Friends,
Below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Tuesday, September 7, 7:30 PM
JOHN JODZIO
If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home
“You may think you’ve read enough stories about penniless gay clowns who can’t get over the loss of a dog, but – I assure you – you have not. John Jodzio is the best kind of modern fiction writer: a thematic traditionalist who feels totally new.” – Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
A middle-aged masochist in love with a comatose man. A gay birthday clown lamenting the loss of his beloved dog. An amateur veterinarian keeping watch over his suicidal daughter. And a bikini model with a barnacle stuck to her rear. These are just a few of the characters who populate the quirky, offbeat world of If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home, a world that feels at once alien and strangely familiar. Jodzio is by turns bleak and hopeful, cruel and tender; his new collection is one exciting literary debut.
John Jodzio is a winner of the Loft-McKnight Fellowship. His stories have appeared in One Story, Opium, The Florida Reviewand Rake Magazine and a number of other places, both print and online. He’s won a Minnesota Magazine fiction prize and both the Opium 500 Word Memoir competition and Opium Fiction Prize.
“…colorful and seemingly fractured tales, each shining brilliantly alone, but also growing more vibrant as one story lays over another. Together they form an intricately stained glass window that looks out onto a whole new world.” – Hannah Tinti, author ofThe Good Thief.
Wednesday, September 8, 7:00 PM
THE RUMPUS BOOK CLUB IN-PERSON DISCUSSION
Tao Lin’s Richard Yates
First, The Rumpus announced its’ version of a book club – one whose members receive a hand-chosen book, for a thrilling insider’s early (before publication) look at what’s likely to be a very hot book. Club members are then invited to an online discussion with the author and with one another. (Read all about The Rumpus Book Club here.) What could be added to the mix? Why, a get-together to meet and talk with other club members in person!
We’re delighted to host these monthly gatherings this fall. Local book club members, come on in; if you’re a member from outside the Bay Area, but planning to be in our neighborhood, you come on in, too! Curious about The Rumpus and its book club? You, too!
Tonight: a discussion about Tao Lin’s new novel Richard Yates. (Please note that Tao Lin will himself be talking at The Booksmith on October 4.)
Thursday, September 9, 7:30 PM
WILLIAM GIBSON
Zero History
Since his 1984 debut novel Neuromancer, in which he coined the term “cyberspace” and envisioned the Internet before it was a pervasive reality, William Gibson has gained a reputation as a trend-spotter with a unique ability to anticipate cultural and technological movements. In his two most recent novels, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, Gibson trained those sensibilities on our contemporary, post-9/11 age. And the present, it seems, is only growing more astonishing in Gibson’s latest novel, Zero History. It’s a time defined by frenzied change, a world in which everything is growing faster and more connected at an exponential rate. If we were in Gibson’s 1996 novel Idoru, we might call it a “nodal point” – a key point in history after which everything will be different.
Zero History returns to the adventures of Hubertus Bigend, the twisted financial genius from Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Bigend’s newest obsession is with the military culture that is trickling down to the streets. Military contracting is recession-proof, and Bigend wants in. But it seems that someone is one step ahead of him, and Bigend must uncover who that is if he’s to come out on top. His plan involves Hollis Henry, former rocker from the cult 90s band The Curfew, and Milgrim, a Russian translator, finally sober after a stint in rehab. It’s not long before Hollis and Milgrim find themselves entangled in a mesh of postmodern marketing and corrupt American military contracting that threatens to topple Bigend’s massive empire.
Gibson’s talent has always been his ability to spot our cultural trajectory – to locate what Bigend calls “the edge”. It’s that barest glimpse of the future at the far reach of the horizon, the cutting-edge that will soon become the norm. In Zero History, the edge is a place where boundaries between on- and offline have become blurred, where the parent-child relationship has migrated to twitter, and where brands generate attention not by marketing themselves but by eschewing marketing altogether.
Preferred seating with the purchase of Zero History at The Booksmith, beginning September 7 (on-sale date). Seating cards will be distributed at the time of purchase until supply is gone. Standing room and limited floor seating will be available as well. Please note that we’ll be at maximum capacity this evening; if you need special accommodations, please send a request toevents@booksmith.com.
Please note that Mr. Gibson will sign copies of his previous books provided that a copy of Zero History is purchased from The Booksmith. Photographs of those attending with Mr. Gibson will be possible.
Friday, September 10, 7:30 PM
MARKOS MOULITSAS
American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right
Markos Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos, America’s largest online political community. His publications include the acclaimed Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics and Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era. He is a frequent guest on cable news and shows like Meet the Press and Real Time with Bill Maher, a weekly columnist for The Hill, and a former Newsweek contributing columnist.
America’s main international enemy -- Islamic radicalism -- favors theocracy, curtails civil liberties, embraces torture, represses women, reviles homosexuality, subverts science and education, and reveres force over diplomacy. In American Taliban, Markos Moulitsas shows how the American right shares those very same traits. He argues that our domestic jihadists are a greater threat to American democracy than any Islamic terrorist.
“I can’t remember a time in my life when anti-intellectualism and intolerance has been more pervasive. From America’s prejudice against evolutionary science to its reactionary condemnation of a scholarly African American president, the time has never been more ripe for a book such as this, which reminds us that fanaticism isn’t always an import.” -- Brett Gurewitz, Bad Religion
“It isn’t possible to understand American politics now without understanding the worldview and arguments of Markos Moulitsas. If you still believe the beltway caricature of the squishy, compromising, conciliatory American left, American Taliban should disabuse you of that notion.” -- Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show
“Markos writes with a conscience and armed with facts to let you know: no, you’re not crazy. What you suspected all along was true—America’s right wing lives on a myth of self-constructed lies about the Other, with a juvenile disregard for reality, and Obama’s presidency has further radicalized an already radical conservative movement.” -- Janeane Garofalo, comic and actor
“Moulitsas alerts us to a clear and present danger in America: radical zealots who disregard our Constitution and our freedoms, and who disguise themselves as patriots.” -- Roger Ebert, film critic
“A thorough compendium of right-wing hypocrisy and selective memory that is either hilarious or tragic, depending on your mood. And it’s all lovingly couched in outrage and profanity.” -- David Cross, I Drink for a Reason
Sunday, September 12, 4:00 PM
MELISSA STEIN
Rough Honey
Rough Honey is suffused with a dark tenderness. These poems speak of fragility and power, the contradictions of pleasure, the bruises we bear. With remarkable range, they carry us from a whitewater rafting calamity to the “torrents of wheat” on a family farm; from a bathysphere’s color-starved depths to a butcher’s blood-soaked counter; from a peepshow’s “manageable storm of boredom and sex” to a passionate fall from grace in an orchard. By turns buoyant and forlorn, Rough Honey’s characters both long for and abandon hope of true connection, of home, in a world where “everything is rented.” But their struggles are rendered in language so radiant, so mellifluous, it can’t help but hint at the possibility of transcendence, the sheer sweetness in being alive.
“Rough Honey is a miracle of a first collection. Melissa Stein’s sensuous articulation of the world from the inside out puts her poems into a kind of freefall—back into a pulsing, primal language. Her electric apprehensions throb with this nearly preverbal knowing . . . Above all, they define and redefine the lyric poem, giving it myriad protean identities. Stein is a new poet of the first order.” -- Molly Peacock
“Openness—of form, and of the receptive and longing body—is Rough Honey’s central subject, and its oxymoronic title suggests the sweet and fierce character of desire, that compelling and dangerous sustenance . . . Stein’s poems are lit by a restless and flashing verbal intelligence . . . Her sentences are beautifully
choreographed; they start and stop the motion of her poems with a nearly invisible, effortless authority.” -- Mark Doty, from the Introduction
Melissa Stein has published poems in The Southern Review, New England Review, Best New Poets 2009, Harvard Review, North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Foundation.
Tuesday, September 14, 7:30 PM
HAIGHT ASHBURY GUIDE & MAP CELEBRATION
For several years, our Haight Ashbury neighbors and long-time residents Jack and Gay Reineck (Rufus Graphics) have been working on a project to design and publish a new, concise but thorough, history and guide to the Haight Ashbury. The project stemmed from a local discussion about a Haight Ashbury Museum; in lieu of a museum, not possible at this time, they’ve created a nifty little “paper museum” that tells the story of the Haight from before the 1906 earthquake through the 60s (including sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll) and to today. With a fascinating text, and a detailed Haight Ashbury map, accompanying over 100 photographs, many of them historical, and some from contemporary photographers including Lisa Law and Herbie Green, this is a terrific book for visitors and residents alike.
Tonight we celebrate our neighborhood’s history with Jack and Gay!
Wednesday, September 15, 7:30 PM
MARK HASKELL SMITH
Baked
Mark Haskell Smith, who “writes like Carl Hiassen’s oversexed cousin” (Booklist), is back with Baked, a charming comic suspense novel that is a hybrid cross-breed of The Big Lebowskiand Half Baked with The Orchid Thief and Weeds thrown in.
With marijuana well on its way to being legalized in California, Smith takes on the subject of cannabis with typically oddball results. Meet Miro Basinas, an experimental botanist, a gentleman farmer who sells his rarefied product to an educated clientele. Only he’s not growing heirloom tomatoes or making organic wine – he’s growing weed. His greatest creation, a blend called Elephant Crush that tastes like mangoes, has his loyal customers, who need medical marijuana for their anxiety disorders and restless leg syndrome, clamoring for more. Months earlier, Miro had entered Elephant Crush in Amsterdam’s prestigious Cannabis Cup and won, but upon his return to Los Angeles, he is shot and his weed is taken, in a brutal blow to ganjaficionados everywhere.
Baked, complete with a typically Smith-ian cast of lovably quirky characters, takes readers on a truly hilarious ride through LA, the world of medical marijuana and competitive pot-growing, all while trying to solve the mystery of who shot Miro and trying to recover the fabled Elephant Crush.
Mark Haskell Smith is an award-winning screenwriter and author of three prior novels, Moist, Delicious, and Salty. He covered the real Cannabis Cup for the Los Angeles Times last fall, and as California speeds towards the ballot initiative to legalize marijuana, he has fashioned himself into a kind of expert on the state’s number one crop. He lives in Los Angeles, close to the Rambo taco truck.
Thursday, September 16, 7:30 PM
DR. DAVID SMITH
Unchain Your Brain: 10 Steps to Breaking the Addictions That Steal Your Life
Dr. David Smith, the founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, asks, along with his co-author Dr. Daniel Amen, “Are you chained to your addiction to smoking? Drinking? Sugar? Drugs? Good? Prescription painkillers? Caffeine? Internet porn? Gambling? Sex?” – and answers everyone who says “Yes”: with tools to optimize one’s brain.
Smith says brain dysfunction is the number-one reason why people fall victim to addiction, why they can’t break the chains of addiction, and why they relapse. He and Amen offer strategies to find lasting motivation to changes, ways to lock up the craving monster, tips for eating right, thinking right, and healing from an addiction, and ways to prevent relapse (including brain science). They offer 7 steps parents can take now to help prevent addictions for their children; 10 daily behaviors that will enhance brain function; 15 strategies for dealing with the people who try to sabotage recovery; 5 natural supplements that can soothe the brain and reduce craving; 4 areas of life one needs to address to prevent relapse; and 1 decision that will change one’s life.
Join the discussion about rediscovering the pleasure of developing satisfying relationships with family and friends, regaining health, finding greater energy, and exploring the amazing world in which we live.
As if founding the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic wasn’t enough, Dr. Smith is a Fellow and Past President of the American Society for Addiction Medicine and a Fellow of the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology. He is an inaugural Diplomate of the American Board of Addiction medicine, and serves as Chair of Adolescent Addiction Treatment at Newport Academy, Medical Director of Center Point, and Adjunct Professor of Medicine at UCSF. He has authored and co-authored over 350 professional articles and over tow dozen books, including Drugfree: A Unique, Positive Approach to Staying Off Alcohol and Other Drugs, It’s So Good, Don’t Even Try It Once: Heroin in Perspective, The Physician’s Guide to Psychoactive Drugs, and Clinician’s Guide to Substance Abuse. He is the founder and publisher of The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs.
Tuesday, September 21, 7:30 PM
SKIP HORACK
The Eden Hunter
In 1816, five years after being captured and sold into slavery, Kau, a pygmy tribesman, flees south into the Florida wilderness, determined to find a place where he can once again live in harmony with nature. Both haunted and driven by his memories of Africa, he embarks on an epic quest through the treacherous pinewoods, swamps, and river bottoms of the southern frontier. Encountering renegades and thieves, traitors and mercenaries, and the dark prophetic magic of the forest before he finally finds himself within the walls of a remote fort on the Apalachicola River, he becomes the reluctant companion of several hundred runaway slaves once recruited by the British to fight in the War of 1812, then abandoned to fend for themselves against the American forces intent on destroying their remarkable stronghold.
Inspired by actual historical events, at turns both violent and beautiful, The Eden Hunter is the amazing story of a man’s journey into the turbulent forces of a torn and garmented America.
“…a stylish, fast-paced, historical narrative…” – Publishers Weekly
Skip Horack is the author of the story collection The Southern Cross (about which Colm Toibin wrote, “These stories evoke places with a sharp, sensuous and at times magical skill. They also dramatize characters and states of mind with a fierce truthfulness and sense of understanding. Horack’s style has a beautiful edge to it; the range of his sympathy makes this a wonderful collection.”). He is a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford, and was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He practiced law for five years in Louisiana and now lives in Burlingame.
Wednesday, September 22, 7:00 PM
RACHEL SAUNDERS
The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook
“[Once] I became hooked on jam making, several years of intense experimentation ensued. I slaved away in my tiny kitchen, gradually developing my own techniques in my quest for perfect results. Over time, I grew to understand fruit. I also, through the course of these several years, formed my own vision of what the ideal textures were for different jams and marmalades.”
The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook represents the distillation of jam aficionado Rachel Saunders’ 10-year exploration of everything fruit. In her unflinching search for the perfect balance of flavor, texture and appearance, Saunders
brings a modern sustainable eye to the age-old nostalgia of the jam-maker’s kitchen. The same sentiment reigns at her Bay Area jam company, Blue Chair Fruit, which sources only from local organic farmers and produces its small-batch wonders in traditional French copper kettles. The resulting cookbook is a vast overview of the art of jam, dressed up with clear descriptions of preserving techniques, stunning photography and over 100 recipes.
Saunders’ passion for fresh, seasonal and local fruits informs every pearl of the long sought wisdom she shares – only plant-ripened produce provides a natural intensity and sweetness that requires less sugar while delivering more flavor. Thus, recipes are chronicled seasonally by fruit, with recipes arranged month-to-month to ensure the book remains a gem throughout the year. April examines rhubarb and strawberry, while July taps sour cherry, currant and Meyer lemon. The dead of winter fares just as well, with bergamot and grapefruit in January and orange and kumquat in early spring. Far from a traditionalist, Saunders also explores a variety of herbs, spices and spirits to produce nuanced flavor combinations that range from basic to complex: Brandied Red Cherry Conserve, White Guava & Meyer Lemon Marmalade, Italian Prune & Cardamom Conserve, even Strawberry Jam with Aged Balsamic & Black Pepper.
Saunders also shares her conviction that preserving is an aesthetic as much as a
technical endeavor. Each recipe includes suggestions for variation, encouraging home cooks to prepare unique creations that express their own style. Informed by her background in art history and French culture (she studied at Smith College as well as La Sorbonne in Paris), Saunders fills every page with the sense
of sheer fun, adventure and imagination that have inspired the book’s creation.
Friday, September 24, 7:30 PM
GARIN HOVANNISIAN
Family of Shadows: A Century of Murder, Memory, and the Armenian American Dream
In Family of Shadows Garin Hovannisian presents the history of Armenia, past, present, and future, through the story of three generations of the men in his family: his great-grandfather Kasper, his grandfather Richard, and his father Raffi.
A teenager in 1915 in the village of Kharpert, in what was then western Armenia, Kasper was caught in the chaos of the first genocide of the 20th century -- the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians and the displacement of a historic people from its homeland of three thousand years. He witnessed the murder of his kid brother, his father, and his family. He eventually escaped to the United States and built an agricultural and real estate empire.Growing up on Kasper’s twenty-acre farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley in the 1930s, Richard spoke no Armenian. In junior high school, he was horrified to learn that, according to the class atlas, Armenia did not exist. He resolved to learn Armenian and has spent his life chronicling the nation’s history and campaigning for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Today, Richard is a professor of Armenian history at UCLA and one of the world’s authorities on genocide.
A corporate lawyer in Los Angeles, Raffi had visited Soviet Armenia many times. In 1990, he and his immediate family returned for good. When Armenia declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Raffi was handed a fax machine and a building that would soon become the republic’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Today, Raffi leads Heritage, a national liberal party, in Armenia’s parliament --and will run for president in the 2013 election
.
A powerful story about the long shadows that history casts on one family, Family of Shadows also perfectly captures Armenia’s history in the last 100 years.
Garin Hovannisian is a graduate of UCLA (06) and of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (M.S., 08). The recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Armenia, he now lives between Los Angeles and Yerevan. His writing on Armenian issues, including the Genocide, has appeared in the Los AngelesTimes, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, and many other publications, as well as in major periodicals of the Diaspora, such as The Armenian Observer and the literary journalArarat.
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Art of TranslationSaturday, September 25, 7:30 PM
DANIEL KEHLMANN
Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes
Imagine being famous. Being recognized on the street, adored by people who have never even met you, known the world over. Wouldn’t that be great?
But what if, one day, you got stuck in a country where celebrity means nothing, where no one spoke your language and you didn’t speak theirs, where no one knew your face (no book jackets, no TV) and you had no way of calling home? How would your fame help you then?
What if someone got hold of your cell phone? What if they spoke to your girlfriends, your agent, your director, and started making decisions for you? And worse, what if no one believed you were you anymore? When you saw a look-alike acting your roles for you, what would you do?
And what if one day you realized your magnum opus, like everything else you’d ever written, was a total waste of time, empty nonsense? What would you do next? Would your audience of seven million people keep you going? Or would you lose the capacity to keep on doing it?
Fame and facelessness, truth and deception, spin their way through all nine episodes of this captivating, wickedly funny, and perpetually surprising novel as paths cross and plots thicken, as characters become real people and real people morph into characters. The result is a dazzling tour de force by one of Europe’s finest young writers.
“Who would have thought contemporary Central European literature could be so fun and so funny? Daniel Kehlmann is who. The young Austrian prodigy, famous everywhere but in the United States, has given us a real beauty of a book, farcical, satiric, melancholic, and humane. Modern fame may have been invented in America, but nobody has dramatized its paradoxes and heartbreaks more entertainingly than the European Kehlmann does here." -- Jonathan Franzen
Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages. Awards his work has received include the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Heimito von Doderer Literature Award, the Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Kehlmann divides his time between Vienna and Berlin.
Monday, September 27, 7:00 PM
THE RUMPUS BOOK CLUB IN-PERSON DISCUSSION
Lan Samantha Chang’s All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost
First, The Rumpus announced its’ version of a book club – one whose members receive a hand-chosen book, for a thrilling insider’s early (before publication) look at what’s likely to be a very hot book. Club members are then invited to an online discussion with the author and with one another. (Read all about The Rumpus Book Club here.) What could be added to the mix? Why, a get-together to meet and talk with other club members in person!
We’re delighted to host these monthly gatherings this fall. Local book club members, come on in; if you’re a member from outside the Bay Area, but planning to be in our neighborhood, you come on in, too! Curious about The Rumpus and its book club? You, too!
Tonight: a discussion about Lan Samantha Chang’s new novel All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost.BOOKSMITH PRESENTS AN EVENING WITH FILMMAKER & NOVELIST GUILLERMO DEL TORO
at the Sundance Kabuki Theater
Tuesday, September 28, 7:30 PM
GUILLERMO DEL TORO
Born and raised in Guadalajara, Mexico, Guillermo del Toro made his feature directorial debut in 1993 with the film Cronos, and has since gone on to direct, among other films, Mimic, The Devil's Backbone, Blade II, Hellboy I, Hellboy II, and Pan's Labyrinth,which garnered enormous critical praise worldwide and won three Academy Awards. Del Toro has produced and written films numerous films. He is currently working on a remake of Frankenstein; it’s been announced that James Cameron will produce Del Toro’s 3-D At the Mountains of Madness, and that Del Toro will direct Disney’s The Haunted Mansion.
With Chuck Hogan, Del Toro has become a novelist as well. Their first novel was The Strain, about which all that must be said is this:
They have always been here. Vampires. In secret and in darkness. Waiting. Now their time has come.
In one week, Manhattan will be gone. In one month, the country.
In two months -- the world.
“I cannot wait to see where Del Toro and Hogan take us next.” -- James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Doomsday Key
The wait is over! Guillermo Del Toro returns with The Fall -- the second blood-chilling volume in their critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling Strain Trilogy. The Fall picks up where The Strain left off -- with a vampiric infection spreading like wildfire across America as a small band of heroes struggles to save the dwindling human race from the vampire plague. Horror fiction and dark fantasy fans will be swept up in this epic story that bestselling author Nelson DeMille describes as “Bram Stoker meets Stephen King meets Michael Crichton.”
In addition to his multiple screen ventures, Del Toro is, with Chuck Hogan, writing the third volume in The Strain trilogy.
Film fans, young filmmakers and vampire and horror novel fans alike won’t want to miss this very special event!
Advance ticket purchase encouraged; general admission tickets at the door may or may not be available.
General admission $12.
VIP ticket for private pre-talk reception at 6:30 PM, also at the Kabuki, with Mr. Del Toro, including delicious food, a special bar drink, reserved seat, and a copy of The Fall $75.
Kabuki Sundance Theater, 1881 Post Street at Fillmore, San Francisco. Doors open for general admission seating at 6:45 PM; VIP ticket holders will be seated promptly at 7:15 PM.
Tickets available at Brown Paper Tickets online or by phone at 800-838-3006, and at The Booksmith.
Tuesday, September 28, 7:00 PM
FOUND IN TRANSLATION Book Group
The Golden Age by Michal AjvazAs we turn toward fall, we read a writer who hails from Kafka's city--Prague--and who is reminiscent of both that famous writer and Jorge Luis Borges. Michal Ajvaz, considered by many the greatest living Czech author, has written in The Golden Age a book that is once philosophical and riveting, a book about language and narratives that includes fake civilizations and dueling royal families. On an imaginary island in the Atlantic Ocean lives a nation of humans without cars, money, or even telephones. They're discovered by a modern-day Gulliver who wants to chronicle their strange society and its one piece of writing, a collective, Wikipedia-like effort known only as the Book (called by one critic a "pre-Gutenberg Internet"). We'll talk about what this odd fairy-tale like book has to say about our own connected culture, as well as satire, the importance of storytelling to a society, and the morality of betrayal.
Join us on the fourth Tuesday of every month for spirited conversation about some of the newest writing hitting the U.S. from all over the globe. No foreign language knowledge necessary and no continental savvy required (but will be appreciated!) -- just bring your desire to read some excellent new books, hand-selected for you by Scott Esposito, of the Center for the Art of Translation and The Quarterly Conversation, who also fearlessly leads the discussion, brilliantly.. You'll also meet some great new people and chat with them about the best new fiction from around the world.
Wednesday, September 29, 7:00 PM
MONA SIMPSON
My Hollywood
Mona Simpson, acclaimed author of Anywhere But Here and A Regular Guy, has written a wonderfully provocative and appealing new novel, her first in ten years. My Hollywood tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood.
Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to LA so her husband can follow his passion for writing television comedy. Suddenly the marriage, once a 50/50 arrangement, changes, with Claire left at home with a baby, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for.
Lola, a fifty-two-year-old mother of five who is working in America to pay for her own children’s higher education back in the Philippines, becomes their nanny. Lola stabilizes the rocky household and soon other parents try to lure her away. What she sacrifices to stay with Claire and “Williamo” remains her own closely guarded secret.
In a novel at turns satirical and heartbreaking, we see two versions of events: the upstairs competition for the best nanny and the downstairs competition for the best deal, and are forced to ask whether it is possible to buy love for our children and what that transaction costs us all.
“This big gorgeous book is at once an entertaining, socially astute upstairs-downstairs drama and a profound meditation on the shifting and often competing demands of love and work in a woman’s life. One more time, Mona Simpson has burrowed deep into the American family to extract the shivering truth about the many trade-offs women face in raising children today. Lola, the Filipina nanny at the heart of this book, is surely one of the great literary creations of our time. My Hollywood is vast in scope, exquisite in detail, rife with pleasure.” – Michelle Huneven
“In her first novel since Off Keck Road, Simpson tells a blistering story of fractured love and flailing parents… The story both satirizes and earnestly assesses the failings of upper-middle-class L.A., and Simpson’s taut prose allows her to drill into the heart of relationships, often times with a single biting sentence. Funny, smart, and filled with razor sharp observations about life and parenthood, Simpson’s latest is well worth the wait.” -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A darkly beautiful atlas of the American promised land, and a definitive novel of modern domesticity. Brilliant, in short.” -- Joseph O’Neill
“Simpson's massive gifts -- for unflinching precision, for artful indirection and for the deft unfurling of imagery -- are on vivid display in My Hollywood, a book that carries us down deep, into the darkness of two distinct worlds, and lights them up, finding all the comedy in the ways they are the same world, and all the tragedy in the unbridgeable distance between them.” -- Michael Chabon
Mona Simpson is the author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, and Off Keck Road, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize of theChicago Tribune. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, recently, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santa Monica.
Thursday, September 30, 7:30 PM
FERYAL ALI GAUHAR
No Space for Further Burials
Set in Afghanistan in late 2002, No Space for Further Burials is a chilling indictment of the madness of war and our collective complicity in the perpetuation of violence.
The novel’s narrator, a U.S. army medical technician in Afghanistan helping “liberate” the country from the Taliban, has been captured by rebels and thrown into an asylum. The other inmates are a besieged gathering of society’s forgotten and unwanted refugees and derelicts, disabled and different, resilient and maddened, struggling to survive the lunacy raging outside the asylum compound. Their collective tale becomes a powerful evocation of the country’s desolate history of plunder and war, waged by insiders and outsiders, all fueled by ideology, desperation, and greed.
Feryal Ali Gauhar studied political economy at McGill University, Montreal, and has worked as a filmmaker and broadcaster in Europe and the U.S. She has been imprisoned by two military regimes in Pakistan for her prodemocracy activism. In 1999 she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund. She lives in Lahore, Pakistan, with fourteen cats, three dogs, a turtle, and four donkeys.
“In No Space for Further Burials, Feryal Ali Gauhar has crafted a novel of unrelenting truth, held in transcendent prose and an exquisite grace. There is no easy redemption here, but there is light and more light.” – Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and Song for Night
“Profoundly touching…Feryal Ali Gauhar questions us and forces us to face our responsibilities as universal citizens. In a mirror effect, she makes us see the image of a world that has become its own tormentor.” – Yasmina Khadra, author of The Swallows of KabulThe girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes
http://media.causes.com/510213?p_id=44401190Tired of Talking to a Voice Robot? Want to Talk with a Human?:
Dial A Human - http://www.dialahuman.com/Women In The Arts - [Video] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUDIoN-_Hxs
World Clock: http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf
Dear World:
We, the United States of America, your top quality supplier of the ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for our 2001-2008 interruption in service. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service outage has been located, and the software responsible was replaced November 4.
Early tests of the newly installed program indicate that we are now operating correctly, and we believe it to be fully functional as of January 20.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage. We look forward to resuming full service and hope to improve in years to come.
We truly thank you for your patience and understanding,
Sincerely,
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICAJUKEBOX - http://www.bobforrest.com/JukeBox.htm
[HUMOR/ETC. - LOCATED NEAR BOTTOM OF PAGE]
SOME INTERESTING GEOGRAPHY
Alaska
More than half of the coastline of the entire United States is in Alaska .Amazon
The Amazon rainforest produces more than 20% the world's oxygen supply. The Amazon River pushes so much water into the Atlantic Ocean that, more than one hundred miles at sea off the mouth of the river, one can dip fresh water out of the ocean. The volume of water in the Amazon river is greater than the next eight largest rivers in the world combined and three times the flow of all rivers in the United States .Antarctica
Antarctica is the only land on our planet that is not owned by any country. Ninety percent of the world's ice covers Antarctica . This ice also represents 70% of all the fresh water in the world. As strange as it sounds, however, Antarctica is essentially a desert. The average yearly total precipitation is about two inches. Although covered with ice (all but 0.4% of it, i.e.), Antarctica is the driest place on the planet, with an absolute humidity lower than the Gobi desert.Brazil
Brazil got its name from the nut, not the other way around.Canada
Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. Canada is an Indian word meaning ' Big Village .'Chicago
Next to Warsaw , Chicago has the largest Polish population in the world.Detroit
Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan carries the designation M-1, so named because it was the first paved road any where.Damascus , Syria
Damascus, Syria, was flourishing a couple of thousand years before Rome was founded in 753 BC, making it the oldest continuously inhabited city in existence.Istanbul , Turkey
Istanbul (AKA Constantinople), Turkey , is the only city in the world located on two continents.Los Angeles
Los Angeles' full name is El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula -- and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size: L.A.New York City
The term 'The Big Apple' was coined by touring jazz musicians of the 1930's who used the slang expression 'apple' for any town or city. Therefore, to playNew York City is to play the big time - The Big Apple.
There are more Irish in New York City than in Dublin, Ireland; more Italians in New York City than in Rome, Italy; and more Jews in New York City than in Tel Aviv, Israel.Ohio
There are no natural lakes in the state of Ohio, every one is man made.Pitcairn Island
The smallest island with country status is Pitcairn in Polynesia , at just 1.75 sq. miles.Rome
The first city to reach a population of 1 million people was Rome , Italy in 133 B..C. There is a city called Rome on every continent.Siberia
Siberia contains more than 25% of the world's forests.S.M.O.M
The actual smallest sovereign entity in the world is the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (S.M. O.M.). It is located in the city of Rome, Italy, has an area of two tennis courts, and as of 2001 had a population of 80, 20 less people than the Vatican. It is a sovereign entity under international law, just as the Vaticanis.Sahara Desert
In the Sahara Desert , there is a town named Tidikelt, which did not receive a drop of rain for ten years. Technically though, the driest place on Earth is in the valleys of the Antarctic near Ross Island . There has been no rainfall there for two million years.Spain
SPAIN literally means 'the land of rabbits.'St. Paul, Minnesota
St. Paul, Minnesota , was originally called Pig's Eye after a man named Pierre 'Pig's Eye' Parrant who set up the first business there.Roads
Chances that a road is unpaved in the U.S.A: 1%, in Canada : 75%.Texas
The deepest hole ever made in the world is in Texas . It is as deep as 20 empire state buildings but only 3 inches wide.United States
The Interstate System requires that one-mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.Waterfalls
The water of Angel Falls (the World's highest) in Venezuela drops 3,212 feet. IT is 15 times higher than Niagara Falls
It has been said that one should learn something new every day.
Unfortunately, many of us are at that age where what we learn today, we forget tomorrow. But, give it a shot anyway!.All My Faves - http://www.allmyfaves.com/
FactCheck.org
Recent Postings - http://www.factcheck.org/just-the-facts/index.htmlTRIVIA
A friend of a friend of mine sent me this. Some interesting bits of trivia. Cheers, Marliese
Buddy Holly's backup band, the Crickets, got their name by flipping through the 'Insects' section of an encyclopedia. One of the names they rejected was 'The Beetles'. The Beatles chose their name in honor of The Crickets. And The Hollies chose their name in honor of Buddy Holly. And Badfinger's original name, The Iveys, was in honor of The Hollies.
Led Zeppelin's original name was "The New Yardbirds". Guitarist Jimmy Page had briefly been a member of the Yardbirds, and the band sprang out of an attempt to reform the band with new members.
Lynyrd Skynyrd named themselves after their high school athletic coach, Leonard Skinner, who'd told them that they'd never amount to anything.
"Mr. Mojo Risin'" (a phrase used in The Doors' song " L.A. Woman") is an anagram for Jim Morrison.
The Aerosmith hit "Walk This Way" was inspired by a gag in Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein"
The band Nirvana was originally called "Skid Row", the members somehow unaware of the very popular heavy metal band by that name. When they finally heard of the band, they changed their name to "Nirvana", and were promptly sued by the members of a practically unknown sixties band that had gone by that name.
-First choice for Terry Doolittle in "Jumpin' Jack Flash" was Shelly Long. Whoopi Goldberg got the part.
-First choice for Bernie Rhodenbarr in "Burglar" was Bruce Willis. Whoopi Goldberg got the part.
-First choice for Rita Rizzoli in "Fatal Beauty" was Cher. Whoopi Goldberg got the part.
-First choice for Deloris Van Cartier in "Sister Act" was Bette Midler. Whoopi Goldberg got the part.-First choice for the title role in "Carrie" was Carrie Fisher. Sissy Spacek got the part.
-First choice for Princess Leia in "Star Wars" was Sissy Spacek. Carrie Fisher got the part.The Professor on 'Gilligan's Island' was named Roy Hinkley. The Skipper was named Jonas Grumby. Both names were used only once in the entire series. Gilligan's full name was never revealed (even Bob Denver, who played Gilligan, was never told his full name, nor was he sure if Gilligan was his first or last name), though some insiders claim his name was supposed to be Willy Gilligan. And Mary Ann's last name was Summers, and Mrs. Howell's maiden name was Wentworth.
Hot water weighs more than cold water.
If a pin was heated to the same temperature as the center of the Sun, its heat would set alight everything within 60 miles of it.
If the Sun's energy output would decreased by one-tenth, the entire Earth would be covered in ice one mile thick; if the Sun's energy increased by 30 percent, all life on Earth would be burnt to a cinder.
If something were to happen to Washington, D.C., the city of Port Angeles, WA, would become our nation's capital.
If you ever need to call someone in Antarctica, the area code is 672.
In medieval England, beer was often served with breakfast.
Beetles taste like apples, wasps like pine nuts and white worms like fried pork rinds.
John Larroquette was the narrator of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"
Leonardo DiCaprio's acting debut was on TV's 'Romper Room'.
Roald Dahl, the children's writer who wrote "Charlie And The Chocolate Factory" and "James And The Giant Peach", wrote the screenplay for "You Only Live Twice", the fifth James Bond Movie.
Female wrestlers are called "siffleuses"
Most tropical marine fish could survive in a tank filled with human blood.
Spiders never spin webs in structures made of chestnut wood. That is why do many European chateaux were built with chestnut beams - spider webs on a 50-foot beamed ceiling can be difficult to clean.
>From the same list with my own addition:
What do Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Kris Kristofferson, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Marvin Gaye, Michael Nesmith (of The Monkees), Bill Wyman (of The Rolling Stones), The Everly Brothers, and Gene Vincent all have in common that Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby do not? They're veterans of course.
Underground Hour
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Paper Mill Creek Saloon, Forest Knolls, CA, - FREE - EVERY Tuesday, 8-11 PM, West on Sir Francis Drake, turn left at the Forest Knolls intersection (before Lagunitas). Thought for the day: Q What is the only food that doesn't spoil? A Honey ..via Michael Welch
