I have discovered these past few days that there are two types of people: those who like daylight saving time, and those who do not. The folks who like daylight saving are like me. They are optimists who look forward to a long summer of sun-drenched evenings, where you can spend the evening hours outside in the warm, lingering dusk. Those who don’t like daylight saving moan about losing a single hour on one weekend of a year of weekends. These people’s lives are mercilessly scheduled, and they apparently find no way to derive joy from the extra daylight, they instead cling to that lost hour as an example of the many ills that befall them. I don’t like those people.
Daylight saving
Hollywood Sightings: A. Scott Berg & Jeff Bridges
Scott Berg stopped by the store yesterday to sign some copies of his most recent book Kate Remembered. Signed books sell well during the holidays so lots of local authors have been dropping by to make their books slightly more "gift-worthy" by putting their names on them. Kate Remembered was quite a sensation in LA this past year. It is, more or less, a collection of conversations that Berg had with Katherine Hepburn over the last ten years. She spoke on the record on the condition that the book not be released until after her death, and so a few weeks after she passed away the book hit shelves and Hollywood folks raced in to see what Hepburn might have revealed about her long life. Berg, though very much entrenched in the Hollywood world, is perhaps better-known by the general reading public as the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Lindbergh, an illuminating portrait of one of America's great tragic heroes. I asked him what he's working on now, and he said that his next book will not be about Hollywood, but instead he is making a foray into presidential biography. He is currently deep into his sixty volume set of the collected papers of Woodrow Wilson, researching a biography he hopes to complete by 2009. You heard it here first.Jeff Bridges, meanwhile, stopped by to sign copies of his new book Pictures, a charming collection of photographs that he's taken on various film sets over the years. The book itself is very attractive and the photographs are surprisingly accomplished.
Baseball is Back
Those of you who've read this blog for a while know that during the summer I tend to pen the occasional post about baseball. Feel free to skip them if you like, but I just can't help myself. Now, on with it. In Chicago, I'm finding that the start of baseball season seems to awaken a collective joy across the city. Riding the El on Friday, I was startled by the conductor's gleeful announcement that the slowness of our train was due to the Cubs home opener. I also learned that the Cubs typically eschew night games at Wrigley Field because, essentially, night games would wake up the neighbors. Most modern stadiums are surrounded by moats of asphalt, but ancient Wrigley is nestled into a city block and surrounded by rowhouses and city traffic and streets lined with bars and diners. Driving north on Clark Street, the stadium explodes into view, surrounded on game day by throngs of fans. A whole section of the city turns into a clamoring carnival of baseball ferment. And then, a few blocks beyond, one returns to quiet streets lined with leafy trees and brick three flats. In the past few days I have noted the pleasure with which the Cubs fan declares that the season has returned. In my experience, they don't talk about the team's chances this year or the strength of the bullpen or anything pulled from the sports pages, they talk about how it feels to have baseball back. They tell me that it's so great to see people drinking beer in Cubs gear on their front porches and shouting "hey" to fans walking to the game. But mostly they sort of cock their heads back so as to gather in some springtime sun, still new enough to be a novelty. In Chicago, baseball doesn't just mean baseball, it means that the gloomy, icy, sunless winter is over. No more trudging through the ankle-deep snow in the pre-dawn darkness to the El, and no more returning by the same route - stepping in the same holes my feet made that morning - in darkness to a home whose clanging radiators provide a cozy warmth, which, over time, simply seems to be the temperature they have set for your prison cell. But, if you see Cubs fans marching through Wrigleyville, all that can be put to rest and forgotten until October, a whole baseball season away from now. There are some grizzled Chicago vets who insist to me that we're not out of the woods yet, that April chills and snows are not unheard of, but I ignore them because, well, baseball is here!(I should note that my already considerable happiness at the return of baseball season has been further enhanced by the book I'm reading right now, a collection of baseball writing by the incomparable Roger Angell called Game Time : A Baseball Companion)
Covering the Catalogs: Grove Atlantic Spring/Summer 2006
I get a fair amount of catalogs from publishers these days, and since they're always chock full of new and interesting books that I'm guessing people will want to know about, I'm thinking about instituting a semi-regular feature called Covering the Catalogs wherein I pick out a handful of items that I deem interesting from the most recent catalog to cross my desk. And since I received the newest Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly Press/Black Cat/Canongate catalog yesterday, this one'll be the first.Recently, Maud was expressing her discomfort with the impending media coverage of the upcoming Samuel Beckett centenary: "I await commemorative events like this centenary with excitement that tends to mutate, as the press coverage appears, into dread, then lamentation, and finally, resigned disgust." The "news" that arises from the anniversary of the birth of a dead writer isn't always scintillating, but, on the upside, such occasions give publishers - wanting to cash in on said press coverage - an opportunity to reissue and repackage the work of the great writer. As such, Grove is putting out two different items to mark Beckett's centenary. The first is a bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot. The play was originally written in French by Beckett, and he translated it into English himself. This edition provides both texts, side-by-side. Grove is also putting out a four volume set of Beckett's collected works with introductions by well-known writers. The first volume of novels is introduced by Colm Toibin and the second volume of novels is introduced by Salman Rushdie. The volume of collected dramatic works is introduced by Edward Albee, and the volume of collected poems, short fiction and criticism is introduced by J.M. Coetzee.Coming in April from the author of Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden is Guests of the Ayatollah. Bowden is well-known for his immersive coverage of armed conflict, and in this book he is setting out to provide an account of, as the book's subtitle calls it, "the first battle in America's war with militant Islam," the Iran hostage crisis.Coming in July from Atlantic Monthly Press is Tom Drury's first new novel in six years, The Driftless Area. Drury was among the "Best of Young American Novelists" named by Granta, and his stories regularly appear in the New Yorker, including "Path Lights" from last fall in which a bottle falls from the sky.I plan on continuing to cherry pick items that interest me from other catalogs as I receive them, so stay tuned. If you are a publisher and would like to send me your catalog, please email me.
●
●
●
Original Sin
If you can’t be a unique writer, have the markings of a generic. Glamorize your squalid room in the bohemian part of a bright metropolis. Peddle opinions on the books you read (if you read). Consort with other writers.
●
●