The first Graham Greene novel I read was the suspenseful “The Third Man”. (Greene worked as a spy for his government and drew on this experience for his thrillers.)The second book of his that I read was the comic spy masterpiece “Our Man In Havana”. These books were terrific reads, but there was a depth in the shadows that I wanted more of. I sought out other Greene novels and basically, got knocked flat. The next three novels of his that I read devastated me.

I later learned that Greene wrote novels that he intended to be popular. He called these novels his “entertainments” and he wrote a good number of them. Greene used his facility for description and dialogue and structural plotting to create some of the best novels of this sort ever written. His political sensibility, that is, his concern for the poor and oppressed, can be experienced in these popular novels, but it is tempered by his need to move the plot to a satisfying conclusion.

It was in reading his serious novels “Brighton Rock” (1938), “The Power and The Glory” (1940), “The Heart of The Matter”(1948), and “The End Of The Affair” (1951) that I experienced spiritual, and often physically violent, nighttime descents into city and jungle canyons I wasn’t exactly ready to take. Journeys I could never have prepared for.

(Penguin Classics has reissued “The Power…” and “The Heart…” in trade size paperbacks. I’ve seen them for sale in airport bookstores. God bless Penguin.)

These intense novels are great literature and I will tell you that reading them most certainly has a cost. >>>>Read more…

I have a friend who is a prep chef in a nice restaurant with a view of the harbor in Camden, Maine. He is a hard working guy who likes to eat and drink. We kept running into each other at live concerts and became friends. One day he asked if I would please lend him a copy of “Hold Me Fast”. I do not carry copies around with me so I didn’t have one to give him. He thought this was a major promotional defect on my part and every time I saw him he would nag me about the CD. I told him that it was available in the library (which we were standing in front of at the time) but that did not satisfy him. So I put the audio book in my car and drove to the restaurant and made it a point to leave the CD for him at the bar.

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A guy is swimming towards me. Gray hair, gray goatee. I am in the shallow end of an indoor pool. My six-year-old son is in my arms. My thirteen-year-old son is standing on the concrete behind me. The man says, “Where did you drive in from?:

Whenever someone is speaking to me in a language that I can determine is some form of English, but I cannot understand what they are saying, I have what my son’s Karate Instructor calls a muscle memory. But instead of recalling something like a perfect spin kick, I recall sliding across asphalt toward a roadside ditch with my boots still tangled in a motorcycle knowing that I have not yet hit the ground, but will soon. Because when I did impact, the concussion made understanding English difficult for more than a few weeks. Fortunately, no one noticed.

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New York Magazine recently asked 60 literary critics to name one novel of the last decade that they thought was important, but overlooked and forgotten. It is a compelling list. There are so many great writers and little time to read them. I felt overwhelmed after reading the list and a memory came to me.

A few years ago I drove to Jackson, New Hampshire to hear my friend singer songwriter Peter Gallway open for Jesse Winchester in the tavern of what is now called The Inn At Thorn Hill. As I approached the front desk to register I saw that the wall behind it was a fifteen foot high bookcase stuffed with hardcover books. The wall was at least forty feet wide. After I registered and headed toward the dining room, I passed another long and high bookcase full of hardcovers. The dining room itself was also lined with cases. Every wall in every room in the common areas of this hundred-year-old-plus creaky inn was a full bookcase. There was a sign on the case that ascended up the stairway that lead to the rooms: “TAKE WHAT YOU LIKE, RETURN IT BEFORE CHECK OUT.” I felt dizzy, because I had been scanning the books and had not recognized one title.

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Four years ago I got up early on Memorial Day and decided that breakfast out was a good idea. I drove to the only place I thought might be open. It’s a small grocery store and diner called “Fraternity Village” in Searsmont, Maine. I sat down at a table at the open front window and drank coffee and ate fat pancakes with a friend. We were about halfway through the meal when a siren sounded and drums pounded and a parade marched past the window. It was led by five men holding flags and carrying wooden rifles. Their uniforms were white shirts with gold emblems, gold roping here and there, black sneakers, and blue berets. I am sure it was not a United Nations color guard, but it any case, the men had a peace time appearance. They were followed by a marching band made up of kids blowing brass horns, other kids pretending to blow brass, a line of snare drummers, and a boy hitting a bass drum strapped to his chest with such passion it looked like he might knock himself over. They were followed by fire trucks from every town within forty miles.

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I liked what Alan Kaufman, Neil Ortenberg, and Barney Rosset did as editors of “The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry“. It’s still in print and selling well. It’s a good read and when it isn’t: the weaker stuff is easy to step over. Look, there’s another poem waiting right there. Thick as a phone directory, the book itself made me smile. Heavy poetry. Gothic tattoo lettered title. No poesy allowed. The rock and roll attitude in the presentation feels refreshing to me and self-conscious enough to be a little funny. Think about the title for a short beat. Poets outside the law. It can take some posing to pull that look off.

You might want to skim some of the more profane selections. That would be a fair amount of skimming. Still, the energy is there and the passion. And for spoken word artists, so are the techniques. At times the books reads like a manual for live poetry presentation. How not to water your audience’s eyes.
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Kurt Vonnegut is no longer stuck in time. I first heard of Vonnegut when he was protesting a war. He was described in a newspaper article as a fiction writer who had been a prisoner of the Germans in World War II. He had my attention.

I read everything he wrote. It was hard not to. His paperbacks seemed to be everywhere. I read him to find out why others read him. But for me there was something like cruelty in the music and structure of his writing that bothered me. I will never forget the scene in his 1969 novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” where a prisoner of war, walking out of a dark hole into sunlight, is surprised to find himself alive after the fire bombing of Dresden. He absent-mindedly picks up a porcelain figurine from the rubble and is immediately put up against a wall and shot dead for looting. The scene had the absurdity of real life and a slapstick structure. It disturbed me. Later when I saw the scene in the movie made of the novel, it was as painful as I imagined it.
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Adbusters Magazine is one of the best things happening in our culture and largely ignored by literary web log sites. I remember the feeling of excitement I felt when I first saw an altered billboard in San Francisco that had a large lipsticked mouth with gleaming teeth glued on the small head of a nearly naked model embracing a bottle of scotch whose label now read DEATH. This was in a district ravaged by street alcoholism. I thought then, and do now, that billboard was radical art worth being arrested for. I am not recommending illegal acts. I am writing about them. I remain a coward.

What I love about these two noted articles on the Adbusters web site is that the first one “In Search of New Comrades“ accurately describes the insanity of the far left’s embrace of religious facists in their attempt to resist the far right. The article ultimately decries the lack of great writers presently attending to issues of the left.
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Why would anyone want to list their personal library in public?

That was my question when I heard about Tim Spalding and his LibraryThing site last year. It makes sense if you are a rare book seller and want people to know what you have, but why would others take the time?

Business 2.0 magazine reported in their April 2007 issue that LibraryThing now has 10 million books listed and in January 2007 had 20 million page views. It has become an immense social networking site and will soon be selling books.

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I enjoy reading criticism and review, but I don’t write it.

I am also a baseball fan. Statistics bore me and I don’t have room for the hiring/firing/trading drama that follows star players, but I love driving down to see the regional farm team. If I’m lucky, I will get lost in the game and feel that strange combination of distraction and concentration that comes with sitting in the warm sun anticipating the next pitch. I don’t play baseball either

Last night, after watching some friends perform comedy live in a VFW Hall for broadcast on a local cable station, we all met in a bar with many televisions set on a variety of stations. Music played. Above us on plasma the Red Sox were playing the Rangers. The crowd was funny and loud until TV by TV, like a virus, a show that featured muscular men with no body fat and no body hair and many tattoos punching each other and rolling around on the floor of a caged boxing ring took over every TV. The announcer’s voice got louder and louder.

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