The Happy Booker

If I Only Had an iPod...

Everyone knows we're all about the iPod (or the 8-track) around here. And we're not alone. Just ask the rock snob at the London Times, the happy couple who chose the iPod over the wedding singer, or the Dutch artist that gave the iPod a woody, sure to produce a "bulge in the pocket." (thx, Dave.)

Yep, we sure do love the iPod. And occasionally, when we're in a generous mood, we'll even toss the keys over to visiting authors and ask them for a few listening recommendations.

Today we're lucky to have Danyel Smith stop by and share her musical musings. Smith is an uber cool hip-hop journalist who has written for Rolling Stone, Spin and The New York Times. Yes, we brought in a ringer. She's also the author of the San Francisco Chronicle-bestselling novel, More Like Wrestling. Her second novel, Bliss, was released last month.

Special Guest DJ, Danyel Smith

It's all about vocalists for me today ... and I'm heavy on the 1970s. I was born in 1965, so  the below music either rocked my pre-teen world, or it seeped in my 'tween subconscious, courtesy of my mother and grandparents. I like hits. I used to adore radio. I've been a music packrat and writer for years now, but I'm not the type to go out of her way to find rare recordings (okay, the Chapter 8 cut is a bit rare). I write reviews, but I love the Billboard charts. A hundred years ago, I worked at the music trade magazine, so I feel like I know the secret algebra.

But it's not all math. Pop and R&B and jazz hit songs are magical. They have a supernatural capacity to appeal to masses of people at the same time -- and for long periods of time. The following songs were recorded before the music business became a club of conglomerates with the marketing arms of a King Kong-sized octopus. I've no illusions about these songs being "innocent," or organic. They were pushed by enthusiastic, if not major labels. But the music biz was different thirty years ago. It wasn't better. In fact it was barely less sinister than it is today. But the recording industry was smaller. And the idea of selling records was, in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, more of a riddle. How can we make a hit? was a Rubik's Cube of a question. These days, there's some magic involved, but hits are mostly made, sprayed and displayed until we finally submit. Perhaps to spite The Big Music Machine, I remain enchanted by many of today's songs -- a surging voice, a perfectly-stretched note, a shocking bit of musical truth. I find my sultry, bass-y oases, and chill there with Erykah Badu and Mariah Carey and Jay-Z and Joshua Redman. But here's to some old souls. Coming fresh off the MTV Video Music Awards, it's that kind of day.

1979's “I Just Wanna Be Your Girl,” from Chapter 8. The small-time Michigan soul band featured Detroit-native Anita Baker before she went solo. The song is not so different from Baker's '80s pop-R&B recordings like "You're the Best Thing Yet," and the excellent "You Bring Me Joy,"  but here she’s more … new. She's on key, exceedingly sensual, and smoky. Better background vocals, too. The simple song is just more pretty than boom-bastic and Quiet Storm-y. Baker is deliciously earnest, and sounds like she’s singing to a real person (a great, under-appreciated quality in pop and soul music).  What’s more plaintive then someone crooning, Please/ Let me be your girl? For me, in the eighth grade, this song was the height of honest communication and romance. Wontcha let me be your girl? Who could say no?

1979's “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” from McFadden & Whitehead. The Philadelphia songwriting/production duo came up under Otis Redding, and ended up working with everyone from The Intruders to The O'Jays to Archie Bell & the Drells. "No Stoppin'" rarely fails to make me upbeat. Rarely fails to make me feel like no matter what's going wrong, I can pull it together and get to work. Plus it's the ultimate Philly Soul finger-snapper and booty-shaker. And if you’ve ever/ Been held down before/ I know you/ Refuse to be/ Held down anymore. You know! SOUL. And this song is one-hit wonder soul, too, which is damn near witchcraft. It’s like, everything the duo had in them is in this one song. Yes, it’s too often on the radio, but when you listen to it by choice, instead of because you're caught in freeway traffic, it takes on a whole different meaning. We’re leaving those negative people way behind!

“Teach Me Tonight,” the fabulous Dinah Washington's 1954 version. One of the four greatest jazz vocalists of all time (up there with Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughn), Washington's voice is clear and meticulous but completely hot. Did you say/ I've got a lot to learn? Washington's voice is a crystal bell. So many people have recorded this song, but Washington’s version is the absolute best -- and that's saying something when you've got Fitzgerald and Liza Minelli and Sammy Davis Jr. and even Cheryl Ladd (!) in the mix. Sammy Cahn's lyrics are almost too quietly sexy to bear. One thing isn’t very clear/ My love/ Should the teacher stand so near/ My love?  It gives chills. The precision in her delivery. It aches with lust that wants OUT. Graduation's almost here/ My love. Washington is soulful and sharp and moving. Not one extra note. Not one false one.

“You Belong to Me,” from Martha's Vineyard girl Carly Simon. This is upper-middle-class blue-eyed soul at its best. The song was written by she (lyrics) and former Doobie Michael McDonald (the Doobie Brothers' version is good , too), though they supposedly never spoke the whole time the song was coming together. "You Belong" is the first track on Simon's 1978 Boys in the Trees: You don’t have to prove to me/ You’re beautiful to strangers/ I've got loving eyes/ Of my own. Then her warbly voice sings out passionately and illogically: Tell her/ Tell her/ Tell her/ That I love you. Gets me every time. Hmm. Simon's song bookends nicely with Baker’s “I Just Want to be Your Girl." The hungry beginning of a love intense — and then Carly brings you to a desperate near-end.

Bonus track: "Seems I’m Never Tired of Loving You," from Nina Simone. "Of all the major singers of the late 20th century, Nina Simone was one of the hardest to classify." What else do you need to know? Don’t even think about it: just listen.

Summer Haze

Friend and  neighbor Tim Wendel stops by to fill us on what he did on his summer vacation. Which makes us think: What did we do this summer? Oh yeah, we bought a house, moved all of our clutter—excess furniture and books and bikes and the normal detritus of daily life—into storage, put our newly cleaned, painted and uncluttered house on the market and then kept our house clean with plenty of kids and pets underfoot. In between we worked on a story collection, churned out all sorts of articles for The Washington Post, read books for the LBC, and hid indoors during a string of 100 degree days.

I think Tim had the better summer…

What I learned on my summer vacation, by Tim Wendel

I returned to the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop this summer with some trepidation. After all this is where I cut my teeth learning to write fiction in the late 1980s, my fumbling prose befriended and much improved by time spent with Tom Jenks, Richard Ford, Oakley Hall and Carolyn Doty.

I returned this summer bumbling, stumbling and fumbling in a new form –screenwriting. Limited to 25 or so would-be Robert Townes, the week-long screenwriting conference runs in a parallel universe to Squaw’s fiction and nonfiction conferences. While I was able to catch up with friends Jenks and Alan Cheuse, for the most part the screenwriters were in our own world. We had been told to bring laptops, and Lord did we use them.

My advisor was Tom Rickman, whose credits include Coal Miner’s Daughter, Everybody’s All-American, Truman and Tuesdays with Morrie. One of the first things he told us that any scene that’s two or more pages (that’s with all the screenwriting spacing and indentation) is way too long for cinema. Well, my working script was filed with such passages. Typical novelist’s mistake.

Tom had me rewrite the opening to my screenplay and then we replotted much of the rest. We spent an amazing afternoon talking through the script in the shadow of 8,000-foot mountain peaks. I’m not sure what I had after a week in the Sierra Nevada, but it certainly was better paced that what I brought to the table.

Even if one never comes closer to a script than renting the latest new release from Blockbuster, I’m convinced that film and television are having a major impact upon how we write. As Robert Olen Butler emphasized in a recent Writer’s Chronicle, “Fiction techniques and film techniques have a great deal in common.” Increasingly, I’m using film clips in my fiction and nonfiction classes at John Hopkins.

So much of going off to writer’s camp, as my family called it, involves coming home with these gems that can reorient and recharge you. On the flight home from Squaw, I found my notebook loaded with them.

“Action is confidence,” Tom Schlesinger told us. He collaborated on Nowhere in Africa, which won the Academy Award in 2003 for Best Foreign Silence.

By this, Schlesinger means that when we’re at a dead-end, thing aren’t working out writing-wise, let loose the hounds. Sometimes we prioritize too much, wish so hard that a particular project will be the one to put us over the top, that we ignore other ideas that could be even more productive or fun to do.

Screenwriter Camille Thomasson reminded us that the protagonist needs to be 180 degrees different at the end than he was at the beginning. If not, it’s not much of a story. That’s true for prose and film.

“Put away it after rewriting, but don’t put it away for too long,” said Gene Corr (Desert Bloom). “We’re changing all the time.”

The recent conferences I’ve attended as a scholar or guest speaker. It was a bit unnerving to return to Squaw again as a participant. Still, as has happened other times in career, I was reminded there’s a vast community of writers out there. The majority are more than willing to help you out.

Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson is appearing over at the LBC right now. Go see. And while you're there, feel free to ask her a few questions. It looks like she's going to be sticking around for a while—here's your chance!

DC State of Mind

The Washington Post Book World got it right this weekend, featuring a moving essay on writing by Elie Wiesel. As often as we bite the hand that feeds us, we felt it was only time to point out something extraordinary about our local paper. Do read it. You'll be glad you did.

And now that we’re in such a DC-positive state of mind, it seems only fitting that we include an essay by author Mary Kay Zuravleff on the many joys of being a Washington writer.

D.C. Lit, by Mary Kay Zuravleff

The Happy Booker invited me to natter on about the land of literature—Washington, DC, don’t you know—and I would have done it earlier had a certain child (you know who you are) agreed to go to camp. The pithiness of the postings in these parts has been pretty much beyond me, though my family would probably tell you I’ve been plenty pithy.

To start with, it never occurred to me I’d meet Washingtonians when I arrived in Washington. Because I grew up in Oklahoma, I thought senators and representatives actually lived in the states they represented, and that the roster turned over every couple of years. I had come for a one-year writing residency; consequently, my peer group was a bunch of transients. There were Hill types (my boyfriend’s literature and politics degree got him a job in a Senate mailroom) along with my Post reporter housemate (who was shipped off to India with three-hour’s notice) and interns at places like the Council on a Livable World and Jane’s Defense Weekly. As far as I knew, people passed through DC like feed through a chicken.

That was nearly twenty-five years ago, and not only am I still in DC, I’ve lived in the same house for nineteen of those years. My husband works on K Street, I take Pilates next door to the Vice-president’s house, and—speaking of the VP—the last time I was stuck on the way home from my son’s school, traffic was constipated by the real-time news report I was listening to on the radio: Cheney was headed to Walter Reed Hospital to have his polyps removed. This is my DC, where absurd juxtapositions are the order of the day. A limo in the Safeway parking lot disgorges William Bennett and his enormous driver (body guard?), who helps him choose between nonfat and lowfat cottage cheese. Donald Rumsfeld and his wife show up where we’re having sushi, and our table engages in an ethical debate about whether or not to fling a tuna roll at the surprisingly tiny guy. At this stage, my friends are fifth-generation Washingtonians as well as folks just in from the airport. We’re rubbing elbows with power but not much else.

Meanwhile, readers of most DC novels must think we spend our time conspiracy hopping. I love being labeled a Washington writer because I’m out to subvert what that label means. My mission is to show the daily side of this town, whose potential is relatively untapped. Also, DC is crawling with talented literary novelists, including all of the Happy Booker’s friends! The scheduler at Politics & Prose told me they could completely fill the reading calendar with local authors, though that includes the guy on our street who wrote the anti-PBS book and Christopher Hitchens. 

I’m not sure any town can equal our affable glam. When my novel came out, I was treated to a soiree at DC-writer Catherine Mayo’s luxurious Watergate abode, where the windows look right up the skirt of the mighty Potomac. And at the Politics & Prose event, which was equal parts block party, Smithsonian reunion, and reading, my four-year-old worked the door in full fringe and cowboy boots, announcing her Montessori teachers to the crowd. Afterwards, Judy Philactos, friend and owner of the exquisite shop Periwinkles, gave a party where she thought of everything, including custom-made fortune cookies bearing messages from my book and a tray of chocolate buddhas. They don’t do that in Oklahoma! 

LBC News

Our To-Be-Read pile is about the same size as our To-Be-Washed pile, which is presently about toddler-height, to be truthful, and is just as unwieldy.  Many of our summer books are on the back burner right now as we feverishly make our way down the Litblog Co-op's list of fall choices in preparation for the next round of voting.

The Autumn titles are very exciting. And there will be much to say about the selections. Will there be more controversy in the works? Possibly. It wouldn't be the LBC without it. But with that also comes intriguing books, some new authors, and certainly lots to talk about.

To get things rolling over at the LBC site, be on the look out for an appearance by Kate Atkinson,  author of the LBC's Summer reading choice: Case Histories.

Watch this space.

All Around the Blogosphere

• Things are getting weepy over at Booklust.

• Things are heating up over at Ed's place.

• Dan Wickett hunts down The Big O.

• She's a poet, in case you don't know it: Reb Livingston, our most Crucial Rooster, has new work here.

Sorry to be all distracted and brief, but the new season of Celebrity Poker Showdown starts this evening and we've got a lot to take care of before it airs. Yes, we're a tad bit obsessed. We admit it. Which we believe is the first step. But when you combine a show we enjoy with a man that makes us go all squishy inside, then the dollar values are double. Deal with it. (Earlier rants about Celebrity Poker Showdown here —but now we take back the mean stuff about the "B" list and all, especially since coming out as a Trebekie.)

Are We There Yet?

Yes, we're back. Barely. Our body is here but our brain is still on vacation. Apparently we've missed a lot being away during the dog days of summer. Still slogging through emails over here — they will be answered soon, promise!— and catching up on much-neglected blog reading. (If a certain Washington Post editor is reading, that Jammin' Java story in the pipeline — really!)

In the meantime, why don’t you hang out with Dan Wickett, who, unlike yours truly, keeps up an enviable place over on his Emerging Writers Network blog. Today he tackles the entire oeuvre of writer Lauren Baratz-Logsted, then throws in an interview with her for good measure. We don't know how Dan does it all, but we want a little bit of whatever it is he's doing — unless it involves clean living and exercise.  (Ms. Baratz-Logsted THB guest essay here.)

For your viewing pleasure, our pal Jeff points us toward the trailers for Everything is Illuminated  and Oliver Twist.

And finally, taking pity on our spare blog posting, author Leora Skolkin-Smith sends us a short FotHB Report from Cambridge, Mass.

A Re-Kindling of Old Flames—Leora Skolkin-Smith
 
At New Words Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass, one of oldest and largest feminist bookstores in country, the work of 1970's women writers dedicated to preserving their ideals survived the tides of change and conservatism. The bookstore had to close in 2002— another independent bookstores suffering under the dominance of the giant chains—but New Words continued to serve as hub for author events, workshops and open-mike readings; the owners hoping to create a lasting nonprofit Center for New Words, dedicated to reading, writing and publishing by women.

Now, in 2005, their endurance has become a kind of inspiration. The Center for New Words, once lauded by woman activists and writers like Marge Piercy, Grace Paley, and Barbara  Ehrenreich, has been embraced by a new generation of women. As Carol Gilligan, Feminist scholar, and psychologist; author (In a Different Voice, The Birth of Pleasure) put it: "New Words Bookstore has always been a place where the voices of women are listened to and heard. Authors, readers, scholars and activists alike have found a home here in the best sense of the word: a place where one's ideas and one's life are accepted and encouraged to grow. This kind of space is more important now than ever, which is why I'm so enthusiastic about the creation of the Center for New Words. I'm confident that in the coming decades, we will turn to the Center for New Words again and again to inspire and transmit women's voices in ways we have not yet even imagined."

A new generation lights those candles again.

Back in the Blogger's Seat

The Happy Booker is back from her happy vacation, which included tours of this sweatshop, a visit to this museum of high culture, a mandatory stop at this high tech bastion of commerce, and a full day spent in this Germanic-themed *micronation.

After all that traveling in the family truckster we were in much need of a vacation from our vacation, so we hid out a few days in this land that time forgot—which made us want to read this book and see this movie.

So, what did we miss around here? Do tell...

*Instructions on how to start your own micronation here.

Guest Blogger—Scott Berg

[Well, it's been a wild week of guest bloggers. Our last is writer Scott Berg, an old friend who would like to start a new series on this blog called: "If I Only Had an 8 Track…"]

I cherish the Happy Booker's "If I Only Had an iPod" feature as much as her next reader. I admire all of her book-published iPod guest bloggers for filling their lists with both the patently obscure (so that I may close up my persistent hipness lag a wee bit) and the familiar (so that I may say "Yeah!" in gleeful or mortified recognition).

And yet. . . . As I'm sure THB will admit (or has admitted), she now has an iPod. She's had one for a while. I think I know where she got it, but I'm not telling, in case I'm wrong.  Most of the people writing "If I Had an iPod" have an iPod.  And there is also this: Everyone gets to play no-limit, all-in on every hand, meaning (for the three people left who aren't risking their mortgages or McDonald's money or both playing online poker) that I have no idea if you really are that hip or if you just asked around.  Or if you listed M. Ward – you do kind of dig it — but actually crank the Scorpions in your car because, dammit, you rock like a hurricane and that's just how it is.

In the spirit of civil disobedience, I'm going to use my guest blogging spot today to test-run a feature I really do hope catches on. I call it "If I Only Had My 8-Track Again".

Elvis Presley, "Aloha from Hawaii"
I grew up in the Twin Cities. 1977 wasn't all that dramatic for us. We had no Summer of Sam. Our lights stayed on. No one set "Saturday Night Fever" in our neighborhood, city, or region of the country (not until 1984 did Prince and "Purple Rain" save all of our Upper Midwestern souls from terminal pop culture obscurity).  But like the rest of country, we watched "Star Wars" in droves and lots of us bought this terrible album after Elvis died.  Regrets, he had a few.

Led Zeppelin, "Physical Graffiti"
Yes, really. If I do say so, it holds up, and for that, thank you, Mike Johnson, my best fourth and fifth grade friend, wherever you are.  If you didn't become a virtuoso harmonica player/comic book artist – if you are doing anything else – there is no meaning to life on this sterile promontory.

Toto, "Toto"
They made so many albums, several went platinum, but who were they, really? This, by the way, is not their fourth album, the one with "Rosanna" and "Africa." This is the first one, when they were keepin' it real with "I'll Supply the Love" and "Hold the Line." 

The Steve Miller Band, "Book of Dreams"
I don't want to get caught up in any – funky SHIT – going down in the city!  Can I say that on THB? My SMB Greatest Hits CD now sings "funky kicks" to me, which at any age, young or old, is just not even remotely the same. Can you still get the naughty version of this song? Anyone?  Or must I be content with Fountains of Wayne and "Bright Future in Sales"?

Original Movie Soundtrack, "Jesus Christ Superstar"
I sat at our kitchen table one night and I sang: "Jesus Christ Superstar, who in the hell do you think you are?" It was a little ditty making the playground rounds.  My mother and father, good and true Lutherans, were not happy.  Still, they weren't Puritans and when I bought the tape they didn't confiscate it -- and much to my surprise those weren't the lyrics, precisely. Later I sold it for a couple bucks right before 8-track machines vanished forever. If only I'd been that smart about my teleco stocks. There.  Taken all in all, I'm not humiliated, though I'm pretty sure number six was the Bee Gees' "Children of the World."  Five is just the right number, apparently.

Guest Blogger—Doug Merrill

[Merrill, a freelance writer, editor, and Euro-blogger, stops by from time to time to lend a little international flair to our reading life.]

The Happy Booker's warm welcome made me feel right at home last month, and her link to the Guardian article made me feel all accomplished and literary: I had heard of four of the first five authors and recently read books by two of them. (The other two were on the radar as someday, but we all know what that’s like.)

The Guardian’s list also reminded me that my local newspaper, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, had undertaken an even more ambitious effort. The editors of the feuilleton section not only selected 50 great novels from the 20th century, the company behind the paper published all of them in attractive hardcover editions, with a retail price of EUR 4.90 each. They published one each week, from March 2004 through February 2005.

With postwar German modesty, they didn’t claim that the list was exhaustive, definitive or representative. Just 50. And great.

They used some wit in the schedule - their Joyce choice published the week of Bloomsday; the last selection, for deepest February, will be If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveller…

Here is more of what I wrote last summer, when I started reading the group:

I see the edition’s distinctive design all over town. With only fourteen issued so far, it’s still possible to tell almost at a glance which book someone is reading. The Hotel New Hampshire? The Name of the Rose? The Unbearable Lightness of Being?

And they’re conversation starters, too. I was reading Voices of Marrakesh, by Elias Canetti, and my doctor’s receptionist remarked that she had just gotten as far as the camels. I had it out at lunch a few days later, and another person at the cafe said it was quite a good book, wasn’t it. Unfortunately, he was leaving, so that was as far as we got, but I imagine many more, fuller, discussions taking place across town, and beyond.

The list is full of books like [Marrakesh or Schnitzler’s Dream Story or Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser], not the heavyweights you would expect from the 50 greatest novels of the 20th century, but the delights you can find when you’re just looking for 50 great novels. Thus the Joyce choice is not Ulysses but Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Steinbeck is not here with Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden, but with Tortilla Flat; Gunther Grass with Cat and Mouse instead of The Tin Drum.

This approach doesn’t always pay off. Kafka’s Amerika is not just unfinished, it’s also not nearly as good as either The Castle or The Trial. I don’t know enough about Faulkner to say for sure, but Sanctuary is just as likely to be an off choice as a quirky one.

The list as a whole is both objectively interesting, and interestingly objectionable. I don’t think such an exercise would be any fun at all if it didn’t produce objections, and mine are more about omissions than anything else. ...