Scenes from the Playground: Neediness.

Gavin and I still haven’t found a playgroup to roll with, so we spend a good chunk of our time during the day finding stuff to do outside, away from the house. We’re lucky to have access to an indoor pool right up the street, plus there’s Goose Poop Park within easy wagon distance. But the same thing gets stale after a while, so we have a rotation of parks and playgrounds and the like we visit.

We always meet kids at those places. That isn’t unsusal. What is unusual is that many of those kids will seem to be by themselves, or with an uninterested grandparent or babysitter sitting on a bench nearby. They will see me with Gav and will come up to me and ask if I would push them on the swing, or watch them as they do a cartwheel, or play catch with them, hungry for any sort of adult attention. This isn’t routine playground interaction with strangers – they aggressively ask for it, sometimes boxing Gavin out of their way. The neediness of these kids radiates off of them in almost visible waves as they ask me to do daddy-type of things for them. I assume the adults they’re with aren’t interested in them, or they don’t have a dad at home, or whatever, but I always wonder if parks and playgrounds are just places for parents to dump their children – to get them off their hands for an hour or two – for them to run around and expend energy. Expending your child’s energy isn’t the point of parenthood, but for some it might just be. Lord knows I sometimes need a break from my child (there are some days where I look forward to my afternoon-coffee-and-Facebook-update breaks like a prisoner looks forward to their parole hearings) but this need for adult interaction that I get from these kids hints at something more.

If the situation wasn’t so heartbreaking, I wonder if I shouldn’t open a Rent-A-Dad service where adults pay a fee and I would meet their kids at the park and do dad-like things, giving them dad-like attention,  for a fixed period of time. Of course, I have my own kiddo who needs my full attention.

 

31 days, 31 posts.

I’ve been in the doldrums recently.

I stopped blogging around the first of the year because of the oncoming crush of my last semester of grad school. I felt I needed to clear the decks and focus on school exclusively. Once I graduated, I then felt I needed a break from everything to refresh myself and recharge some batteries. Now, over a month after that, I’ve come to the realization that I really didn’t need any of that in the first place and it was pretty much all laziness to begin with.

I looked at the calendar this morning and realized that the first day of the month is tomorrow. So: there are 31 days in July, therefore to force myself to get back in the habit of blogging I will post once a day, every day of the month, regardless of whether I can find an excuse not to. Think of it as an internet exercise program that I’m accountable to all of you for. Nothing but unbridled, unrestrained content, coming your way, every day in July. Even if it’s a two-line Twitter/Facebook-style update. Because, dammit, I need to.

Besides, I’ve read about two dozen books or so and need to tell you all about them.

 

Scenes from a Playground: Part One

There’s a nice public park not too far away form where I live. I call it Goose Poop Park becuase there’s a nice sized-lake there that’s infested with Canadian geese, which leave their droppings over everything to the point I fear bacterial apocalypse whenever my 17-month-old bends down to pick up a nice-looking rock or a stick, which will usually end up in the neighborhood of his mouth.

Anyway, I was at Goose Poop Park last week, watching Gav totter around on the playground equipment, making sure he didn’t fall. An older boy, probably around eight, came over to where we were and asked if he could play with Gav.

I responded, “well, he really isn’t old enough to play tag or anything, but you can hang out with him if you want to.”

“Okay.” He stood there for a moment and watched Gav climb up the steps to the slide. ” I came over here because Hayley was being mean to me. She told me I shouldn’t chase the ducks and that I would get in trouble and they could bite me.”

I nodded, not wanting to get into an in-depth conversation with a strange kid on a public playground, and also not bothering to point out that the ducks he was referring to were really geese. He fooled around on the swings for a little bit. After a while, another little girl, a few years older (and presumably Hayley) tromped over to talk to the boy, hands on her hips. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to talk to strangers?”

The boy responded, “I wasn’t talking to strangers. Just old people.”

I was the only person he talked to. I’m 36.

 

Comedy at the Edge – Richard Zoglin

I first discovered stand-up comedy in the early 1980s, when my parents were hosting a party and George Carlin’s “Carlin at Carnegie Hall” was playing on HBO in the living room. I wasn’t allowed in, of course, being about eleven years old at the time, but after a while I wandered in under everyone’s radar and stood leaning against the wall, watching, transfixed. I was thrilled with the exposure to naughty words – being Carlin, there were plenty of them – and I could only understand about half of his routine, but he talked about silly, nonsense stuff, too, like dogs . And I loved it.

Terminally shy, with wit that only came to me after the bullies left, I understood immediately there was power in the ability of making people laugh. One guy standing in front of a brick wall with a microphone, no soundtrack, no band, no partner, no nothing, convincing complete strangers to like and accept them, just by making them laugh. I knew I didn’t have the confidence in doing this myself – thus derailing a surefire comedy and sitcom career into librarianship – but I did spend a large part of my teens buying comedy tapes, playing them endlessly, memorizing routines and repeating them to my friends. George Carlin quickly led to a host of others, and I developed my personal Stand-Up Album Pantheon. Along with “Carlin at Carnegie”, there were Bill Cosby’s “Himself”, Stephen Wright’s “I Have a Pony”, Robin Williams’ “Night at the Met”, Sam Kinison’s “Louder than Hell”, and Richard Pryor’s “Wanted: Live in Concert”. Oh, and Eddie Murphy’s “Delirious”, too. These were, in many ways, the soundtrack of my teens.

All this was my background going into Richard Zoglin’s “Comedy at the Edge”, a study of the emergence of the stand-up scene during the late sixtes and early seventies, starting with the legacy of Lenny Bruce and moving through Carlin, Richard Pryor, Robert Klein, Andy Kaufmann, Albert Brooks, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, and a truckload of others. Ground Zero of the stand-up explosion were the scenes in New York and LA, with comedians working out their inner demons on stage or angling to get a shot at sitting on the couch with Johnny Carson. Zoglin knows his stuff, spending years honing his skills as a feature writer for Time magazine. His extensive interviews gives depth to the performers, placing them in a social context. The book comes off almost as a verbal history, similar to Shales and Miller’s “Live From New York” about the early years of Saturday Night Live. Essential reading for anyone who loves pop-culture history or stand-up comedy.

 

Anatomy of a bail: The Emperor of Scent – Chandler Burr

I’m about a third of the way in and I’ve been struggling with it for a while, and I’m afraid I’m going to just have to cut bait. It took me longer than it usually does to make this decision, since I really really really wanted to like this one. The book would at first blush seem right up my alley: a true story about a charmingly rogue scientist who stretches across different scientific disciplines and creates an entire new theory of how we recognize smells, but his research is sabotaged by the scientific community because he’s a rulebreaker and doesn’t kiss enough ass.

That description has it all: a new scientific principle concerning something we deal with every day, a fun and engaging scientist who’s struggling against the establishment, and a peek inside the multi-multi-million dollar prefume industry. The problem with the book is that there’s too much sdamn cience involved. You see, I consider myself a fairly well-read person and for the most part I enjoy science writing. However, I am an English major and need scientific principles explained to me as one would explain them to a hyperactive fifth-grader. Burr starts off reasonably enough, talking about the chemical bonds between molecules, but soon plunges headlong into electron tunneling and making diodes out of proteins and pretty soon I’m completely over my head. When Burr switches back to the narrative, I’m fully locked in, but within a few pages I’m drowning in the science again, and I start to slog.

So yeah: I’ve got to bail. For those more patient than me, and who are able to follow the science, this is a completely engaging book. A good buddy of mine who can bring the science, the Rambling Rover, would probably love it. But it’s not for me.

 

Shelling out the ducats.

Working at a library, I’m used to not paying for books. Whenever I want something I just go to the shelves and get it or else put it on hold and wait a bit. It makes me wonder why I even bothered paying for all those books when I worked for bookstores all those years ago. (Probably because they gave employees a house account so we had to keep working there in order to pay it off: a modern-day version of indentured servitude. But I digress.)

There’s a very short list of authors I will plunk down my money for. Everything else I’ll happily wait on the hold list like everyone else. Those authors are: 

Michael Connelly. George Pelecanos. Robert Crais just misses this list, but not by much. Lee Child used to be on the list until his latest release sucked; he is exiled until further notice. Don Winslow. Charlie Huston. (I’m currently tearing through Huston’s latest – not as good as Shotgun Rule thus far, but then I’m only halfway through.) Daniel Silva was off the list but is working his way back on – he needs another solid release to get back into my good graces. Bill Simmons.

And, finally, Megan Abbott. If you haven’t read Queenpin, get yourself to your library and snag it immediately, as it’s a sexy, smooth, brilliant, and nasty piece of noir as you’re ever going to read. On the strength of that book alone, Abbott has guaranteed my undying patronage. (By “undying”, I mean at least a three-book grace period.) Having not heard from her lately, I buzzed over to her site and was greeted by a blurb regarding her latest release, due in July, entitled Bury Me Deep, which sent me into spasms of anticipation. Talented writer? Check. My favorite genre? Check. Lurid-as-hell title and cover? Check and mate. Cannot. Freaking. WAIT. For this one.

 

Bruuuuuuuce!

I wish we could all just wait a few weeks to let the Super Bowl get a bit cold in our minds before we start throwing around terms like “Best Super Bowl Ever.” That always annoys me: some idiot sportscaster is always throwing around “best”, “all-time”, and “greatest” in every game, to the point where it loses all meaning. There’s nothing wrong with “pretty good”, people, and that was a pretty good game last night. Certainly belongs in the conversation of Best Ever. But let’s wait a few weeks, huh?

And the halftime show. Sure, Springsteen did a nice set – he shoved his crank in the camera with that badly-timed power slide of his, which was far, far more offensive that anything Janet Jackson could have dreamed up. But even though I was in high school when Born in the USA came out and his “Dancing in the Dark” video with Courtney Cox was all MTV could show, I’ve never been a Bruce guy. Never owned any of his albums, don’t have any of his songs on my MP3 player. His entire Jersey working-class schtick never resonated with me – I grew up in working-class Raytown, Missouri, so any romance or poetry about the situation was pretty much lost on me at an early point.

And to all the baby-boomer producers of the Super Bowl, a 60-year-old Bruce Springteen is about as hip and current as they’re willing to provide after Janet ruined it for everyone. The kids aren’t going to be allowed to sit at the big table for a while – we won’t have Kanye or Spoon or the Ting Tings until they’re 60 years of age.

 

A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918 – G.J. Meyer

World War I is a topic I was fairly ignorant of a few weeks ago, even though I lived my entire life in Kansas City. KC is the site of our nation’s premiere museum and monument to that war. It’s not a war that my generation has an easy grasp of – I grew up during the 70s and 80s when the boomers were (and still are) trying to deal with the Vietnam War, so its images constantly flooded movie theaters and television sets. Likewise, WWII was an easy war to grasp for me. The good guys and bad guys were clearly defined. The good guys were us, while the bad guys included the nut in the funny mustache who tried to take over the world and put people he didn’t like in concentration camps.

World War One existed farther back, over the horizon, murky and ill-defined. I had images of doughboys wearing gas masks in trenches surrounded by barbed wire – along with Snoopy getting shot up by the Red Baron, that was pretty much about it. I recently decided to rectify this and to fill the void in my personal and historical knowledge.

Finding the right book was, oddly enough, a tough go. After a few attempts with some others, I happened across A World Undone by G.J. Meyer, who is not a historian, or even an academic, but a journalist. That distinction helped a bunch, I think, as Meyer approaches the book not trying to frame the war in any sort of grand, sweeping statement, but in a just-the-facts-ma’am manner. Meyer has no judgment he’s making, no point of view to defend or shoehorn facts into. He just spends his time telling us the story of the war, and makes something as incredibly complex as World War One into something graspable and understandable.

Meyer doesn’t assume the reader already has intimate knowledge of the facts and players involved, so he goes into much-needed background of some of the major decisions, explaining why those decisions were made. Chapter interstitials go into a brief, casual history of some aspect of the war – the Romanov dynasty, the Ottoman Empire, trench warfare, Kaiser Willhelm – giving you enough information to explain why people did what they did, why they made those decisions, without ever overloading you, dispensing information efficiently and engagingly. There’s only so much even a talented writer like Meyer can do, as the war, at several points, turns into a series of failed offensives, both sides bogged down in a lethal stalemate, and the deaths mount to horrendous heights.

Granted, it’s not a small book – take a look at some of the other WWI books at your library sometime, most will easily put the Yellow Pages to shame – but for those with an interest in the era, it’s an excellent introduction.

 

Best books of the year, 2008 edition.

Hope everyone out there had a good New Years celebration. At Casa de Bookpusher, the excitement began and ended with a bottle of Tuaca. Also, we spent a substantial amount of time cringing anytime Dick Clark appeared on our TV.

Unlike the cool kids who contributed to this article over at Present Magazine, I’m not limiting myself to books published in 2008; more along the lines of May’s Machete, I’m listing the books I read this year.And I’m sure I forget some, but here goes:

1.) The Secret History by Donna Tartt. A world-class Southern gothic tale set in a small New England college. A young outsider finds a perfect group of friends and all is well until a secret unravels everything. Magical, lyrical, and packs a deep emotional punch.

2.) Old School by Tobias Wolff. Just missed getting into my Goodreads Pantheon section by a hair. Set in a New England prep school (yes, yes, I know – the second in a row. Did I mention that I’m graduating grad school this year?) during the 1960, this novel is a meditation on the power of literature to change lives and reveal truths.

3.) The Turnaround by George Pelecanos. Pelecanos’ previous novel, the Night Gardener, made me cry, and I never cry. His latest is the story of a collision of bad luck and violence in a racially charged neighborhood of Washington, DC, in the early 1970s and how a chance meeting during the present day ties the lives of the participants back together.

4.) The Dawn Patrol by Don Winslow. Kaite Stover – Kansas City’s own Reader’s Advisory guru – tipped me to Winslow, and I spent about three weeks solid plowing through pretty much everything the man ever wrote. Dark, gritty noir on the beaches of Southern California with mobsters, losers, and surf bums. It sounds a bit goofy, but Winslow makes it sing.

5.) Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. Fascinating and absorbing. And here I thought he was just some barbarian dude who conquered some land that no one else wanted.

6.) and 7.) The Shotgun Rule and Half the Blood of Brooklyn by Charlie Huston. Both are awesome for different reasons. His Joe Pitt vampire series needs to be read by anyone and everyone – equal parts bloody and profane with a plot that roars like the engine of a souped-up Dodge Charger. The Shotgun Rule is about four teen friends in and early 1980s meth-laced suburbia who quickly get in deep trouble, uncovering secrets and family ties.

8.) The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly. Connelly continues to be one of the most solid and dependable writers in the biz, and his new novel, a legal thriller that continues with the character he introduced in the excellent Lincoln Lawyer, does not disappoint.

9.) Crossing California by Adam Langer. If Robert Altman had ever made a movie about coming of age in a Jewish neighborhood in 1970s/1980s Chicago, this would be it.

10.) Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian. An intimate look at a family who is shattered by an accident with a hunting rifle. Bohjalian is a master at taking a large social issue (in this case, gun control) and reducing it down to the personal. Touching and perfectly constructed.

 

Reasons Why Not To Read a Book – Intro and #1

There are tons of reasons why you should read books. Seriously: tons. Books are, quite possibly, the best thing that’s ever happened to me. (They’re, at the very least, in the top five, along with my wife, my son, coffee, and the Commodore 64.)

However, working at a library, sometimes I forget just how intimidating they can be. Walking into even an average-sized library, a patron is immediately faced with a building filled with thousands upon thousands of books. That can be intimidating, and even discouraging. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. One of my goals with this blog is to make the process of finding a book easier. Sure, I’ve spent time pushing you toward the good stuff, but what about the bad stuff?

Whenever I’m shelving browsing sections of my library, there are several reasons why I don’t pick books to read. With so many choices on the shelves, I’ve developed several ways of narrowing down the possibilities, making the choice of what book to take home at least somewhat manageable.

First: cigarette smoke. Nothing will make me reject a book faster than opening it up for the first time and a cloud of stale, sour cigarette smoke smacks you in the face. Smoke clings to book pages, and if a previous borrower was going through a two packs of heaters a day, it’s like being visited by the Ghost of Marlboros Past. Last week I picked up a James Patterson that was surrounded by a tiny haze all its own, like Pig Pen from Peanuts. I shelved that sucker and kept on moving.

There’s a possible corollary here having to do with encountering food stains as you’re reading – there’s nothing more gross than being absorbed in a good book and then come across a smudge of mustard in the margin left by some sloppy reader who refused to use a napkin. As disgusting as that is, it’s not something that would make me stop reading the book – maybe just cause me to skip some paragraphs to I can turn the page as quickly as possible – so that would be a whole ‘nother blog post.

Smoke on a book? Absolute no-no. Other reasons not to read a book are forthcoming.