LIFE ON DIGITAL GRUB STREET
Blogging will be light to nonexistent the next couple of days. I’ve come down with a pretty nasty flu, and between the fever and the less attractive side effects, I don’t really have much ambition beyond getting to the bathroom on time.
I don’t want to keep boring you with every bob and weave of my promotional rounds for The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway, but events two and three are now past and both were wonderful. Event Two took place at the Borders in East Brunswick, and while attendees were a little late in arriving (a consistent practice for all three events to date) I ended up with fifteen people, including one of my favorite English professors from my bright college days (take a bow, Bill Vesterman).
It looked dodgy at first, though. When the clock showed 7:10 p.m., the only attendees were two Rutgers students with laptops who’d been looking for a quiet spot to work — not a good omen. I also had a Borders employee drop by an offer preliminary condolences: “We always have trouble getting people in here on Wednesdays.” But people came, books were sold and the manager had me sign additional copies for sale. Now I guess I’ll find excuses to swing through the Borders every couple of days, just to see how quickly the pile is being diminshed.
Last night’s event at the Highland Park Public Library drew some thirty people, one an ex-ironworker with some memories of the period covered in the book. Pretty good sales, too. Once again, I invite one and all to come by and say hello. The next event is tomorrow (Saturday) at Watchung Booksellers in Montclair.
The local video store has taken an interesting tack: in response to the rise of Netflix, it has drastically reduced its video and DVD stock in order to add comic books and used books to its racks. I don’t know how successful this will be as a business strategy, but for me it’s turned the store into a dusty time machine. The store’s owners get most of their used book stock from estate sales, and most of the titles they have are early 1970s stuff from the days when I first started paying attention to the New York Times Book Review and other book magazines. Anybody here remember R.D. Delderfield? Alistair MacLean? Those old Time-Life picture book series on various topics? How about American Heritage when it was still published with hard covers? I skipped the Me Decade therapeutic tracts like I’m Okay, You’re Okay, but I did end up buying a copy of Theirs Was the Kingdom, just to read the stuff about Rourke’s Drift.
After years of dismissing the Harry Potter series as “stuff for boys,” Dances With Mermaids has suddenly taken an interest in the young wizard. Maybe it’s because she’s seen The Lord of the Rings enough times to want a new fantasy epic to sink into. But whatever the reason, we’re now deep into The First Potter, a little over a month before The Last Potter hits the shelves. What’s especially gratifying is that unlike The Lord of the Rings, in which the films are (to me) far superior to the novels, the Harry Potter series is above all a reading experience — the movies just don’t compare. Anyway, Dances With Mermaids is enthralled.
This is the first time I’ve revisited the earlier books, and it’s odd and rather poignant to re-encounter certain characters while knowing what’s in store for them a couple of books down the line. Author J.K. Rowling has warned that two major characters will buy the farm in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which seems downright restrained of her — considering the way she ended Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, I would have expected at least a half-dozen deaths to balance the scales.
According to a news item, the smart money is betting that Potter himself will die, which only goes to show that the smart money isn’t really all that smart. Rowling is nothing if not solicitous of her fans, particularly the young readers who have literally grown up along with her characters, and she knows that killing off Harry would be the equivalent of wiping her feet on the imaginative lives of hundreds of thousands of kids. Besides, killing the hero of a series usually hurts the long-term sales of the series, so even if J.K. were inclined to snuff Harry, Scholastic Books would have her kidnapped and held incommunicado while a ghost writer (how appropriate!) rewrote the ending before publication. I’m sure the Scholastic bigwigs are already depressed enough at the prospect of Harry hanging up his broom without having to contemplate a further drop in sales.
But after the tragedy at the end of Half-blood Prince, it’s clear Rowling is going to deliver a couple of haymakers for her last book. I’m not sure about the second death, but I’m certain Ron Weasley is going to shuffle off this mortal coil in Deathly Hallows. He’s been the stalwart buddy for six whole volumes, and his character really has nowhere else to go. I’m sure Hermione is safe — when Rowling warned that a major character would die in Goblet of Fire, she became downright snippy when people predicted it would be Hermione.
So remember that headline. Ron Weasley is toast. That’s my prediction.
One of the strangest and most powerful stories I’ve read is Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” the appropriate closer of his collection The Night in Question. I say “appropriate” because its subject is what happens at the moment of death, and deals with the subject in terms that are as direct and unsentimental, and yet as unexpectedly moving, as anything I’ve encountered. It’s all the more striking because the subject is so often handled in schlocky and cloying terms: the Patrick Swayze flick Ghost, for example, or Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm, which starts off provocatively but collapses into greeting-card kitsch.
I don’t know Connie Willis or her novel Passage, but they serve as the peg for this great essay about near-death experiences and what they tell us about what we want to believe about what happens next, as filtered through art. There are people who react to overwhelming trauma related to death by rejecting anything that smells of Hallmark sentiment, even becoming angry at it. I suspect Willis is one of them, along with Wolff and the author of the essay, Jennifer Ouellette.
Apparently those gentle spring rains I remember from days of yore are another casualty of global warming: this season, we get either bone-dry weather or drenching torrents that flood basements. Today it’s the latter, so the theme will be “Stormy Monday.”
Here it is from the immortal T-Bone Walker.
Here it is again from Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughn.
Here’s a serving with a side order of Cream.
How about Rui Veloso and B.B. King?
My first book event to promote The Last Three Miles couldn’t have gone better. Well, nobody showed up to give me a pre-emptive Pulitzer, but putting aside that disappointment I’d have to say it all went swimingly. The event, held yesterday at the Five Corners branch of the Jersey City Free Public Library, drew thirty people for a reading and talk that ended up running over two hours.
(Not a Stephen King-level turnout, obviously, but pretty freakin’ good for a first book from an unknown author; I once attended a North Jersey reading by John Sandford that drew about the same number, for the release of Easy Prey.)
Best of all, the people were fully engaged with the subject, asked great questions and (best of all) were eager to buy the book. I’ve read plenty of horror stories about book events were nobody showed up and the only sound in the store was the slow drip of the author’s self-esteem dribbling away. It’s probably inevitable that I’ll have days like that. But this tour is certainly off to a great start.
Thanks to everyone who came, and my thanks in advance to anyone who’s thinking about turning out for the other appearances.
So now it’s been just over forty years since the Beatles put out Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the inevitable anniversary stories are done with. Am I allowed to say that as much as I love the Beatles, and as important as they remain in the annals of popular music, I think Sgt. Pepper is a weak, gimmicky record? Or that I think it led rock music down an ill-advised cul-de-sac? Well, there, I said it anyway.
My answer to the old question “Who’s your favorite Beatle” has always been “John Lennon,” and Sgt. Pepper is very much Paul’s record. Sgt. Pepper really hasn’t stood up to the years as commandingly as the band’s other releases, because the songwriting that was always the band’s calling card (as opposed to instrumental virtuosity or great vocals) took a significant step back from Revolver. It all sounds as wonderful as ever, but except for “With A Little Help From My Friends,” “When I’m 64″ and “For the Benefit of Mister Kite” the songs are at best minor additions to the Beatles catalogue. The exception, of course, is “A Day in the Life,” the menacing masterpiece that is the real reason Sgt. Pepper holds its place in the popular imagination.
Even when my Beatles obsession was at its height, Sgt. Pepper was hardly ever the album I reached for when I wanted some of their music. I would go for Revolver, which showcased all three songwriters in the band (George having finally come into his own), or A Hard Day’s Night (pure up from the first note, the high water mark of the group’s initial phase as John Lennon’s band), or the white album (Lennon’s first real solo album, with guest spots by the other boys). In my perfect musical universe, Sgt. Pepper would be edited down and built back up with the choicer cuts from Magical Mystery Tour: “Penny Lane,” “Your Mother Should Know,” “Strawberry Fields,” “Fool on the Hill,” “Blue Jay Way.” “I Am the Walrus” would replace “Mister Kite” as the closer for side one, and a forecast of what’s to come with “A Day in the Life.”
Sgt. Pepper marked the end of the three-way competition of giants that enlivened 1960s rock and roll. It started with Bob Dylan, whose second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan served as the model for the Beatles as they became more ambitious songwriters, and included the Rolling Stones, who were late to develop their own songwriting skills but quickly made up for lost time. What followed was a wonderful game of Can You Top This? as they tried to outdo each other, with all of us the winners. It ended with Sgt. Pepper. Dylan, who despised the self-indulgent gimmickry of psychedelic rock, turned around and recorded the defiantly anti-psychedelic John Wesley Harding. The Stones, always a few steps behind the Beatles, released the slavishly imitative Their Satanic Majesties Request before high-tailing it back to their signature sound on Beggar’s Banquet. The chief beneficiaries of Sgt. Pepper were the members of the Moody Blues, who decided to chuck their fading R&B-based sound and run with the trippy concept album template the Beatles had created.
Back in the vinyl days, pausing to admire the play of light along the bands that marked each song was part of the whole Japanese tea ceremony that accompanied the placement of a disc on the turntable. You could always tell a much-played album from its scratches and dulled surface. But on every copy of Sgt. Pepper, no matter how worn and overplayed, the band for George Harrison’s dreary sitar-droning song always gleamed as if it were fresh from the pressing plant.
It’s now official. As of today, my first book — The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway — is well and truly published.
I realize that people have been getting copies from Amazon and the like for the last couple of weeks, but according to The New Press, the official publication date is June 1. It’s out there in the media bloodstream. The first book event is tomorrow at the Five Corners branch of the Jersey City Free Public Library if you want to drop by and say howdy.
Please pardon my bliss moment. We now resume our regularly scheduled blogging.
