People are always saying "I don't read books." Too often, the problem is reading too many of the wrong books, thus turning a potentially great experience into something they'd rather avoid. This is where _DictionaryGirl_ and PointBlank come in and let you borrow something awesome. Let's go to town and make some recommendations, shall we?

Who doesn't enjoy a good story of triumph? Those stories where the fallen and dejected hero, much like Odysseus, must fight insurmountable odds to come back and win the day, kicking ass and taking names--we live through them vicarously, pumping our fists for the hero and reveling in their crushing victories.

But what about the almost-triumphs? That is to say, where the lesson learned is that everything can't be spectacular, but sometimes semi-okay is enough? Sometimes I think I like them better.

1. The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno

I fell in love with Joe Meno's writing after picking up Hairstyles of the Damned with my Christmas book store gift card this past December, so there was no debate about picking this one up next. Not to mention that it's the only book I have yet come across with a decoder ring in the back.

The Boy Detective Fails chronicles the life and times of Billy Argo, a meddling kid of the highest calibre. His previous chapters, had they been written, may have had titles like The Mystery At The Old Mill or The Secret of Pirate Island, but this book starts at Chapter 33. It is here that we learn what becomes of a boy detective, once he is no longer a boy. His sister has committed suicide, and his sidekick has become a morbidly obese agoraphobic; the boy himself has been institutionalized for the past ten years, unable to cope with the changing world around him, until now when New Jersey state budget cuts have forced him out of the safety of the mental hospital and into the relatively big world of Shady Glens assisted living apartments.

Now Billy must cope with a graveyard shift telemarketing job, a dependence on Ativan, and the prospect of making new friends and falling in love. It's enough to make even the most average person nervous, but when buildings start vanishing, villains hold an all-day convention with lunch at the Gotham Hotel, and an Alzheimer's-ridden arch-nemesis turns up just down the hall with half-remembered malicious intent--not to mention the mystery of what truly caused his sister's death--it's only a matter of time before Billy must answer to his calling, picking up the trusty magnifying glass once again.

The cool thing about this book is how Meno plays on really classic mystery archetypes--the detective falling in love with a thief, the "dear reader" phrasings, the word search in the back--while creating something entirely fresh and experimental. The fact that it's interactive book (decoder ring and a secret story-within-a-story!) only serves to make it more engaging. Meno also constructs an entire working world within the book, soft and strange with somewhat antiquated speech, an alternate-reality New Jersey.

It is made clear that BIlly Argo's world, though similar, is not the very same world as the one we live in, and as such he is free to create a reality in which fantastic child heroes and ghosts and pirates and villains are as much a part of everyday life as bullies or rabbits. Child detectives, we find here, suffer much the same pressured fate as child actors in our own world, as Billy encounters a few on his adventures, all of whom you will probably know all too well as you find them. The whole thing is funny and sad all at once.

The Boy Detective Fails is one of those books that makes you want to speak so highly of it that the words themselves are just out of reach. You'll smile and well up with tears, and you may even write in the margins. I can't recommend it enough.

You can pick this one up at Punk Planet Books.

2. The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian

I found this book a few years ago, total luck on my part. Someone had left it behind on the counter at the art store where I was working at the time. When no one ever came back to claim it, I ended up taking it home. There was a Counterfit sticker jammed between some pages, a really brilliant local band that's broken up now, and I felt like it was a good omen. It must have been, because the book itself is pretty brilliant as well.

Our unnamed hero The Fuck-Up doesn't start out from nearly as lofty a place as young Billy Argo--just a slacker post-grad living with his girlfriend in New York City and harboring a crush on the concession stand girl while scraping by on a movie theater paycheck, complacent in an okay place. Not for long, however, as in quickfire succession he loses the concession stand girl, gets dumped by the college girlfriend and kicked out of the apartment, and is canned from the usher job for simply asking for a raise.

This is all in Chapter One, by the way, and marks only the catalyst in the almost insane downward spiral that is our young hero's life. Overqualified but underexperienced, he finds his way to sketchier and still sketchier employment; meanwhile, he crashes at his friend Helmsley's pad in Brooklyn (because it's always good to have a friend with even weirder problems than yourself, provided of course that neither end in tragedy), and tries gamely to tolerate the successively strange cast of characters that make their way throughout his life.

It's a pretty funny book in its own absurd and dark way, though it does take turns for the realist as well as the poignant when it's needed. Nersesian has a good eye for keeping the story's tone light despite his poor character's circumstances, as he could have easily dipped it all in melodrama pretty fast. Perhaps the only thing he does better than this is the way he describes the city. He also creates a world here (albeit a familiar one rather than fantastic), often and at great length, and in ways that are integral to the story itself:

I've never, I regret to tell you, been to New York, so I can't much vouch for the veracity of his descriptions; I would hope, however, that such a place really exists, dark yet beautiful, expansive yet ultimately familiar and like home. Someday perhaps I'll be able to tell you.

I was seventeen the first time I read this, and to tell you the truth, it kind of terrified me: the world of our narrator (aged twenty-two years) seemed unspeakably dark and all sorts of what could only be fiction. That was then, however, and I'm not sure if the fact that what I recognize most now, in addition to the amount of heart in the story, is the degree to which it is not entirely implausible with just the right amount of blind misfortune, makes it less terrifying or somehow even more. Nevertheless, any book that begs coming back to despite any implicit terror of the near future is a book that warrants reading. Go check it out.

Anything you've read lately fall along the same lines? Not quite a triumph, not quite a tragedy? Let me know. I love those kind of in-betweens. In the meantime, stay tuned for a word from PointBlank, who will surely be more prompt in his columnizings.

Jack Kerouac died in 1969, the first of the major Beat writers to go by a long shot. Not that it's stopped people from trying to make a name for themselves in his shadow. When I saw the title of this New York Sun article, referring to a "A Jack Kerouac Controversy," I was excited that something new and fascinating about his life might have been brought to light, but sadly it's not really about Kerouac himself at all so much as everyone left in his orbit, primarily one Mr. Gerald Nicosia, biographer by trade and author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Whether emboldened by paranoia or just finally having angered the wrong people once too often, he is coming forth and speaking out about a very important subject: he is allegedly being systematically cut out of Kerouac's legacy.

Nicosia claims to have press packets, featuring "mountains of evidence," to be doled out at his press conference, but no word yet on what actually materialized. He told the NY Sun, however, that he was being blacklisted and subjected to censorship, likely on account of his having supported Jan Kerouac, Jack's daughter, in the lawsuit she brought against her stepmother Stella Sampas, executor of the Jack Kerouac Estate.

Or, she was the executor, rather. It's an extremely complicated and drawn-out legal battle, the gist of it being that, upon his alcohol-soaked demise, Jack Kerouac willed his estate (all of $91 at the time of his death) to his mother; when his mother died just five years later, she entrusted the estate to Sampas. Jan Kerouac called shenanigans on this move, accusing Sampas of will forgery and taking the whole shebang to court. It's a battle that both women would take to their graves: Sampas willed the estate to her brother, John Sampas, upon her death in 1990, and Ms. Kerouac left Nicosia as her "literary executor" upon her own death in 1996. As it stands now, Kerouac's third wife's brother goes to court against Kerouac's daughter's biographer confidante, and the degrees of separation from himself and his estate grow steadily wider.

So Nicosia is crying that his own name is being cut from about the Beat Generation, and no one is very amused, least of all those facing his accusations. Sampas (the brother) says Nicosia is just trying to drum up publicity for himself, and calls him a "stalker of the Kerouac estate," pointing to the fact that this is hardly the first dispute that the two have ever had. Meanwhile, Paul Slovak, a publisher with Viking, pretty much just straight-up calls him a liar.

Personally, I think it's just a sad situation all around. Perhaps Sampas is cutting Nicosia a raw deal, which would be pretty rotten, but ultimately bizarre. Perhaps Nicosia is trumping up charges for attention, which would be rotten, but would ultimately reflect pretty badly on him. It's impossible to pick a winner, and the thing of it is that Kerouac wasn't exactly the kind of guy who reveled in media attention, and it's probably safe to say that the last thing he would have wanted was his family members (and, eventually, their friends) going to war very publicly for decades, the war outliving the wagers themselves, all over his material and possessions. Still, at any rate, there's this: Kerouac's original typed On the Road scroll, celebrating fifty years of existence, is going to be on display at the New York Public Library this coming winter. If nothing else, if Nicosia's accusations at least help redirect a little publicity to that attraction, then at least it's not completely without merit.

Speaking of attractions, let's put a little bit of spotlight back on the man who really matters in all of this. Here's a wonderful clip to end the story: Jack himself, chatting a bit on The Steve Allen Show and reading the last passage of On the Road, surreally accompanied by Allen on piano. It's one of my favorite single run-on sentences in all of literature, and it's even better out loud.

People are always saying "I don't read books." Too often, the problem is reading too many of the wrong books, thus turning a potentially great experience into something they'd rather avoid. This is where _DictionaryGirl_ and PointBlank come in and let you borrow something awesome. Let's go to town and make some recommendations, shall we?

Yes, Memorial Day weekend has once again come and gone, and the time is now officially upon us for the beach and snappy white sneakers and summer reading. The best time of the year ever, if you ask me. Last week, Professor PointBlank assigned you all his summer reading list; this week, I shall hand out mine.

Now it's more or less summer and all where it counts, but even in Southern California (where everyone likes to pretend it's summer year-round) we're not quite out of the metaphorical woods of overcast coastal gloom. Still, it's nice to pretend until the climate catches up, and one of the best ways is with a book taking place as far away from Thomas Hardy's dismal gray puddles and shires as possible. One of my personal favorites for this purpose is Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary. (I'm kind of a big fan of his; not sure if you could tell.) The protagonist here is familiar: Jack Kemp is a skulking alcoholic journalist for a paper on the brink of disaster, into his early thirties and a wrinkled suit, putting up with strange people in some stranger-still warm weather place for the sake of adventure. The book itself, however, is Thompson's first, the better part of a decade before he really grew into his character. This one is fiction, you see, taking place in the far-off heat and political turmoil of 1950s Puerto Rico. Still, somehow—perhaps because he was younger when he wrote it—the characters are real, much less caricature at this point. Even then, however, it's unmistakably Thompson from start to finish, and that's never, ever a bad thing.

One other thing unique to a Thompson novel here is that the fiction angle allows him to really work up a story arc, less stream-of-consciousness and more build-up; it's a side of Thompson rarely seen, and for a first novel it's remarkably well done. The book was rejected everywhere on his first attempt at publication (written in 1959, it didn't see printing for forty years), and it boggles my mind to this day. It's got knock-out fights and political tension, a comical dead-end job with idiot coworkers, gorgeously run-down tropical landscapes, an endless supply of iced rum and cheeseburgers, and (for the ladies) some romance in the form of a desperately sad love triangle and a smash-it-up holiday weekend yacht party that has little hope of ending well. It's also fairly short and a quick read, so you'll have time for some rum and cheeseburgers yourself.

Speaking of something being fairly short, I'm also a pretty big fan of short stories over the summer. This is mostly because I like to bring books to the beach, and the last time I got caught up in a regular novel, I forgot to move for a good couple hours and ended up with a back not altogether unlike a boiled lobster. You don't necessarily want something heavy, however—I leafed through a Raymond Carver collection the other day and almost got depressed on contact—so, in my opinion, you can either go the irreverent pop-culture route or the fun campy retro route.

If you take the first route, you'll probably want to take Chuck Klosterman IV along with you. It's his latest, and it combines a pretty great cross-section of what the man can do. The first section, "Things That Are True," should appeal to you celebrity worship types, with uncut versions of profiles and trend stories he's done for magazines like Esquire, Spin, and The New York Times. From Britney Spears to Billy Joel, no one is safe from his criticizing bespectacled hipster eye. The second section, called "Things That Might Be True," poses rhetorical questions and answers them by editorializing the low-culture staples of Klosterman's daily diet. Here, alone with his own thoughts, he's at times subject to wild tangents that on occasion never make it home, but when he's on, he's really on, dryly hilarious as he explores everything from pirates and robots and 24-hour VH1 to X-Men in real life and a list of the top ten most-accurately-rated artists in rock history:

The third section of the book is called "Something That Isn't True At All," and it's a work of fiction (which seems to be going around with journalists lately in this article). I'll admit: I haven't read that section yet. But it's on my list for the summer, that's for sure. The only real problem with Chuck IV is that it's still only out in hardcover, which can be kind of a bummer for lugging to the beach and such; if you still want to check out Klosterman but don't want the added weight, get Sex, Drugs, and Cocoapuffs: A Low-Culture Manifesto. It's pretty much an entire book full of "Things That Might Be True," put together in mix-tape form, and I have a hard time deciding which book I like better.

Now, if you want to bypass the irreverent pop-culture and go straight to Route Two, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to go all traditional 9th grade reading list on you and assign the interconnected short stories of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, a classic allegory about the sadness of colonization and war in the context of super awesome and adventurous space travel. Of course, by "afraid" I mean "totally thrilled," because it's one of the best books I was ever assigned, and, if certain college courses were any indication, people are probably going to yell at me now that Ray Bradbury isn't real science fiction because there are no dragons and sexy cyborgs or something, but then I would just have to argue that if Bradbury's doing it wrong, then I don't want to be right. It's a fun book to read again now that we're a good deal past the grand future of 1999 and beyond, just because it's interesting to see what he got wrong and what he got right. Bradbury also intersects futuristic science with homey summer scenes complete with hot dog stands and lemonade, enough to almost forgive even the themes of impending apocalypse (a possible downer and source of heaviness in the midst of summer fun).

Wait, almost forgive? What am I talking about? The language alone forgives all. If somehow you weren't assigned this book for school ages ago, this needs to be first on your list. Get on it.

From science fiction, it's really only a short jump to comic books, one of the best summer mediums ever. They read through like lightning, the pictures give your imagination some rest, and they are almost always tons of fun. The most immediate one I have to get behind right now is Jaime Hernandez's Maggie the Mechanic, the first of three Locas-centric Love and Rockets compilations due out over the present to near future. It starts at the very, very beginning of the series, which is lucky for you, because at what better point to jump in than at the beginning? Especially with a storyline like Love and Rockets, which gets complicated pretty fast. The characters are endless, and thankfully there's a legend in the back.

Nowadays the comic is slightly more straightforward slice-of-life, but back in the day it got pretty crazy, mixing goofy-gorgeous Mexican punk-rock girls up with space rocket mechanics, aliens, dinosaurs, and lucha libre. That's the Love and Rockets you get in this compilation: for our not-always-so-fearless heroine Maggie Chascarillo, flying a hover-scooter to fix a spaceship, fighting a dinosaur, contracting a voodoo jungle illness, getting kidnapped by a mysterious secret agent lover man, and dancing drunk on a table, are all in a day's work. What a woman!



No but seriously, it's all a mash-up of short unbelievable stories that veer into wild fun fantasy (and just a little bit of cheesecake, for the... ladies?) while still centering around some of the coolest and most real kids you'll ever meet in a book, comic or otherwise. Enid Coleslaw only wishes she could hang with Maggie and Hopey.

Love and Rockets does cater to a certain kind of pop culture, but if the Klosterman type was more your speed, then the fun summer comic for you is Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim series. The basic story can be summed up thusly: what if life was like an old Nintendo game? This is what Scott Pilgrim, our intrepid Canadian slacker bass-player hero, is faced with when he falls for the love of his dreams, feisty American Ramona Flowers. At first it's all awkward romance and vegan cooking, but the action doesn't stop once the first of Ramona's Seven Evil Ex-Boyfriend Bosses descends upon Scott with his zombie army for an all-out battle. Meanwhile, there's Scott's crazy underaged Chinese ex-girlfriend Knives to deal with, and will his band Sex Bob-Omb ever be more successful than The Clash at Demonhead, the Blood Brothers-esque art trio of the girl who stomped all over his heart like a Koopa Troopa? The odds are stacked against them all, but with a little faith and some extra power-ups, they just might make it.



Suffice it to say, it's a really dorky story, but the sheer amount of scenester parody and video game culture packed into each page keep it pretty hilarious and fun, and the illustrations are adorable. There are three pocket-manga-sized books out so far, and I believe three more on the way. I can't wait.

Wow. Between the two of us, you all are going to be kept busy well into September. Anything sound good? Or, better yet, anything already on your list sound better? I've already read all these ones, after all, and am scrambling for a reading list of my own! At any rate, happy incoming summer, and happy reading! And don't forget to wear sunscreen! Nobody likes a boiled lobster.

So here's a story that's blowing up the literature blogosphere right now: it seems the powers-that-be at publishing conglomerate Simon & Schuster decided to just up and redefine the meaning of the phrase "out-of-print." It's a small contractual parsing of terminology that seems nitpicky at first, and even gives the company a very technologically righteous and forward-minded appearance; when you really get down to it, however, it looks an awful lot like a way for the publishing company to tie writers up in legal tape, which is very far from righteous.

Motoko Rich of the New York Times breaks down the old definition for you:

Now, however, in our sophisticated world of Print-On-Demand, there doesn't really need to be a backlog of the books in a warehouse somewhere waiting to be sold -- when you run out, you can just print more. With that considered, Simon & Schuster decided to simply remove that minimum annual threshold. Thus, as long as a book can be ordered on demand, the brand will still consider it "in print."

The Authors Guild is up in arms about this development, calling for Simon & Schuster to be excluded from upcoming book auctions, and it's hard to understand why if you're not clear on what it all means, especially when the publisher's spokespeople are making it sound super-nifty.

It's a tricky matter though, this whole book-selling business, and others in the trade have some ideas of how this could all go very well for some people and very wrong for others. Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken cites cases in the past where authors with books out of print were able to take back their rights, sell the manuscripts to another publisher, and revive their careers. Meanwhile, a literary agent explains the reality of printing-on-demand.

Meanwhile, Simon & Schuster's Rothberg would like to assure everyone that nothing will really change, it's just some minor little contract words that don't really mean anything, they just thought they'd mix it up a little for fun. 'Cause, you know, that's what lawyers do. Change things around to no effect.

Sounds good, pal. At least this it doesn't seem like this has started a chain reaction among other publishers. So far, spokesmen for Random House and Grand Central Publishing have come out to say that their old threshold policies will remain unchanged. I certainly hope so.

People are always saying "I don't read books." Too often, the problem is reading too many of the wrong books, thus turning a potentially great experience into something they'd rather avoid. This is where _DictionaryGirl_ and PointBlank come in and let you borrow something awesome. Let's go to town and make some recommendations, shall we?

Jim Thompson, the suspense and crime novelist who died a little over thirty years ago on April 7, 1977, told his wife on his deathbed that she should hold on to his papers because, “I’ll become famous after I’m dead about ten years.” A more unlikely success story would be hard to predict. At the time of his death, none of his books were in print and his funeral was only attended by 25 mourners, so how could he know that thirteen years later, his novels would be some of the most admired genre fiction in English? Even better, how would he react to the news that Hollywood was turning three of his novels into movies? 1990 saw a Jim Thompson revival in film with the release of The Kill-Off, After Dark My Sweet, and most importantly, The Grifters.

Jim Thompson was born on September 27, 1906 in Oklahoma, and when his father, a local sheriff, was implicated in an embezzlement scandal, his family relocated to Texas. As a young man, Thompson worked as a bellhop in a local hotel. As this was Prohibition, Thompson made 20 times his regular salary by selling booze to guests. During this time, Thompson would attend school during the day, and work and drink his way through the night. He had his first nervous breakdown when he was nineteen. Thompson’s first novel, Now and on Earth, published in 1942 details these early experiences trying to keep his life together. His battle with alcoholism would be constant in both his life and his fiction.

Jim Thompson came to novel writing late in life, and before that lived on the outskirts of 1930’s America. After a stint (detailed in the autobiographical tall tale, Rough Neck) working in oil-fields in Nebraska and Oklahoma, Thompson returned to Texas where he briefly attended college and where he met his future wife, Alberta. They eloped in 1931, and a few years later he began publishing small crime stories in magazines like True Detective. Thompson was also working, along with Western author Louis Lamour, for the local WPA and was briefly a member of the Communist party in the late thirties. Only after Thompson moved to Los Angeles did his real writing begin. Now and on Earth was published to decent reviews, but sold very little. The same went for his next book, another Steinbeck influenced non-crime story called Heed The Thunder. Disappointed by the setbacks, Thompson returned to the crime story and to new themes: Failure, Rage, and Murder.

1952 saw the publication of The Killer Inside Me, Thompson’s most famous, and perhaps best, novel. Written in the first person, Killer is the story of Sheriff Lou Ford, a man (based on Thompson’s own father) who pretends to be slow-witted and amiable, but who is secretly a brilliant sociopath who can’t stop killing people. The novel does the neat trick of involving the reader in the suspense surrounding a completely loathsome character. We’re both repulsed and thrilled as Lou avoids detection. This novel also began Thompson’s most fruitful time as a writer. Over the next few years, he wrote over a dozen novels, including some of his greatest: Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman, The Nothing Man, and After Dark, My Sweet. This was also the start of his most successful collaboration, with the pulp publishing company Lion Books. Savage Night, especially, is worth noting. Another story of a man at war with his own psychoses, it tells the story of Carl Bigger, a hit man whose mental and physical collapse is mirrored by the surreal tone that the novel takes on as it progresses. The New York Times Anthony Boucher said of it, “Odd that a mass-consumptionrpaperback should contain the most experimental writing I've seen in a suspense novel of late."

In 1955, Stanley Kubrick hired Thompson to help write the screenplay for The Killing. Despite feuding with Kubrick over writing credits, the two collaborated once more for the film Paths of Glory. Again, Thompson received almost no credit. Coupled with the disappointment he met in Hollywood was the news that Lion Books was folding. Despite the praise in some quarters for Thompson’s work, he had a difficult time finding a new publisher. For years, he would blame the violence in his books for this failure. That belief, however, wouldn’t stop him from writing some of his most shocking work. The Getaway, published by NAL in 1959, is most famously known as the film directed by Sam Peckinpah starring Ali MacGraw and Steve McQueen. But the movie only focuses on the first half of the novel. After committing an exciting (if typical, for a pulp novel) bank robbery, Doc and Carol flee to a rumored heaven for criminals in Mexico. Along the way they are forced to hide in Dante-like conditions: A cavern the size of coffins, a room fashioned from shit. And even when the get to El Rey’s criminal “paradise” things are not what they seem. NAL was not amused by the avant-garde flourishes, but Thompson refused to change it.

Although Thompson would live for another 13 years, 1963-4 saw the last of the really good novels, with Pop. 1280, largely a re-imagining of The Killer Inside Me, arriving in 1964 and The Grifters, the year before. The Grifters is the story of Roy Dillon and his relationship with his mother, Lily, and his girlfriend, Moira Langtry. The three are grifters of little success, each erotically involved with the other. The Grifters was also made into the best and most loyal of the Thompson movies. Directed by Stephen Frears, it was nominated for four Academy Awards.

After 1964, Thompson wrote a few more novels, but none had the same power as his work in the fifties and early sixties. He suffered from ill health due to his constant drinking, a habit he was never really able to break. In 1977 he died, largely forgotten, with his wife Alberta by his side. In 1995, Robert Polito's National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biography Savage Art was published. Thompson, dead for almost two decades, was finally getting his due.

Maybe you know Philip K. Dick as the guy who wrote the book that Blade Runner is based on. Or maybe you know him as the guy who wrote the books behind some really bad, bad movies (hurry now and you might still be able to check out Next before it goes straight to laserdisc!). This week, though, Dick is going to be enshrined in the literary canon with a Library of America edition of four of his greatest works.

The Library of America, founded in 1979, has published 173 volumes from writers such as Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Henry James. With this edition, Dick becomes the first writer from the “pulp” tradition to be enshrined with his own volume (two editions of “Crime Novels” were published in the 90s featuring several authors). So why did they choose P.K. Dick? To be honest, his prose is often stiff and unwieldy and he wasn’t very prescient about the future. What he was, however, was remarkably earnest in his investigations of what it is to be human, and what it is to be real. The characters in his best novels strive to find out what is real in worlds where almost nothing is. Their desire to find meaning and authenticity is what drives the plots, rather than the gimmickry of other pulpy science fiction writers.

The Man in the High Castle, which won the Hugo award in 1963, is perhaps Dick’s best-written book. Set in a world where the Allies lost World War II, it is more than just a simple alternative history novel. In the book, characters are also reading an alternative history where the Allies won and the reader is left wondering which world is the real one. The other three novels featured in the edition are Dick at his speculative best, the most famous of which is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for Blade Runner. Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are similar stories, albeit with much different tones, where characters have to sort out the difference between hallucinations and reality.

So what would Dick think of the attention? First the news that there is a biopic in the offing, and now literary respectability? Well, he’d probably think that it was all a put-on, or that he was a character in some film, or maybe that he isn’t really dead at all, and that he was just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

The Library of America edition of Four Novels from the 60s by Philip K Dick will be available on May 10th.

People are always saying "I don't read books." Too often, the problem is reading too many of the wrong books, thus turning a potentially great experience into something they'd rather avoid. This is where _DictionaryGirl_ and PointBlank come in and let you borrow something awesome. Let's go to town and make some recommendations, shall we?

Here we are now, fully within the throes of Spring, and all that is old is being purged in order to make way for the new. I know this because just this week alone my computer's hard drive flat-lined, effectively purging me of the past three years of my life, and yesterday my parents sold the car on which I learned to drive. At times like this, you can either accept the transience of life and press onward, or reject it completely, digging your heels in and immersing yourself in absolute nostalgia wherever you can find it. Considering that I've been listening to The Jazz June's Breakdance Suburbia (recorded circa 1999) all day, it's safe to say which path I've chosen.

Back then I was in high school, and pretty wary of any "books that should be read," mostly because so much of what we were being made to read in AP Literature was (in my sixteen-year-old ADD-riddled opinion, at least) total bunk. The only people I was really apt to trust in any artistic sense were speaking to me in four-quarter time through my headphones; luckily I was listening to some smart records, and they referenced some books that by now I have read so many times that they risk disintegration. Here are my favorites.

1. Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker

Keep me from the old distress;
Let me, for our happiness,
be the one to love the less...

Sometimes now I wonder how Dorothy Parker would have felt about about her verse being turned into a punk rock song; she didn't "dig" bop music back when she was reviewing the works of the Beat writers, and that was still a sight closer to twenties jazz than what us crazy kids are listening to now. Nevertheless, that's how it ended up, and that's how I found her -- for in lieu of words for track four, the lyrics sheet in Mr. T Experience's Love is Dead simply said "lyrics by D. Parker." Who is this D. Parker, I thought to myself, and what band is he in? A search on the intertubes revealed my mistake -- not a he, but a she! -- and a trip to the library later, I was in love.

Let's just get this out of the way -- Enough Rope, Ms. Parker’s first collective publication, is a selection of poetry. Not just any poetry, either, but metered verse, as was still the fashion at the time (1926, before the beat poets who irked her so helped to smash the idea of iambics, tetrameters, anapestics and pentameters all to bits). At this point you might be groaning and rolling your eyes because metered poetry is dry and boring, and I almost wouldn't blame you because there really is a lot of bad poetry out there, but of course there is bad poetry, and then there is good poetry. Then there is Dorothy Parker, and once you get past the apprehension of everything rhyming, you realize that she’s the absolute coolest woman you will never meet.

The most notable thing about her poetry is that it’s never erudite. Even when she exercises her impressive vocabulary, it’s never put together in a way you couldn’t ever imagine hearing out loud. In later compilations she would touch upon subjects like Greek classics and making fun of 19th Century Brit Lit (a noble venture, if you ask me); in this one, she dwells on the basics: boys gone and yet come, drinks drank and yet drunken, and half-ironically wishing you were dead. Most of the verses turn on the last line, and nothing has a happy ending, bittersweet at best. Sometimes lost loves is one’s fault, and sometime’s it’s the other, but the results are always the same.

Oh, and not to mention that she wrote the single best couplet in the world, entirely changed in meaning when one removes the title and you don’t know who first said it and in what context.

Dorothy Parker is the queen of dry sarcasm and self-effacing sardonic wit. She’s your favorite best friend, the funny half-Jewish girl with a glass of wine in one hand and snide one-liners gesticulated wildly with the other. She’s the girlfriend that blew through like a hurricane you couldn’t just quite catch, just a little bit smarter and faster and crazier. In short, she’s something to strive for.

This one's available now along with her other poetry collections, her short story collection, and a multitude of criticism and articles and letters in the brillant omnibus Portable Dorothy Parker, out now on Penguin Classics with a fantastic cover by seth.

2. Life After God by Douglas Coupland

We live our lives to expect the worst,
but once it happens, what is left?
We will never have to be surprised again...

For the life of me I cannot find my copy of The Ataris' Look Forward to Failure right now, but I'm pretty sure I read it in their liner notes there and not an interview or anything that their song "My Hotel Year" is based on Life After God. (Hey, and both of them had interviews recently on our site! Oh, synchronicity!)

This one isn’t a full traditional novel, either; here eight separate short stories are tied together as they pinwheel around the concept of a generation grown up without religion, substituting belief with pop culture and a detached sense of irony. The narrator is nameless and somewhere on the crest of thirty; it’s unclear whether he is the same voice speaking from one story to the next (I shouldn’t like to assume, but accounts vary), but he is driving, almost always driving, in a hurry to get somehow as far away from civilization as humanly possible.

The best part of a Coupland book the way its details jump out in a way that’s almost startling. He describes landscapes like oil paintings, and since half the book takes place in Canadian wilderness, there are plenty of opportunities for him to work his magic; even so, he has a way of illuminating the most mundane objects - - a coloring book, cherry yogurt containers, Count Chocula - - in just such a way that every scene is made equally important and blessed. The chapters are extremely short (rarely more than a page), and each is punctuated by simple little line drawings that define the book to such a degree that I couldn’t imagine reading it without them.



Coupland writes just as simply, but with a photographic eye. One of Life’s major themes is the seemingly arbitrary passing of time, and within his brief paragraphs, he makes time stand still. My favorite story in the book is “The Wrong Sun,” half of which describes the narrator’s apprehensions and memories concerning death through nuclear annihilation, the other half describing death through nuclear annihilation as seen through the eyes of those who might have lived it. Each scene in the second half occurs in seconds, but they pan through in the kind of cinematic slow motion that gives you chills.

It is a kind of a meditation, I guess you could say, of faith - - but not, I have to stress, religion. This is important. The book doesn’t get preachy, and no real conclusions claim to be met. The only thing that’s true to the end is the calm and desperate (yet somehow not depressing) loneliness that comes from knowing that wherever you die, you die alone.

This one's available for your consumption on Washington Square Press.

So, there are a couple of books that really take me back, whether making me think (nuclear holocaust has been an irrational fear of mine since long before I read a whole chapter about it) or reminding me of my goals in life (to be the raddest girl in the room). Do you have anything like that? I hope so. Whether it's a book, or a record: as you can see, the results are often the same (if not intertwined) either way.


Recommended Viewing: If I'm going to be talking about music and how it relates to my reading habits, the least I can do is color in the whole picture, so this is The Ataris playing an acoustic version of "My Hotel Year" live somewhere. (Well, Brownsville, I guess, because the album version of the song goes "...and now the middle of nowhere feels like my home.") The visuals certainly aren't spectacular, but it was the best sound quality I could find, and that's the important thing. I wish I could post "Somebody's Song" as well, but apparently this new hard drive doesn't come with iMovie. Go figure. Enjoy.



_DictionaryGirl_ would like to dedicate this issue to the fine folk over at the Fashion Valley Mac store, for a lightning-fast repair turnaround time that made this update possible. Also for upgrading my OS to Tiger. Rock on! Stay tuned next week for a word from PointBlank. Same time (roughly), same station.

Here's a nice read for a lazy Sunday evening: New York Times frequent contributor Henry Alford has an essay in the Online Sunday Book Review today about the seedy underworld of ridiculous misquoting for book jacket blurbs. Everyone kind of knows that it goes on with movies all the time, with hyperecstatic quotes ranging from cherry-picked to made-up to being taken from Ain't it Cool News, but I'd never given too much thought to what goes on with books. You'd think publishers would be above all that, wouldn't you? Eh, of course not.

The funniest part of the article is the defensiveness with which the editors justify their actions, citing a sort of moral hierarchy to the remodeling of praise (or what passes for it) in which outright making things up is the worst offense, festive sprinklings of exclamation points warrants a sideways glance at most (despite drawing ire from the inimitable Sarah Vowell), and anything else in between is subject to a sliding scale of scorn or condoning.

Yet another reason why the best books are usually described with full, coherent sentences where the number of letters isn't eclipsed by the number of ellipses. Perhaps not "news" per se, and definitely not shocking when you really think about it, but if anything it's just another friendly reminder not to believe every single little thing you read. Especially when it's taken out of context.


"Readers be warned...This Article...is...dictionary...Girls'...finest...tour-de-force...achievement...complex [and] lavish...riveting." ~ Various Artists


Image: New York Times

People are always saying "I don't read books." Too often, the problem is reading too many of the wrong books, thus turning a potentially great experience into something they'd rather avoid. This is where _DictionaryGirl_ and PointBlank come in and let you borrow something awesome. Let's go to town and make some recommendations, shall we?

We’re all familiar with the canonical classics. But does anyone really think that all the great books that have ever been published have been given their just due? I mean, we’ve all read a supposed “classic” and thought, “is that all there is?” So, by that logic, there must be some pretty damned great books that have gone ignored. Every so often, a writer will publish a book that is at least as accomplished, and just as good as anything else on the market yet for some reason, it simply doesn’t make a mark on the general population. Sometimes they aren’t even published until the author is dead. Sometimes the books simply fall out of favor until someone rediscovers them and a new classic is (re)born.

We all love feeling like we found something that no one else knows about. I like turning people on to those hidden gems that I’ve discovered (or have been discovered for me). So, let’s look at a couple of my bookshelf favorites that you might not know about yet.


1.Chromos by Felipe Alfau

The story behind Chromos and Alfau is almost as interesting as the book itself. In 1936, Alfau, a Spanish immigrant to New York, published a book called Locos which was fairly well reviewed but was bought by almost nobody. Whether this was because of its style (a proto-postmodernist mélange of Barthelme, Coover, and especially Barth), its difficulty, or the author’s rumored support of Generalissimo Franco is up for debate. What is known is that the book disappeared, almost without a trace. Disappeared, that is, until an editor from the Dalkey Archive discovered a copy at a yard sale. Surprised at the high level of talent, she tracked Alfau down to a retirement home and offered to publish it. Instead of taking any money, Alfau simply asked that Dalkey consider publishing his second novel, which he had written nearly half a century before. They did, and in 1990 the novel was nominated for the National Book Award.

The opening is one of my favorites:

The book takes place in New York (writing in English, Alfau joins writers such as Conrad, Beckett, and Nabokov, who did much of their great work in “foreign” languages) and concerns a group of Spanish immigrants—“Americaniards”—who are habitués of a bar called El Telescopia. From the title, and even the name of the bar, one can guess that time, and it’s abilities to “telescope,” that is to seem to move too fast and too slow at the same instance will play a large part in the book. The émigrés complain about the lack of time in New York, where no one stops for even a moment. In fact, the novel itself is bracketed by a story that seems to pause as the rest of the story is taking place. There are also books within books, dead characters who return from Alfau’s previous work, and characters who both argue whether they are too American, or too Spanish, mostly through a lesson on the correct way to make paella. Thankfully, this isn’t, a dry study in postmodernist technique, nor is it a book where characters talk endlessly about their circumstances. While there is an ominous undercurrent stalking the Amercaniards, there is more than enough drinking, dancing and humour to fill several lesser books. Chromos is a book that takes an unflinching look at life and its problems, but it obviously written by a man in love with living.

Chromos is available through The Dalkey Archive, one of the greatest small presses in America.

2.Epitaph Of A Small Winner by Machado De Assis

Unlike Felipe Alfau, Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis is not an unknown writer. In fact, he is probably considered one of Brazil’s greatest novelists. That, of course, doesn’t stop him from being nearly anonymous in the rest of the world (America, I’m looking at you!). What the two do have in common is their prescient ability to use postmodern techniques several years (and in the case of Machado, nearly a full century) before they would become codified. Assis, in fact is most often compared to that ur-postmodernist Lawrence Sterne and Epitaph of a Small Winner is often seen as his Tristram Shandy.

He, as well, can write a heck of an opening:

For me, that paragraph just about perfectly sums up what is so great about Epitaph of a Small Winner. That balance between, in the first statement about the author already being dead, meant to surprise the reader, is a great stylistic trick, but then in the second phrase, he admits that it’s also a great trick to keep the reader interested and to sell books. The ironic comparison to the Pentateuch at the end is just the sort of self-effacing and satirical humor that makes this book so much damned fun. Machado takes much joy in skewering the hypocrisies of nearly everyone, and he’s been called the greatest satirist since Swift. Since his targets aren’t (always) those obvious, evil people of power, he also has the ability to make the reader sympathize with those he is mocking, not to mention that his biggest target is, more often than not, himself.

Epitaph of a Small Winner is available now. Please note that it’s original (Portuguese) title is Memorias Postumas De Bras Cubas.

Hey, while we're at it: why not let me know what some of your “secret books” are and, as always:

Join us again next week for a word or two-hundred from _DictionaryGirl_! If there's anything you'd like to see here, never hesitate to let us know.

On 11 April 2007, a walking piece of meat with a mop of curly hair and a propensity for Pall Malls (the "classy way to commit suicide") stopped puttering around this little blue and green rock.

So it goes.

Though not a sign of the apocalypse, many were shocked when Oprah Winfrey chose Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as the latest selection for her book club. Oprah’s Book Club, perhaps the biggest force in publishing (non British boy wizard division) today, is usually the domain of the uplifting memoir or, more recently, a classic of the past. This time, however, Oprah has chosen one of the bleakest (albeit best-reviewed) novels of the past few years.

In The Road an unnamed man and his son travel across a landscape empty of any comfort or sustenance as they hide from roving bands of cannibals—the only other humans left after the destruction of nearly everything . Not exactly light reading . . . and there is little chance that the notoriously media-shy McCarthy will be appearing on the Oprah show any time soon.

So what is behind the surprising choice? Does it reflect Oprah’s angry mood following the James Frey debacle? Perhaps, but The LA Time’s Scott Timberg also sees a trend centered on a growing fascination with eschatological themes in literature and film.

Why the sudden high-art obsession with end times? Is it because of our fears after 9/11 and the war in Iraq? Is it even something new? One thing is for sure: with Oprah’s pick, the future is a lot brighter for McCarthy’s publishers than it is for his protagonists.

Fittingly, the story behind the creation of the novel Frankenstein is almost as famous as that of the monster itself.

Mary Shelley, only nineteen at the time, spent the cold summer of 1816 with her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley; Lord Byron; and Byron’s doctor, John William Polidori. Due to the subnormal temperatures, the group was forced to stay indoors where they entertained each other by reading from a book of German ghost stories. When Lord Byron challenged the group to write their own stories, Mary Shelley came up with the first spark that would become the classic Frankenstein. Remarkably, Polidori was also inspired by Byron that night and later wrote what is considered to be the first modern vampire story, The Vampyre . Two horror greats were born that night. It don't get any more goth than that, people.

Now, however, one scholar is claiming that the story might not be true, at least when it comes to Mary Shelley and her monster. How did a marginally-educated nineteen-year old come up with what is now thought of as one of the first science-fiction novels, and why didn't she ever write anything of merit again? Perhaps she wasn’t the author at all, according to John Lauritsen, who claims that Percy Bysshe Shelley actually wrote the novel.

Lauritsen also points out that the first edition of Frankenstein was published with no author credited and was roundly panned by the critics of the time. Obviously, a book like this is going to cause some controversy, but at least one critic, Camille Paglia, writing in Salon sees the novel as not only an important investigation, but a shot fired across the bow of academia as well.

Will a village of angry scholars armed with pitchforks and torches be coming for Lauritsen when his book, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein comes out next month? Only time will tell.

I’m writing today’s column at New York’s JFK airport, taking advantage of the flight delay to gather together some tattoo goodness for your enjoyment. I’m sitting across from the overpriced but extensive bookstore staring at a Wall Street Journal ad in the display with a middle-aged man sporting half-sleeves and hawking business news. WSJ has obviously caught wind of my Inked Inc. brethren.

Yet, tattoos are not just for corporate raiders. They’ve invaded the chic lit set if JFK’s booksellers are to be believed. Neatly lining the slick backlit cases were The Grave Tattoo and Until I Find You, novels where tattoos still adorn bikers and sailors, not lawyers and investment fund managers. It makes for a better drama.

To paraphrase Jack London, show me a man with a tattoo and I’ll show you a man with a good story, and modern authors have taken heed. The results allow for more interesting down time than, say, tattoo TV. So, today, I’m offering a rundown of some good reads where needles and ink figure prominently in recent paperbacks.



Until I Find You

While John Irving’s 800-page tattoo tome met with mixed reviews, I’d still recommend picking it up to meet tattoo artists around the world—some fictional, some very real—although do pick up the paperback version. The hardcover made it difficult to pick the book up, never mind put it down. Voluminous hard covers especially do not make for easy bedtime reading; my body became tattooed with red indentation marks wherever I balanced the book.

I eventually did get through Until I Find You and, overall, glad I did. It is not a flawless novel. I agree with The NY Times that the story is devoid of conflict: Everything Jack [the central character] foresees about his future comes true, only better. Nevertheless, I enjoyed taking the trans-continental trip with Jack and his tattoo artist mother in search of his tattoo-addicted church-organist father, especially when the artists they meet in each port are often the real godfathers of the tattoo world, some still living today. Even a couple of today's younger tattoo rock stars appear in the novel, which was a bit disconcerting for me; I'm reading a work of fiction that relays stories of certain men I drink with and pausing to wonder, Would Tin Tin really do that?



The Electric Michelangelo

The Electric Michelangelo is my favorite of this list for it’s vivid imagery and strength of characters—completely befitting a tattoo tale. The central figure in the book is Cyril Parks, an English boy who begins his life in the early 1900s aiding his mother at her seaside hotel (and night-time abortion clinic), and grows into a man through a sadistic apprenticeship with a local tattoo artist, Eliot Riley.

Author Sarah Hall perfectly sets the scene of Cyril’s first look at tattooing and how it changed his life:

Riley mentors--and torments--Cyril pushing him to excel in custom work, personalized tattoo designs that were less common than the standard flash sheets of pre-designed motifs. Cyril does so and becomes the "Electric Michelangelo."

After suffering the deaths of his mother and mentor, Cyril crosses the ocean to the tattoo Mecca of the time, Brooklyn’s Coney Island. There, he mixes with an international cast of tattooers, sideshow performers, sailors and street punks. It is also there where the reader becomes most connected to Cyril as he reflects on the nature of the craft, his impact on the lives of others, and the meaning of his own existence.



The Tattoo Artist

Jil Ciment’s The Tattoo Artist centers around, you guessed it, a tattooist. No shockers here. Yet, the personal journey of one New York woman in the 70s looking back on her self-imposed exile for thirty years on the remote island of Ta'un'uu makes for an engaging read.

How Sara, our heroine, arrived on the island and the journey back home is relayed as a flashback telling the story of her life. She learned the art of tattoo from the island natives--the Michelangelos of the South Seas--who wear full tattooed body suits. She goes on to describe the tribal culture and even makes parallels with her own Jewish background. Eventually, Sara acquires a full tattoo body suit of her own and by her own hand. Her body is her greatest masterpiece as an artist, the author tells us.

Like Irving, Ciment's work met with mixed reviews. The NY Times joked "scan the horizon and clichés wash in on every tide." For me, it's worth the read. I'm a sucker for a heroine with a Moko.



The Grave Tattoo

The buzz among book reviews these days is the release of The Grave Tattoo in paperback. Set in England’s Lake District, author Val McDermid creates a fast paced thriller, which The NY Times Book Review called “as much a literary puzzle as it is a murder mystery” for the novel’s weaving plot twists. At the center of the plot is the discovery of a tattooed body, in a bog, of what could be an 18th century sailor based on the Pacific Island markings seamen received at the time. That kept my attention.

Tales of pirates and poets, bounty and booty (not the SG kind) move the story as the protagonist Jane Gresham tries to prove her theory that the body is that of Fletcher Christian, a mutineer on the H.M.S. Bounty, who made his way back to England, despite his exile, and confided his secrets of the South Seas to William Wordsworth. She believes the poet wrote down the stories and that these forgotten texts still exist locally; however, she’s not the only one who wants to get her hands on them.

Unlike the other stories, tattoos are more a catalyst than central theme of the novel but the idea that dead men still tell tales via tattoos is vastly compelling.


Have a favorite work of tattoo fiction? Let me know in the comments section below.


Marisa_DiMattia is a lawyer and editor of Needled.com, a blog on tattoo art and culture.

Recently it came to my attention that the Turkish school curriculum has begun to feature Islamified versions of classic childrens' stories.

I tend to agree with these Turkish publishing houses -- many of these “classic” pieces of literature have gotten just a tad bit stale. So, SG readers, for this weeks “Suicide Watch,” I, Jonathan Kesselman, have decided to try my hand at tinkering with a few of my favorite stories…

1) Animal Farm

This book must be banned! Pigs are unholy, filthy, swine!

2) Morty Glick (AKA Moby Dick)

Ishamael narrates the tale of Captain A-rab, the tyrannical skipper of the Pequod. A-rab is driven by a monomaniacal desire to kill Morty Glick, the Infidel Jew who took his leg. Also, there’s a big, white whale that swims and stuff.

3) Portnoy’s Complaint

Alexander Portnoy rants about his sex life for exactly one sentence. He is then shot in the head by a soldier of Allah; the rest of the book consists of 300 blank pages.

4) Pippi Longstocking

Pippi Longstocking, a super-strong, red-headed, pig-tailed, budding lesbian is the head of a Swedish terrorist cell. Pippi instructs her beloved next-door neighbors, Tommy and Annika, in the science of bomb building and the logistics of orchestrating a suicide attack. All of this is, of course, funded by her father, Efraim, who is having intercourse with Mr. Nilsson.

5) Of Mice And Men

Lennie and George toil on a farm in Salinas, California. An anxious Lennie often asks George to tell him about their future. George placates Lennie by telling him that someday they’ll get a farm of their own where they’ll “live offa the fatta the lan’.” -- after that they’ll blow up the Empire State Building on behalf of the merciful Allah, killing themselves in the process. Lennie will be able to pet all 72 of his virgins in heaven.

6) To Kill and Mock A Jew

Self-explanatory.

7) Lolita

Humbert Humbert-Ali becomes infatuated with his stepdaughter. He marries her, brutally rapes and beats her, slashes her face so that no other man will ever want anything to do with his property, and then eventually sells her on the black market. Everyone’s cool with it.

8) Crime And Punishment

A megalomaniacal Russian contractor believes he is “super-human,” and takes a job re-building schools in Bagdhad. He is kidnapped by members of Al-Qaeda for his crime, and is subsequently beheaded. His death is captured on video and distributed on an Islamic Website. A kid in Omaha downloads it, recuts it to Ok Go’s ‘Here It Goes Again,’ and distributes it on You Tube. The video gets 200 million hits, the kid in Omaha is courted by all of the major film studios, and signs a 3 picture deal with Warner Brothers.

9) Are You There God Allah, It’s Me, Margaret

Margaret, a pre-teen with one Christian Parent, and one Jewish Zionist Pig Parent, is conflicted about finding her one true religion. In the story, she also buys her first bra, has her first period, and performs exercises with her girlfriends in an attempt to increase her bust size. At school, she meets a wise teacher named Dr. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. He instructs her in the ways of Islam. She converts, murders her Infidel parents, and switches from belted sanitary napkins to maxi-pads.

10) War And Peace

There will be no peace, only war, until the Infidels of the West and the Zionist Scourge convert to Islam or are eradicated from the planet!

Now it's your turn, dear SG readers. In the comments section below, throw out some ideas of your own. Not only is it a lot of fun, but young Islamic fundamentalist minds need your shaping!!!...

(I would like to extend a special thank you to SG editor Helen_Jupiter for turning me on to the Telegraph article.)

Jon_Kesselman is the filmmaker responsible for THE HEBREW HAMMER. He is currently co-writing and directing Odd Todd for Paramount, writing and directing The Orbit Of Bob for Nickelodeon, and producing Confessions Of An Ivy League Bookie with Andrew Fierberg and Steven Shainberg. Incidentally, he is also sexy, devilishly handsome, super-smart, brilliantly funny, sexy, and exceedingly modest.

The days are counting down. You have until Friday, August 4th to download all the eBooks your hard drive can handle. After that the month long World eBook Fair will come to a close and you’ll have to pay the annual membership fee of $8.95 for access to a library of over 300,000 books.

The fair is co-sponsored by Project Gutenberg, a non-profit that has been working for 35 years to increase the creation and distribution of eBooks. Just remember, the organization is run by volunteers and many of the eBook submissions are made by volunteers, so the database is not the most consistent or accurate. Your best bet is to stick to the classics (or search at random for independently published eBook gems).

Two books in the collection:


On the other hand, to hear a few words against the eBook revolution, scour the newsstands for remaining copies of O, The Oprah Magazine's July “Reading” issue and read Harper Lee’s rare and brief letter on her love of reading (Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, stopped giving interviews in the early ’60’s and rarely ever, ever publishes anything in print.).

Wednesday Literary Quarterly features the newest works from some of Los Angeles’ brightest writers. The mag is all poetry and fiction—no interviews, no reviews, no ads—written within the last three months. The experimental feel of the magazine does not come so much from a specific aesthetic, but from the feeling that each writer is taking a risk on something new.



Wednesday No. 5 “Most Wanted” drops today. The featured artist is Phillip Martin. His series of paintings, white face on black, are fun, political, heartbreaking and deceptively simple, much like the writing inside. It’s the little mag that begs (in Phillip Martin’s words) “Don’t put me in a box, man.”

Excerpt from "Boiler Room" by Craig Bergman:

Release Party tonight, Friday July 21, 2006 , 7:00 pm @ glu gallery, 7424 Beverly Blvd., LA

Mike the PoeT runs all of his shows as if everyone in the room is family, even if he's never seen them before. This may be because he is an artist born of Los Angeles, a 3rd generation Angelino and a tour-bus driver. There isn't a corner of this city Mike hasn't trekked through. He performs regularly at Blue Nile Cafe and Blue Chips Gallery. You can hear him and his words in bookstores, galleries, museums, nightclubs, even churches across Beverly Hills, Downtown, Echo Park, Long Beach, Hollywood and Santa Monica. There isn't a patch of asphalt in Los Angeles that Mike doesn't love. Up and down the streets you can hear his lyrical verse echo, literally.

After graduating from UCLA in 1997, Mike got his commercial driver’s license and a gig as a tour guide. He led tours up and down the coast, from San Francisco to the Grand Canyon. Over the last decade Mike’s become known for his L.A. City Tours, a composite of poetry and history. His “The Poets Beat Neon Cruise” hosted by the Museum of Neon Art was recently written up in the Washington Post.

In an interview with Kotori Magazine Mike says of tour-guiding:

One night last summer at 33 1/3 Books, then on Alvarado, Mike was hosting. Many regulars read. I read, too, some piece I'd been experimenting with for a while. But the highlight of the night was when a kid named Anthony, a big baby-faced 16 year-old from Compton stepped up to do a piece he wrote. It was his first time. He was nervous. But Mike stood by him, encouraging the young poet and the crowd followed Mike's lead, cheering Anthony on. And when the youngster had finished, he smiled with a sense of arrival. I understood then what Mike had meant and will continue to mean to the creative community of Los Angeles.



In a way, today marks a big day in Los Angeles literature. Not just literature, actually, but in Los Angeles Culture. Tonight marks the release of our city's own Mike the PoeT's first book, I am Alive in Los Angeles. Tonight and Saturday night, he'll be reading and performing from his collection of poetry, prose, and significant lists.

-July 20, 2006 at M.J. Higgins Gallery
244 S. Main Street, Downtown L.A., 8:15PM

-July 22, 2006 "L.A. Reprrazent!" Book Signing 5:00-9:00PM
Crewest Gallery, 110 Winston, LA, CA, 90013
with live painting by MearOne

Mike the PoeT is the first of our new "LA's Next Icon" feature. The series features those writers, artists, performers and occasionally personalities who are locally established, beloved by and in love with the city, and poised to burst onto the national and worldwide stage. Mike has established himself as a true cultural figure, a champion of the creative spirit of Los Angeles, and his influence will spill nationwide.



The cover features the art of MearOne, one of the more important Los Angeles artists whose work has been shown all over the world and a member of Mike's crew, Poets of the RoundTable. You might remember one of his pieces on the billboard above the Union on La Brea. His work perfectly complementing the cityscape that Mike has created with his verse.

It is a completely unique book. It made me think about all the streets I've driven on, about all the sidewalks I've walked on, about the night my friends and I tried to see if we could get lost and drove in circles for hours until we ended up near Jefferson, right by the Fedco on La Cienega. It's hard to explain the feel of the book, but let me try. It's as if Mike understands this city well enough to know that all he needs to do is open my eyes and step aside and I'll see what he sees, the undeniably unique beauty that resides along the fault lines that often threaten to crack this city apart.

From the Introduction:

See, where some artists such as the White Trash Apocalypse Tour, who are more interested in leaving the mark, "WE WERE HERE," Mike the PoeT and his traveling group of artists want to say, "YOU WERE HERE." He wants every corner of the city to know that it has something special that draws him there. He wants to travel the freeways and city streets that he knows so well, the roads that connect the points of the city until it is one work of art.

From the poem "Hollywood:"

Aside from poems and stories, the book also contains lists. LA lists. Best LA Movies. Best LA Albums. And there's this Best LA Books list:

There's one more book that belongs on that list. His own.

Mike the PoeT aka Mike Sonksen is co-founder of getunderground.com and music editor for Jointz Magazine. His spoken word CD "I am Alive in Los Angeles" was given 4 stars by Urb Magazine.

There's a new article about a long time Los Angeles staple, SA Griffin, that appears in the latest issue of Los Angeles Alternative. It rightfully gives due to the work SA has done both as a poet/performer and as a pioneer of sorts with his wild road-trips and Rock & Roll poetry tours: the Lost Tribe, Carma Bums, White Trash Apocalypse Tour. He currently DJ's on killradio.org and continues to pound out his simple and beautiful poetry.

Viggo Mortensen (yes, Viggo of The Rings), who himself is a Los Angeles poet who pops up at the legendary Beyond Baroque for readings, even made a film about SA and The Carma Bums called The Luxurious Tigers of Obnoxious Agreement. That’s respect. That’s star treatment.

I too remember the Carma Bums stomping ground, the Onyx on Vermont. It was a narrow and deep space with stark white walls and a huge "ONYX" sign outside. They had art hanging on the walls and poets and writers reading and writing their work inside. I first went there with my boy Nate, who insisted on what a cool place it was. This was in '89. I don't know if SA was there that night, but there wasn't much poetry. They did have horrible coffee, though.

As fantastic a poet SA Griffin has been, the article overemphasizes the significance of his “crowd,” whether it’s the Onyx (even if Beck became Beck!) or the Bums or the Lost Tribe. Unfortunately, they were embraced by a scene that has never been inclusive. If you have ever been to an event sponsored by Los Angeles Alternative and/or killradio.org, such as the release party for Society magazine from Pale House Press down at historic Cole's in downtown, you’ll understand. They ARE the gentrifying crowd.

There is so much poetry in Los Angeles outside of that crowd. There are artists and venues that continue to be more important to developing more poets. Luis Rodriguez and his Tia Chucha's Cafe Cultural. Mike the PoeT and his Poets of the Roundtable. The Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective. Da Poetry Lounge at Greenway Court Theater. All of them completely inclusive and actually trying to make the streets of LA flow with poetry, not to use those streets to speed their way to stardom and hipster cred.

See, even back in '87, when I first discovered poetry in this city, there was no greater shortage of poets here than in any other place in the world. I was constantly surrounded by hundreds of poets, all members of what would become the Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective. They were doctors and housewives and lawyers and mechanics and engineers and psychos and actresses and grandfathers and high school students (like myself).

A few weeks back a client insisted that I had to “meet” Last Exit to Brooklyn author “Herbert” Selby through a new documentary narrated by Robert Downey Jr. from directors Michael W. Dean & Kenneth Shiffrin.

I hadn’t the heart to tell her that I needed no introduction: I had read his books many times, attended his readings, gotten his autograph, and shaken his hand. Neither did I have the heart to tell her that his name was Hubert, not Herbert. Everyone here in LA (my client included) knew him simply as Cubby.

The first time I saw Cubby read was in a lecture room at Cal Poly. Even though I had seen pictures of him before, it was still jarring to see how small and frail he looked. He apologized for taking so long to catch his breath, but assured us that once he did, we wouldn’t be able to shut him up. And we couldn’t. I heard him again at various Los Angeles book shops and venues, including Midnight Special and Skylight Bookstore. The last glimpse I caught of him was on La Brea in front of A Votre Sante, as he stood by the curb with tubes in his nose and an oxygen tank on wheels by his side, waiting for his ride.

It was a fitting image, for me at least, of a towering writer that had been adopted by LA (and by AA) over the years. It’s amazing how little the literary world in New York talked about him in my years there. I wonder how “big” and “important” he would have become (in their eyes) if he had stayed on the East Coast.

Years ago, during a move to the east coast, a box of books busted in the care of the US Postal Services somewhere between LA and NY. The only books missing from the box were my autographed Hubert Selby’s. Some USPS worker knew what s/he was looking at.

The documentary, which premiered in Los Angeles June 22 and 23rd, was an official selection at the 2005 Anti Anti Fest in Prague, Czech Republic, as well as the Festival du Cinema Américain in Deauville, France. Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow premiers in New York at The Two Boots/Pioneer Theater tonight and tomorrow.

Thursday, July 06, 2006 at 7:00 PM

The Two Boots/Pioneer Theatre
East 3rd Street, between Avenues A and B (closer to A)
* New York City *
(212) 591 0434

The film, which is now available for distribution, should begin to materialize in Indie and Art houses across the U.S.

Until it comes to your town, you can watch the trailer, and familiarize yourself (or revisit) some of Selby's work, including Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream.