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We're only one episode into Season 4 of Mad Men, and already I can't wait to see where things are headed. Like, how will the Surgeon General's 1964 report on the dangers of smoking (and the subsequent required warning on cigarette packs) affect the fledgling ad firm's biggest client, Lucky Strikes? Will we ever see our old pals Kinsey and Cosgrove again? And wherefore art thou, Joan's terrible husband and Roger's terrible wife?
And what better way to kick off the new season than with Natasha Vargas-Cooper's new book? Born of her recurring series on The Awl, Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America is a look at the show via mini-essays that make pointed, witty observations on the cultural context of the early '60s. So you can quickly read all about what Betty's suburban decor says about her and her family, how the writers of the time--John Cheever, Helen Gurley Brown, Mary McCarthy, Frank O'Hara--inform the series, and why the character of Don Draper is the careful combination of traits found in Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne. That's a near-deadly admixture of sex appeal.
To celebrate the return of Mad Men, The SunBreak has three copies of Mad Men Unbuttoned to give away. Enter below for your chance to win a copy. We'll be drawing three winners' names Friday at noon....
There was a great sigh of relief Sunday night all across the land to accompany the Season 4 premiere of Mad Men. It was so good to see all our old friends again, especially how they've all changed in the past year of television time: Peggy grew out her bangs! Don likes it rough! Betty's unhappily married! JFK is still dead.
And what better way to kick off the new season than with Natasha Vargas-Cooper's new book? Born of her recurring series on The Awl, Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America is a look at the show via mini-essays that make pointed, witty observations on the cultural context of the early '60s. So you can quickly read all about the great real-life ad men of the time, the Rothko painting in Bert Cooper's office, what Peggy likely did and didn't learn in secretary school, and just how easy it was to procure an illegal abortion. Fun facts for the whole family!
To celebrate the return of Mad Men, The SunBreak has three copies of Mad Men Unbuttoned to give away. Enter below for your chance to win a copy. We'll be drawing three winners' names Friday at noon....
Ivan Doig (Photo: A. Wayne Arnst)
The author Ivan Doig lives near Richmond Beach, just north of Seattle, but his heart is always in Montana. [Ed: Doig reads at the University Bookstore tomorrow, July 14, at 7 p.m.]
"Mississippi was William Faulkner's muse," Doig said, when we spoke by phone. "I guess Montana is mine."
Montana, specifically the Butte of 1919, is the setting of Doig's newest novel, Work Song, his tenth work of fiction over twenty years. It's a skittish, fast-moving novel that follows the exploits of Morrie Morgan, a dapper dandy with a bit of the scalawag in him. Morrie narrates the story in the best Dickens style; it's the musings of a rogue, and the reader can delight in Morgan's victories both intimate and large.
Doig's novels are impeccably researched and filled with intriguing characters. In Work Song, his portrait of a frontier Butte is close to perfection. If the Butte of 1919 wasn't like this, it should have been.
"When researching books," he told us, "I like to go where Google doesn’t go. For Work Song, I went to Butte's old archives and dug through the nooks and crannies."
At the Butte Historical Society, he found an old photograph of the Butte Public Library in the early 1920s. That image, he said, "Went off in my mind like a firecracker." The library is a central location in Work Song, a place where Morrie finds a job and learns the town.
The reader follows Morgan as he weaves his way into the city, charms his landlord, the widowed Grace Faraday, and lands odd jobs here and there. He is a wholly original character, at once a walking encyclopedia and a brass-knuckle-carrying hard case. You can feel Doig's love of the character, who first appeared as a secondary player in Doig's earlier novel, The Whistling Season.
"Readers fell in love with him," Doig said. "When he's around, unexpected things happened. Morrie has flights of inspiration. I thought it would be interesting to see things through his eyes."
Doig is clearly a devoted storyteller. When he talks about the characters in his books, he speaks of them as living and breathing souls. Morrie Morgan is a particular type of early-twentieth-century characters. At times, he's a step or two away from the Harold Hill of The Music Man, but you feel he is also a provocateur who likes to stir the pot, not for personal gain, but simply to see how it'll work out. He's restless, easily bored....
Filming around Seattle just now is the indie film Grassroots, described by its makers thusly: "A short-tempered, unemployed music critic who likes to dress as a polar bear thinks he can harness the power of the people to ride the monorail to political victory in Seattle."
Grassroots is based on a book called Zioncheck for President, by erstwhile alt-weekly reporter Phil Campbell. It's a hilarious, scarring, gadfly of a book built on the premise that all politics is local loco. Or maybe it's just that the people who decide to go into politics are "tetched" in some way to begin with.
Campbell contrasts his management of Grant Cogswell's ill-fated City Council campaign with the rise and all-too-literal fall of U.S. Rep. Marion Zioncheck, a Depression-era Washington state firebrand. Nothing is airbrushed out.
Campbell was at work at his day job in late 2006 when he got an email from his editor at Nation Books, saying that Stephen Gyllenhaal had read Zioncheck and was interested in making a movie from the book. After meeting up with Gyllenhaal at a hotel bar, Campbell signed away all the rights--"He can make the movie he wants. I didn't want to impose any restrictions on how so-and-so had to be portrayed, me or anyone else."
The movie's cast now includes Jason Biggs (American Pies), Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under), Cobie Smulders (How I Met Your Mother), Cedric the Entertainer (as Richard McIver), and Tom Arnold (as the bartender). Presumably Capitol Hill's cafes and bars--in which much campaign strategizing takes place--will play themselves.
Campbell himself is visiting town this week--he lives now in Brooklyn, and works in Manhattan--for an appearance at the Sorrento's Night School series with The Stranger's philosophical eminence Charles Mudede. It'll be a "discussion about capturing the spirit of time and place in both words and film," and Campbell will also read from his new satirical novel set in Memphis in the age of global warming. It's this Thursday, July 8, and doors open at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free, but you must RSVP to kerri.benecke@hotelsorrento.com.
Tell me a little about your new book....
Free range isn't all it's cracked up to be when the grass is too wet from rain.
As the son of a little old Englishwoman who still raises chickens in her backyard, I read with interest the small book left to us by former Bainbridge Islander Minnie Rose Lovgreen, titled Recipe for Raising Chickens, now available in a third edition from NW Trillium Press.
Subtitled "Simple, economical ways with eggs, chicks, broody hens, laying hens, general chicken care," the bookish pamphlet (or pamphlet-ish book) delivers on all fronts. Attendees of Tilth's annual City Chickens Coop Tour ("Did you know that Seattle has become known as a world-class chicken destination?"), chicken-raising noobs, and even Seattle University students will want to get in on Lovgreen's last words on poultry care.
Like Lao-tzu, Lovgreen saved up her pithy insights--"The main thing is to keep them happy"--until it was almost time for her to depart the earth. In 1975, she was diagnosed with cancer. It was thanks to Nancy Rekow, who tape-recorded interviews with Lovgreen in her hospital room, then edited and hand-lettered the text, that the book exists at all. (Another friend and neighbor, Elizabeth Hutchison, provided the pen-and-ink drawings that illustrate the book.)
Chapters are titled "The Broody Hen And Her Eggs," "Baby Chick Care," "Room And Board For Chickens," "Eggs," and "Virtues Of The Bantam Hen." (Lovgreen rates the bantam hen highly for egg-laying and chick-raising: "A bantam hen can cover as many as 18 to 20 chicks," she notes approvingly, adding, "A good-sized bantam can hatch out about 5 duck eggs, or 2 or 3 goose eggs, or 11 guinea eggs, or 9 turkey eggs. She'll even turn the large goose eggs over every day!")...
This is what William T. Vollmann tells me about death and getting the story. We are at the bar at Sazerac downtown, and are just wrapping up a long talk over the Scotch he generously ordered (Highland Park, him; Laphroaig, me):
One of the great things, I think, about death, is that as we get closer to death we start to sense our own aloneness, and so, whatever the story is, even if we want to hide it from ourselves, it has to come up. So it's always great to talk to dying people, too.
Just past 50, Vollmann is no longer a have-gun-will-travel enfant terrible--but most except the enfant still applies. (When we spoke for this interview,his hazard-pay-worthy travels in Iraqi Kurdistan article had just appeared in Harper's, and he'd just finished writing another piece for Harper's on policy advances in suicide, with stops in Oregon and Switzerland.) His granite block of a head is topped by a buzz-cut stubble, his face weathered, and he couldn't have been a more agreeable former National Book Critics Circle Award-winner, telling me to call him "Bill."
Violence and Vollmann go together, not least because of his idiosyncratic, magisterial Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,300-page, 7-volume examination of humanity's "moral calculus" as it applies to violence that more or less exhausted McSweeney's Books entire publishing budget that year. His first non-fiction book An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World grew out of a youthful, action-seeking sojourn to Afghanistan in 1982.
If you mention trips you regret not taking, he says things like, "I went to Iraq in '98 for Saddam's birthday, and I wish I had taken the trouble to go to Babylon. He had it rebuilt and each brick was stamped with his name. I would have enjoyed seeing that." Your story was about study abroad, and you shut up and sip your Scotch.
So it might surprise you to learn that his latest book centers on esoteric Noh theater. Anyone familiar with Vollmann's prolixity will smile along with his his tripartite title: Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater: with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines.
He's not kidding, of course. The list underscores that omnivorous Vollmann appetite for empathetic connection. In conversation, when cites someone else's opinion, he habitually takes up their voice and quotes them. It may be a paraphrase, but it's not derisive. He mentions several times how "alien" Noh is, and I hear, in part, a gratitude for the challenge of it.
As a classical Japanese art form, Noh theater doesn't seem to have a Western equivalent. Vollmann and I talked about whether opera is similar, but I got the feeling that, in terms of accessibility, our opera is more like Kabuki. ("Noh is for the warrior," a Kabuki actor told Vollmann. "Kabuki is for the general public." To which Vollmann later appends: "Noh's violence has most often to do with the severance of ties.")
You have to imagine an alternate universe where opera split at the time of Monteverdi, and a branch that distilled opera to its essence grew. Noh is music drama: it has a canon of plays; men play the parts of men and women, with masks and costumes; and its performance is ritualized and highly demanding of both performers and audience.
The book touches on many things besides, but its general preoccupations are with how we see and represent the feminine, the transience of life and the immortality of art, and empathy. Knowing of his 20-year construction of Rising Up, I asked how long Kissing the Mask had been germinating, and he told me, "I guess you can say I've been working on the book since, you know, 1975." ...
- Author William T. Vollmann talks about his exploration of Noh drama and femininity, Kissing the Mask, at the Northwest African American Museum at 7 p.m. tonight; tomorrow he's at Third Place Books.
William T. Vollmann, author, gun owner
There are two kinds of readers in this world: those that know of William T. Vollmann, and those that can't handle the truth. You could argue there's a third group of people who know of him, but can't keep up with his output. He's written 21 books in 23 years, which includes Rising Up and Rising Down, a 7-volume exploration of humanity's rationales for violence. You can't find that one anywhere, it's sold out. Hobos, prostitutes, illegal immigrants, and terrorists have captured his attention. He's been a war correspondent, and burned off his eyebrows on a trip to the North Pole.
I'm halfway through his latest, with its duffel-bag-sized title of Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater with Some Thoughts on Muses (especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries, and Venus Figurines. At 200 pages in, it's been mostly Noh, through the recollections, interviews, and research of an enthusiast (not an expert, as Vollmann is careful to emphasize). Though he has just hung out with a 60-something geisha.
Reading Vollmann may be an uneasy experience--he has a talent for putting himself into comprising situations, and for speaking his mind while in them--but this book is filled with an unusual passion and sincerity. Along with copious footnotes--you could dismiss Vollmann as a "holy fool," but for the knowledge he possesses, which (let's face it) few of us would go through such trouble to get firsthand.
The combination of his perverse/idiosyncratic lines of inquiry with the academic rigor of his observation often yields a bittersweet, bite-of-the-apple result: you're wiser, but the world is weirder than you thought.
Kirkus Reviews calls Matthew Flaming's debut novel, The Kingdom of Ohio, "impossible to resist," praising its "marrying poetic prose with hints of steampunk aesthetics." Closer to home, the Stranger's Paul Constant labels it "just deadly dull," adding that "There's nothing in the central mystery to entice the reader on."
So clearly it sparks differences of opinion. For me, this Booklicious review nails down the general outlines, and discontinuities, of the work: "Part historical fiction, part alternate reality, and wholly romantic, Flaming’s novel is a conglomerate of popular publishing trends and timeless storytelling elements."
The daily life of a turn-of-the-century New York subway construction worker is vividly evoked; the Kingdom of Toledo's founding by French pilgrims is carefully footnoted; the unlikely romance between young engineer Peter Force and math genius Cheri-Anne Toledo springs up amid their opposition to a powerful cabal starring J.P. Morgan and Thomas Edison.
All is recounted by a peculiar old historian, closing up shop in Los Angeles, who is less convincingly elderly than reminiscent of that stodgy younger man you know who annoyingly litters his speech with literary archaisms. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, young men fond of archaisms, it's just not as significant of advanced age as it is of advanced bookwormery.)
There's an ambition to this agglomeration that isn't actually to write the ultra-selling novel, but to powerfully reimagine a splintering world as worlds of possibility colliding--this, sadly, is a task that exceeds Flaming's abilities, as yet, as a novelist. Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride....
Daniel Pink visits Town Hall in Seattle on Monday, January 11. His talk begins at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $5.
Of the pack of gurus in the running to assume the mantle of Drucker and become the business world's go-to guy for advice on how to have it all, the author of Free Agent Nation and A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink, both is and isn't in the running.
It's hard to imagine anyone today having the chance to survey a monolithic business world the way Peter Drucker did. Today's analyses are either fiercely domain-specific or meta-analyses of a fractured, niche marketplace. Nonetheless, Daniel Pink books--for "intelligent, forward-thinking, optimistic folks," bursting with the hallmarks of the get-smart genre--sell like iPods (which I think supplanted hotcakes in sales rankings some years ago).
Drive naturally comes with an extended subhead ("The Surprising Truth ABout What Motivates Us") and includes seven reasons for things, invented dichotomies ("Type I's almost always outperform Type X's in the long run"), recourse to experts and research, and glowing case studies of businesses that "get it."
In other words, Drive is to books what the Clif Bar is to food. If, like me, you find your soul's tastebuds shriveling from over-exposure to this high-energy presentation style, I want to deliver some surprising truth of my own: It's worth reading, and mulling over. It challenges you. (If hard-charging execs did book clubs, this would be a good pick.) And it's not "just" for business types--if you need to work for a living, there's something here for you.
Let me skip to the end, to explain why. According to Pink (the author, not the singer), motivation is what happens when autonomy, mastery, and purpose head off in the same direction. That's drive.
He's arguing for real autonomy here, not the faux kind where corporate sets goals and workers have the "freedom" to achieve them by working as long as they want so long as it's longer. The example he gives is of a ROWE (results-oriented work environment), where employees set their own hours--they come to work to work, not to show up at the office for 8.5 hours.
On the one hand, I resist the book jacket's "paradigm-shattering" emphasis, but on the other, just imagine what it would take to get your office to switch to ROWE. Many, if not most, of you are all too familiar with how suspicious command-and-control types are of giving employees meaningful choices. They may mean well, but they just can't get their heads around it. Their mantra is "Work harder, not smarter."
Fundamentally, they believe people don't like work, and would rather be someplace else: Only rum and the lash motivate the swabbies. But the thesis that underlies Pink's book is that in many cases, extrinsic motivators are only briefly effective, and are often counter-productive for the long-term. The thrill of a Salesperson of the Month plaque dwindles quickly. And if it's all about the extra money from a raise, why not take bids from competing firms for your services?...
David Byrne says "much of Seattle" is "vibrant and full of life." He wrote it down in black-and-white in his new book, Bicycle Diaries. But there is another paragraph that summons up Seattle, too.
There is often a highway along the waterfront in many towns. Before these highways were built, the waterfronts, already dead zones, were seen as the most logical places from which to usurp land for conversion into a concrete artery. Inevitably, little by little, the citizens of these towns become walled off from their own waterfronts, and the waterfronts become dead zones of yet a different kin--concrete dead zones of clean, swooping flyovers and access ramps that soon were filled with whizzing cars. Under these were abandoned shopping carts, homeless people, and piles of toxic waste. [...]
Much of the time it turns out the cars are merely using these highways not to have access to businesses and residences in the nearby city, as might have been originally proposed, but to bypass that city entirely.
The book itself...
- T. R. Reid talks at Town Hall at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, September 8. Tickets are $5 at the door. The Washington Post correspondent and NPR commentator has a new book out, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.
T. R. Reid argues that lack of universal health care is primarily a moral question, not an economic one. It's estimated that each year we do not offer universal health care, 20,000 U.S. citizens die who did not have to. To my ears, the debate sounds Abrahamic:
24What if there are fifty uninsured people in the country? Will You really let them fall ill and not spare the lives of the fifty uninsured people? 25Far be it from You to do such a thing–to kill the uninsured with the terminally ill, treating the uninsured and the terminally ill alike. Far be it from You! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
I can't pretend not to be biased here--I've been a proponent of health care reform since reading of Harry S Truman's attempts at reform in the mid-1940...
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