The Happy Booker

Yes, we are still away at our undisclosed location. But no worries, we left the key to the blog under the mat and today our old friend Min Jin Lee will be stopping by for a little visit. Please treat her nicely. Min Jin's first novel, Free Food For Millionaires, will be published by Warner next year. 

Guest Blogger Min Jin Lee

I am a prose writer through and through, yet I stand in awe of the poet. I started to read poetry when I was in my late twenties, never having studied it in school. I didn’t know anyone who read poems, and it was my private thing. It still is, I guess. Every now and then, I take continuing education classes in poetry at the Y with retirees who grew up in an era where they were encouraged to recite their favorites. I took a prosody class last year with David Yezzi who is a poet, and everyone had to memorize a poem. I learned “The Continuous Life” by Mark Strand. There is a line in the middle: “Explain that you live between two great darks, the first/ With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest/ Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur/ Of hours and days, months and years, and believe/ It has meaning, despite the occasional fear/ You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing/ To prove you existed.” Whenever I get to that bit, I have to close my eyes. That’s what poetry does for me, it makes me pause. Yeah, that’s awe for me.

Charge!

Guest blogger Julianna Baggott is the author of four novels -- including national bestseller Girl Talk, The Miss America Family, and The Madam, as well as three books of poems. She also writes novels for younger readers under the pen name N.E. Bode –The Somebodies, her third novel in the series, will be released in September.

When the Pen Name gets a Credit Card Application

Dimpled with innocence, pie-eyed, still a young talent, N.E. Bode, my pen name, has always been a very real person to me. He attended the Alton School for the Remarkably Giftless, where he won the highly competitive Least Gifted Award. Raised by ill parents, he learned to fend for himself in the wilds of suburbia. Tactics he mastered avoiding the evil Brattle twins, he now uses to dodge the attacks of his insanely jealous creative writing professor (a recent winner of the Guggenpulitzheimer) who is trying to kill him with the likes of flambee desserts gone horribly wrong.

However, a few weeks ago, he became real on a different level. He was sent a credit card application in the mail.

Now, of course, I’d argued in the last election that he should be allowed to vote. Even though we live in Florida where voting rules are historically fast and loose (the motto is: Vote early. Vote often.), he was denied.

But for a credit card? I put the application on the fridge just to think about it.

One of Bode’s desires is to get a plaque put on his childhood home that reads: Childhood home of N.E. Bode, who may become a grand literary figure one day. The people who currently  inhabit his childhood home seem insanely uptight. They’ve cut back all the ivy, added a grotesque addition, and keep the grass as tight as a golf green.

However, if Bode had some buying power, he would make the trip. He would buy the plaque. He would knock on the door and make his pitch.

I imagine him waiting on the front stoop, arranging the plaque beside the front door, like at the Thurber House, and how he’ll get so nervous, the old stutter will return and then the lisp, and then the head tick (a direct result of the Brattle twins). I imagine he’ll get a little emotional as well. It is his childhood home, after all. There are bound to be deep emotions associated with the place. His parents are both now dead.

Weeping, stuttering, lisping, ticking-out, Bode will most likely fail to convince the current owners to install the plaque. He’ll be crestfallen. He’ll fly home to his new digs (in a steeple within a tree in Central Park – long story), and sink into a little despairing funk.

I decide he’s not ready for that level of reality. I rip the credit card application in half. It’s wrong to protect him like this, but I don’t care. I’ll protect him for as long as I can.

Carry On...

Guest blogger Liam Callanan is the author of The Cloud Atlas, and the fortcoming All Saints (2/07). Find out more by visiting his website, or, if you're a registered student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, by taking one of his classes this fall.

They're still not on to us, after all these years.

That was my takeaway after we dropped my father-in-law off at Milwaukee's best-in-the-nation airport, Mitchell Field. Everyone in the security line was oddly unladen, clearly heeding to the new TSA requirements. Gone were the carry-ons and shopping bags, trays of lattes and water. In their places...books. Every other person was carrying a book, nothing else. And through the line they went, heads bent to the page.

Five hundred fifty one years after Gutenberg, bookmakers are still at it, and unless someone comes up with the ill-advised notion of turning out gel- or liquid-based novels, I think we readers and writers still have a bright future.

At least we do in Milwaukee. If you're not from Beer Town, then you probably scoffed at my claiming we had the nation's best airport. But I'm sorry, we do. It's not just the computerized wall map of the United States, which tracks every incoming flight in real time, so you can see precisely what part of South Dakota grandad is over at that very moment, or the fact that motorcycle riders -- this is the home of Harley Davidson -- get parking so preferred it's about 20 steps to the gate. Or that you can buy a motorcycle in the retail court.

It's the bookstore. Long after you decided there was no such thing as a great airport bookstore, you come across the one in Mitchell airport, which offers new, used and rare books, magazines and newspapers in an appropriately disorganized maze of bookshelves. It's hard to describe what the experience is like -- other than check-in or baggage claim, when have you ever encountered anything disorganized in airport? Post 9/11, unattended bags get detonated. Luckily, Renaissance Books at Mitchell is, for the moment, fret-free. I bought a Berlin travel guide there and not long after found myself in that very city.

My advice: come to Milwaukee and see where you end up.

A Writer's Challenge

Guest blogger Mary Kay Zuravleff, author of The Bowl Is Already Broken and The Frequency of Souls, challenges us to keep up the pace. We are accepting her challenge. Will you?

School doesn't even start until next Wednesday, and my left eyelid is already twitching. That's because, in addition to teaching "Writing a Short Novel" to grad students at George Mason University, I pledged I would subject myself to the deadlines imposed on them. We're all doing 40K words, from scratch, in one semester. Chris Baty has his well-publicized National Novel Writers Month, and he would deem our pace luxurious, even glacial. But it took me 9 years to finish my second novel, The Bowl Is Already Broken. Please join our quest, or watch from a safe distance. I'll post the syllabus and updates on my web site. Maybe I'll even figure out how to include people's feedback— would that make me a blogger?

Guest blogger Scott McLemee writes a weekly column called Intellectual Affairs and contributes to Newsday, Bookforum, the Boston Globe, and other publications. In 2004, he received the National Book Critics Circle award for excellence in reviewing. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, who works for the Library of Congress. His one piece of advice to young writers is: "Marry a reference librarian."

A Rebel and a Gentleman

One of my back-burner projects is preparing a new edition of Eighty Years a Rebel, a short book from 1949 by Joseph McCabe.

The author deserves better than oblivion that swallowed him up even before his death in 1955. Raised in Victorian England amidst Dickensian circumstances, McCabe became a monk as a teenager, only to find himself tormented by doubts about his faith. He wrestled long and hard — for twelve years, in fact —and finally left the church, only to wage a sort of one-man crusade against all religion.

I made a very brief sketch of his life and work last year in my first column for The Philosophers' Magazine. To be candid, McCabe's anti-religious polemics don't interest me all that much in themselves. My teenage gusto for that sort of argument has waned, over time. And yet I find myself proselytizing on McCabe's behalf -- which does seem kind of paradoxical, come to think of it.

The fascination he exerts has less to do with his beliefs (or lack of them) than his energy and style. He was absolutely tireless in his efforts to unify and popularize contemporary knowledge (much of it now out of date, of course) -- driven by an Edwardian conviction that the world could be set right if people just start thinking a bit more clearly.

This is invigorating, in small doses anyway, even if you can't quite share his faith, if that is the appropriate word to use for it. You get a taste of some of McCabe's distinctive qualities -- his humor, his vigor, the mind-boggling range of just how much he knew -- in this pamphlet. But it is the autobiography he published at the age of 80 that best conveys his personality, so getting the book back in print after all these years seems like a personal mission.

By my calculation, Joseph McCabe published the equivalent of three or four large books each year for about six decades running. Whenever I start thinking of myself as prolific -- and in doing so indulge the deadly sin of Pride, though that was not much of a problem throughout August, when Sloth took over -- there is always that shelf of his books to keep things in perspective.

Leave Talking

We’re blogging from an undisclosed location. But never fear, we've got a content-heavy week here as many of our talented friends stepped up to fill our blogging shoes. 

If you find you're missing the Happy Booker this week, you can always check out our interview with Simon Owens right here.

More interviews:

The Bat Segundo Show scores some chat time with Jonathan Safran Foer and A.M. Homes in this latest podcasts. Remember, you don't need an iPod to listen, just download, play and enjoy!

Here on the Happy Booker today we've got an interview with Nicki Richesin, editor of   The May Queen, and Lily Burana, a contributor to the anthology and author of the new novel Try.

Lily Burana has written for The Washington Post, GQ, The New York Times, Self, Glamour, Entertainment Weekly, Details, The Village Voice, and The New York Observer. She has been a Contributing Editor at SPIN and New York magazines. Her first non-fiction book, Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America made Best of the Year lists in Entertainment Weekly, Salon, and New York Newsday. TRY, her debut novel, was released this year.

NICKI: First of all, congratulations on the fantastic reviews and press for Try. Could you tell me a little bit about the genesis of your new novel and how it came about?

LILY: I was ready to write something sexy and adrenalized! I see Try as an "alt. western"--just pure, hip, heart-pounding fun. After moving back to New York from Wyoming, I wanted to write both an edgy love story and a super-modern Western set against the backdrop of the rodeo world, taking every trope of the Western and framing from a female point of view: the urge for freedom versus the urge to follow your consuming passion, the resistance to being domesticated or "tamed," the connection to the great outdoors, the effect of modernization and progress on the West. Plus, I wanted to mix up horses, foxy cowboys, shotguns, beer, trucks and all that hot yeehaw stuff with Goths, tattoos, body piercing, hot rods and other groovy things.

TV Guide

Book TV is live from New Orleans on Sunday from noon to midnight with a special 12-hour programming block marking the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

From 5 to 7 p.m., Book TV will air LIVE, "The Katrina Collection:  An Afternoon with Authors," a panel discussion with various authors such as Douglas Brinkley, Ken Foster and Jed Horne,  followed by a Q & A with the audience.  The event is hosted by the Press Club of New Orleans and reairs from 10 p.m. - Midnight.

At 9 p.m. ET, Book TV's "After Words," the weekly author interview series, features  the Wall Street Journal's Robert Block, author of DISASTER:  Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security, joined by guest interviewer James Lee Witt, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Featured guests also include Michael Eric Dyson, photographers from the Dallas Morning News, and Ivor van Heerden.

Find the complete complete Book TV weekend schedule here.

Good Works Friday

Mailer and Obama offer support to new Katrina book. Barack Obama has contributed a foreword and Norman Mailer a blurb to It Takes a Nation, a first-person history of Hurricane Katrina compiled by MoveOn.org. The book includes letters, photographs and conversations featuring "MoveOn "host families" and the displaced hurricane victims who stayed with them. Profits from the book will be donated to the New Orleans division of ACORN (The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).

• The Book of Hopes and Dreams, a charity anthology of poetry,will raise money for Spirit Aid to provide medicine, doctors, nurses and mobile clinics for the people of the remote Baglan Province of Afghanistan, an area that has had little or no medical facilities for a quarter of a century (as detailed in the documentary, "Children Of The Rubble").  This book features many award-winning and internationally respected writers, including Margaret Atwood, Moniza Alvi, David Constantine, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael Horovitz, Penelope Shuttle, Anne Stevenson and many others.  Find out more about The Book Of Hopes And Dreams here.

• Book Mooch is a new book swapping site that lets people exchange books with others for free. Earn a point every time you give someone a book and redeam any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you've read a book, you can keep or put it back into the BookMooch system for someone else. The only cost here is mailing your books to others. (via Max)

• Book Mooch reminds us a little bit of our favorite Book Crossing where you register a book, put stickers and markings in it, and then leave it in a public place.  Hopefully, someone will pick it up, read it and journal about it online—or they'll just leave the book elsewhere and let it continue on its journey. It's always hard “releasing” a book into the wild—Can I just leave a book behind? —but when you check on the book's journey, knowing someone else has found a great book, you know its been worth the effort. Check it out. (Related note: Books people leave behind. via GC)

• Finally, this is non-book related, but we feel it's pretty important at chez Booker: LEGO donations. LEGO is hosting a New Orleans LEGO brick drive. Donate your old LEGOS and LEGO will send new ones to the children of New Orleans.   

" The donated bricks will help provide much needed creative play materials and inspiration for children in New Orleans schools to rebuild their lives through play."   

LEGO donation info here. (See Also: Brickfest 2006, where Mr. Happy Booker will be spending his weekend.)

TGIF!!  xxoo, tHB

Painting

Cottages by Elizabeth Osborne now on display in our living room.

Misc.'ing Links

We've been collecting a bundle of links for the past few weeks and had all good intentions of sprinkling them here and there, providing you with fresh literary content daily. But you know what they say about good intentions…apparently, all we've been doing is paving Satan's superhighway.

For now we give you this assortment of links. We trust you will make with the clicky love and thank us later.  Enjoy.

Lorin Stein gives a by the numbers take on literary DC in Salon. (We suggest our reader's comments for the full treatment.)

Tod Goldberg takes a much needed vacation.

One Story starts a blog (look for fiction by LBC member and wunderblogger Matt Cheney in the near future).

The Man Booker Prize takes up residency in cyber space. Pop by the forum for comments and postings on the longlist nominees. (The 6 shortlisters  will be announced on September 14th and the overall prize awarded on October 10th.)  Peter Carey and David Mitchell are getting lots of attention and short odds. We'd rather root for the longshots: Messud and Hyland. 
See Also:

• Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Children, profiled in the Guardian.
• Bat Segundo podcast with David Mitchell here.

Yesterday we posted about the open letter to Gunter Grass in the New York Observer. Today we point to John Berger and Carlin Romano who have quite divergent views on the subject.  From Romano:" … Grass chose to build almost his entire literary career, as both novelist and public intellectual, on the foundation of conscience and ruthless self-honesty. One suspects that more revelations will follow and, like the far less accomplished James Frey, he will never recover his previous status, as writer or social conscience. "  (via TEV)