... of books and e-books...

I've added a "talky-blog" on this topic to my YouTube channel:
 http://www.youtube.com/user/michaelmail.

As a life-long reader, and a career bookseller, my love for the printed word is very strong. For some people, books are disposable items, to be traded in at the local used book emporium, or passed on like an old newspaper.

For others (like me) books are to be cherished, read, re-read, or just picked up and browsed (and for some of us, caressed may be the better description).

Janis Ian - singular talent

Many of these blog entries have highlighted books or authors that I find inspiring. I've meant to add some of my favourite recording artists (a phrase I usually find awkward), or entertainers or singers or chanteuses ... take your pick.

Being a baby-boomer born in the early 1950s - blessed with an unusually good memory - I recall many things:

• some of my childhood in the latter part of the 50s
• the critical decade as I moved through childhood, high school and puberty and started to comprehend politics and social upheavals of the 60s
• my early adult years played against the dynamisms and schisms of the 70s
• the exciting, confusing, and exhausting career-building years of the more sedate (Reagan era) 80s
• the (personal) challenges in my family and career lives as technology really started to change everything in the 90s, and finally...
• as I entered late-career time and the concept of terrorism became mainstream and local during the naughts or zeros decade of the new century.

Now... to finally get to the point.

Of all the records I purchased, and all the CDs I have accumulated over the decades, one stands out as my favourite. (I know... is making that choice even realistic?)

The 1975 album from Janis Ian, BETWEEN THE LINES, still stands above all others for me. It is a profoundly adult collection of sad, morose, and melancholy songs - actually poems of love and loss. (It is reasonable to assume that my personal streak of melancholy influences the impression of depression.)

In spite of the collection's incessant malaise, there is also, to my view, a nascent streak of happiness, just about to emerge. In its entirety, BETWEEN THE LINES is a singular accomplishment, is beautiful, will stay with you (obviously if I'm an example of its alure) and never sounds dated.

STARS is the album from 1974, which makes BETWEEN THE LINES possible. It is more of a pastiche of styles, still angst-ridden, but not as complete a work of melancholy. But you must hear the title track - it is a stunner about the arc of fame. (Actually inspired by Don McLean's Vincent).

Janis has recently released her autobiography  Society's Child. The reason I listed the decades is that I first heard her song Society's Child in 1969 or 1970, when I was 17 or 18. It is a stunner about racial intolerance. She was only 15 when she released that song!

Opus the penguin, of Bloom County

Do any of you remember or care about Opus? I truly miss him since he left the comics pages a year ago, November 2, 2008.

He first appeared in the very funny, very subversive comic strip Bloom County, by Berke Breathed. Breathed won the Pulitzer Prize for his work.






The first syndicated strip was Bloom County, but the author, just like his name, liked to take breathers, putting his 3 series of strips on extended hiatus (hiati?). When we next saw Opus, he was in a strip called Outland, which carried over some of the characters from BC.  After another years-long hiatus, Opus came back stronger than ever in a Sunday-only colour strip called Opus.

While Opus and the strips were never as big as Snoopy and Peanuts (i.e. they were likely not intended for the mainstream in the way Peanuts was), there is a subversive sophistication in there, buried among the dubious life choices (and lackadaisical hygiene habits) of Bill the Cat, that even Doonesbury cannot match. Many of the strips were overtly political, in their own covert way. Like many cartoonists, sometimes Breathed used a hammer when a little nut-cracker would do... but his work really is genius in the creation of a complete, alternate reality in which a penguin wore underwear and a shower cap, dependent on whether he was in his bed or in the shower, and a mangy cat seemed either drunk, at all times, or shall we say, was mentally differently-abled. In this same universe that was definitely the United States, Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush would appear. In the later years, Dick Cheney was depicted hiding under beds as the boogie-man.

Similar to many successful strips, there was also a lot of merchandising available. One time, my friend Blair, in Vancouver, gave me the shower cap-wearing Opus doll (plush toy actually). And I have another one that a sales lady (I think it was Carlton Cards) gave me when I was at a college store convention. I admired it, sincerely, and was not trying to finangle it, and she insisted I have it. With the move from Vancouver to Nova Scotia, I've lost track of the first one, but the second one sits on top of my fridge.










These covers are from the first two collections, c. 1983 and '84.


The cartoons are from Bloom County: Loose Tails, the first collection in 1983.

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Uniquely Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp died in November 1999. But it is his life, not his death that is significant. His life, until he became successful in his sixties, was a difficult one:

• he was certainly not born into money, then had two world wars and a depression to subsist in
  
• social mores were against him; the world at large did not appreciate queers, especially over-the-top flamboyant ones such as Crisp
• he was what he was - out there, flamboyant, and honest. He did not try to be some kind of gay liberationist nor a role model; it was his demeanor that did not offer him any camouflage (even if he wanted to blend in) as he moved through society

In his rather (in)famous autobiography The Naked Civil Servant (first published in 1968), he describes himself in the first paragraph as

From the dawn of my history I was so disfigured by the characteristics of a certain kind of homosexual person that, when I grew up, I realized that I could not ignore my predicament. The way in which I chose to deal with it would now be called existentialist.

On the second page of the book he dismisses his birth as a real accident of nature:

In the year 1908 one of the largest meteorites the world has ever known was hurled at the earth. It missed its mark. It hit Siberia. I was born in Sutton, in Surrey.

That is quite an introduction to his flamboyant life. This hysterically funny and piquant book (and from the fantastic biopic from the mid-70s, starring John Hurt) shows his journey through adversity, love and listlessness as he lived his life rather than lived a lie as so many of his peer group did. By this I mean that I truly believe that what you saw was what he was. When he achieved enough fame and a little money he chose to live in New York in the late 1970s. By that point, I think he may have embellished or lacquered the lady just a tad to satisfy a demanding public and fan base at his one-man shows. (Is it not a truism that we want our stars to be both the same whenever we see them and to offer us something completely new each time?)

If you've never seen Crisp interviewed, you must try to find some footage. He made Truman Capote's languid utterances seem positively butch.

I truly respected Quentin Crisp and his different contribution to gay culture. (BTW... the title refers to the time he earned a meager living by posing nude in a government-sponsored art class.)

The book shown here is my tattered copy that I purchased in 1977. I think I also have three of his follow-up books in my collection.

Hitler's Pope - The Secret History of Pius XII

One of my hobbies, interests, or even obsessions, is with the Roman Catholic Church, particularly the Papacy and the inner workings of the Vatican. (As a lapsed Catholic, this interest may not be all that strange as the indoctrination into the faith -  not solely a process specific to Catholicism - starts young and tends to stay with you.)

The subject of Hitler's Pope ((c) 1999) is Pope Pius XII and the on-going debate as to whether he was in collusion with Hitler and actually anti-Semetic, or has his Papacy been so characterized unfairly.

The author, John Cornwell, does have an axe to grind when it comes to the Papacy, so some of his conclusions may be supportive of his themes, but not necessarily supported by hard facts. Regardless, this is a racy read for those of us who follow such things, and it sped along like a page-turner suspense novel.

One of the things it purports is that agents of the Catholic Church, late 1800s, I think it was, actually kidnapped some Jewish boys and raised them as Catholic, so as to save them. I hadn't heard this before and was definitely shocked by this.

God bless Uncle Harry

Book (c) AVON Books, 1978.





This collection of cartoons first appeared in the now defunct magazine Christopher Street. CS was a not-too-glossy, well-produced gay publication from the mid-70s to the mid-90s. At one point, I had a subscription to it.

It was not a skin mag like In Touch, Blueboy, Numbers or Mandate. CS was a literary - but accessible - potpourri publication with articles on politics, gay rights issues, health, entertainment, and general interest articles. It also published many first-rate authors such as Andrew Holleran, and spawned several collections of short stories.

I think the cartoons humorous but not vicious, but they did skewer some of our cliched behaviors: conspicuous consumption, over-emphasis on body image, and the travails of dating/mating.










It is important to consider that these cartoons predate the AIDS crisis at least 3 to 5+ years; at that time, gays had the luxury of not encountering any STD that was not treatable by penicillin or tetracycline, so these may seem trivial 30 years on. I believe that AIDS sapped the magazine's energy concurrently with the deaths of many of its subscriber base - just my theory.





Enjoy...

Never eat anything bigger than your head

The cartoonist B. Kliban had incredible success in the mid-70s with his book Cats. The drawings spawned a truckload of merchandise. Though he died in 1990, I occasionally peruse his books and experience fresh enjoyment from his intelligent but deceptively simple drawings. My favourite book of his remains Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head (and other drawings). This is always good advice.

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There are so many gems of his that I can still recall from the first time I saw them. Three of my favourites are:

The high life...

Oh, those were the days.

For those of you too young to remember, The High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs (c. 1978) was published by Stonehill Publishing, a division of Trans-High Communications (I'm not making this up). I sold their magazine High Times in the bookstore I managed.

In quasi-conservative 2009, I cannot imagine this book in a mainstream bookstore. Importing it to Canada now would likely be considered some kind of illegal activity.

It is quite impossible to convey to those who weren't around in the 60s and 70s how fluid and almost socially acceptable drug use could be. (For example, a friend brought weed to my bookstore office, and cajoled me to share it, and I did. Another time when we were having a book-signing of a children's book author, he brought cookies laden with hash into the store!)

It was everywhere. I have never been a big user of recreational drugs (or pharmacy drugs, for that matter) but did have a healthy if cautious curiosity. I've not even had weed since about 1981, but I did use this book to get the scoop on the various relaxants of the day.

If someone came up to me today and said that they were smoking weed, smoking hash, eating magic mushrooms, taking mescaline, doing a hit of acid (all things I've done, but over a long time-frame), I'd likely think they were some kind of loser or freak. And I've never even seen cocaine, except in the movies - so that should put my minor activities into context. Now there are so many basement chemists and so much money involved in dangerous and frequently impure drugs such as meth or ecstasy, being adventurous is more dangerous than it used to be.

Truman Capote... the little general

It deserves noting that renowned raconteur, author and enfant terrible of American letters - who else but Truman Capote - would have been 85 on September 30th. His not making it to age 85 should not surprise, considering his alcoholism and drug use, but I do find it startling that he has actually been dead 25 years last month (expired August 1984 in Joanna Carson's home).

I've read many articles and books over the years that explore the gossamer yet steely  friendship and rivalry of Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Gerald Clarke's biography deftly parses this particular triangle and many other difficult friendships of Capote's, notably his jealousy and dissing of his childhood friend Harper (To Kill a Mockingbird) Lee .





Donald Windham's memoir also shines a searing light on this triumvirate that can perhaps be characterized as America's gay Bloomsbury Circle. (Well, Bloomsbury was pretty avant garde, which in those days was code for gay!)

Those of you, like myself, who read non-literary (i.e. trash) books as well as literature may be aware that Jacqueline Susann's last book, Dolores, contained a scathing parody of Capote in the character of Horatio Capone. Capote had memorably said of Susann (and let's face it, she was a hack, but fantastic at self-promotion) "she looks like a truck driver in drag". Gossip had it that Susann was advised by her legal counsel to not sue Capote as all Capote had to do to win would be to bring a bunch of drag truck drivers into court! I think Capote's barb was said on the Tonight Show, and I remember seeing him say it, at least on tape if not at the time.

All of the books shown here are from my personal library, and they are all worth reading. Don't discount the Susann biography just because you discount her writing. She was as much a staple of the 60s/70s talk-shows as Capote and Vidal, and certainly gave the public what they wanted to read - un-literary but fast-paced stories about very unhappy show people.

Christopher Isherwood is back in fashion... with A SINGLE MAN

Christopher Isherwood is back in fashion, it seems to me. He was hot in the late 60s/early 70s because of a very popular musical. Then he was hot, or at least luke warm, in the late 70s, when the gay movement and his extremely candid autobiography converged. Then there was another burst of activity and coverage when he passed away in 1986.

This copy of his novel A Single Man is from my personal library. I think I bought this copy in the late 70s or early 80s, but have yet to read it. I'll get to it before I see the movie.

This snippet about the film is from open.Salon.com, dated 15 September 2009:

Fashion designer Tom Ford's adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel 'A Single Man' won the unofficial Queer Golden Lion award for movies with gay themes or content at the Venice Film Festival last week. The film marks Mr. Ford's directorial debut and stars Colin Firth as a college professor mourning the death of his partner of 16 years. Firth also nabbed the best actor award at the Festival.

I did read his Berlin Stories which was the basis for the first stage adaptation, the drama I am a Camera, that begat the musical Cabaret!












And I certainly recommend his autobiography Christopher and his Kind, published in the late 70s.  

Anais Nin

Anais Nin was not only a voluminous writer, but also something of a sexual adventurer. In the late 70s and early 80s, I read all seven volumes of her journals. (In the states, they were called "The diaries of ..." presumably because the word "journal" might confuse people.)

There is an interesting movie called "Henry and June" which covers some of Nin's affair with famous provocateur and sexually graphic writer Henry Miller.

My take on Nin is that much of her journals are both hyperbole and truncation, depending on what actions (and with whom) were being revealed.

I've not actually read any of her designated fiction, but these journals are quite fascinating if you're interested in the 1930s literary milieu, especially Paris. The journals are dense but extremely readable for fans of literary biographies and memoirs and the creative process.

The other title here is a fine biography of Nin. (No, I didn't lift it from a Vancouver library. Rather, I spilled so much coffee on it, I had to buy it from them as it couldn't be easily rehabbed.)

An encounter with Tennessee Williams

During my career as a bookseller, I've met a few authors along the way.

The most interesting and unexpected encounter was with the late playwright Tennessee Williams.

It was in 1980, when he was in Vancouver to oversee or tweak a production of one of his plays. I was at the cash register in the bookstore I managed, and an older man and a younger man came in. The older fellow asked for a couple of copies of Truman Capote's just-published book Music for Chameleons, which was on display in the store's window.

I peered at him, thought I recognized him, so asked if that was the book that was dedicated to him... he replied quietly that it was. I asked him if he would sign the dedication page for me. He graciously agreed, and I believe it might have been because I brought no attention to him as I handled the transaction quickly and discretely.

His memoir Tennessee Williams: MEMOIRS was published in 1976, and I had read it and loved it. But I was not surprised to read, many years later, that he said a lot of it was fiction(!). To the end, he was quite a character.

Good times/Bad times

This serio-comic novel was my favourite book in my early 20s. It has a Catcher in the Rye vibe to it, but I think it a more interesting, and certainly more complex narrative.

The author, James Kirkwood, died many years ago. He wrote many books, but became more widely known and certainly wealthier when he wrote the book (basically the script but not the music) for A Chorus Line.