Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Many of you probably know that, after I compose a new blog post, I get the word out through Facebook, after which there is typically a noticeable uptick in activity, followed by a fraction of a second brownout along the Eastern Seaboard as discerning readers rush to Blogspot in search of the latest nuggets of wisdom and insight. Well, on a recent Facebook post, I posed the hypothetical question of whether I, based on some of my writings, could possibly be the biggest nerd on the blogosphere. Well the response was electric, with responses pouring in from all over the country (or at least three different parishes in Louisiana), as well as the Iberian Peninsula. Plus, my wife informally weighed in when I was explaining the origin and publishing history of the DC Comics character Swamp Thing. Unfortunately, I misinterpreted a couple of the early responses and created some confusion while tabulating the results, and I would like to clarify those results at this time.

On the question of my stature as a blogosphere-inhabiting nerd, there were two (2) votes of a resounding yes, one withholding of judgment until a later date, and one passionate assertion that I should not limit the breadth of my nerdiness merely to the blogosphere. As I am committed to keeping the polls open until a clear consensus has been reached on this important issue, I have decided to remove myself as much as possible from the task of overseeing the counting of votes, and have recruited experience professionals. Owing to their work observing elections internationally and performing heroic diplomatic missions, I contacted the Carter Center in Atlanta, founded by Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter. I was told politely that their docket was full, particularly with the impending Afghan runoff, but they directed me to a less prestigious institution, the Billy Carter Center for International Diplomacy and 24-hour Roadside Assistance, operating out of Earl's Bait and Ammo in Dead Yankee Hollow, Alabama since 1993. I have complete confidence in their ability to accomplish this task with all the integrity and vigilance regular readers of this blog have come to appreciate and deserve over the last few months.

After a busy few weeks of markets in New Orleans, I am proud to present the October 20 edition of the Greater New Orleans Market Bestseller List. These are the bestselling authors or series from flea markets, festivals and bazaars throughout the Greater New Orleans area in 2009. Here was the last list, from early October:

1. Kurt Vonnegut
2. Star Trek
3. (tie) Ray Bradbury
3. (tie) Walker Percy
5. Albert Camus
6. (tie) Robert Heinlein
6. (tie) Hermann Hesse
6. (tie) Aldous Huxley
6. (tie) James Joyce
6. (tie) George Orwell
6. (tie) J.D. Salinger
6. (tie) Clifford Simak

As of late October, here is how it stands:
1. Kurt Vonnegut
2. (tie) Hermann Hesse
2. (tie) Walker Percy
4. (tie) Ray Bradbury
4. (tie) George Orwell
4. (tie) Star Trek
7. Robert Heinlein
8. (tie) Joseph Campbell
8. (tie) Albert Camus
8. (tie) James Joyce
8. (tie) Henry Miller

Alright, I want everyone to exhale now, I realize that was pretty exciting. For future reference, a brown paper bag beside your computer might be handy in case of overexcited hyperventilation. As you can see, Huxley, Salinger and Simak all have left the list, while mythologist Joseph Campbell and bawdy raconteur Henry Miller have made their first appearances. Hermann Hesse seems to have made the biggest surge of the past few weeks, but Kurt Vonnegut's lead still looks very secure at this time. The most glaring pattern, of course, is the Anglo/American/ European dominance of the list, with the partial exception of the Algerian/French Camus. Chinua Achebe, Ayn Rand and Anne Rice all could potentially change that dynamic, but that is dependent on the literate consumers coming out to the markets for the rest of 2009.

Speaking of which, don't forget the 2009 New Orleans Bookfair, coming up on Saturday, November 7. Deep South Samizdat Books has been a fixture for five years now, and it is always great fun. See nolabookfair.com for further details.

Finally, we at Deep South Samizdat Books have been busy adding to our online inventory. See exciting and affordable new offerings from the likes of Henry Miller, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Ward Churchill, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, e.e. cummings and others at amazon.com/shops/deepsouthsamizdatbooks. And email me at mpbookfreak@hotmail.com with any questions, comments, philosophical musings and the like. Peace, y'all.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Fall Reading

What looked to be a profitable weekend turned out to be a rain-soaked fiasco. Not even a hard rain either. Just enough drizzle for just long enough each day to make people reconsider their plans. Oh, well, we'll try again next week.

Meanwhile, the finished books have been piling up, and I'm sure many of you have been delaying your own trips to your local library or independent bookstore until you got the good word about some new releases. Well, your fervent requests (other known as the voices in my head) have been heard, and although I refuse to do anything for the voice that keeps demanding I do physical harm to Gerald Ford (or is it Chevy Chase playing Gerald Ford?), I can accommodate the rest of you.

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
by Josh Neufeld
Pantheon Books
24.95

Believe me, I was very much predisposed to love this book, a graphic novelization of the experiences of five New Orleanians just before, during and after Hurricane Katrina. Artists like Marjane Satrapi and Joe Sacco have produced masterpieces of the genre illuminating the political complexities of revolutionary Iran, beseiged Palestine and war-torn Bosnia through personal stories and compelling visuals. And I think this book would have been more effective, and viscerally jarring, if published sooner after the fact.

Of the five stories, two (those of high schooler Kwame and French Quarter resident "The Doctor") are treated quite superficially and probably could have been edited out. The other three have their riveting moments, but nothing really new is added to the creative/literary discourse. Leo and Michelle are both described as having grown up in the city, and Denise is identified as a sixth-generation New Orleanian, but I never felt their personal or family histories with the city through their dialogue or actions.

I don't think there is any doubt that a great graphic novel can be written about the Katrina experience, whether intensely personal or grander in sweep. But I would argue that it hasn't been written yet.

1959: The Year Everything Changed
by Fred Kaplan
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
27.95

I approached this book with a fair amount of skepticism, hoping the emphasis on the year wouldn't come across as gimmicky. 1968, for instance, has been responsible for the slaughter of how many innocent forests over the last 40-plus years (the fact that it happens to be the year I was born is purely coincidence, I'm sure)? And let's not forget Bernard De Voto's 1846, or the year 1919, or 1989, other years that have had books devoted to them. But I could think of enough intriguing associations with 1959 (the Beats, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, seminal recordings by Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman) to give it a try, and I'm glad I did.

Kaplan, a Slate columnist, skillfully shows the breathtaking volume of cultural, political and technological change within the twelve-month period while resisting the temptation to force connections between them. While the launch of Sputnik looms large in the conventional history of the time, could one make the argument that the development of the microchip and the birth control pill were just as significant in terms of social evolution? What about economic impact? How to quantify such things?

The contributions of the late 1960's are often reduced by the cultural shorthand into the narrow catefgories of politics and music, but Kaplan's accounting of the accomplishments of 1959 are simply remarkable: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X made life-changing trips to India and the Middle East, respectively; Fidel Castro made a triumphant visit to New York; Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and John Coltrane's Giant Steps were recorded in the same freaking month, for God's sake (just two months after Coleman played on Davis' Kind of Blue; to me, that's like a scenario where Jimi Hendrix played on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and then turned around and recorded Are You Experienced. It just doesn't happen!).

But what about the books, Parker, what about the books? William Burroughs' surreal Beat masterpiece Naked Lunch, Norman Mailer's Advertisements For Myself (not his best work, but a crucial one in Mailer's transition from straightforward novelist to the New Journalism of Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago), and, unmentioned by Kaplan, Kerouac's Subterraneans, an autobiographical account of the author's interracial romance. Speaking of which, Kerouac wrote the introduction to Robert Frank's The Americans, a book of stark black-and-white photographs by the Swiss immigrant with a Guggenhiem Fellowship, pictures in dramatic contrast to the Mad Men-propogated glamor of the era: "He (Frank) saw the way people sat side by side at lunch counters without exchanging a word or even looking at one another. He grasped the sheer oddity of the drive-in theater, where people watched movies--by nature a communal experience--in the isolation of their cars. He took a close look at the massive auto factories, where workers were just another set of cogs in the machinery. And he gazed in horror at segregation in the South and the strange hypocricies it produced," (p. 185).

So read this book. And then read Lady Chatterley's Lover, marveling at the fact that it couldn't be legally brought into this country before 1959. Order Shadows from Netflix, dig out the Dave Brubeck and Lenny Bruce albums (now there's a man who died for his society's sins), and reflect on the last 50 years. Oh, yeah, the first two American soldiers died in Vietnam that year, as the United States government and military embarked on an effort to prop up an illegitimate and unpopular puppet regime by force, to the disastrous detriment of our and their country. I guess maybe not everything changes, after all.

Monday, October 5, 2009

First Love and a New Flame

The stars were in alignment for last Saturday's Freret Market. Heavy rain Friday morning and all day Sunday, but a beautiful day in between, high of about 83-85, overcast clouds fluctuating with bright sunshine, and a good day for Deep South Samizdat Books and all the beautiful people daring to take control of their own personal evolution, refusing to succumb to the temptations of the twittering (I)pod people with their stunted attention spans that would embarass a hummingbird.

Sorry about that tirade, I must be channeling the still very much alive Harlan Ellison, the subject of the great documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth, directed by Erik Nelson. For those who don't know, Ellison is a writer and editor who works primarily in science fiction, his favored forms being short stories, essays and teleplays, all of which he has won numerous awards for. His short stories include the unarguable modern classics "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," and "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman," and his novella "A Boy and His Dog" was made into a cult classic movie starring a very young Don Johnson and the dog from the Brady Bunch.

I discovered Ellison, like oh so many, as a teenager, and I would identify him as my first favorite writer. Much of his work was still in print in mass market and trade paperback editions, and I would pick them up at B. Dalton in the mall (there's a blast from the past for you, huh?). Before I read Vonnegut or Kerouac or Ginsberg or Hesse or even Philip K. Dick, I read Ellison, and my mind was twisted and molded in so many formative ways by his themes and his passion. "I Have No Mouth" depicts a technologically distopian future in which the victorious machines are even more sadistic than Terminator and more godlike than the Matrix, while "Repent" is a brilliant broadside against the tyranny of punctuality. But just as important to this reader were the introductions, in which Ellison settled scores, expressed his political opinions, praised mentors and lamented the intellectual deterioration of the times. They were often eruditely vulgar, like the best of Lenny Bruce or George Carlin, and they took no prisoners. Ellison marched from Selma to Montgomery for civil rights, opposed the Vietnam War, campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, and evidently came very close to a physical confrontation with Frank Sinatra in the mid-60's. The man is unapologetically left liberal, and would make a great talk radio host (for at least a few hours, until he had a heart attack [not his first, I might add]).

Friends and colleagues, including Neil Gaiman and Robin Williams, are featured in the documentary, which is pretty straightforward in its construction (talking heads, archival footage, biographical info, contextual analysis), with some great readings from the author's work and some choice rants. If I can actually let go of it and release it back to Netflix, you can even get it from them soon.

And now to my new flame. Musician and author Ned Sublette has released two remarkable books about New Orleans in as many years, both absolute jewels of both monk-like meticulousness of research and heart-on-the sleeve personal engagement. Both were the direct result of a research fellowship at Tulane, an investment the university should be profoundly proud of.

The World That Made New Orleans (Lawrence Hill Books) was released in 2008, and is a densely comprehensive history of the city's first century. Sublette has been affiliated with the radio program Afropop Worldwide for many years, and has written extensively about Cuban music and culture, and emphasizes the connections between that island nation, Haiti and New Orleans as provocatively as he does the more obvious complexities of the relationships with Spain, France and finally the United States. The subtleties of the different cultures' conceptions of slavery are sublime, and expressed with a masterful balance between scholarly objectivity and appropriate moral outrage, particularly the explanation of the utter centrality of slave trading to the antebellum Southern economy. Not as a mere component of the agrarian system, mind you, but the buying and selling, and particularly breeding, of human laborers, as the linchpin itself.

Sublette also considers the importance of New Orleans as a historical crossroads of the crucial revolutions of the 18th century: American, French, and... if you said Haitian, you win the prize. The author's description of the events of the Haitian Revolution are an incredibly concise history lesson, rendering that country's more recent tortured history that much more tragic.

The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans (Lawrence Hill Books, 2009) is the more personal of the two books, combining personal memoir with an account of the time that Sublette and his wife spent in the city during his fellowship year, framed by the festivals, celebrations and funerals which he argues frame the time of the city in its unique way.

Sublette spent some years of his childhood in Nachitoches, and describes Jim Crow north Louisiana in vivid anecdotal detail. He says at one point that he learned at an early age that movies would lie to him and music would tell the truth, and he deftly analyzes the effect of both mediums on him. He also provides a great overview of the unique Shreveport music scene of the 1950's, centered around the all-white Louisiana Hayride, the black blues and r'n'b scenes, and the gambling dens and strip clubs in Bossier City where the two would clandestinely mix.

There is no question that Sublette brings great affection and appreciation to his portrait of New Orleans, but I would argue that it's strength is magnified by the reticence that is ever-present, as well. Much is made of the contrasts between New Orleans and Sublette's home city of New York, where it seems as if more of his life is centered around walking and around the night, both of which seem potentially perilous in his temporary Irish Channel neighborhood. That discussion, as well, is handled with grace and appropriately-directed anger at the dynamics responsible.

Finally, there are several fascinating asides to this memoir, where a particular New Orleans institution is put under a microscope and dissected respectfully by this guerrilla anthropologist. I learned a great deal about the history of WWOZ and the development of the unique New Orleans rap scene and its contributions, for example, and Sublette's experience of Mardi Gras melds the personal, political and historical humorously and exhaustingly enough that it will bring back memories (mine included drinking High Life on the couch outside the Maple Leaf at the end of Mardi Gras Day, bikes propped against the wall, mission accomplished).

Alright, enough already. No one's paying me for this yet, and I should get to bed, so I'll be fresh for my phone call from the New York Review of Books tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. The next post will include the updated Great New Orleans Market Bestsellers List. I know, I know, it's overdue, but you'll just have to be patient. Peace, y'all.