Tuesday Tune: "Huntsville.ca" by Kevin Hearn and Thin Buckle

It's the dead of winter.  We all could use a little sun.

Kevin Hearn and Thin Buckle deliver the rays.

Starting with an unmistakable Ventures-style drum downroll* and an organ swish**, "Huntsville.ca" is an upbeat summery pop boogie set in a northern Canadian town where "it's forty-below."  Released in 2009 on the band's Havana Winter, it's an infectious song that throws us back to the 1960s, but keeps us firmly rooted in 21st-century snark.  Hearn is also a member of Barenaked Ladies--another import from up north, eh?--and there's plenty of tongue-in-cheek playfulness going on in this song (Hearn counts Randy Newman as one of his influences).

Walking through the city in the sun
Where are these people coming from?
Will they all disappear when the winter comes?
Will they all disappear when the winter comes?

Sun sun sun, here they come
Summer summer summer, fun fun fun
It's forty below, where did they go?
Shoveling shoveling shoveling snow

It's like the Beach Boys, except with parkas.  "Huntsville.ca" never fails to make me do a little butt-bounce in the seat as I'm driving down I-15 in southwestern Montana.  Even if it's twenty-below and frozen trees are cracking off limbs in the Helena National Forest, I've got a grin on my face.

The "Huntsville.ca" video isn't much to speak of--straight performance footage, enlivened only by drummer Bob Scott doing what looks like mouth pops with his sticks--but the groove is....well, it's pretty groovy.



If you'd like to purchase "Huntsville.ca" on Amazon, CLICK HERE.


*Not a technical musical term.
**Neither is this.

Erika Dreifus' "Quiet Americans" Come to Terms With the Past

Erika Dreifus’ debut collection of short stories may have the word “quiet” in its title and, because it’s being released by a micro-press (Last Light Studio Books), it will probably enter the hurly-burly cacophony of publishing with little more than a whisper, but spend some time with Dreifus’ fiction and you will soon learn there is nothing soft-spoken about these seven tales.  Stylistically, they’re not loud or showy, but they speak to the heart and mind at a volume which cannot be ignored.

Quiet Americans is an unforgettable collection of short stories which draws its soft rage from the atrocities of the Holocaust.  The death-camp horrors are only seen on the periphery, but Auschwitz and Buchenwald never stop echoing in the lives of the Jews who populate the book.  As one character reflects, “Good news carried so much more responsibility these days.  So many burdens….with the holes of loss and absence, the demands of replacement, the trials and terrors tearing through the hours and days and years.”

Like a family tree, many of the stories are linked and we witness the gradual dilution of the Holocaust's impact from generation to generation.  Quiet Americans begins with a Jewish doctor treating the daughter of Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring and ends sixty years later in New York City with the son of survivors investigating the “stripped-bare branches” of his family tree on the internet.  In that latter story, “Mischpocha,” what happened in Germany stayed in Germany, much to the frustration of the son as he tries to get answers from his tight-lipped mother:

But whenever David tried to go back, even to a time after the Worst, to the years between his parents’ departure from Europe and his birth Over Here, she closed up. “David, please leave it all alone,” she’d say.  His father followed her lead. “David, my son, listen to your mother.”  Eventually, David had stopped asking.

Germany is the ancestral home for many of these Jewish characters and even when “the Worst” comes along, they find it hard to think of themselves as “displaced persons.”  If, that is, they even make it out alive.

In the first story, “For Services Rendered,” as the Nazi storm is brewing in the late 1930s and Dr. Weldmann is treating Goring’s daughter, he finds it hard to face the truth, no matter how much his wife insists they should get out before it gets worse:

She’d wanted to leave Germany for years, already.  He was the one reluctant to abandon the land of his ancestors.  He just refused to believe that this absurdity would continue.

Quiet Americans is rich with the themes of faith, rebirth, and familial devotion.  Dreifus doesn’t shy away from hard subjects, but she addresses the unthinkable--the broken histories of European Jews--with a remarkable mastery of form and sensitivity for her characters who have suffered through so much (or, if they didn’t suffer directly, then their immediate ancestors did).  She’s a classic storyteller and there’s a clear, direct line from Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernard Malamud to her 21st-century keyboard.

I especially liked the way “Lebensraum” unspools and resolves itself.  In this story, Josef Freiburg is serving as a U.S. soldier whose assignment keeps him stateside in 1944.  His unit is given the duty of establishing a prisoner-of-war camp in a small town in Iowa called Clarinda.  Even though we know the confrontation between the Jew and his Nazi prisoners is coming, Dreifus handles it with such skill and subtlety it nearly takes our breath away.  Meanwhile, another thread of the story follows Josef’s wife Nelly as she gives birth to their son and the couple struggles to find a rabbi in the middle of Iowa to perform the traditional circumcision ceremony.  There is a moment of unexpected grace and then Dreifus ends “Lebensraum” on a beautiful, hopeful note:

Tomorrow, says the doctor, Nelly and the baby leave the hospital.  Josef can come fetch them after the breakfast shift.  After that, well, the world is open.  Free.  In America.  In Clarinda. The country’s basket of bread.  How much quiet.  How much land.

In the title story, expertly told from the second-person viewpoint, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors takes a trip to her ancestral homeland and finds herself confronted with the moral perplexities faced by many of the characters in the book.  She stays silent in the midst of her tour group, torn between sympathy for the tour guide whose family suffered the Allied bombings and her own grandparents who suffered at the hands of those same bombed-out Germans:

       But you also stay quiet because, remember, you are a guest.  And not just any guest.  You’re the one who just doesn’t know whether it’s worse to be an American or a Jew in Europe these days.  And today you aren’t only in Europe.
       You are in Germany.

Eventually, the granddaughter remembers the one German word she does know: Vergangenheitsbewaltigung.  “Coming to terms with the past.”  That is what everyone who walks the pages of Quiet Americans must do.

That is also the duty Quiet Americans charges readers with, no matter what our nationality or religion may be.  Somehow, we must reconcile ourselves with the idea of moral evil which still spreads its tentacles through the world.  How do we overcome the sins of the past and still move forward, like Josef, into a land that is open, free, and quiet?  Not through forgetting, but through forgiveness.

"Don't you EVER interrupt me while I'm reading a book!"

I'm on the road: living the hotel life, working long hours, trying to chip away at Mount To-Be-Read, and missing my wife like peanut butter misses jelly.  Each morning, I rise early, and go to the hotel's exercise room where, iPod earbuds sunk into my head and Run Lola Run cranked up high, I do my best to burn off my beer belly (or "wine waistline," as the case may be).

At the tail end of this morning's session (5 miles and 846 calories on the elliptical, in case you're asking), a woman came in, sat down on the recumbent bike next to me, and started pedaling.  Instead of an iPod, she was carrying a Kindle.  Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail so severe, she practically had eyes in the back of her head.  Her mouth was set in a flat, grim line and she got right down to the business of pedaling and turning e-Pages.

I finished on the elliptical, toweled off the handlebars and--I swear I just couldn't help myself--I asked the standard book-fanatic's question: "Whatcha reading?"

The look on her face was like that moment when Deer met Headlights.

"Oh, uh," she looked down at her Kindle, as if the device would save her from me, the only man in the room.  And a huffing, sweaty man at that.  "I, uh, don't even know the title, really.  It's a Special Ops book."

Special Ops?  I thought.  Really?  I thought for sure, she'd say something like "Water for Elephants" or "The Help."  After giving her a second look, I decided she did kind of have that Marine-y look about her.  Or maybe it was a different Special Ops book?

Either way, I could see the fluster building in her eyes and I knew that was my cue to make my exit (hey, I'm a guy, but after 27 years of marriage, I can read female signals).  I made some small talk about grabbing my Kindle and giving it a workout--then realized how that sounded, so I beat a hasty retreat for the hotel's breakfast bar.

Miss Recumbent Bike's eyes were practically welling with tears of relief.

So, to this anonymous Kindle reader and all readers out there who just want to be left alone to read in peace, I dedicate this video.

Friday Freebie: "The History of History" by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

Congratulations to Doni Molony, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, The Great White Bear: A Natural and Unnatural History of the Polar Bear by Kieran Mulvaney.

This week's book giveaway goes from the polar regions of the globe to the equally-cold realm of the Holocaust.  The History of History by Ida Hattemer-Higgins is a new novel from Alfred A. Knopf which The Guardian has called "extravagantly ambitious, wide-ranging in reference, and written with real flair."  Here's the blurb from the publisher:

       A young woman named Margaret stumbles one morning from a forest outside Berlin, hands dirty, clothes torn.  She can remember nothing of the night in the woods, nor—she soon realizes—anything of the previous months.  She returns home to her former life.
       Two years later, she receives a letter from a mysterious doctor, who summons her to an appointment, claiming to be concerned for her fate.  Margaret keeps the appointment, but when she leaves the doctor’s office, the entire city is transformed.  Nazi ghosts manifest as preening falcons; buildings turn to flesh; reality itself wheels.
       This is the story of Margaret’s race to recover her lost history—the night in the forest, and the chasm that opened in her life as a result.  Awash in guilt, careening toward a shattering revelation, Margaret finds her personal amnesia resonating more and more clamorously with a nation’s criminal past, as she struggles toward an awakening that will lead her through madness to the truth, and to the unanswerable agony of her own actions.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of The History of History, all you have to do is answer this question:

According to this list of 25 Things About Ida (which was originally posted to Facebook), how many languages does the author speak?

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  The contest closes at midnight on Jan. 27, at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Jan. 28.

The Life Before His Eyes: Reading Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain"

There comes a jarring moment in every reader's life when he connects with an equally profound moment in the writer's life.

Let me start that again....

There comes a jarring moment in every writer's life when he connects with his reader in a moment of earthquake proportions.  Invisible Writer meets Invisible Reader, shaking hands with an audible clap of flesh.

A word, a phrase, a sentence coils up from the page, snakelike, and leaps across the space between writer's finger and reader's eye.

For me, that happened when Manley Pointer put Hulga Hopewell's artificial leg in his valise and snapped the latches shut in Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People."  And it happened again in that chilling, devastating final line of Raymond Carver's "Popular Mechanics" when a man and a woman have a fight and involve their infant child in a literal tug-of-war:  In this manner, the issue was decided.

In its most recent iteration, that author-reader frisson ran along my spine in the sixth paragraph of Tobias Wolff's short story "Bullet in the Brain."  The story, which appears in Wolff's collection The Night in Question, begins with two sentences crammed with exposition:

Anders couldn’t get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper.  He was never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders – a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.

In the course of the next four paragraphs, a bank teller closes her window.  When the two women in front of him complain about it, Anders the critic makes a characteristic cutting remark.  One of the women starts to take offense at his sarcasm and, by the time the fifth paragraph arrives, Wolff is well on his way to establishing narrative conflict and tension in a scene that's familiar to any of us who have stood in line at the bank (or grocery store or concert or DMV).

But then, but then....

Then comes the moment I was telling you about--that paragraph when the writer does something so marvelous that the reader immediately lifts the tablecloth and examines the inside of the top hat in an effort to see just how the magic was performed.

Warning: Spoilers ahead...

Anders has just none-too-subtly insulted the woman standing in line ahead of him and is watching for her reaction:

She sucked in her cheeks but stared past him and said nothing.  Anders saw that the other woman, her friend, was looking in the same direction.  And then the tellers stopped what they were doing, and the customers slowly turned, and silence came over the bank.  Two men wearing black ski masks and blue business suits were standing to the side of the door. One of them had a pistol pressed against the guard’s neck.  The guard’s eyes were closed, and his lips were moving.  The other man had a sawed-off shotgun.  “Keep your big mouth shut!” the man with the pistol said, though no one had spoken a word.  “One of you tellers hits the alarm, you’re all dead meat. Got it?”

What strikes me most about that paragraph is its focus.  Instead of writing something like, "At that moment, two armed men in ski masks entered the bank and grabbed the guard," Wolff has us facing away from the action.  Like Anders, we see what's happening as it's reflected in the expressions of the two women, then the tellers, and then as "the customers slowly turned" in the thickening silence.  The threat of the armed robbers gradually seeps into the story, rather than coming at us with a banged-open door and voices yelling "Everybody on the floor!" as we've come to expect from the gospel according to Hollywood.  And so, when the camera-eyes of the reader finally pan over to "the two men wearing ski masks and blue business suits," the chill is all that more sub-zero.

At this point, if you haven't already read "Bullet in the Brain," you probably should do so, because I'm about to lay some plot spoilers on you.  It won't take long to read because it's a very short story--which makes its lasting echoes all the more remarkable.  Here's a link (you'll have to overlook a few typos--but it's worth it):

"Bullet in the Brain"

As the action continues (with the Hollywood cliches of "Put the money in the bag," etc.), Anders' character is further revealed as a critic who just cannot stop, well, criticizing.  As Wolff himself said in an interview with The Paris Review:  "(The story is) about a book critic who is so jaded, and so filled with allusion and literary reference, that even when his very life is threatened he hears the threat as a series of clichés that he thinks are risible."

The tension mounts as Anders continues to flap his gums at the agitated bank thieves.

“Hey, you deaf or what?” The man with the pistol walked over to Anders. He poked the weapon into Anders’ gut. “You think I’m playing games?”

And then, and then...

Wolff takes the story in a new (and yet inevitable) direction altogether.

     “Fuck with me again, you’re history.  Capiche?”
    Anders burst out laughing.  He covered his mouth with both hands and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” then snorted helplessly through his fingers and said, “Capiche – oh, God, capiche,” and at that the man with the pistol raised the pistol and shot Anders right in the head.

Here is where I suspect "Bullet in the Brain" earns the reputation and popularity it so richly deserves.  Wolff throws the entire story into slow motion (slower, even, than the car plunging off the bridge in the movie Inception--a three-second fall that director Christopher Nolan stretched to thirty minutes).

After striking the cranium the bullet was moving at 900 feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared to the synaptic lighting that flashed around it. Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, “passed before his eyes.”

Even then, when given the opportunity to flash Anders' life before his eyes, Wolff once again confounds our expectations by giving us a long list of what the dying critic did not remember: the carnality of his first lover, his wife and her boring predictability, his daughter playing with her teddy bears, the "hundreds of poems he had conce committed to memory," etc.  All of these unremembered memories deepen and widen our understanding of Anders, slowly melting us to something approaching sympathy.

Until finally we arrive at the one thing Anders does remember: a boyhood game of neighborhood baseball on a hot, insect-buzzed day when one of the regular players brings "a cousin of his from Mississippi," who is asked what position he wants to play: “Shortstop,” the boy says. “Short’s the best position they is.” And it is the sound of those last two words which captivates Anders then and in this last nano-second of his life.

Just as the carapaced critic, hardened against the humdrum joys of life, remembers a solitary moment when language first lit up his wonder and curiosity with the music of two words--they is--so I, too, am struck by the fresh surprises of Wolff's story.  Here is a master playing with narrative as if it was a wind-up toy, releasing it across the floor and, just before it bumps into the wall, picking it up and turning it in a new direction, not once, but twice.  Here is mastery of the form, here is a story wriggling to life and taking control of itself, here is the spark leaping from writer to reader and back again.


Photo credit: Annie Wells/LA Times

Soup and Salad: Dzanc Day, The Great American Novel, Book Signings From Hell, Birthday Bestsellers, Breece's Bones, The Afterlife of David Foster Wallace, Anthony Doerr on Loving Books, Hustling Readers

On today's menu:

1.  Dzanc Books has announced the date for its second annual nationwide workshop.  Dzanc Day will be held on Saturday, April 9.  The creative writing workshops led by renowned authors in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry start at just $30 for two hours.  You can't find a better deal than that at the Dollar Store, ladies and gentlemen.  And it all goes to a good cause.  From the publisher's website:

In addition to being a great way for participants to receive instruction, get inspired, and meet other local writers, Dzanc Day also helps to partially fund our many charitable endeavors, including the Dzanc Prize, which recognizes one writer annually for both literary excellence and service to his or her community, and our Writer in Residence Program, which places professional writers into classrooms to provide creative writing instructions to public school students who could not otherwise afford the opportunity.

So, all you budding Melvilles and Micheners out there, check out the map and find the nearest city (if you don't see one in your state, keep checking back--new workshops are being added all the time).  And if you're an author with a free Saturday to spare in April, why not consider volunteering to host a workshop?  See the website for more details on how to contact Dzanc.


2.  Speaking of writing The Great American Novel (unsubtle hint at the possible benefits of attending a Dzanc Day workshop), ever wonder about the origins of the term?  Turns out it was a fellow named John William de Forest back in 1868.  The American Literary Blog has the details, including a link to de Forest's essay in The Nation.


3.  Once you write that GAN, you can only hope to be one-tenth as funny and self-deprecating as A. L. Kennedy (who, I imagine, is still striving for title of Great Scottish Novelist, which is another thing altogether and involves multiple ejaculations of the phrase, "Great Scot!").  She wrote a column for The Guardian about book signings which is snort-milk-through-your-nose funny--especially if you're a writer who has ever had to endure the loneliness of the autograph table in Barnes and Noble on a Saturday afternoon in July.  Which I have not and can only dream of one day "enduring" (Oh, make it so, I pray to the publishing gods every morning).  Anyhoo....Kennedy recounts her experience at a joint book signing with Martin Amis and Richard Ford:

       More hopeful are the signings that take place after readings--unless you're reading with someone ridiculously successful, as a kind of warm-up act for them...How clearly I recall that evening when I was on the bill with Martin Amis and Richard Ford.  Dear God.  Average Ford and Amis queue-dweller: "We've been waiting for three months outside the building--so glad we got in.  This is little Martina--she was conceived in the queue.  And Richard--he's two now... We love you.  Can we touch your hair?  Sorry for talking for so long--we know you still have 3,000 other people to deal with..."  First person in ALK queue: "Hi.  We met when we were both on holiday in Jordan.  Um...I thought I'd turn up.  So...You write books, then?"  Second person in ALK queue: "I work here.  You might as well sign this...keep you busy."  And that was my queue.  And Mr Ford got me to sign a book for him, because he is a kind man.  Not that Mr Amis isn't--he was just being borne shoulder-high across the foyer by admirers and didn't have his hands free.
       Size matters, people.  And you can't just walk away when you're done.  Nobody leaves until the last book is Sharpied...if that means you have to engage your tiny clutch of people in deep conversation, sing songs from shows, or open your wrists to pass the time, then so be it.  This is literature, baby--nobody said it would be easy.

You can read the rest of the article by clicking HERE.


4.  I was all excited to come here and tell you about a cool website where you can look up bestsellers for the week you were born (back when #1 and #2 had entirely different meanings for you).  But then I saw that Lisa Peet at Like Fire had already beaten me to the punch.  Read her post "Hitsville" and you'll have the same take on the list as you'd get from me.  No, I mean that literally.  Lisa and I share the same birth week.

5.  Over at HTMLGiant, Giancarlo DiTrapano talks about the trip he took with Scott McClanahan to visit Breece D'J Pancake's gravesite.  I'm still sad and angry he killed himself.  Breece, that is; not Giancarlo.

We filled the car with gas, got a six-pack of cheap beer because Breece would want it that way, and we drove.  We had the name of the graveyard and location logged into my iPhone.  (There had been clouds but they broke on us and the sun shone for the drive.)  We were the blue emanating blip going down that line from green dot to red dot.  But when we got to the red dot, there was just a neighborhood where there were two college girls walking down the street.  We stopped to ask them about the cemetery.  They had no idea where it was. We drove off, giddy with finding Breece, and joked about how lucky those girls were that they didn’t end up in the trunk of this fucking rental car for not being able to assist us.  Stopping by the local library, we found inside a whole display case of Pancake’s shit: portraits, books, a VHS tape (which we should have watched), and a stack of slips with directions from the library right to his grave up the hill.

6.  Speaking of reputations beyond the grave, "The Afterlife of David Foster Wallace" not only gets our blood pumping harder in anticipation of April 15, but it also details the rising academic appreciation for the author who, like Pancake, took his own life before he was finished writing all the books still inside his head.

Readers outside academe caught on to Wallace before scholars did.  When he died, academic interest in him had only begun to show real signs of life, with scholars starting to look closely at the ways in which Wallace responded to and reshaped for a new generation the postmodernism practiced by writers like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon.  Two years later, spurred in part by his death but even more by a rising generation of young scholars, the impending publication of a posthumous novel, and the opening of a major archive of the writer's papers, David Foster Wallace studies is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise.

7.  There is so much to love about this essay by Anthony Doerr (Memory Wall) that I'm tempted to quote the whole thing, but I'll just share the first few paragraphs.  Click HERE to read the rest.

       Whenever we buy a book, we say we buy a “copy” of it.  We buy a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, say, and we carry our copy home.  We open it; we fall into it.  And it is here that the word “copy” fails.
       Because what I experience when I read Gravity’s Rainbow, or Beloved, or The Moviegoer, is not at all a “copy” of what you experience when you read the same novel.  Now that the books are in our hands, in our homes, in our heads, the copies have become something much more idiosyncratic and alive.  They’ve become individual experiences.  They’ve become memories.
       Last year I bought Daniyal Mueenuddin’s story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders at Annie Bloom’s Books in Portland. I read two-thirds of it, wrote all over it, flew to Boise, drove home, and realized I’d left the book on the airplane.
       “It’s okay,” my wife said, when she saw my disappointment.  “You can buy another copy.”  But I couldn’t, not really.  That was my copy.  My experience of the book.  And once I finished it, I planned to stow it on a shelf in a particular spot in my office and there it would sit, with my notes scribbled in it, waiting to be called back up, in the way I imagine individual memories wait to be called back up inside our brains.
       It is the weather in which one reads a book that interpenetrates the paper.  It is the mood one is in, the mindset one carries, the hunger in one’s gut, the quality of the sunlight falling across the page.  It is the little coffee stain on page 29, the twelve bright stars scratched ecstatically across page 302.

8.  Demolition of the Ivory Tower Alert:  It's no longer good enough to just cloister yourself away and write books.  Now, it's all hustle and promo and Tweets.  The Wall Street Journal explains.

       According to Penny Sansevieri, an adjunct professor at New York University and CEO of Author Marketing, a publicity firm, there are 1,500 books published daily in the U.S., including self-published titles.  "To get noticed," she said, "you have to throw more at people than just your book."
       Sometimes, you have to throw sex toys.

Tuesday Tune: "Changing Your Mind" by Bob Schneider

Bob Schneider is a wildly unpredictable artist and measuring the quality of his songs (and the delivery thereof) can resemble the outline of the Cyclone at Coney Island.  The same man who brought us the popular speed-singing romantic ballad "40 Dogs (Like Romeo and Juliet)" also grated our ears with the drinking song "The Sons of Ralph."  He's funk, he's rock, he's Calypso, he's white-man rap.  He's the Baskin-Robbins of the music world.

With the release of 2009's Lovely Creatures, however, he delivered one of his most consistent albums (at least as far as quality is concerned--there are still plenty of diverse genres to please discriminating ears).  In addition to "40 Dogs," Lovely Creatures features "Bicycle Vs. Car," "Tarantula," and "Bombananza."  But the song which has stuck with me, and has earned a coveted spot on my Rewind-and-Replay list, is "Changing Your Mind."

Like the other Tuesday Tunes I've selected this year, it's a Polaroid snapshot of male anguish in the wake of a breakup.  Here's a guy who's confounded by the fact that he's staring at his lover's taillights disappearing up the road.  For some reason, even though I have a healthy, happy marriage, I'm drawn to these moments of anguish when male hearts are crushed. Could it have something to do with the years 1977-1982, when my heart was consistently flayed open by romantic rejection?  Possibly and probably.

What's so funny is nobody's laughing
at this change of heart you're having.
What's so funny is I'm filled up with thunder,
I can't seem to get out from under
all these stones you tied to my chest.

I can't change your mind.
I can't change your mind. 

What's so funny is I'm scared and lonely,
and I don't think that I'm the only one
as I watch you drive away.
And what's so funny is the birds are singing,
sun is shining, and the bells are ringing
and I'm thinking, "What happened here?"

"Changing Your Mind" takes on even more depth with the addition of Patty Griffin, whose voice interweaves with Schneider on the chorus.  Both partners in the relationship are complaining/accusing that they can't change the other's mind.  With the counterbalance of the female perspective, it becomes one of the most beautiful sad songs I've ever heard.

I can't help but get a Raymond Carver vibe every time I listen to it.  Think "A Serious Talk" and "Why Don't You Dance?"--or any one of a half-dozen other moments of capitulation between a man and a woman in Carver's short fiction.  "Changing Your Mind" could easily be a soundtrack to many of the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.  I'm also reminded of Carver by the seemingly abrupt way the song ends:

There's a werewolf out on my front lawn
and he's looking pissed off
and he's wet from all the rain.
I think I'll go say hi,
and offer him a beer.

If I was a crying man, I'd be weeping at the thought of man and beast sharing a rain-soaked brew as they moan and mumble about lost loves.

Give a listen:

Niagara roaring through the head of a pin

From one of the many tomes I had read on the “art of fiction,” I had got the idea that, like Athena, the goddess of wisdom who sprouted full-breasted from the head of a man, the majestic sweep of my novel would roar out once I could “see” my first sentence—roar out like Niagara through the head of a pin.

          --Frederick Exley

          A Fan's Notes

Frederick Exley has been on my mind a lot lately, having just read his blistering landmark 1968 novel, A Fan's Notes, in preparation for reading and reviewing Brock Clarke's less-blistering (but no less potent) 2010 novel Exley.

It's hard to read A Fan's Notes in large doses.  It would be like chugging a quart of vodka.  There are so many moments when he comes right off the page, kicks you in the baby-making nether-regions, spits on you when you're down, then snuffs out a cigarette on the back of your hand.  Those of you who think I exaggerate Exley's brutality to the reader have obviously never picked up A Fan's Notes.  As Walter Kirn once wrote, "His prose is moist with lyrical revulsion."  There's a lot of self-loathing and cynicism soaking the pages of that autobiography thinly disguised as a novel.  I loved every minute of it; even while the poison was going down, I was smiling in recognition.

Amid the brutal scenes of alcoholic vomit, mental hospitals, electroshock therapy, and an extended "depression on the davenport" interlude, there are some excellent moments of metaphorical language, such as the above quote.  When I read A Fan's Notes, I was galloping down the homestretch of polishing off the latest revision of my Iraq War novel, Fobbit.  It was a laborious process: tinkering with words, slashing away whole sentences, adding more flesh to skeletal characters.  I was worn down by the effort, yet flush with hope for what the novel might one day become.  Despite the days and days of revision, some of the best sentences of Fobbit are probably still unwritten, padlocked inside my head.  I can strain and grunt all I want, but they won't come any easier.  All I can do is show up for work on time every day, crack my knuckles, splay them above the keyboard and keep vigil for the words which may or may not show up.

When I read that sentence about Exley's idea of his novel roaring to life, "like Niagara through the head of a pin," I felt the burn of recognition.  Yes, I too had been waiting for the floodgates to open on the novel, waiting for the tumble of words that will make Fobbit the best it can be.   Like Exley, I'll still sit here and stare at the head of that pin, waiting for that first welling bead of water to appear.

God, I hope the electroshock doesn't hurt.

Friday Freebie: "The Great White Bear" by Kieran Mulvaney

Congratulations to Ken Egan, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, The Wilding by Benjamin Percy.

This week's book giveaway remains in the wild with unpredictable bruins.  The Great White Bear by Kieran Mulvaney is, it goes without saying, about polar bears--specifically, about their struggle to survive in a world of diminishing ice.  Here's the publisher's blurb for the book:      

       Polar bears are creatures of paradox: They are white bears whose skin is black; massive predators who can walk almost silently; Arctic residents whose major problem is not staying warm, but keeping cool.  Fully grown they can measure 10 feet and weigh close to 2,000 pounds, but at birth they are just 20 ounces.  Creatures that may wander thousands of miles over the course of a year, they begin life in a snowdrift.
       Human encounters with these legendary beasts are cause for both excitement and apprehension.  Tales throughout history describe the ferocity of polar bear attacks on humans; but human hunting of polar bears has exacted a far larger toll, obliging Arctic nations to try to protect their region’s iconic species before it’s too late.
       Now, however, another threat to the polar bears’ survival has emerged, one that is steadily removing sea ice and the life it supports.  Without this habitat, polar bears cannot exist.  The Great White Bear celebrates the story of this unique species.  Through a blend of history, both natural and human, through myth and reality and observations both personal and scientific, Kieran Mulvaney masterfully provides a context for readers to consider the polar bear, its history, its life, and its uncertain fate.

If you'd like a chance at winning The Great White Bear, all you have to do is answer this question:

What Canadian town is known as "the polar bear capital of the world"?  (The answer, if you don't already know it, can be found on Mulvaney's website)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  The contest closes at midnight on Jan. 20, at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Jan. 21.
 
 
P.S.  Last week's Friday Freebie asked this question: "What was the best book you read in 2010?"  Here's a sampling of the responses from those who entered the contest (the first two books received multiple votes):
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving
NOX by Anne Carson
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
Safe From the Sea by Peter Geye
Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy
Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan
Pike by Benjamin Whitmer

Soup and Salad: 3-D Gatsby, Libraries of the Rich and Famous, The Sherlockians, The Story Prize, Snooki Booki

On today's menu:

1.  This just in from the Please-Just-Make-It-Stop Dept.:  What do Yogi Bear and F. Scott Fitzgerald have in common?  Apart from the obvious love of peanut-butter-and-anchovy sandwiches, the Jazz Age writer may soon join the Jellystone bruin in the realm of 3-D movies.  That's if director Baz Luhrmann has his way with the filming of The Great Gatsby.  As the Los Angeles Times tells us, Luhrmann (Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge) has grandiose plans for the film, no matter what the dimension: "People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and 'The Great Gatsby' can provide that explanation," he said.  The cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan who, we can only pray, will be a little less wooden than Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.  The New York Times defends Luhrmann's film against its book-loving critics:

...a “Gatsby” movie needs a director who isn’t interested in worshipful fidelity, who doesn’t even to try to translate the book’s endless unfilmable aspects into celluloid, and who makes the most of the cinematic side of “Gatsby” instead — the lifestyles of the rich and famous backdrop, the dialogue and repartee, the boorishly entertaining secondary characters (from Tom Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson to Meyer Wolfshiem and the man in owl-eyed spectacles), the big physical set-pieces (parties, fights, car crashes, murder) and the whole wild Jazz Age ambience.

Yeah, okay.  But 3-D?  Really?  If I wasn't convinced of the gimmick's added value to films by the latest Tron, then what's going to get me into a theater to watch a flapper's dress reach out and smack me in the face?

2.  Ever wonder what the libraries of Oprah, Rod Stewart, and Greta Garbo look like?  No?  Neither did I, but this gallery of heavy-laden bookcases at Flavorwire is an interesting tour of homes belonging to Those Who Are Not Like The Rest of Us.  That's fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld's overpowering collection pictured above.

3.  The game is afoot in three new books surrounding the mysteries which surround the Sherlock Holmes mysteries.  Yvonne Zipp sorts out all the elementary details in her review at The Washington Post.  Graham Moore's The Sherlockian is already high on my list of to-reads.  Who can resist a mystery that sees Arthur Conan Doyle persuading Bram Stoker to be his Watson?

4.  The Story Prize finalists have been announced:  Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li, and Death is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca.  Congratulations to all three whose books were selected out of a pile of 85 other short story collections to compete for the $20,000 prize.

5.  And dubious congratulations go out to Washington, D.C. which tops the rankings of "most literate cities" in the United States.  No matter what Sarah Palin says, youse guys in the Capitol City aren't stoopid.

6.  Speaking of which, am I the only one who thinks this vlog of Ross Everett at a Snooki book signing is hilarious?  Everett talked to crazy-eyed (and crazier-haired) fans standing in line at a Los Angeles Barnes and Noble waiting to have their book signed by the Jersey Shore "star."  To say they were all a-tremble would be an understatement.  You'll either find Everett funny or sand-in-your-crotch irritating.  Me, I'll admit I laughed out loud when he asked a girl how drunk she was "on a scale of one to Mel Gibson."