How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Categories In the News , Entertainment , Movies & Books , Nonfiction

The writers' strike is finally over, so the 80th Annual Academy Awards are still set to air on Sunday, February 24th at 8:00 p.m. on ABC.  In honor of all things Hollywood, I decided to write about Toby Young’s gossipy memoir,     How To Lose Friends and Alienate People. 

Young is a British journalist obsessed with American celebrity.  He leaves London to accept a job as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, but after years of inappropriate office pranks, drinking too much, desperately trying to crash Oscar parties, and offending celebrities like Nathan Lane and Mel Gibson, he is fired.  As the New York Times wrote, “Young has an instinct for annoying the rich and famous that crosses over into the self-destructive.” 

How to Avoid Making Art, and a New Book by Someone Who Hasn't

Categories Movies & Books , Fiction

It was kind of nice to read two books in a row that I could get through in a single sitting.  The first is Julia Cameron's 2005 book of cartoons, How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy).  The suggestions are funny but sobering, since I've independently discovered them all on my own.  Hang out with time-consuming people.  Think about your novel instead of writing it.  Write emails (or blogs) instead of your novel.  Tell yourself your job makes it too hard to write.  Tell yourself you've missed the boat and are too old anyway.

Sort of related is Charles Webb's Home School, a sequel to his 1963 The Graduate.  It's 11 years later, and Richard Nixon is president.  Benjamin and Elaine are happily married, living outside New York City.  Benjamin works as a library shelver (yay!), but mostly, they devote their lives to homeschooling their 2 sons.  Note that homeschooling once seemed stranger than it does now.  They haven't seen Elaine's mother in 7 years.  That, of course, is just about to change.

Essence Magazine: Best Books of 2007, Part Two

Categories Award Winners , African American

In an entry dated January 10, I promised to follow up with the final list of award winners in the first annual Essence Magazine Literary Awards.   In a glittering ceremony in New York City, the awards were announced on February 8, and the Essence website offers a photo gallery of many of the honorees.  Lifetime Achievement Award winner Terry McMillan was looking very stylish as she announced that she is working on a sequel to her big breakout novel from 1992, Waiting to Exhale.  Describing the impact of a life immersed in books, McMillan said, “I don’t know where I would be without words and stories.”

Vermeer's Hat

Categories History , Staff Picks , Nonfiction , Arts & Crafts

Here’s one for all of you art history buffs, lovers of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and even readers of what are now popularly being called microhistories, those fascinating social histories that look at how a single insignificant object or place or event changed or reflected the course of world events.

In Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, Timothy Brook uses the objects glimpsed in Vermeer’s paintings to explore how economy and culture became globalized in the seventeenth century.

The broad-brimmed hat of the dashing officer in Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl becomes an emblem to explore the American fur trade and the search for the fabled Northwest Passage. A porcelain dish of fruit in the foreground of Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window leads to a discussion of the Chinese porcelain trade, and so on.

The Casey Award and Willie Mays: Art in the Outfield

Categories Sports , Local Interest , Arts & Crafts

Winter can be a very long stretch of time for a baseball fan.  Dreams of sunny afternoons at the ball park begin to float around with increasing frequency.  There is an art exhibit currently installed in the atrium of the Main Library that serves to make those idealistic images even more alluring.  For a generation of fans, Willie Mays is the embodiment of grace in the outfield.  In oils, watercolors, collage, and pencil drawings, Mays is represented for his artistry and for his love of the game.

Originally gathered in 2006 in honor of Mays' 75th birthday, the collection was first displayed at the Louisville Slugger Museum.  Cincinnati author Mike Shannon, editor of Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine and creator of the annual Casey Award, was the curator of this art collection; the Library has it on display through March 20.  Mr. Shannon will appear at the Main Library on Saturday, March 1 from 1:00 to 3:00 pm in the Reading Garden to meet the public and to sign books. The accompanying book can be purchased at the Library Friend's Shop, open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm.

Who Came First? Napoleon the First

Categories History , Poetry

First, watch and listen to this audio file. If you’re at work, depending on your office, you’ll either want to stick in the earbuds or crank it up really loud. If you’re reading this while waiting for the security guys to escort you to the bus stop, set it up as a loop.  (Email me, if you have time before they find your cube, and I’ll tell you how to make the loop hard to stop.)  

For all these years, I’ve thought about Gertrude Stein’s comparison between Napoleon and Picasso as having to do with a physical resemblance and with the nagging question of whether the experimental ideas of Picasso, like the Napoleonic empire, might someday come crumbling down.  Then I read Anton Neumayr’s 1995 Dictators In the Mirror of Medicine, which purports to be a psychological and physical portrait of Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin. 

People of the Book

Categories Fiction

A very popular genre in recent years has been the history-hopping novel where the author tells a story by tracing a work of art or literature through the centuries and illuminating each generation’s response to it.  Girl in Hyacinth Blue, by Susan Vreeland, was one, The Dream of Scipio, by Iain Pears was another, and Lord Byron’s Novel, by John Crowley still another superb example.

Well, here’s a very readable and enjoyable novel based on the same premise, and this time the found object is both literature and art:  a rare illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain that finally turns up in twentieth-century Sarajevo.  The novel that tells that manuscript’s story is People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks.