13 April 2009

The Coffee, Women, Pizza, Light, Architecture, Gondolas, Pesto, Food, Wine, Food

The other day I received an excellent letter from my friend, author Todd Walton. I had asked him for some words about his new collection of stories.

The new book is titled “Under the Table Books, A Novel of Stories,” written as well as illustrated by Todd Walton and published this month by Lost Coast Press in Fort Bragg. Todd and his wife, cellist Marcia Sloane, currently are on a book tour through the Pacific northwest.

When they’re in town you can find Todd and Marcia performing music and stories together. Todd is a composer and guitarist as well as a writer of whimsical, moving, stories. His most recent previous collection was “Buddha in a Teacup” and you also can find his work in audio format.

This is Todd’s letter:

Dear Tony,

I hope you have a splendid time in Italy. I've never been, but I hear nothing but good things about the place. The coffee, the women, the pizza, the light, the architecture, the gondolas, the pesto, the food, the wine, the food.

(Since you asked,) "Florence" is really my story. All of them are. And this is the largest work I've published. Some of these stories are recorded on the CD I made with Marcia: “I Remember You.”

The outside story about this book is as follows:

In 1992 (living in Sacramento) I wrote a collection of eight or nine stories (I have a copy around here somewhere) entitled “Under the Table Books.” The stories were set in an anarchist bookstore, but they (the stories) were not otherwise connected. Consciously. I made fifty photocopies of the collection and sold them at readings. The copies went fast and reaction was swift – write more of these goodies, they make us happy.

I spent a couple years writing more bookstore stories. The characters turned out to know each other and the stories added up to a novel. I made a few copies of that second edition and illustrated it with a dozen or so black and white photographs. I gave these copies to a few trusty readers. Reaction was swift. Make more copies and spread them around. But first I moved to Berkeley.

Once settled in Berkeley, I decided to replace the photographs with pen and ink drawings, and in 1995, for the third edition, I created one hundred and fifty bound photocopies and gave them to friends and sold them at readings. The copies went fast and reaction was swift – get this book published!

I showed the manuscript to four literary agents. Reaction was swift and unanimous. "You will never convince a mainstream publisher to take a chance on this crazy thing."

Ten years went by. Then in one amazing stretch of five days in 2005 I received four letters and three phone calls from people (of all ages and political persuasions) encouraging me to reissue “Under the Table Books.”

So I read the book for the first time in a decade and was greatly inspired to write new stories to go with the old. One thing led to another and I wrote forty-four new chapters. I then shuffled these new tales into the existing manuscript and rewrote the whole thing. Then I put the book away for a year, rewrote it yet again, and made fifty copies for all the people clambering for copies. That was in 2006. Now it is 2009 and “Under the Table Books” has finally been published. Just in time to save the world.

It really is a novel, though the stories may be read as free-standing stories, though I think it ultimately succeeds more profoundly as a novel. The End.

Thanks and bon voyage, Todd

NOTES:

“Under the Table Books, A Novel of Stories” by Todd Walton. Lost Coast Press hard cover $26.95. ISBN 97819354489020. Illustrations by the author.

Todd Walton’s web site

09 April 2009

Anyway, They Won't Be Able to Read It

Some time in March, in Maine Township, which is not in Maine but in fact is an unincorporated region in central Illinois, someone just about lost their home burning books in the fireplace.

North Maine Fire Marshall Arnie Witzke said gaps that formed in the mortar between aging fireplace bricks allowed outside air to get inside the fireplace. “That, combined with the extreme heat generated by the large amount of paper material and ink being burned caused a fire to grow in the chimney and fireplace wall,” Arnie said.

This story is repeated every winter anywhere wood stoves meet old chimneys. However, it was the book burning aspect of this conflagration that got my attention.

What were the titles of the burned books? Why those particular books? How much heat would an old book give if an old book could give heat? Are burned books hotter than scorched newspapers? Were some books saved for later? If not, what happened the next cold night? Is burnt ink toxic? Did the homeowner run out of furniture to burn?

We need follow-up on this story. We need details. We need safer chimneys.

Meanwhile, in Canada, a 1,553 page, five inch thick Webster’s Dictionary borrowed from a library in Ontario in 1899 was returned 110 years late. The fine would have been $9,000, but local librarians waived it.

"It's amazing ... It's great to see a book from here come back after all this time. I'd just like to see one (returned) that's just been gone a month," librarian Ruth Blanchard said. "And I've been involved with libraries for 36 years and I've heard all the excuses," she added.

There’s more to this story, but all that’s important is the book got returned.

You don’t need to know that Mutt Baird, scion of the Baird family, carried the dictionary on a skid from Canada into New York over the frozen St. Lawrence river, then journeyed to Colorado, where the book languished in the Rockies for more than a century, from where Uncle Mutt’s descendants returned it to Canada this month.

Returned just in time for big printed dictionaries to be replaced by their online counterparts. Thanks a lot, descendants of Mutt. You might have thought of that before you went and invented the World Wide Web.

When I scan the World Wide Web for news about books I find stories that read like this one: Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, is complaining that “school reforms have destroyed English as a subject and denied children the chance to read books.”

British literacy as measured by standard tests is well up, but the teaching of English, in all its subtlety and glory, apparently is being overlooked.

In a speech to her association, Bousted said “...literacy, as a subject, is based on the naming of parts. Children rarely read whole books; they read parts of books - extracts. These extracts are mined for adjectives, and adverbs, and active verbs, and nouns.

“And so a whole generation of children have lost the opportunity, in school, to learn how to talk and how to listen to others," she said. "And for those children who spend their lives at home cocooned in front of the television, interacting with no-one, this loss will be incalculable."

A high level to-do in London the other day makes Bousted’s argument for her.

When photographers snapped pictures of a Secret document being carried into 10 Downing Street by Britain’s most senior anti-terrorist policeman, those who could read were accidentally alerted to a planned operation against a suspected al-Qaeda cell.

Bob Quick, the Assistant Commissioner who didn’t close the cover on these secret documents, has apologized and resigned. Photographer Steve Back, who also is a magistrate, said “(the Assistant Commissioner) looked at us. He knew we were there.”

The photographer claimed he had tried to warn the Government that photographers were able to read top secret papers when people go through the door of 10 Downing Street. He said, "I have told Downing Street before that the quality of lenses and digital lenses means that we can read ministerial papers.”

This proves it. Photographers, at least some of them, can read.

So, officials: Go ahead and wave your secret docs at the fish and chips crowd. They won’t be able to read them anyway.



NOTES:

Book Burning Leads to Chimney Fire: "If you have a fireplace, and if you burn wood, you should have it cleaned out every year," he said.

Book Returned 110 Years Late

School Reforms teach literacy, not English

Bob Quick resigns

01 April 2009

Frogs in the Sun

We were sitting around in the late March sunshine, four guys of a certain age, talking, surrounded by green growing things, and birds, and women and children, as old men ought to be surrounded in the spring.

We were talking about a village in Zimbabwe in the 1990's where 400 sculptors had gathered in a cooperative to produce art. The only rule: No copying each other. People came from the wider world to see the village and buy the art.

We were talking about the death of newspapers. One of us asked, rhetorically, did we think there would be any newspapers left publishing on paper in our lifetime? And if not, what comes next?

Newspapers, like books, are the products of a long chain of events. In the case of books it may be years from the idea to the book in your hand. In the case of newspapers, maybe a day or two, idea to print.

You pick up the finished product, look it over, skim to the Sports or read a chapter in a book that interests you. You can read as much or as little as you wish, but someone else thought it through and laid it out before you picked it up.

On the Internet, right now, you can design your own book and create your own newspaper. If all you want to read is Sports, that’s all you will read. You will not have to page through the news, Home & Garden, or anything else. Just Sports, if that’s what you want.

Same for books. Leaving aside stories, tales, novels, comics and poetry, leaving fiction aside, you easily can look up a topic on Google, research Wikipedia, visit any number of web sites in any number of places, and make your own book, at least in your own mind.

You won’t be going on a book tour. You won’t write like Rebecca Solnit or have adventures as thrilling as Bernard Cornwell’s inventions, but you can find the facts yourself.

Then there’s the bookstore. When you enter a good one, you enter into someone else’s mind. I always thought of my bookshop as a mind filter. There’s a universe of books and newspapers out there, but in my store you find only what made it through my personal filter. Books I liked even before they were published and hoped you’d like. Picked for you, or someone just like you.

So the question came up, Tony, you’re about to travel in Italy. What are the bookstores like over there? And what about libraries? Do they even have libraries with free lending over there?

Good question, my friend. I’m going to look around and ask questions. I have seen modern Italian bookstores, sleek and clean, in the big cities. I don’t remember seeing bookstores in other places, little towns. I don’t remember seeing bookstores anywhere in Italy but in the cities.

Same for libraries. There are famous and important libraries in Italy, but they are mostly museums for manuscripts. They keep the originals safe and scholars consult them in white gloves. Italy never had Andrew Carnegie to build brick palaces throughout the land for free lending libraries. Are regular books available for regular people in regular libraries? I have no idea.

* * * * *

Children raced around the garden, making trails that never were, climbing trees, shouting to each other. The women came and went, staring. In silence they watched us, squatting in the sun like frogs, shooting the spring breeze. Waiting for instructions.

It is so fine to be an old frog in the sun, pondering the world and its many wonders. No need to jump. No reason, right now, to go inside and do the dishes.

Spring, sun, and friends. Italy, books, and libraries, and newspapers and African sculptors who invented a tobacco farm into a cooperative village in the former Rhodesia.

How are they doing in that village now? I asked. Zimbabwe is a mess.

They’re still there; I think they’re doing fine, my friend said. That’s what he said. Maybe someone should go look.