Telegraph Avenue

I’m not a writer with a set time of day to work on fiction. I’m more comfortable letting the mood strike me and putting down what I want to say, though I do try to touch on it each day, whether it’s writing a new piece or revising something previously written. A lazy writer, the mood does nevertheless tend to strike me at the same time each day, in the late afternoons and early evenings. It’s not an ideal time for someone with a house full of people, dinner to tend to, laundry, dishes, homework and bedtimes. I should be more disciplined, perhaps, I should set my clock for sometime deep in the a.m. or burn the midnight oil well into a new chapter. I have friends who write each day at the same time and I envy them their discipline. I’ve done this before, but only when I’m near the end of a project and want to push through, when the light at the end of the tunnel flutters my eyelids and wakens me before the alarm clock.

I’ve read that Michael Chabon, if he’s near the end of a novel, or on a particularly difficult portion of whatever he’s working on, will say goodbye to his wife and four kids for a stay in a hotel where solitude and peaceful working conditions help him realize his goal. I can’t imagine even suggesting such a thing in my home. Then again, I don’t have a Pulitzer, or any bestsellers, (or a published novel) to back me up. Chabon’s latest, Telegraph Avenue (Harper, 2012), is more evidence for why the man should have his own suite at the Chateau Marmont.

The book is the story of Nat Jaffe and Archy Stallings, longtime friends who are struggling to keep their record store, Brokeland Records – a haven for the denizens of Telegraph Avenue, for the hip, the has-beens and the policy makers of pop culture – open in the glare of a corporate megastore, Dogpile, threatening to take up residence in the neighborhood. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are partners in a midwifery practice and face their own struggles for acceptance in a world of ever-increasing medical convention. Archy’s estranged father, Luther Stallings, a one-time kung fu champion and blaxploitation film star, is a source of concern for his son like a migraine sneaking up from the back of the skull. And there are so many more, a whole, colorful cast of characters carrying the backbeat of plot like Parliament Funkadelic or the MGs.

In Telegraph Avenue, I imagine Chabon takes to heart the old adage “Write what you know.” Maybe he did a lot of research for his story based in Berkeley and Oakland, and the worlds of vinyl soul albums, 1970s film noir, leisure suits and all manner of vintage and pop culture from the late 60s and 70s. But maybe, when he had a question, he simply walked across his office to a wall-length bookshelf and took down a comic book or album to peruse, read, listen to and study. He loves this world he inhabits and wants nothing more than to give us a tour with a soundtrack provided by his very own mix-tape.

All Chabon books will forever be compared to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &Clay (Picador, 2000), which is unfair, but it is a book I carry with me; not physically, though I probably could the way Nate Jaffe’s son, Julius, carries his portable, plastic eight-track player, but inside me where it hums just as Nat keeps a constant beat in his head. It is a book that astounded me the first and second time I read it. The characters of Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay live in a real world swirled within the magic and fantasy that their dreams, fears, relationships, and lives are hinged upon. Telegraph Avenue isn’t so different, though the nostalgia – and there is nostalgia, to be sure, try not to overdose on it – takes us back, not to pre-World War II Prague, but to post-Vietnam San Francisco, and into the bedrooms of every 14-year-old boy ever, replete with the sloppy experimentation in music, sex, pop culture, and the independence they all precipitate.

There are small, insignificant issues I have with a storyline or two, but I’m willing to let those go because of the writing. There is nothing quite like a Chabon sentence. It’s like a steak dinner or a chocolate cake dessert, not just a slice, either, but the whole damn thing eaten in one sitting, with some ice cream on the side, and maybe a glass of ice cold milk.

Regarding writing sentences, Chabon told NPR’s Fresh Air:

“Sentences are the purest, simplest, most pleasurable part of writing for me. And it's the part that comes the easiest to me. … I love that aspect of it: the shaping of sentences, the crafting of sentences, that's the fun part of writing for me.”

And it shows. He packs so much into one sentence that I tend to read a page or two and then back off, lean back on the sofa, loosen my belt and digest it all. There is, of course, Part III, “A Bird of Wide Experience,” with its single, 12-page sentence, but that’s just showing off and, frankly, unnecessary. It’s more a testament to Chabon’s standing in the publishing world, and an overeager editor, than his writing ability. Can you imagine an unknown author including that bit in a query letter to an agent? “Oh, and in the middle I include one single sentence that goes on for a dozen pages. People will love that.” The rejection letter would be much more brief and written immediately after reading that queried sentence.

But that’s nitpicking because the writing is beautiful, all of it, every adjective (plenty), comma (many), clause, phrase, digression and aside. Chabon hooks his words together like train cars to take us on a journey through descriptive lands peopled with fanciful citizens, all dressed to the nines in their flamboyant Aztec numbers, and all strutting to their own brand of funk.

The Boost of the Olive Tree

Okay all you bookish people out there, it's time to rally the troops. My good friend Courtney Miller Santo has a major book release next Tuesday, Aug. 21, with The Roots of the Olive Tree (William Morrow). She has a lot of author events upcoming in places like San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville, Portland, Oxford and Asheville, so if you're in any of those cities, get out there and support her. And tell your friends!

Courtney also needs some reviews circulating out there, so give the book a read and tell the world what you think. Doesn't have to be long, just a few sentences, a paragraph or two, on your connection to the characters and stories. Now, we here at Urf! are big on books - paper, binding, covers, the whole package - but for those of you who like to download a novel and read it on your computer phones, the publisher has a great deal for you. For the rest of this week only, you can download The Roots of the Olive Tree eBook for only $4.99. You can do that right here. So go do that, I'll wait ...

Now, once you've read it, say something about it at the following sites (your review can be copied and pasted into each site to make things simpler):

Barnes & Noble (Scroll to the very bottom of the page to review)

Amazon (You can review the electronic copy now, but not the hardback)

Books-A-Million (Scroll to the lower third of the page, account creation required)

Reviews are also accepted at the Apple Store if an iPad or iPod are your preferred mediums

I was lucky enough to read an advanced reader's copy back in the spring and said a little something about it here.

I also wrote a feature on Courtney for The Commercial Appeal that ran in the paper on May 31, 2012. I'll copy that below so you can get a feel for where Courtney's story began and how it evolved. If this isn't enough, you can read her winning story for the 2012 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest right here.

Thank you all for your help!

Writer's first novel followed storybook path to publication

Courtney Miller Santo grew up in conditions fertile for a burgeoning writer, a conservative Mormon household with seven children where there was no television to be found. Instead, the large and close family told stories and created plays. They interacted in ways almost unheard of today. And they read.

"My dad was always reading, he would go to bed at 9, and he would always have a book," Santo said of her father, an elevator mechanic.

Santo, the oldest of those seven children, describes her childhood just outside of Portland in Milwaukie, Ore., as "chaotic," yet a bookish manner set in and has paid off for her in a big way as she prepares for her debut novel, "The Roots of the Olive Tree" (William Morrow), to be released in August.

The story is threaded along one olive-growing season, taking a look at the lives of five generations of firstborn daughters and Anna, the 112-year-old matriarch, who wants to be the oldest living human being in the world.

The story, set at Hill House and the family's olive groves in northern California, centers on a geneticist coming to study the longevity of the family just as the youngest, Erin, returns home alone and pregnant.

It's a combination that, the dust jacket of an advance reader copy explains, "ignites explosive emotions that these women have kept buried and uncovers revelations that will shake them all to their roots."

It's a novel with a road to publication almost as intriguing as the tale within the pages. Santo entered her manuscript in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award competition in 2011. Out of 5,000 entrants, she made it to the semifinals and the remaining 50 hopefuls. And then she was eliminated. But that's only the beginning of the story because she was then contacted by an agent with the Janklow & Nesbit Associates literary agency who had read the manuscript excerpts posted at Amazon, and wanted to represent Santo.

It is on the West Coast where olives grow and fantasies are realized, and it was there in summer 2011 that Santo's life changed. "I was in the middle of this cross-country vacation that had been planned forever ... and the day after we get home to my grandmother's house in Vancouver (Wash.), she (the agent) calls me and says, 'Sit down, I have an offer, and it's a really good offer,' and she told me the offer, and I was glad I was sitting down because I did not believe it."

That offer was that the book, along with an unwritten second book, would be sold to William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins, for six figures. Foreign rights for "The Roots of the Olive Tree" have already been sold to Italy, England, Spain, Germany, Holland and Turkey.

Santo doesn't downplay luck in this adventure. "It just doesn't seem real; it didn't seem real for a very, very, very long time," she said. "This is the dream; this does not happen that you get a company that is so excited about a debut novelist that they put this much publicity and effort into it. I feel crazy lucky."

The women of her novel might be illustrated by a photograph Santo keeps in her office, a tiny concrete bunker on the University of Memphis campus. It's one of her and her daughter flanked by her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Santo is a collector of stories. "My mother is a storyteller," she says. "I come from a long line of storytellers on both sides." Some she recalls verbatim in her fiction, those from decades of family lore, and others from time spent as a journalist, and others she presses like olives for the oil and essence that add flavor to her characters.

Though her love of reading and the idea of writing began in the Pacific Northwest, at the age of 18, she "decided to get as far away from home as possible" and went to school at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. She met her future husband, Charlie, there and studied journalism. "I'm very practical, so to say something like, 'I want to write a book' seemed very stupid; it's like saying 'I want to be an astronaut.' Whereas being a journalist, you get your name in print every single day and you automatically get the title of writer. I think sometimes writers have a hard time owning that title."

She worked for the Roanoke Times and the Charlottesville Daily Progress. From those days as a journalist, Santo learned to love fact-checking and says that when she gets writer's block now, she does research. "Whenever I would get stuck, I had this huge stack of books that I checked out from the library about olive cultivation, and if I got stuck writing, I would just pick it up and start to read about how to take a branch from one olive tree and splice it into another olive tree, or about blight."

She would eventually end up in Memphis, where her husband took a job as associate professor of city and regional planning with the U of M, and it was here that she really began to own that title of writer. She worked as the editor of The Lamplighter, the newspaper of the Cooper-Young neighborhood, and was accepted into the Moss Workshop in Fiction, a community writing workshop with novelist Richard Bausch. "Once I got into his class, I realized all kinds of things, like there was such a thing as an MFA program," she said, laughing. "So Richard encouraged me to apply, and I got in and I got serious about writing."

The Moss Workshop took the idea of being a writer, in her mind, from being "abstract and foolish, to something that seemed plausible. But even though it seemed plausible, it's still not something I ever expected to happen in the way that it did." Through the MFA program, she met and worked with mentors such as Tom Russell and Cary Holladay.

"Cary really taught me that if you're going to write for somebody besides yourself, it comes down to revision," Santo said. "You have to be willing to roll your sleeves up and get into the prose and redo it, it's never perfect the first time out."

"She really listened, and she can recognize a good suggestion, and then she can just tear into it," Holladay said of her student and friend. "She's a very aggressive reviser of her work and, of course, it helps that she's got terrific talent and she's extremely well-read."

Last year was a good year for Santo, who also won the 2011 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest for a short story that will appear in the upcoming June issue. "Her stories are just fun to read," Holladay said. "They're rich, and they're revelatory in terms of human character and experience."

Santo has her hands full with two children, Sophia, 9, and C.J., 7, and the writing of her second book as she anxiously awaits the release of "The Roots of the Olive Tree." But she loves teaching and intends to continue doing so with her undergraduate fiction and literature classes, saying, "I'm a better writer because I teach; it keeps me honest. It's very difficult to critique a student's work and see an error, or a way that it could be written stronger, and then not go back to your own work and recognize every single mistake that you've made."

Says Holladay: "I was eager to get her in the classroom, and right away I saw how comfortable she was as a teacher and how much her students liked her."

Though she writes these days in a place far from the Pacific Northwest, it's a land fertile with writers, where the streets teem with character. It's where her family has put down roots and made a home. "I feel like if you're on the right track, you get little nods along the way," she says. "So I feel like we made the right decision to move to Memphis as a family, and it's been the best decision we've made personally and professionally."

Look At The Billion Year Old Birdie

When I first moved to Midtown Memphis in 1989 or '90, the very first day I was driving to my new apartment on Belvedere with the key pressed in my sweaty little hand, and while stopped at the corner of that street and Union Ave., I saw an old man vomiting on that apple pie slice of grass right there at the Shell service station. It was the middle of the day and I remember thinking to myself, "Welcome to Midtown."

I've just finished reading a couple of books: "Look at the Birdie" by Kurt Vonnegut (Delacorte Press, 2009), and "We Are Billion Year Old Carbon: A Tribal-Love-Rock-Novel Set in the Sixties on an Outpost Planet Called Memphis" by Corey Mesler (Livingston Press, 2005). I am embarrassed to say that this is the first book of Mesler's that I've read. It won't be the last. He evokes, in his stories populated with characters such as Johnny Niagara, Camel Jeremy Eros, Madame Sabat and Sweetness Enlight, the mythical Midtown Memphis. He conjures up the feelings I had as a nineteen-year-old watching a man give up his breakfast on the nexus of town, taking late night walks to the Pig, past Decadence Manor and in the near vicinity of The World Famous Antenna Club, an all-night doughnut shop and a small graveyard. There were things going on that were unseen then, yet they were there all the same, in apartments that abutted the sidewalk, their one window that wasn't painted shut blaring music or television, love and argument. There were things within the Pig not to be seen anywhere else or believed by your own eyes.

Mesler captures it all in a time before my time, the Memphis of the sixties, a time of the Bitter Lemon coffee house and a home-grown counter culture that tends to get buried within the world-changing tales of our city's history. It's a love poem (and there is plenty of poetry throughout this book), not just to a city on the river, but to the geographic and soulful boundaries of Midtown. And it's written to the soundtrack of Captain Beefheart, Buffalo Springfield, Furry Lewis and The Beatles. One surprising and delightful chapter gives us a series of reviews of Beatles LPs, from 1964 and "Meet The Beatles" to 1969's "Let It Be" wherein we witness the reviewer's, Creole Myers (Corey Mesler?), love life fall apart over that span of five years and ten albums. The ever-evolving persona and music of the band hearkening a change within Myers's courting, engagement, marriage and dissolution.

I didn't know what to expect from this book though I expected it to be well-written because I know of Mesler's work ethic. It is exciting for me to have an author with so much out there that I have yet to tap into.

It's difficult not to expect a lot when the author's name is Vonnegut. All I have to do is say the name and my mind is filled with passages from "Bluebeard," "Cat's Cradle," "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Breakfast of Champions." These are old friends who I've visited many, many times over the years. The expectation that Vonnegut will bring the most delicious dish to the table is a given.

However, I'm wary when anything, especially short stories, are published posthumously. Perhaps even more wary in this case because of the über-literary name attached to them. Were these stories that were previously passed over by publishers? Did Vonnegut have rejection slips hidden away someplace with these titles attached? Not likely. I imagine he could have called upon any number of publications to print these stories at any time. My guess is he didn't feel they were ready, or they were exercises or, because the author has always seemed like a fairly playful character, simply something with which to amuse himself. Either way, The Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Trust felt it was time for them to see the light of day.

The stories are good. Don't get me wrong, of course they're good. They're just ... different. They put me in mind of some old "Twilight Zone" episodes, replete as they are with a sense of unknown, of dread, and that there is a hand somewhere unseen controlling the players in a scene. And there's a bit of noir here, too, sometimes with a voice more Dashiell Hammett than the Vonnegut we know. A particularly dark story is Ed Luby's Key Club in which a naive and innocent couple out to celebrate their anniversary are caught up in, and falsely accused of a murder. The hopeless spiral downward is one you will feel in your gut and with sweat on your brow. Only a true master, possibly only Vonnegut himself, could accomplish such a feat.

Pick both of these books up for highly engaging and entertaining reads. In fact, pick them both up at Burke's Book Store in Cooper-Young (Midtown).

Reading Local

Roots & Rabbis

Eat local. You can't escape this directive these days, it's there on the screen every time you turn on the internet. To that end there are farmers markets and dinner parties serving nothing but locally grown or butchered fare. The community at large is rallying around the agrarian community.

I've recently made the decision and a concerted effort to read local. Memphis is home to, or has given birth to, many fine writers. The land here seems almost as fertile for short stories, novels, essays and memoirs as it is for tomatoes, okra, radishes and melons. The literary community has roots that run deep in the Delta.

While at the beach last week, I finished "The Roots of the Olive Tree" by Courtney Miller Santo and immediately picked up "The Frozen Rabbi" by Steve Stern. Santo is an Oregon native now calling Memphis home while Stern is a Memphis native residing in upstate New York.

Both books are multigenerational with Santo's Anna Keller, the family matriarch, born in 1894, and Stern's Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr frozen in time in 1890. Both books are also steeped in secrets known and unknown. In "Roots of the Olive Tree," a geneticist comes to Hill  House, the family home set among olive groves in Kidron, California, to study the longevity of firstborn daughters, and clues and hints are gleaned from stories told and blood drawn. In "The Frozen Rabbi," the secrets hidden by Max Feinshmeker are kept under wraps - kept under layers of clothing - to keep him anonymous and alive; Shmerl Karp's equine lair is an intriguing laboratory of pulleys and cranks that will yield the mysteries held aloft.

Both books are also steeped in age - the age of the olive trees and women, the age of traditions and lore - yet driven by youth. When the youngest, Erin, shows up at Hill House unannounced and pregnant, the women of the family rally around her protectively even as family secrets seek to turn her world, and theirs, upside down. There are questions she wants resolved and chapters put to an end before her own child is born. And when the Rebbe ben Zephyr thaws after more than a century, it is 15-year-old Bernie Karp, a descendant of those entrusted with the safekeeping of the frozen tzaddik, who discovers him and introduces him to the present age, ways and culture.

Stern's book, while riddled with more Yiddish than drawl, is nonetheless colored by the South and with recognizable cultural and concrete landmarks to Memphians such as the Harahan Bridge, Pinch District, local newspaper and various city streets. Santo's book takes place almost entirely in the Pacific Northwest, yet its theme of family, storytelling and the tendency to come together over an item of food is instantly recognizable to all of us from the area. In fact, family is at the root of both novels and both storytellers are adept at bringing alive the individual characters and characteristics that detail each tribe as a whole.

Read local. There are nuances and details within these books and stories that one might only get from a local writer, whether they are in a manner of speaking, a reference to an obscure cultural icon, food or even weather pattern. They are details that will leave you nodding your head and whispering, "yes." Any bookstore in the area should have a section devoted to local writers, this is your farmers market. These books may not make up the bulk of your shopping list, but there should be one or two thrown in to add some homegrown flavor to your literary feast. Memphis is replete with good writers from fiction - Stern, Santo, Cary Holladay, Corey Mesler - to nonfiction - Kristen Iversen, G. Wayne Dowdy, Molly Crosby. And then, of course, there are those no longer with us - Shelby Foote, Peter Taylor and William Faulkner.

Buy their books, attend their readings, alert your friends both near and far of the tales they tell. These writers should be staples on anyone's shelf, for the health of our imagination and of our community.

The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern
2010, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

The Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller Santo
Available Aug. 2012, William Morrow

Read more about Santo here

Type

Photo from Smith Journal

Photograph

"I learned how to play this song on guitar when I was your age," I told my son and his friend as we pulled out of the friend's driveway earlier. My son sat beside me and continued to text while his friend worked on a candy bar in the backseat. "MTV had only recently been born, but we didn't have cable so I'd spend entire weekends at my friend's house watching the twelve videos they rotated through. This was one of them."

"What is it?" C asked.

I was elated he'd asked; elated that he was still breathing there next to me with his nose in his flip phone.

"'Photograph' by Def Leppard." I went on to explain who they were and that the drummer had lost an arm in a car accident yet continued to play with a specially designed drum set. Behind me there was the rustle of candy wrapper, and beside me, more click-click-clicking. "MTV began in August, 1981," I ventured, somewhat ashamed that I was able to reel it off quicker than I could any of my kids' birthdays.

I took guitar lessons when I was 13 or so. My poor instructor attempted to teach me the chords and theory and how to play the damn thing. I wanted to learn how to play 'Photograph' and, perhaps, 'Back in Black' by AC/DC. I was an awful student and it shows today, I still can't play. It wasn't completely my fault, though, or his. I have no rhythm. I could memorize the notes, I just couldn't do anything with them. The idea of learning the principles of music was as foreign to my newly-teenage, freshly-MTVed brain, with all of its lasers and pyrotechnics, as the idea of typing a message to someone on a telephone might have been then. 

I watch my kids now as they struggle to master whatever interests them and it's fascinating for me. They seem so naturally talented in ways that I wasn't, or in ways that I didn't recognize at the time. The other night, while the adults were sitting glassy-eyed and brain dead in front of the talentless field that was the Grammy Awards, JP sat at my computer and wrote a story about the Great Depression for school. It is a fantastic piece. I sat and watched S sketching a bowl of grapes with an onion resting beside it as I cooked dinner the other night and, while the proportions were slightly skewed, I saw the same determination and concentration in her face that I see in my sister's when she sketches. C is also a great writer, having won a Memphis in May short story contest last year, and he's an ever-improving baritone saxophone player as well.

I think one of the greatest things about having kids is watching them develop, seeing their talents and interests grow on a daily basis. They may not stick with each one, they'll probably find new ones to explore and work at as they progress through school and age, but I see now that they commit to ideas and see them through, and that they see the value in such endeavors.

It means a lot to me.

In the car this evening, I had a very distinct muscle memory for how to play the guitar solo in 'Photograph.' I'm sure I couldn't play it if you handed me a guitar because I wouldn't be able to play anything if you handed me a guitar, I have no aptitude for the instrument. And my kids may realize they don't have the talent it takes to continue on a particular track, but for now it's great fun for me to watch them and fun for them to make the attempt.

Much more fun, I'm sure, than a history lesson with soundtrack by The Buggles.

Uninspired

Inspiration.

Photographs. Friends. Family. Music. Conversations. Films. Books. Books. Books.

Inspiration is an ingredient for writing, but there needs to be more. You need to be hungry and driven enough to even step into that kitchen in the first place. It's work. I surround myself with the things I need visually and aurally to propel me to write - old family photos, background music, whatever I'm reading at the moment, and my muses. These are integral to keeping the words flowing, but it takes something more to begin, and I'm finding it's so much easier to start when I'm only halfway there.

Some writers are scared of the blank page, but I welcome it. I'm more confident and comfortable knowing I need another 40,000 words than with the thought that the 80,000 I have need to be overhauled. I'm not talking about my initial read-through and revision upon completion of a first draft. I enjoy that. I love the part where I read over a chapter and make changes to sentences, tweak a turn of phrase and bend a metaphor or two. But this idea that there are flaws in the storyline, or with a character? I can't figure out where to get started. There must be some fissure I can push my finger into that will allow me to peel back the rough rind and work with what's in there.

The inspiration wall over my desk is hung with old photos and new, with hand-written quotes and memorabilia that have helped me get to the completed drafts of two novels. I listened to months' worth of Lester Young, Oscar Peterson, Thelonius Monk, Billie Holiday, Sonny Rollins and dozens of others to put myself in the right mind to write 5 NIGHT STAND. And yet, neither the photos nor the music seem helpful when it comes to revising. That's work.

Others have been writing and posting about inspiration lately. Bobby, over at Spillmanville, waxed eloquent about music and food and drink. Everyone everywhere is inspired, whether a writer, painter, photographer, musician, photographer, chef, computer programmer, teacher, landscaper or architect. It's something personal, something from within that is touched off by something from the outside, and I hope you find yours.

I know this, too: successful writers will tell you not to wait around for it. That to wait for inspiration is to sit at your desk and stare at that blank sheet without ever filling it up. So I don't. I sit down and write, surrounded by the things and sounds that fill my imagination.

But right now those blank pages are all filled up and I'm glancing around for the spark that will ignite the fire to light the way back into this thing. And right now I'm only finding a confidence-shattering darkness.

Going Deaf, Quietly

I'll go on a tear sometimes when I find myself in a used bookstore and buy up an armload of books without really studying them first. I bring them home and set them in a stack on my desk or a table where they'll be left for a few days just so I can gaze upon them.

I love books.

Eventually, of course, those books need to be given a home and I'll spread them out among various bookcases or, if they're lucky, place them within the same case where they'll be allowed to remain a family. And then, occasionally, I'll wander through my shelves and look for something to read.

This is how Deaf Sentence by David Lodge (Viking, 2008) found its way into my house, onto my shelf and, recently, into my hands again. I'm not even sure where this book came from or why I might have picked it up. I'd never heard of the author and the cover is hideous. I always take the dust jackets off books while I read them to preserve them, but I would have taken this one off regardless; it's awful.

The book, however, is good. It's the story of Desmond Bates, takes place in a town north of London, and involves his elderly father, younger wife, children, step-children and a crazy American Ph.D. candidate. Bates is a retired professor of linguistics who is going deaf and describes, in detail, what it's like to go slowly deaf. That must be how deaf people live, within their own heads, hashing things out, paying attention to every detail that doesn't involve sound. Bates is very thoughtful and reflective, and Lodge takes his time with this character.

As Bates goes slowly deaf, he deals with the mundane, day-to-day tasks of a retired person. In these days of repetition, however, is thrust an aging father near the end of his life and a student studying the linguistics of suicide notes. The characters and their plights weave in and out of each other and leave the reader, at times, wondering how and why it's all going to come together in the end.

It does come together, just give it time.

The reason one might not be compelled to give this book the time required is because it's a quiet book. And that speaks to me. I like quiet books. I've documented here many times my fondness for the books of Richard Russo, Paul Auster and Richard Bausch, and they all write what I would call "quiet" books.

I received a rejection from an agent recently for my manuscript, The Simplest Pattern. The rejection was full of encouragement and compliments, but did say that it is "too quiet." I know this has more to do with the market than with what this agent thinks makes a good book, but it still stings. Probably more than anything, it stings because it's completely out of my control. It's how I write. It's how I wrote The Simplest Pattern, it's how I'm writing my next book and it's how I'll write my tenth book. I can't change the way I write (not to that degree), nor do I want to, but neither can I change the market place.

I'm not sure what the market was like when Lodge wrote Deaf Sentence, which was published in 2008, and was his 14th novel. I don't know what the industry was like when he wrote and sold his first novel. This is the first book (though it won't be the last) by Lodge that I've ever read, but I'm sure there is not a lot of difference in voice between that first and this fourteenth.

Coming across this book on my shelf was a treat, and I looked forward each day to finding a nice, quiet place to read it.

Beneath The Underdog

I read a lot, or try to, and I like to write about what I read. In doing this, though, I've taken a page from Nick Hornby and his excellent column in The Believer, "Stuff I've Been Reading." Hornby doesn't write about books he doesn't like. I respect that, he's a novelist and probably doesn't appreciate critics going around bashing his work, so he doesn't partake of that. Instead, he writes glowingly about those he does like.

But sometimes disappointment just overcomes me and I have to say something about it. Such is the case with Beneath The Underdog: His World As Composed By Mingus, the memoir of jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus. This is not a current book by any means, it was first published in 1971, and I've had it for years. I don't recall where I got it, I probably picked it up at a used bookstore at some point and knew I'd want to read it one day. That day came last weekend when I finally grabbed it off the shelf to find out what Mingus was all about.

Turns out Mingus was a pimp, which I did not know. He also played some jazz, he was a very progressive bass player and composer, which I did know, and about which I know very little else, still. But I do know a whole lot more about his being a pimp, and about his sex life.

Mingus was born in 1922 and grew up in the Watts area of Los Angeles. The book, while a memoir, is written in third-person by someone (or something, some spirit perhaps) who is with Mingus at all times. Most of the prose is in conversation with one person or another. It's a lot like listening to one side of a phone conversation. There is a stream of consciousness, beat quality to it, which is just fine for a book on jazz, but it gets tedious after a while.

Also, it's not a book about jazz. If I'd known Mingus was a pimp and wanted to read a memoir about Mingus the Pimp, then this would be the book for me. But I wanted to read about Mingus the bassist, Mingus the composer, Mingus the civil rights champion. I got very little of that. There are brief glimpses, of course. There is Mingus on stage with Miles Davis, Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, but then it's right back to Mingus and a date or wife or mistress and their very graphic, very explicit sexual encounters. It got to the point where it read more like the collected writings of a college student recounting sexual conquests to his fraternity brothers, in detail.

And what of Mingus the civil rights activist? I knew before getting into the book that he wasn't fond of white people, but I came away with almost no understanding of why (not that a black person born in 1920s America needs to explain himself on that, but still, I'd like to know his experiences). He bashes white men and culture, and the South in particularly, though there's only one story glossing over a trip to the South. He wrote "Fables of Faubus" on the great album Mingus Ah Um as a derision of Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor who tried to block integration in Little Rock's public schools. It's a great song, a great album, and there is no mention of it in Beneath The Underdog. And, as much as he did comment on his hatred of the white man, Mingus's treatment of women, by his own account, was little better than the white man was treating the black man in the first half of the 20th century.

I prefer an autobiography over a scholar's biography of jazz artists because in the writing, or telling, of their story, there is a certain improvisational feel as you get with all good jazz music. They tell their story with segues and language that make the reader feel as though they're listening to a record or a late-night jam session. I recently read Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography by Sidney Bechet, the jazz cornet master. He was born in 1897, and so of a different generation than Mingus, but certainly no less hard a time for a black man to live in. Yet Bechet talks more of the music than anything; he had a great passion and respect for the music - he treated it gentle - and it is this love of his profession that shines through in his autobiography.

As gentle as he might have treated the music, it was not a gentle time by any means, and being a jazz musicianer (as Bechet calls it) was not such a gentle job. Bechet was a bad son of a bitch who spent time in a French prison before being deported from Paris for accidentally shooting a woman (he was aiming for someone else). For all of its sweet sounds, jazz is not the cherubic grin of Louis Armstrong or the limp tones of Kenny G (shudder). It's the music of a painful and dangerous American past, in it is the story of slavery, Jim Crow and civil rights. Sure there were pimps, hustlers, gangsters, drug addicts, killers and thieves among its characters, but there was also, always, the music as a salve. Mingus's memoir, unfortunately, is much too heavy on the former and only a few notes struck on the latter.

Mingus was insane. He had his demons and portions of the book are told through a conversation between Mingus and his psychiatrist, Dr. Wallach. Near the end of the book, when Mingus has committed himself to Bellevue's psychiatric ward, is when he writes the most about music and wanting to be out of the hospital so he could pursue his music. The rest of the book is the perverse rantings of a misogynistic hustler and that's a shame because Mingus, for all of his myriad faults, was one of jazz - and all music's - great composers. Or at least, that's what I've heard.

On My Desk: The Chicagoan

The Chicagoan

Hidden Memphis: Nelson Smith III

Some time ago, my sister, Elizabeth, was working for the UrbanArt Commission and made a studio visit to check on a project she was managing. The project was a monument for Manassas High School being cast from concrete and bronze. The artist was Nelson Smith III. She told me later all about the studio, how packed it was with art, the crappy part of town it's in, the vastness of the space and the friends Mr. Smith had sitting around chatting with him, passing time in the middle of the day.

More recently, one of my editors at The Commercial Appeal told me that Chris Peck, THE editor at the CA, had an idea for a series on people and places around town that many people might not know about. These subjects would almost define Memphis, yet live in near-obscurity. Did I have any ideas? Would I be interested in writing it? What to call it?

Well, of course I was interested, and the first person I thought of was Nelson Smith III (Prodigious output of 'general practitioner' found everywhere from hotel rooms to dashboards to clubs; CA 12/26/10). Mr. Smith approached those who ran the Shoney's restaurants in Memphis back in the 70s and told them he could make a Big Boy statue for the cost they were having them shipped from California. They gave Smith a statue and he fashioned a mold from it, cast a new Big Boy on spec and put the two side-by-side. "Which one is yours?" he asked. They couldn't tell and he had the job. He made over 20 for the restaurants over the years.

Elizabeth told me about some of the work he had done, but also about what a nice and gentle man he is. Part of what I love about my job, about freelance journalism, is the people I get to meet day in and day out. Not just meet, but nearly inhabit for a time. I drove to Smith's studio at the corner of Thomas and Huron, in a part of Memphis that is nearly deserted now, save for the clump of houses at the end of Huron, a dead end street. There was wash hanging on lines outside these homes and people sitting on their porches. Dogs ran through the street and there were cars that looked long-abandoned in yards and at the curb. The man who answered the door of the squat, brick building appeared kind and open to questions. For the next hour, he told me all about his life and his work. He showed me around his studio, pulling sculptures from piles and telling me the stories behind them.

The studio itself is the old Currie's Club Tropicana, and Smith told me that any black artist who was anybody back in the day played there - B.B. King, Ray Charles, Isaac Hayes ... he showed me where the stage had been and you could almost hear the guitar and the Hammond B3 organ oozing from the plaster and lumber he had laying about. Smith would think of something - a mold or a piece of cornice he'd sculpted - and could go straight to it, wherever it was and whatever it might have been buried under.

The series, by the way, is to be called "Hidden Memphis." It will be semi-regular and I look forward to meeting and researching the subjects, be they people or places. If you have any ideas, any at all, please let me know at richard@richardalley.com. The story in the CA got some nice comments and one e-mail from a local children's book author, Alice Faye Duncan, who said that her father had a portrait of her painted as a child, when she must have been two or three, but never knew who the artist was. It was simply signed 'Nelson III.' My story led her to the artist and she has contacted him to buy some of his artwork. Helping with these connections is another reason I love my job.

Nelson Smith III is a fascinating subject, he is locked into the modern history of Memphis through the artwork and signage he's produced for some of our most iconic establishments - Libertyland, Mark Twain restaurant, Holiday Inn, Shoney's, Shakey's Pizza ...  the list goes on. And so does Nelson.