Category: Books

Words and whiskey

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Back when I regularly haunted bars, usually dive bars and usually alone, I would carry along some kind of reading material, a newspaper or, in a burst of middlebrow bravado, a New Yorker magazine. Something less intense and more foldable than an actual book.

Knowing that poring over prose looked odd in a place of revelers, pool pushers and loud music, I tried my best to be inconspicuous, settling down at the end of the bar, bathed in the neon splash of beer signage, or at a far-off table near the bathrooms, where the perfume of urinal cakes and dollar-store Glade lent a dubious olfactory ambiance.  

Reading in public is acceptable in cafes and airports, but in bars it seems to be a pretentious faux pas, some sort of performative act. It could be a sly “pick-me-up” gesture, a “dating hack,” as LitHub recently put it. 

That never occurred to me. A woman reading alone in a bar might be misconstrued as a come-on, but as a guy reading the police blotter in the paper, that was hardly the case. I simply wanted a whiskey with my words, then get out of there. At times I felt like a noir character — bruised alienation with a newspaper under his arm, trench coat optional.

Only once did someone mock me for reading in a bar, an annoying professional acquaintance who wanted me to join him at his table to gab. He teased me for reading a magazine, as if I was showing off, when really I was blissfully absorbed in my own inky world and couldn’t care less what anyone thought (proof: I was drinking Miller Lite).

I was having none of it and, in more polite terms than these, I told him to buzz off and leave me the goddam hell alone, that I’d rather read a mediocre Shouts & Murmurs than have to fake my way through vapid conversation and be as social as a mannequin.

In general, most good bars are too dark for reading, like Club De Ville in Austin, although the late Longbranch Inn, also in Austin, was ideal, especially on slow weeknights. The lights were strong but not glaring and you could always find a good half-hidden spot at the massive wood-carved bar, which looked like the bow of an ancient ship encircled by mermaids.

One of my favorite reading bars is the gloriously art deco Vesuvío Cafe in San Francisco, which shares Beat Generation bona fides with legendary bookstore City Lights, right next door. Have a drink, stroll on over, browse the shelves, buy a book, go back to the bar and read. In that case, a book in the bar couldn’t be more fitting. (Just don’t get Ginsberg’s “Howl.” That’s a little too on the nose.)

I’ve also written in bars, a lot. That’s when I’m traveling abroad. After a long day, I crack open a moleskin notebook and record the day’s doings, the contact info of people I’ve met, and attempt the occasional pen and ink sketch, which are invariably doomed to violent preschool abstractions. I draw as well as I play the tuba.

Bars are unique reading arenas. Bars are special. They’re where you unwind with a funny movie review by Anthony Lane or a lyrical music profile by Michael Corcoran while sipping a cold one. It beats sitting on your sofa doing the same. For bars are communal. You’re around people, and that might just afford a whisper of hope. 

Maybe I look dopey sitting at the bar, alone, nose in a periodical. But believe me, I am rapt and content. Content as could be.  

Not me. I don’t have a beard or such a suave sweater. Also, I think he’s Spanish.

Recent tomes I’ve tapped

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

I’m never not reading a book or two. These are a few new titles I got my grubby paws on: 

Mike Nichols’ 1966 film of Edward Albee’s corrosive play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” remains a dish-rattling, drink-spilling, daggers-in-your-ears delight, all marital earthquakes and social Molotov cocktails. (Cocktails. Of course.) Booze is big in that cracked portrait of a long-wed couple on the rocks. (On the rocks. Of course.) And you get a contact high reading the riveting “Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” by Philip Gefter, who capably captures the play’s serrated edges, dubious morality and verbal drive-bys, as well as the behind-the-scenes hoopla of making a controversial movie with a controversial couple, no less than Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor — Hollywood nitroglycerin. It’s a bracing blast of theater and cinema history.  

“Headshot” is by a woman named Rita Bullwinkel. Let’s get that out of the way. (There, done.) This slim, tightly coiled novel is also a muscular debut, damp with the blood and sweat of a passel of female teenage boxers, zesty characters realized with pointillist panache. Time-leaping and fragmentary, the girls’ stories are told in intense vignettes for a scrappy scrapbook of pugilistic profiles that pounds with humanity and life. If not quite a K.O. — more tonal and rhythmic variety would shake things up — the book is a fleet-footed contender. 

With irksomely precocious flair — at 35, he’s a wizardly wunderkind — poet Kaveh Akbar conjures worlds of art and ideas in his radiant fiction debut “Martyr!” Reeking agreeably of auto-fiction, this dense but delectably readable novel is about an Iranian-American poet scouring past and present, life, death and love with the insight of an artist and the squishy heart of the wounded. Gorgeous language propels you through its lush, gently philosophical thickets. And despite some muddled mysticism near the end — I’m allergic to spiritual allegory — “Martyr!” had me pleasantly reeling. 

Lorrie Moore’s a personal favorite and her latest fiction is the knottily named “I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home.” Like all her books, tangy prose festoons the pages (a bite-size sample: “Fluorescent light rinsed the room.”). Yet the novel, with its arch surreal touches, rubbed me wrong. The narrative, centered on a man and his dying brother, is gawky, with sharp elbows and knobby knees. Plus, there’s heaps about chemo, cancer and croaking, and I’m not in a hospice mood. The novel just won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, so call me bonkers. In this rare instance, Moore is less.

Not for the feint of heart but perhaps for suckers for sentiment, the bleak memoir “Molly” — breathlessly written by Molly’s husband, Blake Butler, a noted novelist of thrillers — starts with her gunshot suicide and continues with another bang, the crack of bared emotion and tell-all candor. This is the story of Butler and Molly Brodak’s three-year marriage, a melding of art and nature and words and, in her case, bouts of inconsolable darkness. Brodak, a published poet and author who said “I simply wasn’t good enough,” killed herself three weeks before her 40th birthday, in 2020. “Molly” is so much about her and her devastating secrets, yet equally about Butler’s clawing to the other side of grief through deep (and verbose) psychic excavation. He includes Molly’s suicide note (“I don’t love people. I don’t want to be a person”), along with the frantic blow-by-blow action of finding her body in a favorite field of theirs. These passages are tough-going, not only for the forensic particulars, but for Butler’s writerly histrionics as well; he pants on the page. A cult sensation, tugging readers to and fro like emotional taffy and kicking critics into superlative overdrive, “Molly” is a divisive read, by turns lovely, wincing and overheated. It is the first book I’ve read that opens with the phone number for the national suicide hotline. 

‘X’ marks the spot

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I recently wrapped Catherine Lacey’s transfixing novel “Biography of X,” and it still haunts me. Published last year, the book is pungent and persistent, banging around my brain, impressions springing up at random moments, all of it strongly fragrant and strangely alluring.

“X” is a big book of ideas and feelings. It has a collage-like texture. It’s about art and the ravenous impulses of the artist; romantic love and its hazards; the fluidity of identity; the slipperiness of selfhood; and the rigors of creation. 

And it’s about the relationship between X, who has died, and her widow CM, the so-called writer of this fictional biography, which of course was written by Lacey in a neat feat of authorial ventriloquism.

X — who went by a swarm of pseudonyms, depending on her setting — was a shape-shifting Zelig, insinuating her self into the realms of art, music and literature, finding creative success and romantic excess, much of it to CM’s dismay and heartbreak as she researches her ex-wife’s half-cloaked life. 

In elegant, unfussy prose, Lacey conjures an alternative world in which X wrote the iconic David Bowie song “Heroes”; Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder and other major artists are killed in a terrorist bombing; and Bernie Sanders is the President of the United States. Cameos by Patti Smith, Christopher Walken, Susan Sontag and other luminaries arrive with cheeky nonchalance.

Lacey’s command of her literary experiment and the constellation of personalities she so blithely courts sometimes makes you think you’re reading an actual biography of an actual person. It’s a good trick, deft and ambitious, and a delight to plunge into.

At 38, Lacey is a bona fide wunderkind, and her performance in “Biography of X” has me trusting her to lead me farther into her cerebral yet accessible oeuvre. 

This week I got her slim gothic fable “Pew,” from 2020. It’s about an anonymous orphan who’s lacking crucial identifying components — age, name, sex, history — rattling and confounding a small, deeply religious community in the American South. 

I’m half-through this mysterious novel, whose humanity almost blinds. I’m with it all the way, totally sold. Lacey’s virtuosity sings, loud and clear as a bell. I’ll just say it: She is one of the most interesting authors of her generation.

This week’s astounding headlines

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‘turro de force

Onstage, John Turturro is a frothing, frenetic vortex, spewing barbed-wire invective, spittle flying, making you cringe and laugh all at once. He’s Mickey Sabbath, retired puppeteer, devout deviant, a 60-ish sybarite of unbound lusts, a Vesuvian id raging in the night (and day and morning). I recently saw this crackling Off Broadway performance of “Sabbath’s Theater,” adapted from Philip Roth’s acclaimed, notoriously naughty novel, and while the small cast is a marvel, it’s Turturro as Sabbath who harnesses the show’s electric eros, whipping us along on a ride of pathos-kissed perversion. Everyone — he too — leaves exhausted. 

‘Home Alone’ 2023

In the “classic” Christmastime movie “Home Alone,” a little brat played by little brat Macaulay Culkin — in one of the most implausible plot twists in cinema history — is accidentally left behind when his family goes to the airport to fly to Paris for the holidays. So Culkin is all by his lonesome in the big empty house, until two bungling burglars show up … and yada-yada. This year I’m that little brat, home alone for the holidays, my friends flung around the country, and my immediate family jetting to Madrid on Christmas Day. With my parents passed, I’m left with Cubby the magic dog, a pair of impish cats, and, if I get lucky on Xmas Eve, when goodies will be gifted, a tiny tank of swirling Sea-Monkeys, my Proustian madeleine conjuring the age of Pet Rocks and the Fonz. I’m a loner at heart. I spent 10 Christmases solo in Texas, so this is actually my comfort zone. Leftovers, tipples of egg nog, a CBD gummy, a great old movie. I’m set. It might even snow. And there, the tableau is complete.

Mamet’s mad

Though repulsed by his latter-day conversion to all things alt-right, I will listen to nearly anything playwright/screenwriter/director David Mamet preaches about the craft of writing. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“Glengarry Glen Ross”) has written a zillion books about writing and directing theater and film, as well as penned movies like “The Verdict,” “The Untouchables” and “Wag the Dog,” and written and directed 10 of his own movies, from “House of Games” to “Homicide.” Mamet’s been through the Hollywood wringer, and he’s pissed. His new memoir, out this week, is “Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood.” I just got it, and though not quite a swashbuckling thrill through the fraught Hollywood jungle (see William Goldman for that), it’s peppered with Mamet’s signature biting commentary. Producers are venal scum (“Are none of you idiots paying attention?”). Race and gender are never off limits. Errant grumpiness is rampant (“If you put cilantro on it, Californians will eat cat shit”). And fascinating insights into arcane movie lore abound. Mamet can be astringent, but anyone who calls “School of Rock” a “wonderful” picture can’t be all bad. 

Packing my bags 

So, Sicily it is. My next journey is a return to Italy — no! To Sicily. For locals, the distinction is vital. I quote: “People from Sicily consider themselves Sicilians first and Italians second. Though Sicily is a part of Italy [the big island beneath the boot] the region has its own culture, traditions and dialect, and Sicilians are incredibly proud of their heritage.” I go in February, after the chilly holidays, before the heat sets in, and before spring religious rites flourish. The history-drenched capital Palermo is home base, with day trips to the ghoulish catacombs and the dazzling mosaics of Monreale Cathedral, plus food and culture tours and lots in between. Tips? Phone lines are open … 

Fido’s funk

It’s raining and the dog went on a walk and got damp and now he smells like a giant corn chip. He’s needed a bath for some time, and the drizzle has activated a slightly fetid doggy odor that happens to recall a processed dipping snack. Pass the Ranch?

Chick lit

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“The idea of meeting someone in a library, in the aisle of a bookstore or while reading on the subway, for instance, remains stubbornly high on the list of many people’s romantic fantasies.” — from The New York Times (link below) 

I admit there are few things more alluring to me than an attractive woman reading a book or browsing in (or working at) a book shop or library. It’s a smashing combo, a kind of electrifying alchemy that I can’t quite explain.

For instance, in the 1946 noir “The Big Sleep,” I’ve always been partial to the bespectacled bookshop proprietress played by Dorothy Malone than to Bogart’s famous glamor squeeze Lauren Bacall — a nerdy example of my bookish bent.

My personal history of amore is lucky with literature. There was blue-eyed Guen, who brought on our first date a copy of David Mamet’s “Writing in Restaurants,” just for me. Laura, who made my knees buckle from afar, was toting the poems of Herman Hesse (we were soon a couple).

One of my biggest crushes was on the girl who worked at the hippest book store in Austin. Then there was the woman who, after a little wine, insisted we go browse the local used book store and buy each other a volume. Now we’re talking.

On the flip-side, I once invited a date to my place. She looked around at the Rothko print and various vintage movie posters, all without comment. Then she eyed my bookshelves and scoffed, “You have way too many books.” Deal-breaker!

Like movies, books are crucial to me, and a shared passion for them is just that — shared passion. It’s something in common, hot to the touch, and can be the bedrock of something more intense, meaningful and feverish.

All this was stirred up reading the above mentioned story in the Times titled “Is Reading the Hottest Thing You Can Do as a Single Person?” (Answer: yes.) 

Check it out HERE.

Dorothy Malone, bookshop owner, face to face with Bogart in “The Big Sleep”

Facing evil

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Let’s not get all down about it, but I’m reading “Survival in Auschwitz,” the slim and indelible account of life in the most notorious Nazi concentration camp by Primo Levi, an “Italian citizen of Jewish race.” Published in 1947, the pages bulge with terrible and inconceivable realities, much of it learned about in any decent schooling, yet far more personal and unsparingly granular. The horrors are shattering.

So I will spare you. I’m reading the book, an autobiographical classic, because of my upcoming visit to Auschwitz, just outside of Kraków, Poland. My trip, as I’ve oft-noted, takes me to Budapest, then Kraków, where I went years ago, including the day trip to the concentration camp, which is now a haunting al fresco museum that staggers with its bleak, blunt truths. Even the gift shop (yes, gift shop) is stained with gloom.

Why do we go to such places? I know someone who said he would skip Auschwitz if he went to Kraków, a fact I find astonishing. Few places throb with such recent history and so many fresh ghosts and has shaped so much of the modern era to now. It’s living history, inescapable. To duck it, inexcusable. 

That’s just me. Genocide is vital and we should be exposed to it as a reality check and cautionary device. Visiting Auschwitz (or Duchau, which I toured in Germany) is mind-expanding. It’s not a place for morbid curiosity or ogling. It’s a place for reflection and wonder. Like any potent museum, it works intellectual muscles and, more so, wrenches emotional ones. It’s as powerful as any Holocaust memorial or, similarly, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Its utter humanity rumbles, and humbles.

I have a strong stomach for dark and doom. I seek out shrines to deformity and mortality, like the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, the Museum of Forensic Medicine in Bangkok, freak shows and books about human oddities. I always make a solemn visit to Holocaust museums, be it in Amsterdam or Israel. Or, of course, Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

It’s not about luxuriating in morbidity or getting a “thrill” from death, like some sophomoric Goth, who gleans reality from graphic novels and zombie movies. It’s the opposite, being repelled by it while pondering the strength, the sheer fortitude, of the victims and acknowledging that it can’t happen again. The triteness of that statement is a reflection of its truth.

In “Survival in Auschwitz,” Primo Levi writes eloquently of struggle and endurance in the face of naked evil inside the death camp. His spirit is wounded but unbowed. Survival is paramount, and he carries on because it’s all he can do. 

He says: “Sooner or later in life, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unobtainable … Our ever-sufficient knowledge of the future opposes it, and this is called, in the one instance: hope.” 

How ‘Jaws’ ate me alive

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

Today was a two-errand day. I was picking up a modern classic potboiler at the library — the one about a ginormous great white shark that terrorizes the bejesus out of a New England beach town — and I was getting my periodic pedicure at the salon. I dubbed the day “ ‘Jaws’ and claws” to amuse myself. (Mission accomplished.)

The book I got really is “Jaws,” Peter Benchley’s 1974 blockbuster that spawned Spielberg’s famous film and a million petrified beachgoers around the world. As a kid, I lived in beachy Santa Barbara when both were released, and I fantasized about flesh-shredding teeth and ominous dorsal fins to unhealthy degrees. It terrified me, and I loved it. 

First I worshipped the movie, which I saw at age 7, then I snatched my parents’ mass market paperback of Benchley’s novel and gobbled it up at age 8. I savored those pages, slashing with vivid, violent writing that helped turn me onto reading for a lifetime. 

I still own that cracked, yellowed paperback, but it’s packed away with other mementos. So, on a whim, I hit the library up for its copy. I quickly located some of my favorite passages, ones that haunted — and excited — me as a young reader.

Just like my own copy

Can you handle it? This horrifying scene is from the opening of the book, when a young woman — recall her from the movie — takes a skinny-dip in the moon-dappled ocean. 

“The fish smelled her now, and the vibrations — erratic and sharp — signaled distress. The fish began to circle close to the surface. Its dorsal fin broke water, and its tail, thrashing back and forth, cut the glassy surface with a hiss. …

“At first, the woman thought she had snagged her leg on a rock or a piece of floating wood. There was no initial pain, only one violent tug on her right leg. She reached down to touch her foot, treading water with her left leg to keep her head up, feeling in the blackness with her left hand.  

“She could not find her foot. She reached higher on her leg. Her groping fingers found a nub of bone and tattered flesh. She knew that the warm, pulsing flow over her fingers in the chill water was her own blood. Pain and panic struck together. The woman threw her head back and screamed a guttural cry of terror.

“This time the fish attacked from below. It hurtled up under the woman, jaws agape. The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water. The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly.” 

Now, as a young boy, this was about as stupendously visceral as prose could get. (And I omitted the rest of the violence for reasons of taste and space.) “A nub of bone and tattered flesh” — I reread that line over and over, shocked, thrilled, gobsmacked. 

Even today, these opening pages stun. Getting the book at the library, I was hoping Benchley’s eloquence would strike me again, and it did. That’s why I shared some here. 

Call him a hack or a mercenary, but you’d be wrong. Benchley’s a savvy craftsman, expert at tension and thrills, not to mention a vibrant stylist with a painterly (think Francis Bacon) flair. His humans, from Quint to Brody, pop off the page even if the world he confects for them occasionally brushes pulp.

I’m not going to reread the entire novel, which is remarkably short at 278 pages, but it was fun revisiting a book that so influenced my cultural life.

Why “Jaws,” why now? Well, I’m reading an excellent new book about the history of Hollywood and the Academy Awards called “Oscar Wars,” and I’m deep in the chapter focusing on the making of “Jaws” (as well as “Barry Lyndon,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Nashville” — 1975 was a hell of a year in American film.)

The lore is notorious: Making the movie “Jaws” was a prolonged ordeal and near-disaster for all involved, including a 26-year-old Steven Spielberg, who was sure his nascent career was finished. We know how that turned out.

If the movie “Jaws” remains one of my all-time favorites — in a crowded field that includes “Heat,” “All About Eve,” “Sweet Smell of Success,” “Manhattan,” “City Lights,” “Seven Samurai,” “Duck Soup” and on and on — the novel “Jaws” is more of a sentimental gem. It’s dear to my heart for reasons that go beyond art. On a nostalgic level, it has — yes, I’ll say it — sunk its teeth in me. And it won’t let go.