B K West Root Beer drive in restaurant--Route 25

August 29, 2008
Spotlight: Logansport, Indiana

Rather than blogiate on, Michael Dashkin's photos around Logansport speak pretty eloquently for themselves. These were taken yesterday to and from Lafayette, Indiana (only notable for a superb BBQ restaurant South Street Smokehouse and a Purdue student's errant Nerf football we plowed over hightailing out of town).

A drive-in theater on Route 17 just outside Logansport (price of admission: $7)

The Whitehouse No. 1 diner with "Buy Em By the Sack" burgers. Hours: 4 am to 1 pm

A Mexican restaurant and parking lot

Store for rent

August 27, 2008

Yesterday we set our sights on Peru, Wabash, and Silver Lake, Indiana, where we strolled around the former wintering grounds of the Ben Wallace Circus (now a sleepy museum and hall of fame overseen by a veteran ringmaster named John Fugate), chatted with the owner of a vintage, largely unaltered Lustron prefab house from the 1950s (which features prominently in the current MOMA exhibition), ate curbside bratwurst at Mr. Weiner’s drive in, and cleared out the New York section of Reading Room used bookstore (including a rare, early 1930s roman a clef entitled The Scandal Monger and probably the first work to take a pot shot at the gossip columnist Walter Winchell: “What a grotesque being he really was, with his thatch of red hair, his beaked nose, his slimy eyes, his angular gait and nasal twang. He reminded himself of a high-crested, crimson macaw chattering idiotic gibberish among the owls of vaudeville”).

[insert rant -- %$#@&^%* because our digital camera malfunctioned and deleted all the day’s pictures]

Instead we can offer this amateur video of the 1922 barn erected by Ben Wallace to house his elephants and lions. A distant cousin now patrols the doorway.

***

So, before venturing to other towns in the vicinity we pause to examine the Failey family cottage in Culver, Indiana, on the quiet banks of Lake Maxincuckee. Purchased almost a hundred years ago by Malby Failey of Kankakee, Illinois, it became a summer retreat for his brood of five daughters: Elizabeth (Eleanor), Cora-Catherine, Laura, Patty, and Ethel. Their library survives largely intact, a mix of Malby’s passion for fishing, hunting, and armchair traveling and the escapist literature of his daughters’ generation (full of Edwardian moralism, flapper exuberance, and Depression-era cynicism). Here’s a sample:

“Now you go to it. You sit right down on your little fanny and do your stuff. Hoochie-kooch situations for Lowell [Sherman]. And—here’s an idea—introduce a bunch of skoits. Arab skoits! Them there Oriental odalisques! Give ‘em swell lines—hot lines, if you get wot I mean. And I’ll long-distance down to N’Yawk, to the Chamberlain Brown agency, and have ‘em send me half a dozen good-lookers. And I’ll get Livingston Platt, our art director, to get costumes for ‘em. Not too much. The sort you can mail in a small envelope. And tomorrow night we’ll have a brand-new show. And—take it from me, sweetheart—she’ll be a wow!”
--Achmed Abdullah on his experience writing the comedy, “The Passionate Prince,” for Broadway producer Al Woods (The Cat Had Nine Lives, 1933)

“It is incomprehensible how the country Abyssinian manages to survive the heavy boredom that must be his. It is well enough to rise early in the morning to get a good start loafing, but when such inaction faces one each day, day after day and year after year, it becomes a hard occupation. With nothing to do it follows naturally that he will sit in the shade long hours with friends—all in the same strenuous state of inertia—and while away the long days with rambling, pointless talk, heated arguments about nothing and ferocious but harmless discussion.”
--Explorer James E. Baum on his Ethiopian expedition funded by the Field Museum of Natural History and the Chicago Daily News (Savage Abyssinia, 1927)


“Now by general word, the Dead Rabbit was not unknown to me. It was neither tavern nor boarding house, but a mill of vice, with blood on its doorstep and worse inside. If ever prayers were said there they must have been parcel of some Black Sanctus; and if ever a Christian went there it was to be robbed and beaten, and then mayhap to have his throat cut for a lesson in silence.”
--Alfred Henry Lewis on Gotham graft (The Boss: And How He Came to Rule New York, 1903)

“Vaguely I heard the thundering hoofbeats of stampeding zebra; the picture of black human bodies, oily and naked, flashed through my chaotic mind. Once more I was in the land of ticks, heat, thirst. Then I could hear the rhythmical throbbing of tomtoms; the sad melody of a ‘sing song’ under a colossal full moon.”
--Daniel Streeter en route to Africa (Camels!!, 1927)

“The camel has a single hump;
The dromedary, two;
Or else the other way around.
I’m never sure. Are you?”
--Ogden Nash’s doggeral “The Camel” (The Primrose Path, 1935)

“Very often Doreen did not want any breakfast after a late night. She then lay in bed until eleven or twelve o’clock, smoking cigarettes. Sometimes she had a brandy and soda in the middle of the morning; sometimes she waited for a cocktail before lunch. Doreen Galbraith was twenty-five, without joy, without morals, and without hope."
--From a E. M. Delafield novel (Jill, 1927)

“It is neither humane nor sportsmanlike merely to cripple an animal. Instant death is the true sportsman’s motto. So long as we eat meat, the best we can do for our victims is to put them out of the way as quickly and painlessly as possible.”
Horace Kephard on “Killing Power” (Guns, Ammunition & Tackle, ??)

“Smooth, satiny, fine skin.
Shapely, long, thin, firm throat.
Shaped, but not too narrow eyebrows.
No wrinkles or lines on forehead.
Low forehead, natural hair line.
Clear, bright, rested eyes.
Curving lips, accented mouth.
Well defined firm chin.
White, sparkling teeth.
Well-kept firm hands.
Long, not too shiny, nails.
Graceful, easy carriage.
Poised, but not stiff, posture.
A pleasing enunciation and voice.
Gracious manner.”
--Margaret Story (or Mrs. Chester B. Story) on the “Standards of Beauty” (Individuality and Clothes, 1930)

“There’s something in a scrimmage like that you never forget. A helpless man dragging along behind his crazed pony with one foot caught in the stirrup. Another clinging to his saddle-horn, six-shooter gone, trying to drag his Winchester out of his scabbard, coughing blood while his wounded pony takes lunging buck-jumps. Men diving off wooden sidewalks into the streets between the whirling horses’ hoofs.”
--Captain Tom Rynning on his days as a cowboy and gunman in the Wild West (Gun Notches, 1931)

August 24-26, 2008
Our blog on wheels broke an axle. Perhaps it was our lackluster impression of Columbus, Ohio, after Pittsburgh's bounty. Instead of culture on a slope, we got cruising on a strip. A mile long stretch of High Street is Ohio State University's main drag--which on a Saturday night hustles like a midwestern Sunset Boulevard. We navigated around local bobbysoxers in town for a Jonas Brothers concert and packs of drunken women in heels stumbling to Arena district bars. In the harsh sunlight of the following morning the neighborhood looked hungover. The revelers were replaced by homeless men shouting into payphones ("only 10 cents per minute for international calls!") and the occasional OSU graduate shopping for used CDs. The campus stood deserted, the Wexner Center in between exhibits, and the Thurber House shuttered to New Yorkers. But all was not lost, an excellent brunch at Goody's Drive In, followed by dessert of Cherry Lambic and Lime Cardamon ice cream at Jeni's Ice Cream in the North Market put us on our way west.

In the golden hour just before sunset we hit Lima, Ohio, and their chief delicacy: the Kewpee burger. A vintage fast food joint that once was part of a regional chain, they still serve up a stylish four-sided hamburger. A crew of white-aproned women patrolled behind the counter. That two out-of-towners were snapping photos and video recording the experience was greeted with a certain sangfroid. Over it all statues of kewpees presided in Christ pose. The interior is a tight but streamlined space of booths and red plastic seats. Two swinging doors labeled "employees" and "women" beg the question, where do men kew-pee? We were directed to a room at the rear of the building, accessible only by walking around cars in line for the drive through window.

But Lima held many other surprises and photo opportunities in far excess of the larger burgs of Wheeling and Pittsburgh. Satisfied, we rode straight on to Culver, pausing only to capture the the fields of corns and the vehicular advertisements en route.
--Michael Dashkin and Peter Miller

Click the image above to see a mixed media video not intended by the Carnegie Museum of Art

August 23, 2008
Day 3 (day 3, mind you! Nobody dawdles this long between the coasts, let alone within one time zone--we're less Lewis and Clark than Lewis and Martin) was another large slurp of Pittsburgh, with a dash of Wheeling, West Virginia, and a chaser of Columbus, Ohio. We have to say Pittsburgh blew us away not just for its impressive topography (is there another major city -- besides San Francisco -- so molded by hills, or defined by bridges?) but for its cultural pickings.

Exploring Carnegie's campus and the neighborhoods of Shady Side and South Side we stumbled on a few neatly appointed and well stocked used bookstores. Though we didn't leave with the same haul we found at the York Emporium, we didn't walk out entirely empty handed. At one we bought a historical guide to Indiana, a state we may hope to reach by Labor Day; at Elijay's a work on La Guardia and a 1913 guide to natural disasters before FEMA (Our National Calamity of Fire, Flood and Tornado); and at City Books a seldom seen collection of New Yorker articles by a forgotten staffer named Berton Roueche.

But just when we thought we had exhausted the art opportunities in Iron City we walked into the Carnegie Museum of Art. Cheek by jowl with their Natural History Museum our expectations were low (picturing galleries of Dutch masters and Greek statuary collected by the local robber barons of yesteryear). But the Carnegie is a world class institution with no fear of the contemporary. Their current show is the ambitious "Life on Mars," which pulls together international art confronting issues of being human. Ok, that's a bit of curatorial hooey (isn't much of art about being human?), but who cares. In Pittsburgh it probably helps to fool visitors by making them think they're walking into an IMAX film about extraterrestrials. What they would discover would still seem otherworldly.

For one, there's Mike Kelley's installation, inspired by the fictional city of Kandor from the Superman comic. Occupying an entire large gallery once devoted to classical sculpture, Kelley's installation brings together video images, sound, scale models and lab experiment-like sculptures to address themes of memory and perception. We cannot show you what the installation looks like (a friendly but watchful security guard explained the ground rules to us), but you can hear the aural maelstrom whipped up by Kelley's tornadic art in the video above. The images are an exhibit of miniature rooms displayed in a side gallery, a remnant of an earlier curatorial mandate that the museum pursued.

Nearby, in an alcove of the Natural History museum, a short film by Cao Fei documented in three parts the grim routine for workers in a Chinese factory that manufactures fluorescent bulbs. In contrast with the celebratory industrial films of America's early 2oth century manufacturing prowess, Cao Fei's machinery doesn't so much relieve workers of tedious tasks, but instead relegates them to painstaking, ever-diminishing quality control-bots.

Worthy of mention amongst the forty-four participants is Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn's work "Cavemanman," an immersive, confrontational, but thought-provoking environment where museum visitors are led through a cave-like maze built from packing tape and cardboard. It's filled with detritus (aluminum soda cans); texts (Habermas, Foucault, Thomas Paine) hooked up to dynamite and connected to the heads of aluminum foil manikins; consumer culture imagery (pages from celebrity magazines, pornography). The unease is heightened by the oblique angles and uneven floors that must be navigated by the museum visitor.

Before concluding the day in scintillating Columbus, Ohio (more to come), we spent a few hours in that Miss Havisham of cities, Wheeling, West Virginia. Empty of inhabitants except for a few policemen minding a water main break (ok, it was the weekend), the town had literal cobwebs on its light posts. But the late afternoon light made for perfect photo opportunities, and herewith are a few fading signs from Wheeling's more prosperous yesteryear. Click on them to see additional images from the day. There may not have been a gallery of conceptual art to browse, but the city itself is a living monument of interstate commerce and transient lifestyles.
--Michael Dashkin and Peter Miller

Windows in Breezewood diner

August 22, 2008
The morning began with a complimentary breakfast next door to the Best Western in Breezewood, PA. We breezed through our meal, but not before taking in the scenic view through their windows (see above). High tailing it to Fallingwater over tollways and windy state roads, we still missed our 10 am viewing of the legendary home made famous by the irascible Frank Lloyd Wright. The burble of the waterfall only just drowned out the sound of retirees oooing and ahing over the decor. It felt like an open house for bargain hunters scavenging at a sub prime foreclosure auction, even though we learned the maintenance is a cool million and a half. We assume however that the old owners would throw in the dehumidifier and Diego Rivera print for no extra cost.


Yet visiting the site made it clear why the Kaufmans (Pittsburgh retail tycoons) chose that spot. The grounds are lush and green and cicadas alternate with the waterfall for a bucolic soundtrack. Built in the 1930s, it has been upstaged by more contemporary buildings, but there is still a nice sense of flow and light. The design was meant to promote a healthy lifestyle, so the sunning decks (one for every inhabitant) and airy rooms succeed. That healthy mission has evolved into an environmentally conscious stewardship--exemplified by the notices posted over each urinal. As male visitors make their own waterfalls, we learn that 150,000 (the average number who visit each year) "potential flushers" will have their waste recycled and treated to irrigate the surrounding gardens.

After eating blackberry pie straight out of the pan in Donegal, we headed on up to Pittsburgh and the Mattress Factory on that city's North Side. A reclaimed factory space that showcases conceptual art (in the manner of P.S. 1 in Queens), there is an impressive selection of permanent and changing exhibits from international artists. James Turrell's work challenged not only one's senses but also the Pittsburgh fire codes. Pitch black or dimly lit rooms intentionally disorient for one big effing mind trip. Stranded in total darkness, you're left to wonder how large the space truly is (bound in by guard rails, only the sound of one's voice in the manner of a bat sending out sonar helps establish the contours). It was also a reminder that this kind of intimacy and concentration would be trampled by the Barney's warehouse-like stampede of MOMA.

But if you want to talk about your senses being thrown into disarray, try following up the above with the unique Pittsburgh sandwich making custom (made famous by the Primanti Brothers in the Strip District) of shoving a whole side of french fries between thick slices of bread. After eating one of these sandwiches, you've drunk the proverbial Kool Aid and wonder why you've gone so many years without fries in your salad, your apple sauce, your ice cream sundae. Sadly we weren't able to enjoy the many other shops and food emporiums along the Strip since they seem to keep bankers' hours.


We wrapped-up the evening drinking coffee on the Pitt campus. We're done for the night. Pennsylvania it is again.
--Michael Dashkin and Peter Miller

August 21, 2008
The first day concludes. As other, more responsible figures mind the store, we embark on a journey across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. It began with an Iselin, NJ, rental agency, Allentown bbq, Lincoln highways, Gettysburg sunsets, and Chambersburg indigestion (though we were shut out at Hoss's Restaurant with "an in-house butcher"--which by the look of the well fed gent departing at closing hour has quite a satisfied clientele). But the highlight was the York Emporium, a giant used bookstore owned and operated by Jim Lewin. Jim was a longtime customer (a dozen plus years) who stumbled on the store during his career as a Kodak account manager. Three years ago he convinced the proprietor to let him take over. And by the looks of it, it's in terrific hands.

From Grumpy to Thackerey--a stroll down a York Emporium aisle

The video above gives a very small sense of its eclectic qualities. While a chess club quietly arranged their boards, we wandered aisles upon aisles of books, music, and miscellany (from Civil War regalia to arcane technology like old tools, typewriters, eight tracks, stereo equipment) arranged in such a way that you will keep digging and digging. We found more than our share of treasures. A WPA guide to natural history called Who's Who in the Zoo (we can only guess that Clifton Fadiman was behind the wart hog entry, or Malcolm Cowley chose to discourse on boobies), a 1955 collection of profiles of retail giants called The Great Merchants ("Four Doberman pinschers (Mom, Red Star, Cash and Suzy) help watchmen guard the Macy treasure house at night"), a Scholastic anthology of essays on the counter culture entitled The New Sound and introduced by Murray the K ("Like something out of Malice in Wonderland, the hordes of shaggy rock-n-roll singers thump across the land, whanging their electric guitars"), and Patriotic Poems of New Jersey (with the stirring and eye tearing "Ode to the Raritan River").

--Michael Dashkin and Peter Miller

August 19, 2008

When Jonathan Miles stopped by the store a few weeks ago to read from his new novel, Dear American Airlines, he let drop his admiration for and his association with the great Oxford, Mississippi, writer not initialed W.F. Before he died in 2004, Larry Brown authored ten books, five of them highly acclaimed novels. Though we have a copy of Big Bad Love at the store, I've never read Brown's work. Worried that his posthumous reputation has suffered a tad from that special brand of New York literary parochialism--God forbid you proudly lived your life without a Brooklyn zip code--I asked Jonathan to discuss what set Larry Brown apart from the pack:

How did you know Larry Brown?
I met Larry in 1992, when I was 21, at a bar we both frequented in Oxford, Mississippi called City Grocery. I’d just published a short story in a local alt-weekly, which had apparently caught his attention, because he introduced himself and invited me to dinner with him and his wife—during which, I should note, he got up and danced on the table beside us, because one of the neighboring diners had once wronged him. Twisted his bootheels right in their food—the table dance as act of vengeance. That alone was enough to make me want to hang out with him forever. From that night forward we developed a close close friendship—a relationship that ultimately came to resemble a father/son relationship, though Larry could play the crazy uncle role just as often. His family more or less adopted me, to the extent that when I say “home,” I’m talking about the Brown house.

What influence did he have on your writing?
An immense and crucial influence, though perhaps not the kind of influence you can spot in the text. Larry taught himself to write, and willed himself to become a writer, against steep odds: He had a family to support, and worked multiple jobs to do so; he’d had no literary education beyond the English classes he almost failed at Lafayette County (Miss.) High School; and the endless stream of rejection letters (more than one hundred) constantly sucked the wind out of him. Yet he persevered. His discipline and determination were just breathtaking. Look, writing is difficult, it’s an act of endurance—every writer experiences those moments of self-doubt and frustration when the prudent course seems to be to quit, when everything seems tilted against you, when you just don’t think you’ve got the drive, the chops, the talent. But Larry’s example rendered those kinds of thoughts moot. With him around, there was no way not to press on—because how could you justify quitting to him? And, oddly, that feeling only intensified after he died. To give up then—and there were lots of times I wanted to give up, and in fact, at one point, I did, abandoning a prior novel after 700 pps. and seven years of work—would have been to disrespect his memory. Even now I hear his voice: Keep going. Write it.

How was he as a teacher/mentor?
It’s a bit strange: I never thought of him as a teacher/mentor when he was alive. Maybe because the word “mentor” seems so pompous, I don’t know. I remember being introduced as his “protégé” once, at an Oxford book signing, and Larry and I both kind of recoiled as if the person had suggested we were dating. It was much more informal than that. I’d give him stories to read, and he’d give me manuscripts to read, but, while he was obviously the Master, it just felt like writerly sharing. Like two guys raising the hoods of the cars they were restoring. He never took a red pencil to a manuscript. No, it wasn’t until after he died that I came to understand the education I’d received. It never occurred to me, as we’d be riding around Lafayette County in Larry’s truck, listening to Robert Earl Keen and drinking beer and talking about books and writing, that I was getting an education. It just felt like two guys shooting the shit about the things they loved. Only later, when lines of his would come back to me, when I realized the way in which he’d guided my writing and reading life, when I’d remember him verbally working out snarls in his own writing while we drove and talked, did the realization hit me: That was an education, and as great an education as anyone could wish for.

What was the Oxford scene like when he was alive?
In the early to mid-nineties, incredibly lively. The Oxford American was based in Oxford then, so there were local opportunities to publish nationally, and the living was cheap & easy & funky, so you could actually survive as a fledging writer. There was and is a fantastic bookstore on the town square, Square Books. Barry Hannah was teaching at Ole Miss (and still is), and his classes were filled with transient writers who’d been drawn to Oxford—or with locals, drawn to writing—by the high voltage of the writing scene, and by Barry’s own wicked voltage. It was all very loose and freewheeling. Back then there was no MFA program at Ole Miss, so I think the crowd of aspirants was more varied, a little woollier. There was a sense of geographical magic. You had Faulkner, you had Larry—people wanted to drink the water, eat that soil.

What is it about his work that sets it apart in American literature-—Southern or not?
Authenticity, for one thing. Lots of writers have made working-class Americans their subjects—when Larry started writing, “Dirty Realism” was all the rage, with Carver disciples (mind you, Larry was one) churning out bleak story after bleak story about underclass existence—but for most of them it was literary slumming. Look at Richard Ford, who started there, but found his true voice with middle-class Frank Bascombe. Many of these writers were tenured writing professors who were drawn to marginalized characters and ramshackle settings for the same reasons they were drawn to folk albums and blues festivals—for the soulful authenticity, or the perception thereof. Even Faulkner wrote about his Snopses from the high reserve of Rowan Oak, a columned house grand enough to be named. Larry didn’t grow up with people who named their houses. And Larry wasn’t “drawn” to these characters; he knew them, and, apart from his literary ambitions, he was one of them. So his stories were “true,” in that fictional sense: There’s genuine, authentic life in his pages, and I don’t believe anyone—Carver included—got the true grit of American working-class life down on paper as well as Larry did. It burned Larry to no end when he’d come across a poseur, some pith-helmeted writer venturing to the other side of the tracks for his fictional material. I remember his disgust at one short-story writer egregiously fumbling a coonhunting scene, and the offense he took when another celebrated writer, who’d claimed a hardscrabble background similar to Larry’s, turned out to have invented that past. For Larry, lying was the ultimate sin, and though it may sound counterintuitive, you didn’t lie in fiction, either. To cite the old writing saw, Larry wrote what he knew. And what he knew—the weary desperation of living from paycheck to paycheck, the downcast turmoil of life on the margins, the ways in which hopeless people lash out against their circumstances (violence, booze, sex)—was, and is, something we desperately need to hear.

In the land of Faulkner, how was he regarded?
Very, very warmly. Maybe Oxford learned its lesson with the way it treated Faulkner, but I don’t really think that was it. Larry was a humble, generous, kindhearted man who earned everything he accomplished, and no one could begrudge him anything. His heart was sometimes too big for his own good. I remember him complaining one day about the hours of work he’d lost from reading a “godawful novel” of 600 godawful pages that some aspiring writer had sent him. I asked him why the hell he’d kept reading it if it was so bad, and he looked at me as if I’d just said the rudest thing imaginable. “Well, he sent it to me,” he said.

Does he have a legacy?
Absolutely. And not just among writers, though his work has a solid cult of literary admirers. I helped organize a charity tribute concert last year, in Oxford, because so many songwriters were inspired by Larry. Robert Earl Keen, Alejandro Escovedo, and Vic Chesnutt, among many others (hell, even Tim McGraw wanted to play, but had a scheduling conflict), traveled to Oxford to perform, and not one of them would even accept money for their travel expenses. His work inspires an almost limitless passion.

And I've never read one of Brown's novels. Where should I start?
With the novels, start with Joe. It will haunt you for years. Then go to Dirty Work, his first novel, which is an acrobatic feat of storytelling about two wounded Vietnam vets lying side by side in a hospital. Father and Son will hit you with the force of a runaway log truck. But don’t neglect the short stories, especially those in Big Bad Love. They’re so fierce, so bare. After reading Larry, so much of contemporary fiction can seem like twee parlor games. Or like the meat we buy in the supermarket: safe and clean and precut in its saran-wrap packaging, with no ties to the animal it came from. Larry is there with the steaming, just-killed carcass, rooting around in its belly to pull out the guts, hands covered in gore, a Marlboro dangling from his lip, saying there it is, life, that’s the truth of it. Look at it.

August 10, 2008

"He seemed older and sophisticated and we had great sex, so why not? I met him in a club, naturally. I never thought he was very good-looking, but you could tell he thought he was. He believed it so much he could actually sell other people on the idea. He has that confidence everybody wants a piece of. This blond hair that looks like he has it trimmed about three times a day."
--from Story of My Life (1988)

Yesterday the New York Times reported that Rielle Hunter, the other woman in the John Edwards scandal, caught the eye of another public figure two decades earlier. For his novel of '80s misbehavior among New York's young, spoiled, and rich, Story of My Life, Jay McInerney modeled his narrator Alison Poole on Rielle (then named Lisa Druck), and the wild lifestyle of her 20-something friends.

Since the media may pick up on the more sensational aspects of McInerney's story--cocaine, promiscuous behavior and unprotected sex (during the era of AIDS), not to mention a plot-culminating abortion--I decided to pull the copy from our shelves and read for myself. Calling McInerney's novels "dated" is fair enough. The 190 pages I zipped through this afternoon would look alien to the post cellular crowd. Though Story of My Life will never be required for high school students, it still holds some Fitzgeraldian universal truths about monied thoughtlessness. So, you might ask, was Rielle/Lisa really this debauched?

It's a question you ultimately have to put aside when reading the novel, if only to trust the author's own storytelling instincts. These are fictional constructs, social extremes that fit nicely within McInerney's own urban landscape--he was a notorious party animal after all--and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that the tales of sex, drugs, and boorishness are embellished composites from years of observance.

Told from Alison's perspective, nothing much happens in Story of My Life. She parties with friends Francesca, Didi, and Jeannie. She sleeps with Skip, Alex, and Dean, and comments on their abilities in bed. She is emotionally drawn to the older Dean--the book's Mr. Big--and plays mind games to keep him in tow. Money is both a source of anxiety and an entitlement. Parents and siblings remain distant and manipulative, dangling favors yet never following through. Bills go unpaid, friends fight and pass out and puke, STDs make the rounds without turning into full blown AIDS. No one dies, no one gets seriously hurt, no redemption or enlightenment are achieved. Why would there be? Alison and company are too cool to let that happen.

Though I was expecting a Bret Easton Ellis orgy of product placement and gratuitous violence, Alison's account is oddly muted. The reader feels as jaded as she does. The details are unnecessary. The low level shock value could also be our hindsight. While the technology has improved (Alison and friends can only call from pay phones and leave messages on machines), the habits haven't. We're probably too inured to Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan to care. This is a city where we are at greater risk of being hit by a falling supermodel than a car.

Reading McInerney's novels, however, does make you wonder: What became of these fast living, flip, spoiled scenesters of the 1980s? Segway to Rielle/Lisa. According to the Times, she moved to LA, married a lawyer, changed her name (first and last) and, apparently, reinvented herself as a filmmaker. For McInerney, the prevailing characteristic of the young Rielle/Lisa that inspired Alison was not her relationship with men but to honesty: “One of her most striking traits was her obsession with truth-telling and her horror of being lied to, something that I certainly took directly from Lisa.” Early in the novel Alison lays out her own thoughts on the subject: "Acting is about being true to your feelings, which is great since real life seems to be about being a liar and a hypocrite." Pair that with an Edwards quote Maureen Dowd pulled from one of the political videos Rielle was hired to make for his campaign:

“I’ve come to the personal conclusion that I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am, but I don’t know what the result of that will be. But for me personally, I’d rather be successful or unsuccessful based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll that you put up in front of audiences.”

In this context Maureen Dowd is being self-congratulatory--she did coin the Ken doll crack in the first place--but to me this rather dull example of political hypocrisy begs a smaller question: what did Rielle see in Edwards? Maybe it's just having read McInerney's novel so closely, but I kind of hoped in the sequel that the Alison in Rielle would have better judgment.
--Peter Miller

Pat Willard speaks about her new book America Eats! (photo by Michael Dashkin)

August 8, 2008
Finally we are getting around to recapping the BBQ last Sunday (perhaps because it took us that long to emerge from our food coma), in which Pat Willard made remarks about her new book, America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA, The Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food. With dozens of admirers on hand, we ate pork sandwiches (topped with coleslaw) prepared by the author's Bay Ridge neighbor, Rich. Though several trays were prepared--along with a hot potato salad mixed according to a Eudora Welty recipe--all was consumed in a rapid fire two hours.

Pat's book brings back to life a forgotten enterprise of the WPA, an offshoot of the Federal Writers' Project in which writers were put to work recording the foodways of America during the Depression. Languishing in archives and libraries ever since (they were never collected or published as originally intended), Pat both resurrected these pieces and revisited the locations depicted by writers like Welty, Ralph Ellison, and Saul Bellow. As BBQs figure prominently in the original project--an American tradition that has not diminished with time (though the rising cost of meat can't help)--Pat chose to turn the book discussion into a communal event. And that may be the point in the first place. The Federal Writers Project sought not only to put unemployed writers to work, but also to celebrate regional differences and the ways in which communities come together. Food, it's no surprise, is one of the great unifiers.

And where there is food, Pat discovered, there is politics. Not just in the sense that these portraits were commissioned (and ultimately abandoned) by the government, but in the opportunities food socials gave to campaigning politicians. In particular, BBQs in the South often became handy rallies, as the smells of slow cooked pork drew more locals than any loudspeaker could. Pat also makes the point that the messy, outdoor, and democratic nature of a BBQ made a politician look like one of the people. So in that spirit we encouraged Daniel Squadron, who is running for State Senate office, to say a few words. But rather than take the stump (or the bait) his remarks were brief and well chosen for the occasion, demurring from "working" the backyard in the sense we are accustomed to from an opportunistic politician. For that he has won our vote. It's a far cry from the BBQs of the 1930s, as this Georgia correspondent caught:

If the guests at a political barbeque are seated, the speakers of the occasion are "spotted" among them, so that the audience is addressed from every angle. After such a meal, the people are likely to be drowsy, and the speeches must be as fiery as the barbeque sauce to arouse them to attention. And usually they are. Here the oratory of the old South comes back. Shouted exhortations, stinging irony, anecdotes with local humor, the sentiment that strikes close to home and heart--all are there.

Daniel praised the book and passed the coleslaw, celebrating a public works project that revealed government involvement at its best. But who knows what the coming recession may demand of our public officials?

* * *

Michael Chabon interviews Oakley Hall on the Berkley campus (Feb 6, 2008)

Today on the way to the store I found a mass market edition of an out of print novel called Corpus of Joe Bailey. The cover is striking and unique for the time--lacking the kind of sensation typical of pocket books in the '50s. The illustration of a man with furrowed brow staring back at the reader is remarkably straightforward and blunt. Here's an intimate book about a serious protagonist. The single "sexy" cover quote is downplayed, though the back jacket does yield to a Kansas City reviewer's overheated prose: "One of the big novels...big physically, big in sin, big in conception and execution."

But what drew me to the book wasn't the jacket design but the author. I've never read Oakley Hall, but knew he was one of the few to receive public praise from Thomas Pynchon--and one of even a smaller clique whom Pynchon acknowledged as an influence on his own writing career. Warlock, considered Hall's masterpiece and the book Pynchon and his buddy Richard Farina championed, is now reissued by the New York Review of Books. But Corpus of Joe Bailey is forgotten, except in obituaries as the greatest book to be written about San Diego. Perhaps it's the curse of being an unabashed West Coast writer. You will always be damned with faint praise by the New York literary establishment.

Somehow I think there's more to it than that, and hopefully we can learn more about the book in the coming weeks--please write in with your thoughts or impressions. We'd also like to hear from Hall's numerous proteges, who include Michael Chabon and Richard Ford. If you ever took classes with Hall at UC Irvine or elsewhere, speak up. Watch the video above to hear Chabon's heartfelt conversation with Hall mere months before his death in May. It sheds some light on Chabon's own dexterity at bending genres--something Hall had been doing for years.
--Peter Miller

August 2, 2008 (15 minutes after posting below)
Beautiful Children has been sold! Congratulations to Mr. Bock. Now if I can only move those copies of Art Garfunkel's poetry...

Jonathan Miles reading from Dear American Airlines (photos by Michael Dashkin)

August 2, 2008
This past Wednesday, Jonathan Miles concluded his book tour for Dear American Airlines at our store. How appropriate. The novel is set at O'Hare International Airport, so our newly paved Columbia Street (a landing strip to Ikea shuttles, Chinatown buses, and the B61) made an excellent aural backdrop to Jonathan's voicing of his protagonist Bennie Ford. Ford's white-middle-aged-rant is in the high literary tradition of Zuckerman and Schmidt, leaping from the interminable hell of plane travel into the depths of a misspent life. Hearing Jonathan read in his Mississippi accent put a different spin on the character of Bennie, who I initially imagined as a variation on the angry, red-faced, ticking timebombs of male frustration in my hometown of St. Louis. But Bennie is more than a boorish cliche--listen to Jonathan's slow burn performance on this podcast we just uploaded.

Afterwards Jonathan told us a bit about his process, akin to "method" writing. Trained as a journalist (he must have one of the most desirable positions at the NY Times--as cocktail columnist), he researched what a bad layover would entail for a traveler like Bennie. He purposely spent 30 hours in between planes at O'Hare, an experience that led to some very useful details and insights, but probably enough material to fill several volumes of hate mail literature. Merely walking between concourses at that Midwestern behemoth is enough to turn quiet monks into raging sociopaths.

However, that participatory experiment pales in comparison to the performance art of Tehching Hsieh, who visited the store the other night to see our ongoing group show (in particular the sound project "Coney Island of the Ear" by Hong-Kai Wang). For one year in the late 1970s, Tehching lived in a cage. In the early '80s he punched a clock on the hour every day for twelve months. Each punching would snap a photograph of him--which strung together created a remarkable six-minute compression of the experience. For an artist whose work revolves around time and existence, Tehching fittingly commented that his own acceptance by mainstream critics has been a test of patience. This winter he will formally be honored at MOMA and the Guggenheim.

Such feats of endurance are all the more cherished here at Freebird, where we are attempting to set the record for the most days Charles Bock's much hyped Beautiful Children has gone unsold. The hardcover has sat forlornly on our new arrivals table for five months no matter how hard we display it. Reduced to $8 it has been passed over for, among other things: Susie Bright's Sexual Reality, a field guide to roadkill, a set of Bobbsey Twins stories, a manual on flower painting, a biography of George Harrison, a Creole cookbook, and several cases of Moxie soda. But the night is still young.
--Peter Miller