Brian Jay Jones's Blog, page 25

You Better, You Bet

My pal Scott S. Phillips has just released his new novel Squirrel Eyes, and it's ready for you to download right now in either ePub or Kindle format over on Amazon. Scott is one of the funniest and most talented writers I know — he can turn a phrase like no one's business, and make even a mundane activity like eating Froot Loops sound funny or exciting — so I can guarantee you'll have fun.

In fact, if you agree to write a review of Squirrel Eyes for Goodreads, you can download the thing for free.  Go on; shoot him an e-mail at edpscott (AT) gmail (DOT) com, and tell him I sent ya.  (Or leave a comment, and I'll put you in touch.) I've known Scott for more  than 25 years, so believe me — I know what I'm talking about when I tell you he's great.

If you don't wanna write a review, but want to read Scott anyway, you can still get Squirrel Eyes right here.

Speaking of book reviews, there's a new player in town, courtesy of my colleague David O. Stewart.  It's the Washington Independent Review of Books, "a labor of love," as David put it, "produced by dozens of writers and editors, mostly in the Washington area, who are dismayed by the disappearance of book reviews and book review sections in the mainstream media."  It's only been live about a week, but it's already crammed with lots of good stuff, including interviews and an up-to-the-minute news feed on all things publishing.  Bookmark it now.

Finally, Kurt Vonnegut biographer Charles J. Shields has a new blog, Writing Kurt Vonnegut, where he'll write about . .  . well, writing Kurt Vonnegut, but also pretty much anything else that crosses his mind.  Light fuse, then stand back — Charles, like Vonnegut, is always a helluva lotta fun to read.

Breakfast (and Lunch) of Champions

There's something else I've come to love about biography: biographers.  Last week, Barb and I had a wonderful Indian dinner in DC with Charles J. Shields and his lovely wife Guadalupe, who had braved bad weather and slick roads to attend the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. It was a terrific time, with good food and even better company — and I'm even more excited now about getting my hands on Charles' upcoming biography of Kurt Vonnegut, which his publisher, Henry Holt,  is rightly making its Christmas 2011 centerpiece bio.

Speaking of top-notch biographers, the Biographers International Organization recently announced that its recipient for the 2011 BIO award — which also means its keynote lunch speaker for this year's conference here in DC — will be Robert Caro.

Yes, you heard me — and forgive me for being crass here, but — ROBERT EFFING CARO. If there's a Mount Rushmore of Biographers, he's on it.  If there's a Beatles of Biographers, he's John Lennon. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, his comprehensive, multi-part biography of President Lyndon Johnson stands — in my view, at least — as the ultimate example of what great biography should be: thorough without being mind-numbing, dramatic without being histrionic, and scholarly without being pedantic. (I've described my favorite book of his, the third volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography, Master of the Senate, as a biographical thriller.)

We're less than a hundred days away from the 2011 BIO conference, and slots — as well as hotel rooms — are filling quickly, so if you're interested in attending, click here for complete information.  As a member of the Washington Biography Group, which is serving as this year's host, I'll be moderating one panel, but I'll also be participating as a panelist during the session on "The Role for Fiction in Biography."

Last year's conference was hugely successful, and a lot of fun.  And you don't have to be a biographer or even a writer to attend. Just loving books is more than enough.

A Speculative Discussion at the Rosenbach: Sir Walter Scott, Rebecca Gratz, and Washington Irving

Washington Irving

An event I've been waiting to announce has at last become officially Official—but before I post it, I need to give you a bit of context first.

In 1817, Washington Irving spent several days with his literary idol, Sir Walter Scott, at Abbotsford, Scott's stately home near Melrose, Scotland. At the time, Scott was known more for his romantic poetry than his novels, though at the time of Irving's visit, Scott was reviewing the proofs of his historical novel Rob Roy, part of his popular Waverley series.

Rebecca Gratz

Three years after Irving's visit–right around the time Irving was enjoying international success with the publication of The Sketch Book—Scott published a blockbuster of his own, another installment of the Waverley series, the medieval adventure novel Ivanhoe.  Featured prominently in Scott's story is the character Rebecca, the beautiful daughter of a Jewish moneylender, as well as a healer who saves Ivanhoe and is later tried–and, with the help of Ivanhoe as her champion, cleared–of charges of witchcraft.

Walter Scott

Rebecca doesn't get Ivanhoe in the end—he marries the Lady Rowena instead–but to most, Rebecca is the heroine of the novel.   She was also a strong Jewish character in a novel written at a time when Jews were struggling for emancipation in England–and Scott's sympathetic portrayal of Rebecca is credited by some as helping pave the way for reforms in English law that began to give  Jewish citizens—or, at least, the men—the same status as other "emancipated" Englishmen.

Why is that relevant here?  This is where it gets interesting.  Shortly after the publication of Ivanhoe, the Jewish Philadelphia philanthropist Rebecca Gratz—who was also a friend of Washington Irving–was constantly being collared by friends  who had read Scott's novel and swore up and down that the character of Rebecca was based on her.  Gratz had never met Scott, and Scott had never met Gratz.  That left only a mutual acquaintance–the aforementioned Mr. Irving—who could possibly have told Scott about Gratz.

But did he?  Was Scott's heroine indeed based on Gratz?  And if so, did Scott learn of Gratz through Irving?

On Thursday, March 3, Gratz scholar Susan Sklaroff and I are going to talk about it in a "speculative discussion" at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. More information can be found on the Rosenbach's website by clicking here. The discussion starts at 6:00 p.m., and if you're in the City of Brotherly Love at that time, come by and throw in your two cents. This one'll be fun.

My thanks to Susan and the folks at the Rosenbach for inviting me.  Susan also writes a fine blog on Rebecca that you can see right here.  Check it out.

A Blast From The Past: The Midnight Conference

The other day, I received a nice e-mail from Rob Dale at AmDale Media, the fellow who puts together the Comic Fanzine Price Guide. Through a bit of clever detective work, Rob discovered that, back in the late 1980s, I used to write for a Batman-related fanzine called The Midnight Conference (TMC), and would I mind providing a little insight about the 'zine?

Well, sure.  In those heady days before Batman was ever a money-printing movie franchise, there was The Midnight Conference, a  fanzine produced by a pleasant fellow from Canada named Martin R. Noreau, who printed and distributed the mag mostly out of affection for a character he loved.  I doubt the thing ever made a nickel, but Martin diligently put out the mag for a couple of years, typing up each issue and pasting in drawings, then photocopying, binding and mailing the thing.  This was in the days before computers made things like formatting and typesetting as simple as changing a setting in the template or selecting  a different typeface, and while it wasn't exactly bearskins and buck knives, it was pretty close.

Eventually the production got large enough that Martin needed a bit of help, so he tapped the pseudonymous lettercol phenom T.M. Maple — who seemed to have a thoughtful letter in nearly every comic book published in the 1980s — to act as his assistant editor.  TMC lasted until the late 1980s, when Warner was preparing to put out the first Batman movie — you know, the one with Michael Keaton and directed by Tim Burton, which we all groaned about until we actually saw it and decided it was pretty darn cool —  and, allegedly, the Powers That Be at Warner issued poor Martin a cease and desist letter in the name of protecting their copyright. That was pretty much it for TMC.  It folded after thirteen issues. (Meanwhile, T.M. Maple — whose real name was Jim Burke — died of a heart attack shortly thereafter at age 38.  He was a thoughtful guy who genuinely loved comics and couldn't understand why they didn't have a more mainstream acceptance. I wonder what he would think about the medium and characters he loved now.)

I was the regular reviewer for the Batman comic for seven issues of TMC. It's not work I'm particularly proud of — I was still in college, still feeling my way with voice, and when I go back and re-read those pieces now, they bury the needle when it comes to the cringe factor. Yet, I did take the job seriously, banging out what I thought were really thoughtful critiques of Jim Starlin's take on the character, or discussing whether the art in a particular sequence was helping the narrative. Mostly, though, I was just trying too hard.

Still, from time to time, I scored a coup or two.  For one issue, I managed to nab an interview with writer Steve Englehart, who wrote what many — myself included — still consider one of the finest story arcs in the character's eighty year history.  Another time, I collared MAD magazine artist Sergio Aragones and paid him twenty bucks to produce a drawing of the Dynamic Duo to use as the cover on what turned out to be TMC's final issue in late 1988.  Wanna see?  Here you go:

I still have the original black-and-white drawing on the bookshelf in my office. And let me add that Sergio was — and is — a super nice guy with a great sense of humor. He's still going strong today at age 73. And for the record, this marks the only time I have ever appeared in anything with a great Aragones cover.

Statistically Speaking

At the end of the year, WordPress handily sends out an e-mail analyzing the most popular entries and referring sites for blogs and websites, which is always an interesting and humbling exercise. Oddly, the pieces one slaves and sweats over get hardly a look, while the dopey or more casually tossed off ones get tons of traffic.  With that in mind, here are the top three most-read entries for this site for the last year:

(1) "Rolling Stone Picks The 500 Greatest Rock Songs":  I think part of the reason for the popularity of this piece from May is that it showed up as a "related link" in one of the earliest web stories (I think it was the CBS page, but I'm not certain).  It still gets hit quite a bit even today. Oddly, it's really not even that great of an entry; more than anything, it was an excuse to post the link to the goofy VentriloChoir singing "Yesterday." But at least it springboards readers to the site with the full list, so . . . you're welcome, America.

(2) "Life Writing Done to Death (And All Because of Amanda Foreman!)" I put this entry up in 2008 mainly because I thought the debates in the UK press on biographer Amanda Foreman (she of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire fame) were so amusing — and lamenting the fact that we never seem to have high-profile spats over biographies over here in the States.  For some odd reason, this entry ended up attached at the end of Ms. Foreman's Wikipedia entry, which continues to drive traffic here in droves.  I'm sure they go away disappointed, since there's really nothing titillating there — though I'm flattered that Ms. Foreman herself checked in and commented on the whole controversy.

(3) "The Real 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow'":   This long piece from 2008 tends to get hit a lot around Halloween, though I'll also point out that the search words "cliff notes for sleepy hollow" also bring quite a few people this way. Whether its actually helped anyone write a paper or pass a test, though, I couldn't say.

Rounding out the top five are two informational pages, Books and Author.  The author page, more often than not, seems to be used to verify whether I'm the dead Rolling Stone(I'm not)  or the balloonist (still not), since those are two terms that bring people here as well. Once again, readers get to leave empty handed or unfulfilled.  Sorry about that.

I use Statcounter to track other data on this site — and it annoys me that WordPress inhibits its functionality, making it impossible to generate truly useful data. I can see where visitors come from, how long they were on the site, or whether they're a repeat visitor, for instance, but I can't see referring pages or search words, which would be really helpful.  You can do this when you use Statcounter in association with Blogger, but WordPress is huffy about it.

Anyway, among other interesting data, this site was viewed by over 14,000 unique users (not bad), and by readers from cool places all around the world, like Russia, Greece, India, Australia, Germany, and Ireland, not to mention Schenectady, NY. Thanks for dropping by, everyone, I appreciate it. I'll try to get better about getting new material up here in the coming year — though the older stuff seems to be doing just fine by itself.

Back At It

Happy 2011! And good lord, is the first week of the year really almost over?

The winter break was a quick sprint through the Southwest for Barb and me — I'm a New Mexican, and she's an Arizonan, so we spent a few days with family and friends in each state before setting up camp (read: staying in a hotel) out in the Gold Canyon region of Arizona for several days.  Barb took advantage of the spa services while I spent my time in front of a fire, sipping Land Shark, burning the eight-dollars-a-piece Duraflame logs provided by our hotel, and reading Robert Caro. All in all, not a bad way to pass the time.

It was unseasonably cold while we were out there — as it seems to have been across most of the continental US that week — and a snowstorm blew through northern Arizona late last Wednesday, blanketing Flagstaff under two feet of snow and closing roads in all directions.  The only problem was, our New Year's Eve plans included driving to Flagstaff and ringing in 2011 from there. Fortunately, the roads cleared and we made it to Flagstaff with no problems, though we greeted the new year with temperatures hovering at 15 below. On New Year's morning, I discovered that a case of sodas I had stupidly left in the back seat of the rental car had frozen and exploded — then instantly froze again, making the clean up easy: I simply picked up the frozen ice sculpture of cans, box, and foam and threw it away.

I left behind the laptop I had intended to carry along with me — we decided to forget work and stay off the grid during our vacation, though Barb couldn't resist bringing along her iPad and checking e-mail every once in a while.  Since our return, however, we've been back at it.  In fact, this week, I'll have a draft of several chapters completed that I can ship off and have some folks take a look at. Yeah, I'm pretty excited, too.

On a completely random aside, I'm pleased to announce that I've got two Washington Irving-related events in the coming months, both in Philadelphia.  One is a speaking engagement at the Rittenhouse Club, while the other is at a celebration of Rebecca Gratz at the Rosenbach Museum and Library. At the Rosenbach, I'll be speaking in tandem with Susan Sklaroff, a Gratz scholar and docent at the Museum.  Susan writes a great blog about Gratz (which you can see here) and she and I will be discussing Irving and Gratz's rather amusing relationship, as well as whether Sir Walter Scott based his heroine Rebecca in Ivanhoe on Irving's description of the dynamic Rebecca Gratz. I'll post more information as it becomes available.

Finally, I just registered for the Biographers International Organization's 2011 Compleat Biographer conference, right here in Washington, DC.  And you should too.

Happy New Year!

Stille Nacht

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And Laying His Finger Aside of His Nose…

"And the sage Oloffe dreamed a dream–and lo, the good St. Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings yearly presents to children, and he descended hard by where the heroes of Communipaw had made their late repast. And he lit his pipe by the fire, and sat himself down and smoked . . . And when St. Nicholas had smoked his pipe, he twisted it in his hat-band, and laying his finger beside his nose, gave the astonished Van Kortlandt a very signifcant look, then mounting his wagon, he returned over the tree-tops and disappeared."

– Washington Irving

A History of New York (1812 edition)

Book II, Chapter V

 

Odds and Ends

It's funny, when I started this blog several years ago, I was fairly good about updating and posting — on a good week, I might post three times, sometimes daily.  At the time I was doing the political job by day, while promoting Washington Irving and working behind the scenes on Jim Henson. And I thought, "Man, if I ever get to the point where I can stay home and write full time, I can blog daily! I'll be a blogging machine!"

Yeah.  Well.  Not so much, sorry.  But I think you'll thank me in the end, since it means I'm devoting more of my writing time to my current project than to the blog.  Still, that's not to say there isn't plenty else going on.  Like for instance:

-  Early registration is already open for the second annual Biographers International Organization (BIO) conference, which will take place in Washington, DC on May 21, 2011.  Home base for the event will be the National Press Club, but conference sessions will also be held at the National Archives and the Library of Congress.  More information — including a tentative list of panels — is available at the BIO website, by clicking here.

- Barb and I attended an absolutely spectacular lecture at the Smithsonian the other night, where we got to listen to Bob Hirst, the general editor of the new Mark Twain Autobiography, discuss Twain's life, work, and the problems an editor stumbles across when trying to decide exactly what is meant by an "authoritative" autobiography.  To a packed house at the Natural History Museum, Hirst showed photos of Twain's original typed manuscripts, which had been written on by Twain, corrected by later typists, smudged by typesetters, and revised by previous editors who thought they knew better than Twain how to tell his life story.  Looking at the mess on each page, it was sometimes unclear which corrections were Twain's — was the slash through a comma, for instance, really his correction or that of a later editor? – which really made you appreciate the hard work, and the detective work, that goes into a project like this.

- This Saturday, we're attending a showing of A Christmas Carol over at Ford's Theatre.  It's one of those things that's become something of a Christmas tradition with us, in the same way that we always watch Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas or A Christmas Story. Plus it's an opportunity to go see the Christmas trees for each state over at the White House, and the huge tree at the Capitol.  The only wrench in the plan right now is the weather.  It was a whopping 19 degrees this morning here in Maryland, which is not conducive to strolls on the Mall.

- Finally, here's a really interesting piece on Herman Melville over in the New York Times, courtesy of my colleague — and 19th century historian and fellow political speech writer — Ted Widmer.

The Look

For the past few weeks, we've had the hammers flying at our place as our trusty handyman and an excavator have been doing some work on the back of our 1930s-era stone farmhouse, installing new French doors,  filling a ravine, and pouring a patio.  I love watching them make progress — but I also brace myself for the inevitable disaster.  While our house has tons of character, it also has a pesky personality that almost flagrantly defies handymen, carpenters, electricians, and plumbers. 

It was built in the 1930s, and then was added on to several times over the next 20 years.  Consequently, the top floor doesn't really match the first floor, and the basement is shorter than the upper floors of the house.   There are several short hallways marking where the pre-1950s version of the house ended, and in some rooms, you can see the plaster outline of a removed door – ghostly remnants of the old floorplan.  The first floor in particular twists and turns itself into several nooks and crannies, and we've seen more than one carpenter come up the basement steps, take three steps into the downstairs hall, and have no idea where the front door is.

The wiring is purely old school (though apparently incredibly safe and insulated), and the plumbing can often be cobbled together — ironic, considering the town plumber owned our house for fifty years.  All we can figure is he used whatever was left over in his truck to plumb his own house, resulting in the plumbing spiralling its way unnaturally through the walls and floor like a cast iron spiderweb.

In fact, once you're inside the walls, chaos rules.  We once found a bucket sealed up inside a wall, where it had been used to catch water from a slow leak in a pipe . . . a pipe that had continued to leak for 30 years, until we moved in, found the pool of water and had the problem fixed and the bucket removed.  While redoing another room, we discovered that the previous owners hadn't bothered to actually run power down one side of the room — instead, they had plugged an extension cord into one corner,  ran it along the inside of the wall for ten feet, sealed up the cord inside the wall, then poked it out a hole, creating — in their minds at least — an instant power socket.

Given all this, we're used to carpenters, plumbers and contractors giving us what we call The Look. 

The Look usually shows up when (1) what should be a routine job suddenly becomes unnecessarily difficult due to a previously unseen bizarre jerry-rigging in the house (see the plumbing example above), or (2) an unbelievably dopey fix is discovered (cross reference:  The Bucket In The Wall Solution).  Usually I'll catch the contractor emerging from the attic or down off a ladder with The Look on his face, shaking his head quizzically, mouth open, ready to ask, "What in the hell?"  All I can do at that point is shake my head in exasperation. "Don't even ask," I say, "just fix it."

For example, several years ago we had a plugged drain in our upstairs shower.  We had lamely snaked it and run gallons of Drain-O down its throat, but it never got much better, so we called a plumber to carry out what we thought would be a routine power-snaking.  The plumber dutifully arrived and squatted over our tub, trying to cram his high-tech snake down the drain, only to find it buckling and bending after about three feet.  Puzzled, he wanted a closer look . . . and couldn't find any access to the pipes.  A flash of The Look crossed his face, but he calmly decided cut a hole in the ceiling  just below the bathroom so he could stand on a ladder and  tinker with the pipes.

Crisis averted? Not even close.  Once he got a look at the pipes, he discovered that a series of L-shaped pieces of pipe had been welded together, creating an impossible maze of right angles for the snake to negotiate, rather than the sloping U-shaped curves that are normally installed.  To fix the problem and get our water moving down the drain again, then, the plumber was going to have to remove the mess of L-shaped pipes.

Making things even worse — and here's where we finally got the full-blown Look — the pipes that had been used in that portion of the house were apparently only available between the years 1951 and 1953, making it nearly impossible to attach any modern pipes into the system.  As a result, he had to remove and replumb about sixteen feet of plumbing.  So much for a routine snaking.

Another time, we hired a contractor to come and do something fairly easy: install new insulation in the crawl space that runs along the side of the top floor of the house.  He and his crew stooped and tromped around for a while in our crawl space before emerging moments later with The Look clouding their faces.  Apparently the previous owners had applied insulation not to the kneeling wall, where it actually works, but against the sloping walls of the inside of the roof, where it succeeded only in holding cold air in a pocket against the walls of the house.  Which is pretty much the opposite of what you want to do.  "Don't even ask," I told the perplexed crew. "Just fix it."

We ran into another odd problem during our current slate of projects — we discovered, after removing a bay window, that there was no supporting concrete beneath the structure, resulting in the need to repour an entire patio — but this particular quirk was discovered by our regular handyman, who's used to such things.  He doesn't give us The Look any more.  He just points and laughs.