE ,novelist, Mink River (University of Oregon Press) editor of Portland magazine

Hmmm. Maybe THE HORSE’S MOUTH by Joyce Cary. Best novel I ever read, period, but not one that many people have on their shelves. Also made into a terrific movie, which is a rare case of a glorious novel being made into a glorious movie. The few others I know: LITTLE BIG MAN, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, LORD OF THE RINGS, THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, maybe THE ENGLISH PATIENT, maybe MASTER AND COMMANDER.

Daniel OLIVAS, novelist The Book of Want (University of Arizona Press)

The Old Man’s Love Story by Rudolfo Anaya

I interviewed him for the first print. Enjoy the list-making edition of the Los Angeles Angeles Review of Books regarding this novel. It’s quite beautiful but did not receive the kind of coverage it should have.

The Old Man’s Love Story by Rudolfo Anaya

Micheal ORTHOFER ,editor, eminence gris The Complete Review

Way too much gets way too overlooked, but I guess I’d suggest: “Where Tigers are at Home” by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès (which seems to have gotten almost no review- and little reader-attention). Runner-up: “Tirza” by Arnon Grunberg, which got a bit more attention but nowhere what it deserves (it’s a best-of-year-contender) — perhaps overshadowed by Herman Koch’s somewhat similar (and considerably inferior) “The Dinner”.Still: that’s just the tip of the overlooked iceberg.

Where Tigers are at Home by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

BEN FOUNTAIN, award winning author, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco)

…Several come to mind:

Little Big Man by Thomas Berger. I don’t know if it could be called tragically overlooked, given that it was made into a blockbuster movie in the late 60s, but nobody talks about it much these days. I think it’s one of the great American novels. Top ten for sure, maybe top five.

We Agreed to Meet Just Here by Scott Blackwood. A lovely, short novel that came out about 7-8 years ago. It won the AWP award, and Scott subsequently got a Whiting Award on the strength of it. It’s just about perfect. His forthcoming novel from Knopf is even better.

The Gay Place by Billy Brammer. A novel of Texas politics, published 1961 or ’62….

“We Agreed to Meet Just Here” by Scott Blackwood

Robert Mccrum , editor, The Observer, author, Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language (WW Norton)

Hadrian the seventh by Frederick Rolfe

Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe

ALLAN Gurganus ,novella-ist, Local Souls

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page By G.B. Edwards—this is the single novel by a bureaucrat who spent his life on the Isle of Guernsey. G.B. Edwards imagined a trilogy of such works but he died in a mainland boarding house with this manuscript under his bed. The landlady got it published in 1981. The work is erotic, tumultuous and heroic as a Beethoven symphony. We get the twisted history of incestuous island families. We get the German occupation of the island during World War II. Love stories are offset by men battling the ocean and its creatures. This novel, a rare instance of Folk Art in narrative, deserves a larger readership, a secure place in our literature.

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page By G.B. Edwards

Gary Fisketjon ,veteran editor at Knopf

Indeed, I could fill a volume in that category with many new additions every fucking year. But given that we’re in 2013, I’d say that Steve Yarbrough’s THE REALM OF LAST CHANCES has been overlooked most tragically. That’s one reason my only lingering resolution – to quit smoking – always fails to get any real traction. …

The Realm of Last Chances by Steve Yarbrough

Billy Giraldi ,novelist, Busy Monsters (WW Norton) critic , essayist, long form journalist editor, Agni

Indeed. Caleb Williams by William Godwin and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Neglected masterworks of suspense both of them. Divinely written.

Caleb Williams by William Godwin

Hari Kunzru ,novelist, Men Without Gods (Knopf)

I’ll nominate Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell To Earth. Bowie fans have seen the movie, but the book is beautiful, poised. As if Richard Yates wrote SF.

The Man Who Fell To Earth by Walter Tevis

Joseph Epstein ,short fiction writer,The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff: And Other Stories (HMH), essayist, former editor, American Scholar

1. Lampedusa’s The Leopard 2. Sandor Marai’s Embers. I’m not sure if these are tragically overlooked or merely insufficiently well known, but both are swell novels.

Embers by Sandor Marai

Sven Birkerts, Literary Man for All Seasons, editor, Agni memoirist, writing program administrator (Bennington),

I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch
The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz
The Death of a Beekeeper Lars Gustafsson

I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch

Tom Piazza ,novelist, City of Refuge (Ecco) screenwriter (Treme), musical connosieur

I’d have to vote for Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann, in the H.T. Lowe-Porter translation. Mann is underread in general these days, but Buddenbrooks was a masterpiece. People tend to think it’s just a 19th-Century family saga, but it’s really a book that combines 19th-Century techniques and sonorities with startlingly modern technical strategies that get missed because they work wholly in the service of the narrative. It’s almost like a Mahler symphony — one foot in the 19th Century and one stepping off the cliff into the unspooling chaos of the 20th. Very important to get the old Lowe-Porter translation. Random House made the mistake of letting somebody “update” the translation and they ruined it, sort of the way Pevear and Volokhonsky ruin the Russians.

Among contemporary books, Lives of the Monster Dogs should have made Kirsten Bakis a big literary star.

Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis

Susan Bergholz, non-pareil and sage literary agent (Eduardo Galeano et al)

Here you go; can’t do just one!LOG OF THE S.S. THE MRS. UNGUENTINE by Stanley Crawford, simply the best book about marriage ever written in the US by a living treasure POWER OF THE DOG by Thomas Savage/dead now, extraordinary workAN IMAGINARY LIFE by David Malouf–a pitch perfect novel, except for the Afterword.THE TIME OF OUR SINGING by Richard Powers, our most brilliant and amazing male novelist; makes Franzen and company sound as though they are writing soap operas. Prepare for his novel out in January, ORFEO/stunning!!!

I forgot one very impt novel: CARAMELO by Sandra Cisneros
And another one: IN THE PALM OF DARKNESS by Mayra Montero
And: AND THEIR DOGS CAME WITH THEM by Helena Maria Viramontes.
Ok–I’ll stop now!!!!!!!

LOG OF THE S.S. THE MRS. UNGUENTINE by Stanley Crawford

href=”http://www.identitytheory.com/blake-bailey/”&gt;,literary biographer Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (Knopf)

THE LOST WEEKEND, of course, and Anthony Powell’s first novel, AFTERNOON MEN<a.

Praise Saps the Strength

West Newton No More 2013
(photo: Robert Birnbaum)

I know some smart guys and some down-to-earth guys and some well-read guys and some politically astute and committed guys, but very few guys who are all of those things, and Robert Birnbaum is: he’s one of those invaluable voices out there fighting the good fight and keeping reading and thinking alive. He’s one of the our most incisive and important interviewers.

Jim Shepard

There’s something drastically wrong with Robert Birnbaum.
He takes literature seriously, but he isn’t self-important about it. He spends his time talking to other writers and asking intelligent questions, and – even worse – he reads their books before he talks to them. He’s no literary theory robot; he encounters books with his own mind and heart, and he thinks this is an important thing to do with his life. I mean, he’s just begging for trouble.

Tom Piazza

Part Malcolm Cowley, part Terry Gross, some Charlie Rose mixed in for good measure, Robert Birnbaum is a gift to literature. He cares about books that matter and conducts conversations that make a mark. This is a rare and beautiful thing. I wish we’d finally master cloning because we could use more of him in the world.

William Giraldi

“I never know quite what book I have written till I talk to Robert Birnbaum about it. Some people do ‘close reading.’ His can be as interior as Vermeer, as sweeping as the Hubble eye. We all count on him. He helps us see.”

Allan Gurganus

I don’t live in Boston, so I am not among the “Our” who get to claim Robert as their own. Yet once every few years, when I am in town whoring for one book or another, he is My Man in Boston, if only for an hour. And it is always the most delicious, cracked-up, dressed-down, battery-charging hour. Robert is a reminder that the deeper, grander pursuits of our culture — art, polemics, fine essay — are all around and ever worth stopping for. May I confess to you? I love him madly.

Mary Roach’

Thank God for Robert Birnbaum.

Arthur Phillips

Whenever I talk with Robert Birnbaum I get the feeling that he sees me more clearly than just about anybody. Astonishingly, he doesn’t appear to blame me for an of it, which is why he’s My Man in Boston. If you love books, he should be yours, too.

Richard Russo

Me personally I think Our Man in Boston is better than a stick in the eye. There’s just no question about this, I feel. I think people who think Our Man in Boston is not as good as a stick in the eye are not reading Our Man in Boston at all, or have what we call in the Catholic world a fecking enormous beam of timber in the old orbital socket. Trust me on this one. I have read a lot of muck in my lifetime – I mean, I read all of Jerzy Kosinsky, before I recovered – and Our Man in Boston is just not, no matter what anyone says, muck. Trust me.

Brian Doyle

An interviewer with personality, curiosity, and no fear — clearly Birnbaum will never make it in the big time. Glad he’s on my radar screen, though.

George Scialabba

George. We knew that. For years. And now the timeless Birnbaum conversations come to roost in a better, at least a more appropriate, place. About time.Read them all. Start anywhere. [This assumes Robert will get on the stick and give us some links…] Doing so will pay big dividends. Literati will be enthralled. Izzy [Robert is merely his nom d’émigré] will feel even more important (and more significantly will get that frisson he so seldom gets, as when he’s accorded respect) because someone paid attention. But most importantly, saying all this will help keep Izzy off my back, and make him continue to owe me big time.There are a lot of conversations, silently (well, I speak figuratively), slowly accreted into a different sort of literary treasure, ready to be re-re-discovered, again and again. You may end up thinking, “Robert Birnbaum spreads himself too thin.” But there’s a lot of him to spread. I speak, of course, literarily and culturally: I’ll withhold judgment on the intellectual, until he shows a little more serious intent with the copy editing. There’s always more of what we love Robert for—never shutting up. Hail to a major repository of the national cultural treasure of his 25+ years worth of conversations with noteworthy authors. As a conversationalist, James Lipton, of a different era and cultural medium, has nothing on Robert—and Robert is younger, cuter, and available.
Go Cubs.

Howard Dinin

Robert Birnbaum is a great guy, an incisive interviewer, and a true dog-lover, whose only defect lies in rooting for the wrong baseball team.

George Saunders

Things You Didn’t Know

I’m going to risk looking foolish with the perilous assertion that there are some things you don’t know (which are worth knowing)that I know. Ah, but then what is a well-lived life that does not jeopardize one’s hard acquired and cherished coin of credence?

Untitled (Girl Covered in Grass) Ezven Sobek

Untitled (Men with Guns) by Ezven Sobek

It’s probable that you are unaware of writer Brian Doyle—ensconced some distance from major centers of ambition, Doyle besides occupying his daylight hours as the editor of Portland Magazine has authored over a dozen books—of which Mink River (Oregon University Press), his most recent novel and Bin Laden’s Bald Spot (Red Hen Press). Doyle has taken up weekly residence at The American Scholar’s website. Introducing himself, Doyle asserts

He’s riveted by the way people tell and speak and sing their stories, and he thinks that often the very best pieces of writing are the ones where the writer leaps out of the way of a story as it passes from teller to listener.s riveted by the way people tell and speak and sing their stories, and he thinks that often the very best pieces of writing are the ones where the writer leaps out of the way of a story as it passes from teller to listener.

Bin Laden’s Bald Spot by Brian Doyle

Twenty-two year old Jennifer Lawrence already has a substantial body of work and is currently riding a wave of adulation for her performance in what I find to be an Oscar nominated undistinguished film. Among other projects for which she has been reportedly slated is the lead in Serena, the movie being made from Ron Rash’s best selling novel. Prior to her Hunger Games celebrity,Lawrence appeared in a number of small films, The Burning Plain, the heart rending Like Crazy and her bravura performance in Winter’s Bone with the protean Mr John Hawkes—a film that may contain the best performance of her life.

Did you know that Pittsburgh is the 4th most literate city in the USA?

I recently noticed an auto commercial where the salesman has a dog as a prospective buyer and, of course, is hustling the hound to make a sale. I don’t where in the arc of a trend this falls but apparently Subaru has been working this theme diligently having created an octet of advertisements linking dogs and autos. And if that isn’t sufficiently cute, British photographer Martin Usborne hasa new monograph The Silence of Dogs in Cars(Kehrer Verlag),Uzburn opines, “that the project is, sort of a metaphor for how we silence animals in our lives, including, our own animal natures.”

Shep by Martin Uzborne

Speaking of the superlative and inimitable John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone, The Sessions), I recently discovered him in Miranda July’s first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, a charming narrative, whose subplots dovetail in resolving themselves in pleasantly surprising ways

The real world tournament, World Baseball Classic, begins its Second Round (Modified Double Elimination) in Tokyo and Miami March 8 through the March 16 culminating in the Championship round single elimination) in San Francisco beginning March 16. The competition includes the usual baseball playing nations and Italy, the Netherlands,Spain,Israel and theCzech Republic.

Talk about arcane knowledge I chanced to read an article described a new product filling in a burgeoning niche in the American marketplace—Wisk Deep Clean a solution to the growing invisible stain crisis.

From a faux documentary about invisible stains

Currently reading Benediction by Kent Harouf (Knopf)

Who is the Real Brian Doyle?

Mink River by Brian Doyle

Ever since I came across and enjoyed Brian Doyle‘s only novel (but 10th or 12th book) Mink River I have been interested in his work. Then came Bin Laden’s Bald Spot (Red Hen Press), a collection of stories, and it became clear to me that I had became something of a Doyle fanboy.

The Wet Engine by Brian Doyle

Doyle’s The Wet Engine: Exploring Mad, Wild Miracle of Heart Brian Doyle ( University of Oregon Press) ruminates on matters of the heart based on his infant son’s need for heart surgery. Originally published in 2005 it has been republished with a new foreword
by Dr. Marla Salmon, dean of the University of Washington School of Nursing. Doyle explains,

My son Liam was born nine years ago. He looked like a cucumber on steroids. He was fat and bald and round. He looked healthy as a horse. He wasn’t. He was missing a chamber in his heart, which is a problem, as you need four chambers for smooth conduct through this vale of fears and tears, and he only had three chambers, so pretty soon he had an open-heart surgery, during which doctors cut him open and iced down his heart and shut it down for an hour or so while they worked on repair

Cynthia Ozick weighs in,

Brian Doyle’s spirit is catching: it will catch you up, and soon you will have caught on to everything he feels and ruminates over and marvels at, and you will comprehend what poetry is and does. And you will know from the throb of The Wet Engine, this unique and beautiful book written in celestial prose, that Brian Doyle is a glorious a poet as he is a father; and vice versa.

Brian Doyle has also recently published a novel (though I don’t know why it isn’t a novella),Cat’s Food (Corby Books) based on the conceit— What if a man who lost his foot in a war decides, many years later, to find it? “ This will, of course, give you pause to examine more closely this Oregonian writer who has previously escaped your attention— “Among the more astounding and puzzling honors for his work are the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ 2008 Award in Literature, and the University of Notre Dame’s Father Robert Griffin Award for Writing, in 2010. That award earned him a free steak dinner, which he remembers fondly.”

Currently reading Battleborn by Claire Watkins (Riverhead)

“Written in Celestial Prose”

“Written in celestial prose” is how the how the inimitable Cynthia Ozick describes Brian Doyle’s new opusThe Wet Engine Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart(Oregon State University Press)

Internet tourists and visitors to this far flung place may recall that I have been a vocal enthusiast of Oregonian Brian Doyle based on his first novel Mink River
and his latest story collection Bin Laden’s Bald Spot.`

Here’s how Doyle begins The Wet Engine:

My son Liam was born nine years ago. He looked like a cucumber on steroids. He was fat and bald and round. He looked healthy as a horse. He wasn’t. He was missing a chamber in his heart, which is a problem, as you need four chambers for smooth conduct through this vale of fears and tears, and he only had three chambers, so pretty soon he had an open-heart surgery, during which doctors cut him open and iced down his heart and shut it down for an hour or so while they worked on repair…

Though it is a slight volume (128 pages) it astonishes me how much Brian Doyle was able to compress into this story that involves parental love, medical science, spiritual healing and the super sized metaphor that is attached to the vital organ known as the heart.

THere is much to admire in this book and much to savor —as Brian Doyle intones. “Romance is a small sea in a vast ocean.The heart leaps in so many directions at once.”

Note This

My new friend (at least in the small world of literature) Brian Doyle, whose recent works(Mink River and Bin Laden’s Bald Spot) I have extolled in this space and others, has taken to sharing some of his amusements with me. Brian, among other things, edits Portland Magazine. In that sinecure he he has created a number of form letters so as to pursue his work with, uh,greater efficiency:

A Note on Submissions

We do not accept poems about cats, guns, cats with guns, or guns used on cats, however delightful the prospect of the latter would be. We do not accept poems in which French words suddenly appear, or the poet praises one or more breasts of his or her acquaintance, including his or her own. We do not accept poems about God unless the word God does not appear. We do not accept poems about poems. We do not accept poems about the artistic process, the arduous nature of eliciting poetry from the trammeled soul, the agony of poetry, the primacy of poetry among the written arts, or anything whatsoever to do with poetry. We approach the reading of poems having to do with nature or landscape warily, as if hunting elk with a bow, but we have in fact accepted several. We relish poems about sports if they do not draw any sweeping conclusions about character, personal and/or national, or use sports as metaphor. We accept poems about insects. We do not accept poems about religions, unless the religion is reduced to human proportions, which is where religions all started to begin with. We accept poems about birds. We accept poems about food. We look favorably on poems in which wood appears in any form whatsoever. We accept poems about chess. We do not accept poems about cars and driving and the vast American yearning and loneliness as represented by cars and highways. We do not accept poems about poets. We do not accept poets with poems. We decline to lunch with poets no matter what the ostensible context for said lunch. We approach lunches with novelists warily, keeping both hands on the old wallet. We do lunch with essayists, in a heartbeat. We decline to meet with artists to see their vast and inchoate portfolios. We do not publish poems about dance in any form. We decline to read or entertain work of any kind in which the author or artist specifies his or her copyright with that little copyright mark. We decline to read work from authors or artists who use only lower-case letters in his or her names.

Cordially,

Brian Doyle
Editor, Portland Magazine
University of Portland

Currently reading Ghosting by Kirby Gann (Ig Publishing)

The Best List of 2011

Russell Banks Copright 2011 Robert Birnbaum

As you are being besieged by the predictable onslaught of seasonal and year-end commercial and media gestures, rest assured that my list is no mere journalistic contrivance but more in the spirit of Umberto Eco’s catalogue of civilization. There is, of course, no such thing as a best list but employing such a fiction to get your attention seems reasonable to me. No?

Anyway, in no particular order:

Luminarium-Alex Shakar(Soho)
Men in the Making– Bruce Machart(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The Sisters Brothers– Patrick Dewitt (Ecco)
The Barbarian Nurseries -Hector Tobar (FSG)
Doc– Mary Doria Russell (Random House)
Remembering Ben Clayton -Steve Harrigan (knopf)
Galore– Michael Crummey(Other Press)
The Lost Memory of Skin– Russell Banks (Ecco)
Love and Shame and Love-Peter Ormer (Little Brown)
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self-Danielle Evans (Riverhead)
To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal (Little Brown)
21: The Story of Roberto Clemente -Wilfred Santiago (Fantagraphics)
Bin Laden’s Bald Spot-Brian Doyle (Red Hen Press)
You Think That’s Bad: Stories by Jim Shepard (Knopf)
Broken Irish-Edward Delaney (Turtle Point Press)
Once the River by Bonnie Jo Campbell (WW Norton)
Rules of Civility-Amor Towles(Viking)
Chango’s Beads and Two Toned Shoes-William Kennedy (Viking)
Conquistadora– Esmeralda Santiago (Knopf)
The Cut–George Pelecanos (Reagan Arthur)

Lake Oswego’s Favorite Son

Though I am not given to pandering or following already trod paths(or so I would like to think) I could not help but notice the excess of readers drawn to this small backwater web journal by my recent publication of one of Brian Doyle’s literary bon bons. Which is a long winded way of saying that I am pleased to offer up another of Doyle’s delectables. Here’s

Feral Boy Scouts: a Note

The ballots are all counted, the results are in, the pundits have pundered all over the floor, but one item remains unsolved – feral Boy Scouts. They are rife among us, with their tattered merit badges and snarling attacks on cherub-cheeked toddlers for the maple bars we have “borrowed” from the vestry after church, and if we do not address this problem, the terrorists will have won.

First, we must all admit, in public, in a circle, with our index fingers touching in a friendly but non-intimate manner, that we have all seen feral Boy Scouts, every evening at dusk when they come out of the hedges to feed, and we have egregiously ignored them, we have pretended not to hear their gnashing teeth and fluttering woolen vests, and for this we beg forgiveness of Lord Robert Baden-Powell, from whom all blessings flow. We have seen them, catching carp with their bare hands, and building little tent cities out of carp skins, and teaching minnows to swim in arrow-shaped formations, and wearing their ceremonial masks made from raccoon pelts and police parade tape. We have seen them lurking in the thickets outside firehouses, hoping for a scrap of baby-back rib with a honey sauce with just a hint of cinnamon and nutmeg for a sort of sugary nutty flavor that really elevates the meat. We have heard their eerie wailing from the ridges at night, where they gather in small packs and worship the relentless life force that is Joyce Carol Oates. We have found their tiny arrows embedded in our house cats, which made us want to leave handguns on the porch so the feral Scouts could just for heaven’s sake finish the job, as we cannot stand cats, and have many times surreptitiously urinated on them on ethical grounds.

Second, we must confront the true source of the problem, and not spend all our dwindling resources on mere culling of the herds, and empty and shallow public relations gestures like scattering fresh redolent merit badges along their game trails, or leaving mounds of almond-paste croissants in snowy fields, and spending inordinate amounts of hard-earned tax dollars on such ludicrous projects as remote-sensor cameras and trip wires to obtain photographs for the usual bleeding-heart photopornography journals that some readers like to get in their homes, or the homes of their mistresses, specifically 254 Knox Street in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Third, we should honestly face the immorality of the ankle trap, and recall that they wear those excellent tough little hiking boots, the ones that lace up high above the ankle and can repel rocket attacks, like Johnny Unitas used to wear, and if we are going to use humane traps, we should design roomy traps papered with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and equipped with natty little badge sashes, and excellent walking sticks cut from hickory and ash, and the cool things that hold neckerchiefs together, and little folding chairs like the ones found in the basement of the minister’s home, whether he is home or on Knox Street in Fort Lee, ostensibly visiting the sick and bereaved, which if that’s what comforting the bereaved is like, I am so there.

In conclusion, the problem of feral Boy Scouts is one that neither major party has addressed, and it is the one subject on this green earth that Joyce Carol Oates has not written a novel about. Therefore it devolves to each of us, in our innermost soul and conscience, to reach out, in a friendly and non-intimate manner, for our fellow citizens, small and vicious though they be, and give them easier access to the heavy-gauge weaponry promised and protected by the foundational documents of these United States. The time for false cooperation and lip service has passed, and the moment of honest cooperation across the aisle is upon us. We can solve the twin problems of feral Boy Scouts and cats in general – but we must act now, before the minister gets back across the George Washington Bridge.

Let me also point out or remind you that I commended Brian Doyle’s recent short story collection Bin Laden’s Bald Spot (Red Hen Press) and I am aghast that other so called literary gatekeepers continue to be blinded by scales before their eyes.

Currently Reading The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak (Bellevue Literary Press)