Bookpusher

…because you eat the same food you did the day before, only you can do it in your jammies, lounging on the couch, watching TiVoed “Grey’s Anatomy” without your relatives around.

Kansas City’s own Robert Altman died today. Since he was KC’s contribution to film history, and he was one of the greatest American film directors ever, I feel like I should post about him.

Everyone and their dog will list MASH, The Player, Short Cuts, Gosford Park, and Nashville as their favorite Altman movies. My favorite of his has always been Cookie’s Fortune – I’ve recommended it to tons of people and I’ve never heard a negative word about it.  

I think I’ll fire that sucker up on DVD tonight. Rest in peace, Bob.

Go out and rent the film Hard Candy. Right now. It’s a low-budget psychological thriller about a 14-year old girl who entices her way into a 32-year-old photographer’s house via a chatroom, where some serious gamesmanshipbegins: the girl knows a lot more than she lets on, and the photographer may not be the pedophile we make him out to be. The film is starkly shot with tons of closeups so you can count every bead of sweat on their faces.

It’s also one of the most intense films of the year, as well as the most violent, even though almost all of the nastiness occurs offscreen. Still, the torture scenes make those in Reservoir Dogs and Swimming with Sharks look like Amateur Night at Abu Ghraib. I found myself with my hand over my eyes like a seven-year-old watching a slasher flick on cable. Oh, and actress Ellen Page has seriously got the goods.

Light posting through the holiday. Happy Turkee Day, everyone!

When I’m not at work on school stuff, I’ve been tearing through the novels of Andrew Klavan. Just in the past week and a half I’ve already read three of his books – and counting. And I’m a slow reader.

I got started with Dynamite Road, which continues with the same characters in Shotgun Alley. I got hooked because they are just the kind of novels I like – neo-noir thrillers where the good guys are emotionally damaged knights from the Raymond Chandler tradition and the rest of the world is hard and brutal seems cut out of a Jim Thompson novel. Where noble people are few, hookers have hearts of gold, and the rest of the world will do anything for money or women, and not necessarily in that order.

Dynamite Road features private investigators Weiss and Bishop. Weiss is the sad-sack bulky ex-cop with sad eyes and a deeply lined face, like Philip Baker Hall with an extra hundred pounds or so of muscle. He has an amazing ability to see into the criminal mind but it leaves him cynical and removed from the world, only able to protect people from a distance. His partner, Bishop, is the smooth ex-military ex-criminal badass who does the dirty work, mostly undercover. In Dynamite Road the two investigate criminal doings at a rural airport which blossoms into a hunt for a serial killer and a prison break-out. In Shotgun Alley, Bishop joins an outlaw motorcycle gang to rescue the wayward daughter of a Senator, only to discover the gang is responsible for several violent killings.

I then launched into Klavan’s Hunting Down Amanda, which begins with a jazz musician who pursues a hooker after a passionate one-night stand reminds him of his dead wife and somehow the novel turns into a noirish retelling of Stephen King’s Firestarter. Just when you think the book is going the stereotypical route, Klavan turns the narrative down a completely unexpected road. It’s a great ride, with memorable characters and excellent storytelling which kept me completely hooked.

Klavan’s novels are sharp and complex and involving. What might seem like cheap knock-off thrillers – plane-ride books, as my dad used to say – gets elevated into something more. After some digging, I found that two of Klavan’s other novels, True Crime and Don’t Say A Word, have been turned in to movies. It doesn’t surprise me – his cinematic style seems perfect for film.

Fergie’s “Fergalicious” sounds exactly like Salt & Pepa’s JJ Fad’s “Supersonic”.

(Thanks to Tony who set me straight in the comments. Not only did Fergie sample from JJ Fad, she listed them as cowriters.)

Confession time: I’m not a fan of chick lit. I’ve tried the genre several times and each time I drop the book after about twenty-five pages and at least two tablets of Advil. I know chick lit is huge and makes tons of money and strides over the bestseller lists like a colossus, but when it comes to your friendly neighborhood bookpusher, it’s just simply Not My Thing.

It’s like this: I find the show Desperate Housewives completely unwatchable because of the unbearable sing-song Mary Alice narration that’s in every episode. It’s stilted and overly cutesy and drives me up the wall. Most chick lit I’ve read reminds me of that – breezy, unrealistic, as empty of nutrition as a Rice Krispy Treat. The exceptions to this rule are Jennifer Crusie, who imbues her chick lit with excellent characters and plot, and Janet Evanovich.

One for the Money is the first in a series of mystery novels starring wisecracking Jersey girl and accidental bounty hunter Stephanie Plum, currently in her twelfth book and counting. In OFTM, Plum becomes a bounty hunter because that’s the only job open to her – that, and her sleazeball cousin owns a bail bonds company. With the help of a hansome and mysterious rogue cop and an equally handome and even more mysterious professional bounty hunter, she unravels a drug ring involving a boxing champion and a cast of Jersey mooks that would feel right at home in your average “Sopranos” episode. Evanovich strings humor that’s just this side of slapstick into her mystery and does an effective job of balancing the two and making a readable and entertaining book.

(How this series hasn’t been made into a feature film is beyond me. All you need is to get Marisa Tomei to gain twenty-five pounds, Bridget Jones’s Diary style, and you’ve got box office gold.)

The political upheaval over the past few days has made my head all dizzy. I have to resist the urge to cruise the comments section of Little Green Footballs and Free Republic to enjoy me some schadenfreude. Instead, here are some links for you:

An excellent interview with All-World comedian Stephen Wright over at the Onion AV Club.

“Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”, the best television show you’re probably not watching: renewed for a full season?

Like many of my generation who grew up in the 80s, there was no more memorable voice than Peter Cullen. I especially like that people come up to him, years later, to tell him how much of an influence he was on their lives.

If the goal of a conference is to load you up with ideas make you want to run through a brick wall in the name of your profession, then the Kansas Celebrate the Book Reader’s Advisory conference on Topeka last Friday did the job.
I drove to Topeka avoiding the easy I-70 corridor and instead went down K-10 to Lawrence and then fudged my way through the back roads until I found my way into the city. Beautiful country, by the way – lots of large farms with cows, goats, and horses. I would have stopped to take pictures if I had my camera with me. Living in KC I’m used to branch libraries scattered about everywhere, but in our state’s capitol there’s just one big library to call home. It’s new and quite pretty, almost like a museum, but I didn’t like the layout – collections were housed in different wings, so if you’re in the children’s section and want to look at the DVDs, for example, you have to go down a hall and into a separate room.

I went to three breakout sessions and cruised by the check-in table at every opportunity to snag handouts from the sessions I didn’t go to. I was able to find people from other branches of my library to sit with during lunch and met other people from other Kansas libraries, including two people I already know from my classes at Emporia State. Everyone was nice and I enjoyed the speakers: KU Chancellor Robert Heminway, who looked like an aged version of Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, and Mark Spragg, author of An Unfinished Life and Where Rivers Change Direction. Spragg was an impressive speaker, even while fighting a cold. He told stories of his family growing up in rural Wyoming and his family’s monthly trips to to town to buy supplies, do banking, and to visit the library. He didn’t look like a cowboy – a cowboy’s accountant, perhaps – but he was the real deal, the Great American Author in the flesh, and he was inspiring.

So I go back to work tomorrow ready to assault my coworkers with pages and pages of RA resources, and I’ll be posting some here as well. After this, you certainly won’t hear me complaining about not having anything to read.

On Friday, I’m attending a Reader’s Advisory conference in Topeka. This’ll be my first actual library conference, so I’m excited in a geeky way. I have no idea what to expect – I’ve never actually been in Topeka. I’ve only driven though it on the way to somewhere else, which, I expect, is how most people know Topeka. It’s good to be excited about something. I’ve had a complete lack of energy this week something fierce, which I’m blaming on the weather, Daylight Savings Time, and political advertisements, in that order.

“Lost” is about thisclose to landing a spot on my “Dead To Me” list. Good thing they’re going on break after next week’s episode - by the time the show returns, perhaps I’ll forget how disappointed I am with the season. I don’t mind characters getting killed off on television shows, but for teh love of god, at the very least, have characters die with meaning. I get enough senseless, random deaths in real life. When someone we know and have spent time with on a television show dies, the gates of heaven should open and rain down gifts of spiritual and emotional healing on us. We should get a sense that Everything is Connected, that (insert character’s name here) made a difference in the lives of people on the show, that somehow that death has meaning that will stay with us long after we’ve turned off the set. Not so much on “Lost”, huh? I get the feeling that the writers are just making it up as they go along, high-fiving each other in the office as they come up with new ways of throwing sand in viewers’ eyes. They’re getting away with it because “Lost” built up so much credit with us that first season. But it’s increasingly getting thin. Good thing that the show is going on break after next week – by the time it comes back I might forget how disappointed I am with it. Surely, I can’t be the only one out there who feels this way. Is anyone else bothered by this?

A few days ago I was putzing around doing some random link-jumping and came across BookDaddy, a blog written by former Dallas Morning News critic Jerome Weeks. He’s a fiendishly clever writer who can review a book and tie that review into a piece of history, or a personal memory, or five other wonderful books that you’ve never heard of, and the whole thing comes across as something more than just a book review. Reading him, I get a sense of voice that I one day hope to achieve.

Going though his archives, I came across a mention of Hiding the Elephant by Jim Steinmeyer, a book about the history of the golden age of stage magic. Having recently come out of the Carter Beats the Devil/Kavalier & Klay jag and having always been fascinated by American myth, this sort of thing was right in my wheelhouse.

Steinmeyer is a magician himself. He knows that even though people like me want to know how a magic trick is done, a dry, clinical explanation will suck all the magic out of it and make it into a mechanical con. Stage magic isn’t a con, it is Art. Steinmeyer treats these magicians with respect and reverence, interlacing biographical facts with hints of the large- than-life myth that they cloaked themselves with to make their fame and to sell tickets. He doesn’t psychoanalyze or get into his subjects’ heads much, with the notable exception of Houdini, but that’s because Houdini’s giant-sized Oedipal issues pretty much beg for it. But you can read all that in the book.

He treats Hiding as a historical narrative from the first modern technical illusion – John Henry Pepper and Henry Dierks reflecting an actor’s image on a pane of glass on stage in 1862, making the first believable illusion of a ghost – leading up to Houdini making a full-sized elephant disappear on stage in New York. Steinmeyer masterfully takes us through the innovators and the personalities, never spending too much time on any one magician before he stuffs him back into the hat and goes on to the next act. He reveals secrets but always stresses how much time and effort went into creating original tricks and how valuable they were, with manic arms races springing up over all the major illusions, with magicians stealing and double-dealing and scooping each other. It’s all great fun.

Hiding the Elephant is one of those wonderful microhistories that doesn’t feel like you’re reading a history at all. And as we know, that’s a magic trick all its own.

(Oh, and incidentally – Steinmeyer does tell us how Houdini hid that elephant. You’ll just have to read it to find out how.)