Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle

Hardcover, 240 pgs, Pub Mar 9th 2010 by Free Press (first pub March 9th 2009) ISBN13: 9781439153024 Awards: Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Nonfiction, Debut Author (2010)

It could be the thing I like best about Boyle’s stories are the changes made to one word of common phrases so that the meanings come up again, fresh and clear and relatable, like “wash your iniquities,” or “I hear your cancer’s in intermission.”

The other thing I enjoy Father Boyle’s work for is to hear how he takes the thoughts and work of others to meditate on. In this book he quotes the poet Mary Oliver many times, Rumi, Mother Teresa, Pema Chödrön, among others. There is always something interesting in what those leaders of thought say, and also in how Father Boyle chooses to apply their lessons to his daily life and ministry.

And let’s put this in perspective. I am not a religious person, having become inured to such teachings in Catholic schools—how did they manage to strip the joy and beauty out of love, for cripes’ sake? And then, of course, the scandal that enveloped the Catholic Church, revealing even ordained ministers to be hypocrites…

Since then I just try to pay attention. When goodness appears in our daily life, what happens? When evil appears, what happens? How to deal with evil? How to consider the bad things people do? How to love the people who do these bad things? Father Boyle gives us his answers to these questions. He’s interesting, and he seems to be able to transform bad attitudes into good ones.

He has written only two books, both of which are wonderful to read, but are also good texts for meditation, since his writing style are short…parables, really. Boyle has a M.A. in English, and his ability to write may reflect his interest in reading. But take for example, his paraphrase of Mother Teresa:

“We’ve just forgotten that we belong to each other.”

You can put that at the beginning of a tale or at the end. It says it all.

This book was written some years ago and I am reviewing it in 2017, when I discovered it. It turns out Sarah Silverman interviewed Father Greg Boyle in Nov 2017 shortly after his second book, Barking to the Choir was published. Her questions ask this important religious leader how we are supposed to deal with someone who does wrong, but on a spectacularly large scale...not a homeboy, but a Trump? Father Boyle has been ill some time, suffering from leukemia, so all of us who know of his work are eager to hear how he would respond.

Sarah Silverman's interview with Father Boyle comes at the end of her piece (start 15:33).



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Kill 'Em and Leave by James McBride

Hardcover, 256 pgs Pub April 5th 2016 by Spiegel & Grau (first published February 2nd 2016) ISBN13: 9780812993509

It looks like McBride did his interviews for this book about music phenom James Brown in 2012, long before this book was published in 2016. In the Foreword McBride crankily reveals he was being taken to the cleaners in a divorce settlement and he needed to write this book—any book—to bring in a little money.

Any flaws this book contains then become perfectly understandable, and McBride keeps up that level of honesty and casual explanation all the way through. This is no stilted celebrity biography covering well-trod ground. This is down home and personal, gentle conversations with the men (they were mostly men) and women who knew most about James Brown and his life.

At the end of his story, McBride highlights the 62-year-old grandmother journalist Sue Summer who, writing for the financially strapped Newberry Observer in South Carolina, has kept in the public eye the disgraceful carnage made of James Brown’s $100 million estate. Brown’s will stipulated the bulk of his estate should go to educate poor children in Georgia and South Carolina, the states where he grew up, but within days of his death on Christmas Day in 2006, his family had arrayed a bevy of lawyers to contest the will citing ‘undue influence.’

That ‘influence’ would have been the South Carolina lawyer David Cannon who had been hired by Brown to extricate him from IRS charges of underpayments. Cannon and Buddy Dallas, a Georgia lawyer, were white men who had never worked for a black boss before. They brought Brown back from destitution when his act suffered the toll performers experience when they age, and when the IRS realized they’d been robbed. They set up what they’d thought was an unbreakable trust serving poor children and then suffered personal attacks and rake-backs as the trust was contested.

James Brown played a role in McBride’s youth—in every young black man’s youth, is McBride’s contention—being a role model and human divinity of soul. His concerts and records made a difference in how the world turned. The 1960’s-70’s were the height of his popularity, but he made a mark that lasted to his death, and McBride argues, will long after. “Kill ‘em and leave,” Brown exhorted the younger men he mentored. Don’t hang around after a concert for folks to pick your carcass clean. Make ‘em wait.

McBride spins his story out slowly, the way he collected it, through innumerable interviews with band members and managers, friends, and family. He is conversational and not cruel when he tells us the plain facts of James Brown’s lonely upbringing, early incarceration, exceptional singing talent, and enormous drive. Brown never wanted to be hungry or lonely or dependent ever again, especially to the white man, who he feared.

There was a moment near the end of McBride’s story about Brown that widened out for me into a real down-home truth we all learn eventually: “there’s talent everywhere.”

“I remember having lunch years ago with a legendary record executive in L.A., bending his ear about a great unsigned singer I knew. The guy listened, nodded, yawned, reached for his triple-decker sandwich, and took a bite. ‘Great singers,’ he said between chews, ‘are a dime a dozen.’”

That’s right. That’s right for every field. If they don’t have ‘em, they’ll make ‘em. But more importantly, and listen to this: those executives—they aren’t so special either. They do a job, but somehow we’ve allowed them to capture an unnatural percentage of the take. They have nothing without the talent and the rest of the organization, but you wouldn’t know it talking to them. But there is a truth in that it takes more than talent to be a great star, if that is where you are aiming. It takes more determination than talent.

Brown had determination. He wanted to present his best side to the world, so no one would have cause to put him down. After shows he would sit through 3 hours of treatment under the hair dryer to get his pompadour back in shape…and then he would leave without seeing the fans waiting for him. Kill ‘em and leave.

I loved the way McBride told this story, mixing a little of himself in there. He’d gone to Columbia Journalism School in 1980, so was undoubtedly aware that the reporter should scrupulously keep himself out of the story. But his ease with the scene and his knowledge of the backstory, his understanding of the silences between questions and his sense of the real meaning of James Brown gave us the mystery of the man and a deep sense of his place in pantheon of black culture. I loved hearing the familiar names, Rev Al Sharpton and Michael Jackson among them, and seeing how they fit in this picture.

It’s a comfortable, unstrained telling of a difficult life built on success. Race is everywhere in this book, though it is rarely mentioned. The fact of America’s race situation both made James Brown who he was as a performer, but it constrained him as a human being. McBride gives us that, shows us how that was. A book by McBride is cause for celebration, no matter that the editing was a little off, or he repeated sections. This is a story you won’t want to miss.

It was fine to look back at James Brown at his peak, singing "It's a Man's World" in Paris in 1967. And McBride mentions the legendary 1964 TAMI concert in Santa Monica , a warm-up slot for a Rolling Stones performance that Mick Jagger forever after regretted because James Brown & The Famous Flames burned the place down, making the Stones look like a high school band. Below find a link to the full concert that night:



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Lonesome Lies Before Us by Don Lee

Hardcover, 336 pages Expected publication: June 6th 2017 by W. W. Norton Company ISBN13: 9780393608816

Don Lee’s novels have always resonated with me and towards the end of his latest, I began to understand why. Lee is resolutely plebeian in his writing: he gives his characters, no matter how wealthy or learned, no place to hide from our judgments of them. The business of living is messy, he seems to say, though some might look like they have an easier time of it, it ain’t necessarily so.

Lee also isn’t snooty about genre: there is a touch of romance hidden within the complexities of the married lives he delivers in Lonesome. People aren’t settled, despite their legal status. The intensely personal and minutely calibrated nature of the characters, however, elevate his art above the ordinary. Reading his work is just fun.

One of the things that Lee does exceptionally well in all his books is give us an idea of what exactly people do in their jobs, and what makes each job an opportunity for creativity and excellence. While many authors might hint at hidden depths, say, in cleaning a celebrity’s suite in a five-star hotel or in laying wall-to-wall carpet in a decaying hovel, Lee takes the worker’s eye view and relishes in explanations of how it can be done elegantly. It’s interesting. Readers develop understandings and sympathies where before there were none. (The government should hire Lee to analyze labor equivalencies in the workplace. We would come out with a far flatter and more just wage structure than we have today.)

At heart, this novel is about the creative process and the winding path each person’s dreams take as their lives progress. Yadin was a musician ever since he can remember, writing songs, both lyrics and tunes, that people want to hear. He sang, too, but experienced such severe stage fright that it began to take a toll on his health. He had to quit touring, and his life narrowed to a pinpoint of casual work & sleep as he tried to cope with his illness. One day, chancing one day upon a few lines of spoken poetry, his capacity for song is awoken again.

Poetry and song: the parallels are many. Those readers who relish language will love Lee’s focus on the way words work to draw us in, to inspire and delight us. In addition, there is something terribly exciting and beautiful about capturing the process of creation. Moments of creative flow described on the page are exhilarating for what similarities they bear to one's own experience. We don’t tire reading of someone who has managed to cobble together something unique from scraps; conversely we yearn for more.

Yadin’s mind was busy with “a thread of melody noodling inside his head” as he lay carpet; he would stop to call his landline and leave a message of the tune so he wouldn’t forget. Later, a few words and phrases burbled up from his subconscious which he’d capture on a piece of masking tape with his Sharpie.

Life is complex, and Lee relishes that complexity, carefully unpicking the tangled threads that got us from happy days of infatuation to a limping marriage, paradoxically featuring both not enough sex and too many children. His characters are irredeemably flawed, all of them, though they are talented enough that others may look to them to lead the way. Their failures are heartbreaking, and are perhaps as much like us individually as any characters in any book.

If I have any criticism of this novel, it is Lee’s two strong female characters. Each is carefully drawn and multi-dimensional, Jeanette being Yadin’s long-time companion and the daughter of his boss. The slow reveal of her character’s history is fascinating in its surprises but one has the sense at the end that here is a woman struggling to free herself from a constricting web of her own making. I personally thought she was capable enough (at her age) to have made a more proactive choice than the one Lee chose for her. In the end, she was not an appealing partner for Yadin.

Mallory, the celebrity folksinger, is familiar to the extent that we feel we may have met her before—her type, certainly. Mallory wanted authenticity in her art and had to settle for less to get by, but she was always looking for that real experience again. She had most of what she needed most of the time, but she was aging out of the business of love songs. Lee may have made her harder, less sympathetic, and less vulnerable than strictly necessary. I bought it all until the end when I thought she would have (at her age) made a different choice.

This novel of sophisticated adult dilemmas gives us confused folks who make one choice as young adults and different choices in the fullness of years. Yadin was completely sure, in his later years, what he wanted. Lee did not tie his novel up neatly but showed us the messy lives of people making choices we don't like. If aspects of this novel had romance-genre undertones, the overtones were richer and deeper and far more complex.

Another GR reviewer made the terrific suggestion that this novel would make a great indie film, and he is completely right. In the hands of the right actors, this is a star-making vehicle. All that unrequited or misdirected love can play out as music.

An interview with Don Lee by Terry Hong on the Bookslut blog shows us how Lee agonizes over the publication process of novel-writing, a phenomenon which is examined more closely in this novel when Yadin writes a couple songs and then agonizes over their method of release. Paste Quarterly has a book trailer featuring an exclusive Will Johnson track of the title song.




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The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei translated by Canaan Morse

This wonderful short novel, Ge Fei’s first translated to English, has just been published by NYRB as a Classics Original. The cover copy calls it a “comic novel” and it is...in the sense of the straight man in a comic duo undergoing relationship trouble, family trouble, and job trouble in a fast modernizing Beijing. Our hero—we only ever learn his surname, Cui (pronounced Ts-wei)—plays the straight man role to the end, never quite losing his nerve, though he comes close, while we watch helplessly.

Cui is not completely destitute, except in terms of money, love, and friendship. He has skills. He can put together hi-fi sound systems that audiofiles want to buy. When forced to move from his sister’s unused apartment one winter, Cui develops a sound system that should qualify as “the best in the world,” for any discriminating buyer in China, in hopes that the profit will give him enough to buy a small courtyard for himself to live in.

What elevates this novel is the ordinary man quality, the sense we have of a human fleck bobbing on a wind-tossed sea over which he has no control. The bad things that happen are outside of his control, and though he makes plans and efforts to extricate himself, there is a certain inexorable flow to his outcomes.

This novel is not especially dark, though it has delicious elements of horror and mystery. We become genuinely terrified when a mysterious wealthy stranger offers to buy the "best sound system in the world," but who exudes a hard inflexibility and sense of ferocity when challenged...or when asked to pay. There is some evidence that he has done damage to those that oppose him.

Who wears the invisibility cloak in this novel? Cui tells us that

"In the 1990s, Mou Qishan, the celebrity tycoon, was a household name in Beijing. He liked calligraphy, climbing mountains, and hanging out with female movie stars—all an open secret. Other rumors, however, told of his eccentric and often unpredictable behavior. The wildest story I heard was that he could show up at any event unseen because he wore an invisibility cloak…"

When Mou died, Cui bought a pair of hexagonal Autograph speakers from Mou’s estate. He used them to construct the “best sound system in the world.” It could be the invisibility cloak passed from person to person with ownership of the speakers.

When Cui’s childhood friend Jiang Songping played a joke on Horsewhip Xu, an old man in his neighborhood, Cui had a personal revelation:

"...the best attributes of anyone or anything usually reside on the surface, which is where, in fact, all of us live out our lives. Everyone has an inner life, but it’s best if we leave it alone. For as soon as you poke a hole through that paper window, most of what’s inside simply won’t hold up to scrutiny."

What do we take from this? If you are wearing the invisibility cloak, you not only cannot be seen, there isn’t much worth seeing? It does seems as though once ownership of the Autograph speakers changed hands, the “freed man,” as it were, becomes once again visible, and able to express himself “on the surface,” without us having to look through “the hole in the paper window” to their inner thoughts.

One of the more intriguing things Ge does in this novel is debunk the integrity of Jiang Songping, Cui’s best and only friend, and he does it using a pomegranate. Jiang Songping was a clever boy, but Cui’s mother could see right away he was going to be the kind of person who owned people. Jiang had a way of sounding authoritative, even when he spoke rubbish. All of us come under his spell to some degree when he states categorically that all pomegranates, no matter how big or how long they've grown, contain the exact same number of seeds, 365 to be exact. Our eyes pop a bit with this news, for who has ever actually counted pomegranate seeds, and who could dispute this entrancing fact? Later, we learn with the chagrin we share with Cui’s sister that, in fact, Jiang lied on this occasion, and perhaps on many others.

One of the more poignant moments in the book was when Cui returned to the neighborhood where he grew up and discovered it much changed:

"Human memory really is unreliable. I could clearly remember this alley being long, wide, submerged in green shade or sprinkled with white locust flowers, and nowhere near as cramped and seedy as it looked that day…As I sat on the stoop and surveyed the cluttered street under the setting sun, I felt vaguely alienated from everything."

Not all change is good...but memory is unreliable.

This is a delightful addition to the canon coming out of China today, having none of the syrupy schmaltz that earlier, more severely censored works demonstrated. Terrific translation by Canaan Morse, and many thanks to NYRB for picking this one out to share with us. Kudos to all on this one.



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The City Baker's Guide to Country Living by Louise Miller

Louise Miller is remarkably accomplished in this debut novel about a family-less pastry chef escaping an affair with her boss in Boston, a married man, and landing at the Sugar Maple Inn in Guthrie, Vermont. All of our senses are engaged just by contemplating the premise: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Miller adds the umami ingredient, voice. Her main character, Livvy, has the wit to speak her mind and the cooking talent to go with it. What she doesn’t have before she moves to Vermont are the comforts of a home where people will love her for just who she is.

Romances are written to a formula, and some do it better than others. Miller manages to include every element of a rockin’ romance, including a prudently unconsummated sex scene with said boss late in the proceedings that proves her bonafides when it comes to one of the more difficult things to write well: sex. That this is a debut is reason for romance-lovers to celebrate. The story was inventive enough to encourage us to believe that there is more where that came from.

We are treated to the Coventry County Fair prize-winning apple pie recipe at the end of the book, though anyone who has baked before knows there is always a magic ingredient in successful baking: skill or luck. What we didn’t get, alas, were recipes for the three-tier wedding cake for Margaret’s arch-rival’s granddaughter, Emily White, which included coconut with passion-fruit curd, devil’s food with rum ganache, and lemon with fresh raspberries and white chocolate cream, all covered with fondant. But you can search those out and practice a little until her next novel yields more suggestions.

Miller herself is a pastry chef in Boston, though she gives Livvy “a splashier career” than her own. In an interview conducted by her publishers, Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, Miller tells us

"Actually, writing a pastry chef character gave me a surprise benefit: it made me more mindful in the kitchen. I found myself paying closer attention to everything I was making—especially to the tasks I can perform without thinking, like making chocolate mousse or crème brulee—wanting to capture all the details."

Truthfully, it would not have bothered me a bit to have a few more clues to successful baking left in. Who isn’t completely obsessed with TV’s The British Baking Show?

"I find that writing about food is a million times more difficult than actually making food. Baking requires precision, and I had to fight the urge to include every step of the process when writing about making dessert. Many of the baking scenes had to be edited several times because they sounded too instructional."

I don’t bake often, but when I do, I want to make sure it turns out. A few more hints to winning techniques wrapped in a romance fondant wouldn’t go astray in this reader’s opinion. Besides, if we learn a few things along the way we may not feel so guilty about taking a day or two to read about someone else pursuing their dreams.

When asked why she chose this particular story line, Miller admits that she has always been a city kid:

"I think the allure comes from the fantasy that life will be vastly different—a slower pace, a life more connected to the land and to the seasons, with space to grow a big garden, to own a little piece of land and to know it well. Life in the city requires constant negotiation—with your neighbors, with the people on the subway, in line at the coffee shop, in traffic—part of the attraction is being free from some of those pressures."

Fantasy is a big part of successful romance. The most reassuring thing about this novel was that Livvy and her fellow characters all progress to some kind of personal dream fulfillment in the course of the story. Livvy creates her own family with strong bonds, and her friends manage to wrestle her to the ground long enough for roots to form. She is not finished growing, but we leave knowing she has a solid foundation for a good life and successful career. And that is how we feel about Louise Miller, too.

This is a fine book to escape the summer heat, so rustle up a copy when it comes out August 9, 2016 and settle in for a journey that begins with flambé and ends with homemade apple pie.

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Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole

This book of essays by Teju Cole aren’t always essays: they might be scraps of thought, well-digested and to an immediate point. They are fiercely intelligent, opinionated, meaningful in a way that allow us to get to the heart of how another thinks. And does he think! Let’s be frank: many of us don’t do enough thinking, and Cole shows us the way it can be done in a way that educates, informs, and excites us.

The work in this volume are nonfiction pieces published in a wide variety of outlets and that he chose from an eight-year period of travel and almost constant writing. The emphasis in these pieces, he tells us in the Preface, is on “epiphany.” We can enjoy kernels of ideas that may have had a long gestation, but have finally burst onto the scene with a few sentences but little heavy-handedness or any of the weight of “pronouncements.” This reads like a bared heart in the midst of negotiating life, as James Baldwin says in The Fire Next Time, “as nobly as possible, for the sake of those coming after us.”

Cole references Baldwin in all these pieces in his unapologetic gaze, but he does so explicitly in several pieces, notably “Black Body” in which he tells of visiting the small town in Switzerland, Leukerbad (or Loèche-les-Bains), where Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain found its final form. Cole expands on his time in Switzerland in “Far Away From Here,” which might be my favorite of these essays. Cole tells how he was given six months to work and write in Zurich and though he did precious little writing, he was totally absorbed every day, gazing at the landscape, walking the mountains, photographing the crags, trails, and lakes, thinking, unfettered. This is someone who carries all he needs in his head, and I loved that freedom as much as he.

But how can I choose a favorite from among these pieces when each spoke of ways to approach a subject with which we have struggled—or haven’t yet…About race and class: “how little sense of shame [Americans] seemed to have,” he writes, looking at America from his upbringing in Lagos. Cole echoes Baldwin again in “Bad Laws” about Israel and its laws concerning the rights of Palestinians:

”The reality is that, as a Palestinian Arab, in order to defend yourself against the persecution you face, not only do you have to be an expert in Israeli law, you also have to be a Jewish Israeli and have the force of the Israeli state as your guarantor…Israel uses an extremely complex legal and bureaucratic apparatus to dispossess Palestinians of their land, hoping perhaps to forestall accusations of a brutal land grab.”

Earlier Baldwin reminded us that “…few liberals have any notion of how long, how costly, and how heartbreaking a task it is to gather the evidence that one can carry into court [to prove malfeasance, official or not], or how long such court battles take.” Americans looking at Israel and Palestine should be able to discern some outline of our own justifications and methods, and vice versa.

Photography is one of Cole’s special interests and he is eloquent in Section Two "Seeing Things" in discussing what makes great photography as opposed to the “dispiriting stream of empty images [that the] Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia.” And then he discusses “Death in the Browser Tab,” wherein he tells us what he sees and what he knows after retracing the steps caught by the phone footage recording Walter Scott being shot in the back by eight bullets from a .45-caliber Glock 21.

Politics is what humans do, though “the sheer quantity of impacted bullshit in politics” is clearly not something Cole relishes. In "The Reprint" Cole admits he did not vote until sixteen years after he was eligible, and when he did vote finally, for Obama, “like a mutation that happens quietly on a genetic level and later completely alters the body’s function, I could feel my relationship to other Americans changing. I had a sense—dubious to me for so long, and therefore avoided—of common cause.” He notes that Obama was “not an angry black man, the son of slaves” but a biracial outsider who invisibly worked his way to the center of the political establishment piggybacking the experience of American blacks by hiding in plain sight. The night Obama won, Cole was in Harlem.

“There was as exuberant and unscripted an outpouring of joy as I ever expect to see anywhere… Black presidents are no novelty for to me. About half my life, the half I lived in Nigeria, had been spent under their rule, and, in my mind, the color of the president was neither here nor there. But this is America. Race mattered.”

Cole will speak out in "A Reader's War" against Obama’s “clandestine brand of justice” and his “ominous, discomfiting, illegal, and immoral use of weaponized drones against defenseless strangers…done for our sakes.” He admits that Obama believes he is trying “to keep us safe,” and writes “I am not naive…and I know our enemies are not all imaginary…I am grateful to those whose bravery keeps us safe.” It is one of the most difficult questions about political and military power that we face today and Cole wrestles the issue heroically. Not any of us have yet answered this question well, and until we do, the disconnect between justice and drone strikes will continue to plague us. We have unleashed a terrible swift sword on far away lands while we continue to suffer the brutality of a thousand cuts from our own citizens. Cosmic justice?

When Cole talks about literature I experience a frisson. There is nothing quite like someone very clever and well-spoken addressing something about which one cares deeply. His insights add to my pleasure, and detract nothing. His description of the poetry of Derek Walcott remind me of the first time I encountered Walcott’s work: “This is poetry with a painterly hand, stroke by patient stroke.” I have forever thought of Walcott in this way, in color and in motion: turquoise and pale yellow, cool beige and hibiscus pink, the palest gray and an ethereal green I am not sure is water, air, or sea grass. The ocean creates tides through his work, and it seems so fresh.

When Cole writes of his visit to V.S. Naipaul in “Natives on the Boat," we sense how Cole’s initial reserve is eventually won over by Naipaul’s deeply curious and wide-ranging questions. In the very next essay, “Housing Mr. Biswas,” Cole writes an ecstatic celebration of Naipaul’s accomplishment in creating the “smart and funny, but also often petulant, mean, and unsympathetic” Mr. Biswas in Trinidad,

“an important island in the Caribbean but not a particularly influential one on the world stage…the times and places—the farms, the roads, the villages, the thrumming energy of the city, the mornings, afternoon, dusks, and nights—are described with profound and vigilant affection…it brings to startling fruition in twentieth century Trinidad the promise of the nineteenth century European novel.”

He’s right of course. Naipaul is a beloved writer of a type of novel no longer written, and perhaps now not often read.

Reading all these essays in one big gulp was a lot to digest so I am going to recommend a slower savoring. This is a book one must own and keep handy for those small moments when one wants a short, sharp shock of something wonderful. By all means read it all at once so you know where to go back to when you can dig up copies of some of the photos he talks about or want to recall how Cole manages in so few words to convey so much meaning. His is a voice thoughtful in expressing what he sees and yet so vulnerable and human I want to say—read this—this man is what’s been missing from your lives.


These collected essays will be published August 9, 2016. I read the e-galley provided to me by Netgalley and Random House. I note that some of the essays about art or photography that were initially published in newspapers sometimes were accompanied by examples of the work he discusses. In a perfect world, these would be included in the final book, but truthfully, his writing is clear and compelling enough to not make that nicety strictly necessary. Apologies to the publisher for quoting from a galley: my excuse is that the work is previously published and therefore no surprise.


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The Shaking Reeds by John Pedersen

This terrific mystery feels positively handcrafted and reminds me of my favorite music. Since childhood when different folks ask me what kind of music I like my answer has always been the same: “homemade.” That means anything not overly processed that can be listened to up close and personal and bears some relationship to its sources and its roots.

In a sense this mystery is an invitation to a mystery: how some people manage to live by their wits and their art, whether it be music, carpentry, motorbikes, surfing, or any other of a million special fascinations.

John Pedersen is a fiddler, banjo player, and owner of Amazing Grace Music store in San Anselmo, CA where he and his wife do stringed instrument repairs, among other things. I knew John in high school and by some miracle of internet he reconnected long enough to send me this marvelous mystery that brings us deep into the Irish music and vintage motorcycle scene in and around San Francisco.

Soren Rauhe plays accordion nearly every night amongst friends in the pick-up Irish music spots around San Francisco. By day he is a wave-watcher and motorcycle mechanic, restoring vintage mounts for connoisseurs and enthusiasts in the region. The rich variety of Rauhe’s interests and talents extend to being a chump for a white-skinned, blue-eyed, red-haired beauty of his childhood acquaintance who manages always to find more prosperous benefactors than himself or his best buddy, the carpenter and guitarist Sean, who is likewise smitten. The tension in the triangle offers depth of background to a foreground of recent hook-ups.

When Soren clumsily spills coffee on a woman in his local breakfast bar, that unexpected encounter becomes the entree to an accordion mystery that reaches back to San Francisco’s great earthquake in 1906.

Everything about this San Francisco mystery felt authentic, right down to the Russian rocket scientist handcrafting replacement parts for 70-year-old motorbikes, and the care the restorers take in handling the motors. The bump and scrape of setting up in houses or bars for a night of music sounded right also, as did the habitual morning scramble to gaze over rooftops to catch a glimpse of breakers on the beach.

The central mystery of the accordion and the factory in which it was fashioned was as deeply fascinating to a nonspecialist as it would be to one who repairs instruments every day. I especially love the way Soren’s expectations of the people he initially met on the phone were confounded in person: an Asian man Soren pictured as a thin intellectual with bow-tie and eyeglasses was a brawny hulk of a man and the blue-eyed Nordic type he imagined from the factory was in fact short, thin, dark, and the meanest crook.

We also get a glimpse of the path to a man’s heart in that the woman who eventually captured Soren was capable in her own right and not given to unnecessary drama, was an inventive and enthusiastic lover, and able to put together a homemade meal without undue fuss. I can verify that this is the perfect recipe for an attractive male companion as well.

Perhaps best of all, this mystery gives us a glimpse into the unimaginable mysteries of city life, of how our tangential lives glimpse and bounce off one another, unaware of the richness of the experiences going on all around us.

Because good novels are difficult to write well, especially for a full-time musician, we can’t expect that Pedersen will be able to pull off the writing schedule of a-mystery-a-year that professional crime writers do. He does have an earlier novel, featuring a bluegrass fiddler and a mystery violin, called Scroll and Curl. But I sincerely hope that one of his future novels include surfing experiences which are also part of his world. Ever since reading Finnegan’s two-part New Yorker article in the 90s about surfing, I am a complete surf-potato if such a thing exists. I adore reading about it, watching it, marveling over it. Don Winslow, another California writer, has a Boone Daniels mystery series devoted to surf buddies. Hope springs eternal, as does music, surf, and mystery.

I.Loved.This.Book.

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If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Sappho translated by Anne Carson

This marvelous collection of the extant fragments of verse attributed to Sappho is a glorious spur to the imagination. Sappho was a lyricist, a poet, a musician. It is unknown whether or not she was literate in reading and writing, but her work was collected in writing, and reprinted, but little has survived the centuries. Only one full poem, the ode to Aphrodite, survives whole at twenty-eight lines.

Bust inscribed, literally Sapfo Eresia, meaning Sappho of Eresos. Roman copy of a Greek original of the 5th century BC
attribution of photo: "P.Köln XI 429" by Masur - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons

Sappho was known and lauded throughout the ancient world for the beauty of her poems accompanied by the lyre. She wrote nuptial songs mainly, it seems, for the tenor of the fragments suggest the happy circumstance of a marriage. The Encyclopedia Britannica suggests that Sappho taught young women the arts of courtesanship, seduction, marriage which may (I speculate here) be one reason why she was so universally adored and admired.

Can we all agree that to be a brilliant courtesan requires great intelligence: a deep understanding and acceptance of human nature and desire, and enormous self-control and discipline? Add to this her apparently unparalleled skill as a poet—alas! We do not have enough of her work surviving to adequately judge, but the fragments set us to dreaming and are an undeniable spur to writers and lyricists alike. We will have to trust her contemporaries and sup upon lines like

Eros shook my
mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees

and

you burn me

Anne Carson has chosen to reprint fragments attributed to Sappho, sometimes single words, separated by brackets to indicate lost fragments. The blank spaces are fruitful places for meditation on what was once there. Sometimes the few words jump from the page

for as long as you want

or

] ] ]
]goatherd ]longing ]sweat
] ] ]
]roses ]
]
]

Does your mind race? And this

]
]
]
]
robe
and
colored with saffron
purple robe
cloaks
crowns
beautiful
]
purple
rugs
]
]

and

]Dawn with gold sandals

attribution of fragment photo: "P.Köln XI 429" by Masur - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons -

If many of the song or poem fragments are songs composed for weddings, just that concept brings a host of associations and an understanding of Sappho’s history. There is more to learn about her as an individual (she had three brothers, was married with a child, was exiled to Sicily in her twenties it is thought) but not much more. It is thought she lived from 610 B.C. to 570 B.C. A collection of her work was published during the Middle Ages in nine volumes but has not survived. Our imagination will have to suffice.

That the work of an individual has so inflamed the public imagination for such a long time is cause enough for wonder. One fragment shows an awareness of her fame

someone will remember us
I say
even in another time

Sappho was a “honeyvoiced…mythweaver,”

]nectar poured from
gold
]with hands Persuasion

The surviving fragments are a spur to the creative mind. When becoming stuck, writers could do much worse than flip through this book for its inspiration. To my mind Sappho addresses writer's block:

for it is not right in a house of the Muses
that there be a lament
this would not become us

Apologies to Anne Carson and publisher AA Knopf for not being able to reproduce the high quality typesetting and lovely spacing in this book. If this review is at all intriguing to you, try to lay your hands on a printed copy from 2002. The formatting is as informative as the print.


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Powers of Two by Joshua Wolf Shenk

Joshua Wolf Shenk, celebrated author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, has a new book due out August 5 which focuses on the power of creative pairs. Using a number of compelling examples, Shenk posits that exceptional creativity is not the outcome of an individual mind, but requires the interaction of two minds. He will argue that three people change the creative dynamic. The concept of the “lone genius,” Shenk says, is overstated if not flat wrong.

Describing a phenomenon many of us have experienced firsthand, either personally or by observing others, Shenk posits that two well-suited creatives together experience a surge in their output that is greater than either individual could achieve on their own. He interviewed pairs who are not household names, but used mostly the examples of well-known creative pairs that each of us will recognize to illustrate the power of creative pairing. For this he mostly used the vast record that has grown up around such pairs as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, James Watson and Francis Crick. In each case, Shenk posits that each pair could be shown to have followed a set of stages that allowed and fostered groundbreaking creative output: 1) Meeting, 2) Confluence, 3) Dialectics, 4) Distance, 5) The Infinite Game, and 6) Interruption.

The book uses the outline to structure his narrative, and though he occasionally uses the results of psychological/sociological studies to buttress his argument, this is not a formal proof. It is the presentation of an idea. Shenk also suggests that pairs take the form of The Star and the Director, The Liquid and the Container, The Dreamer and the Doer, or Generator and Resonator, or all of these at different times. Shenk sidesteps the debate between “Collaboration is good” and “Creators need time alone” by recognizing people vary in their needs and no one can prescribe the proper conditions for collaboration from afar. “…Complex interdependence—one with real room for idiosyncratic individuality and enmeshed identities—is characteristic of the best collaborations…The conditions required for human beings to thrive in one another’s company are…a function of balance.”

There is often an obvious power disparity between partners in creative pairs. Shenk points out that “the chief advantage of power clarity is absence of strife.” When both sides of the pair recognize which of the two is stronger, there need be little argument about it. But, Shenk follows, “To be a strong pair, both members must be able to lead and follow.” This also seems like something we probably have witnessed in our own experience. Strong husband-and-wife pairs, for instance, inevitably switch dominance roles often in their interactions, yet each feels confident of their role at any particular time. “The necessary flexibility in power can manifest in a variety of ways…The ultimate irony of extreme alphas is that they often have someone who dominates them.”

Shenk brings his thesis full circle, describing events that may precipitate a “system failure” or an interruption of the creative outpouring. Ironically, this may include success. “As the world around the pair changes, the experiences of the two within it are naturally affected too…Success can bring to the surface quarrels about credit that would otherwise remain underground” or irrelevant. “The most common wedge comes in the form of a third person who gets between a pair.”

Shenk’s theory is not as obvious as it appears at first blush. After all, he is saying creative genius does not stem from the individual alone. He allows us to consider this radical idea in the context of his many examples of successful creative pairs, either cooperating or in competition (Larry Bird and Magic Johnson), and gives us space to consider that this model may be the prevalent one for creative output, while the “lone genius” model (Einstein) is the exception that proves the rule.

For those of us who relish contemplating the creative process and that magic moment when the lightbulb comes on, Shenk’s discussion of the creative interaction between Lennon and McCartney or between Picasso and Matisse is revealing and utterly fascinating.

“For fifty years, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso pushed each other, goaded each other, drew from each other, and tried to best each other. It may not be too much to say that, over the course of their careers, they made each other—and shaped the standards for modern art in the twentieth century.”

I immediately applied Shenk’s thesis to my [admittedly limited] knowledge of Harper Lee and Truman Capote working together on the groundbreaking non-fiction fiction In Cold Blood. It could be possible that the two friends created a competitive environment that pushed each to exceed their already considerable talent to contribute material that resulted in that unforgettable book. The competition between the two may have also spurred them each individually to excel. Marja Mills, in her recent The Mockingbird Next Door (July 2014) talks a little about the relationship between the two authors.

Shenk uses his own experience with his editor as an example of the creative power of pairs, insisting that he is more clever and capable and productive when he is working directly with his editor, Eamon Dolan, whom he credits as co-creator of this book. It is a far more personal and reflective statement of theory rather than proof. Whether or not we believe this thesis to be true is hardly the point. We ourselves probably have examples of creative pairs we could consider within his outline. But whether it is true to the exclusion of the concept of “lone genius” is another matter.

My mother once told me that “Nobody is successful on their own.” This always rang true to me, since “success” can only be realized in society. Joshua Wolf Shenk’s theory focuses on the creative spur to success and his thesis states that groundbreaking creativity also requires society. He says we can do something about our creativity by facilitating the conditions for its flourishing by finding someone with whom we resonate. It makes sense. More importantly for readers, perhaps, is that it is interesting.

I am happy to offer a giveaway of this hardcover to an interested reader until August 5, when the book is published. (U.S. respondents only, please.) If you are interested in this title, you may fill out the form below. I will use a random number generator to choose a respondent. That reader will have two days to respond to my email with an address to which the publisher will send a hardcover copy of the book. Good luck and good reading!

A winner has been chosen. Thanks for your participation!

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Buck: a Memoir by M.K. Asante

buck (n): a fashionable and typically hell-raising young man. 2 racial slur--used to described black men. 3 a young black man: what's up young buck? 4 the act of becoming wild and uncontrollable: he went buck wild. 5 a dollar. 6 to fire gunshots: buckshots in the air. 7 to go against, rebel: buck the system.

"Everybody calls me 'young buck' when they see me."

Asante’s journey from inner city street punk in Killadelphia to college professor is a wild ride. Knowing the outcome doesn’t dull the description of his path: sexy, wild, ugly, and redemptive. There is a kind of love shown between family members in this ghetto life that may be greater than all other loves because it flows despite real failures by real people. A little light, and a little faith in a kid backed into a corner seems to have made a difference. Not every intervention can be as timely, but the results are unequivocal.

This book was assembled from fragments in a teen’s life in the late nineteen nineties. My copy of this title was published in 2013; the paperback will be released in May 2014. The language and sensibility wears a noticeable twelve-year lag, it seems to me, but it is instructive none-the-less. How far we seem to have come in ten years, all of us. I wonder if Asante would agree, or if he would say that “nothing has changed.” Perhaps nothing substantive in the lives of Killadelphians has changed, or changed enough.

The main thrust of the narrative, however, is perennial. A young boy discovers the voices of all who have come before him and realizes that the paths ahead are many and varied and bear no resemblance to the one he walks daily in his neighborhood. “I spit lyrics to songs under my breath--all day, every day…It’s like hip-hop Tourette’s.” The book is punctuated with stanzas that suit the action, his own and those of others, suitably referenced. One can tell words, descriptive words, are his passion.

The story introduces street life through street slang. I particularly liked the device of reading Malo’s mother’s diary to learn what she was thinking as she lay torpid and drugged through Malo’s teen years. His father quit town to save himself, and his brother got himself locked up. All in all a harrowing upbringing, but kids still learn without being in school. It’s what they learn that is at issue. Asante still has a ways to go to break into Literature but his path is true and his talent real. He is a good mirror. I note he is a filmmaker.

Asante has a right to be proud. And whoever gave him the chance to get out of the hood has a right to be proud.

I learned of this title from a NoViolet Bulawayo’s B&N interview, and have thought of that recommendation several times since.


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Chicken with Plums by Marjane Satrapi

Satrapi relates the death of her great-uncle and celebrated musician Nasser Ali Khan with the cool detachment of a reporter. Her drawings and captions do not reveal how she views the events she shares with us. Her uncle took to his bed one day and decided he was going to die. It appears to have taken him eight days.

The explanation Satrapi offers us is that he lived for his music. When his beautiful instrument was broken by his wife in a moment of rage, he never imagined his talent would abandon him. But Khan believed he played so well because he carried within his heart an unfulfilled but requited love that sustained him and fed his talent. When he thought that love was withdrawn, he lost the will to live. Was he foolish?

I have heard that it is possible for a person to give up their will to live, but I have always thought it a conundrum: it takes enormous will to give up one’s will. I would not have thought it so common in majority Christian Western democracies to find such abandonment of will, but I believe the Asian countries have many examples of suicide by simply refusing to live, and now Satrapi tells us it is apparently not unusual in the Middle East as well.

It looks like a relatively peaceful, painless way to go, emotional trauma aside, if she describes it correctly. Since she wasn’t there, it’s possible it wasn’t quite as comfy as it looks. This observation is separate from the discussion about whether it was a good choice. I would have to say, in his case, with the information we have of his life, it was not a good choice. He seems to lack the maturity to make a reasonable moral choice on the matter.

Regarding the love affair: bosh! Unrequited love has been the impetus for, and subject of, many a grand piece of music. The more unrequited the love, the grander the music. Nasser’s old lover may still have loved him. We don’t know, and neither did he. But she’d been mature in making the best of what she did have. He should have, too.

I think his wife was right. He was a selfish bastard.

This book is what they call a "graphic novel." It is not a novel and it is not graphic, but it is called that none-the-less. Satrapi’s drawings, writing, and presentation of the issues are dead-on terrific and deserve much praise. That I don’t condone the activities described therein does not alter my praise of her skills. Nice controversial piece. She's a devilish one, that Satrapi. Keep your eye on her.


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Orfeo by Richard Powers

“What is it you wanted from…[music, fiction, art?]”

“Awe. Surprise. Suspense. Refreshment. A sense of the infinite. Beauty.”--from Orpheo

Orpheus could make the stones weep, animate the inanimate. The love of his life is taken to the underworld. He wants to steal her back and creates music to tame the underworld, but he dies at the hands of those that cannot hear his divine music.

I always receive news of a new Powers novel with excitement. I think to enjoy his novels you must just allow yourself to be led, just for a little while. He is telling you a story that requires you to make connections. Powers has the heart of a musician and the soul of a scientist but his mode of communication is language.

This novel is about art, and what it means for our lives today, and what the boundaries are. Peter Els is a seventy-something musician who gave up everything, including his wife and daughter, for his music. He created music that people often didn’t like, and couldn’t follow. When he did finally create music that was meaningful to people, he refused to have it performed because it felt exploitative.

There are two threads in this novel. One is El’s regret for having missed the central meaning of life—to be with people you love. Els began to see that one can hear music everywhere, in ordinary outside noises, and that losing his family was the big regret of his life. The second thread is that Els, now in old age and at the end of his time on earth, wants to create music that transcends the time in which we live and changes as our lives change. This, he feels, will be a more permanent legacy than any music he could create for now which bridges past and future. He wants to connect that past with the present and the future. He conceives of the idea to implant a musical phrase into living bacteria so that it will evolve with the times. This is perceived by government regulators as subversive and he is pursued.

Ideas about art, how it is created, how it is perceived, what constitutes art are all central to this novel. In addition, Powers muses about plentitude, and solitude, and how we can manage either, or both, and what they mean for our perception of art. When you have ALL music to listen to at any time in any place, can you hear anything? Attention is harder to get, harder to keep. Powers says, paraphrasing from his interview with Nancy Pearl, “The challenge of today’s human is in meeting the increase in capacity of what we are able to do.”

Orfeo almost seems like it is written in another language. Just like music is a language, this book has pauses, codas, interwoven threads for different voices, all adding up to a larger piece…

Powers shares stories, partially made up but based in history, of composers and the act of creation and how certain pieces come into being, notably Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps or Quartet for The End of Time. The emotions and feelings of the composer are in the music that we hear and that our bodies feel. In an interview with Nancy Pearl, Powers asks the question, “There is something about a pattern of sounds that compels our bodies. Is it in the physics of creation or is it learned?”

These stories about creation and the meaning behind the music are riveting and meaningful and add immeasurably to our understanding of, and appreciation of, the pieces. On his website, Powers shares a link to the music mentioned in Orfeo, a list of the more important pieces and suggested renderings of that music. Listening to the music then enhances one's reading of the novel. This is big art--art to be savored.

In a series of interviews conducted after the publication of this book, Powers tells Salon.com that his “alternate career” would have been music. He tells Nancy Pearl that he began studies as a physicist:

paraphrased: ‘As a young man, I always wanted to be a scientist, but I discovered as I grew older that to be successful as a physicist, one has to specialize narrowly. At the same time I fell under the spell of [a great teacher of literature] and I realized that there is one field that encompasses all fields, and that is writing.’

Salon interviews Richard Powers

Washington Independent Review of Books Beth Kingsley writes a review of Orfeo

Nancy Pearl talks with Richard Powers

Richard Powers introduces his novel

I want to tell you in advance that these referrals to articles and interviews may not help you understand or appreciate the novel. What they do is enhance your experience of the novel. If you didn’t enjoy the mind of Powers by reading his novel, you may be even more confused by the man in person. He goes deep and one has to listen with both ears and full mind, not with divided attention. I am not criticizing divided attention. We all have that. But one must sink into this novel and into his interviews with a willing resignation. A second read, a second listen may yield greater understanding. Don't be frustrated. Be intrigued. If you do take the time, you may find something very special, unique, and powerful. This is a man who could, perhaps, have been anything, but he chose to tell stories. Following him is a remarkable journey.

“If no one is listening, your art is set free.”


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Ham: Slices of a Life by Sam Harris

Sam Harris is among the lucky ones…one of the lucky ones who survived high school in Oklahoma as a young gay man in the pre-acceptance days and got away…got away to Nashville, Broadway and finally to Hollywood where he survived his own early success as a belt-‘em-out white man singing songs made famous by black women. Now, as a proud father himself and looking back, he shares the highs and lows and the realities of a show business life.

It is a joy to read of someone who finds and nourishes within themselves a great talent. Despite the expected barriers to success, Harris managed to hopscotch his way to major milestones and to patch together something we call a successful career. Every life can be fascinating, but a meteoric rise is breathtaking…like the time he opened for his idol, Aretha Franklin, on a cold winter weekend in Cleveland.

For Sam Harris fans, this book is a necessity. Harris takes us through moments of great affirmation (the swelling applause of adoring crowds including a Carnegie Hall performance at 23 years old), shares moments of great intimacy (the birthing of his boy, Cooper), and uncovers moments of great pain and sorrow (his high school suicide attempt and later, the recognition of his alcoholism). He is one to whom the sound of people clapping is a magic balm making all the trials and tribulations of a life spent in the limelight go away.

And now my admission: I had never heard of Sam Harris. I had to look him up and play a couple Youtube freebies to get an idea of his range. But it doesn’t matter if you know him and his music or not. His memoir was instructive to me for the poignancy in the stories of his high school years when he recognized and agonized over the discovery that he was different. The stories revealing the truth behind the high profile openings, the adulation, and the famous friends are likewise instructive. I’m just glad he got to do what he loved, to be with someone he loves, and to experience the joy and pain of raising a child. These things offer the real applause in a life.

The writing gives us a sense of the man. He is able to laugh at himself and the circumstances in which he finds himself, which is probably why he survived the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ And he is funny, whether singing, writing, or living. (“Do you mean funny….or funny?”) But I wouldn’t compare him to Sedaris and Rakoff--his skills would not be shown to advantage in this triptych. Rather, I would simply say he is a funny white gay man with a big voice who survived his talent. He is worth reading for these successes alone.


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Just Kids by Patti Smith

This spare, elegiac memoir about Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith has something of the Christian iconography about it: if words were installations, one can imagine an altarpiece with the Virgin Mary and perhaps a crucifix surrounded by velvet, feathers, bits of lace, and little skull beads…not kitschy, but strong, puzzling, edgy. Patti Smith is a force, though perhaps one might say she is the negative to Mapplethorpe's positive in the first part of the book: the black negative to Mapplethorpe’s clear clean photograph. In the last half of the book, Smith herself is the positive and lighter image, and entirely clear. And what an unforgettable picture it is.

Smith and Mapplethorpe were soulmates, and she accepted him unconditionally. That closeness and lack of criticism gave them both room to develop in a environment of mutual trust. Even if Smith didn’t agree with, nor completely understand, the impulses that ruled Mapplethorpe she was his first proponent. She grew into her own art even as it grew in her. She was often unsure of the work, but not of the path. By now she might be considered a swami for the equilibrium she exhibits in writing this book. Amerigo is the first song on her new album, Banga, out in 2012, and in it she says “they called us Caribe, which means men of great wisdom…” Perhaps only now can she say that, but she has earned it.

I loved reading of those moments when one change (in appearance, friends, or piece of art) made an enormous difference in how Smith or Mapplethorpe were perceived. She makes it sounds like a chemical reaction–that moment a salt solution becomes crystal.

Her sound is even better for my knowing her history. A life in the pursuit of art is something extraordinary, and this telling of it is breathtakingly lovely and clear and spare. Not the life, especially, but the telling of it. Perhaps Mapplethorpe and Smith were destined to meet, but imagine for a moment they did not. Smith was perhaps the less fragile. We can’t help but wonder at the path they took and how, necessarily influenced by externals as we all are, things would have been for them in a different constellation. Great read.


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Revival: A Folk Music Novel by Scott Alarik

Scott Alarik knows what every good novelist knows: readers want something real. And he delivers. The Boston folk music scene has never been so intimate. Alarik, former folk music critic for the Boston Globe, is a singer/songwriter in his own right, and with this debut, a novelist. We get the inside story on what it feels like to write music critiques for a major newspaper in this new century, but we also get a good sense of what it feels like to be a musician, writing songs, jamming late into the night. And Boston comes across so strongly, we can smell the streets and feel the weather.

This story is told in the voice of a musician whose name is stored in the memory of folk aficionados, but who has not written a song nor toured widely for many years. He is handling open mike night and jam sessions at a neighborhood bar near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is remembered for his own songs, but also for his adaptations of old favorites going back through the centuries. He is also remembered, he fears, for the alcohol-induced slackness of the years after his chance to be a big name passed him by. He keeps his life limping along until a shy, young songwriter/musician comes into the bar one season and changes everything.

Alarik doesn’t hold back: he shows us the thrill, the passion, the fear, the dark despair that is every performer’s lot. We hear a musician talking to himself about which music he likes--how and why. We watch a songwriter create songs: we see moments of creation and remember flow. We feel the pain of what it means to be a success—the tour. We learn what kind of person it takes to get to the top, and own the bittersweet regret of looking back on one’s life and wondering “what if.”

A message that comes across strongly in this novel is the solitariness of creation. There is a necessary introspection to the creation of new (or modification of old) art and Alarik’s main character, Nathan, has it in spades. But community is necessary also, and that’s where we come in. We find here a map for creating community, a guide to the people you will meet, and an understanding of the various meanings of success. Alarik’s website gives his tour dates. You’ll want to listen to him after reading this book, I promise you that.

The publisher sent me a copy of this book for review, and is offering one as a giveaway to readers of The Bowed Bookshelf! Leave a comment below with your email address by September 10, 2011 and I will use Random.org to choose a winner. You do not have to be a follower of this blog, but if you win, you will be contacted by email to get your mailing contact info. You will find Revival: A Folk Music Novel a fascinating meditation on music, art, and the meaning of mature love.

Giveaway completed 9.10.11

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Rock and Roll Jihad by Salman Ahmad

The best thing I liked about this book is something that is not in it: the music. As a result of reading of Ahmad's struggle to be a musician in a country that no longer valued new forms of musical expression (Pakistan in its ideologue phase), I downloaded some of his music and found it fascinating and accessible, retaining some essential South Asian characteristics while sharing some of our instruments, rhythms, and feel. But Ahmad does a good job of showing the trajectory of his life, the choices he made, the kismet he enjoyed, the focus he retained. What struck me most was that through his telescope, time in Pakistan became a lens through which we view could changes in the society, and in the government. One can see that the rich cultural underpinnings of the society are squelched by religious fervor for a period of time, like a wave. In that sense, this book reads a little like a history book of modern Pakistan, and is interesting for that.