Barry Wightman's Open Salon Blog

Pepperland - Live at The Tattered Cover - May 2013

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 10:01:47 -0500

Pepperland – my new novel, slated for a May 2013 release date, will shake, rattle and roll into Denver’s LoDo District with a live, in-person authorial appearance at one of the great American bookstores–The Tattered Cover. Can’t get much better than that. If you’re anywhere in the western third of these United States in late May, hit the road for Denver – Tuesday, May 28, 2013 at The Tattered Cover, 1628 16th Street, Denver.

Coolness.

Thought I saw Kerouac up the street.

Pepperland - the novel - coming Spring 2013

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 09:10:08 -0400

News flash! Pepperland - the novel - will be published in the spring of 2013 by Running Meter Press, an imprint of Big Earth Publishing of Boulder, CO! Paperback and ebook. Let's rock.

Think the Ramones meet Jane Fonda meets Bill Gates.

What?

Pepperland is a noir love letter to the magic of music, the talismanic powers of new-fangled computers and a generational urge to change the world. It's one big, historical, multi-track concept album. Funny and satirical, told in fast-moving rock ‘n roll riffs and rhythms by the noted Music and Cultural Authority, Martin Alan “Pepper” Porter, Pepperland is about missing information, missing people, missing guitars, paranoia, Q & A, brothers, revolution, Agents of the Federal Government, IBM, interviews in Rolling Stone (real, imagined, or otherwise), Hugh Hefner, the birth of the Internet, a talking bear, the 18 minute Watergate tape gap, a Dark Stranger, love, death and the search for it amidst the wreckage of recession-wracked, entropically rundown mid-seventies America.

Watch for the Pepperland World Tour, coming to your town in 2013...

Schopenhauer meets Maynard G. Krebs...

Fri, 3 Aug 2012 11:08:56 -0400

The Asphalt Warrior
by Gary Reilly
Running Meter Press, Denver, 200 pages
ISBN: 978-0-984786-0-0-8

What if the gloomy 19^th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer drove a cab in Denver? What if Schopenhauer, crossed with Maynard G Krebs (you do know who that is, don’t you?) by way of comedian Steven Wright, chased fares in the Mile High City?

You’d have this book. And you need to read it.

The Asphalt Warrior, first in a promised string of taxi tales of urban adventure on the high (and low) streets of Denver, is a howlingly funny, literary cab-with-no-brakes ride through one Boomer’s late 20^th century angst—that of Brendan Murphy, otherwise known as Murph. I mean, any cabbie that quotes Nabokov’s Lolita, (“That Nabokov. What a Russian.” Ref: page 155), uses a copy of Finnegans Wake as a piggy bank, ruminates on English Romanticism (1789 – 1815), running everything through a screwy Sixties TV sitcom filter debating its intellectual value, well, I’ll ride with that guy.

That Murph. What a cabbie.

May I quote the wit and wisdom of Murph? Sorry, not enough room here. My copy is dog-eared, scribbled and beat up. I need to have a set of those metal bookmarkers. I’ll set it up showing Murph’s Greatest Hits. I tell ya, reading this book will make you feel like three hundred bucks. (Ref: page 72) Don’t worry, the Cab Driver’s Prayer applies: “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.” (Ref: page 26 et al)

Cue Tommy James and the Shondells’ Hanky Panky. (Ref: every time Murph turns on the radio)

But at heart, it’s a big-hearted personal story, with Murph as stand-in for author Gary Reilly and what he must’ve thought was a failed career, with the both author and character struggling to come up with the courage to face that typewriter and the blank page yet again. To write. Thankfully, he did. And now we’ve got it. And we laugh.

That Reilly. What a writer.

Biografiend

Thu, 2 Aug 2012 14:08:19 -0400

(This review was originally published in The Washington Independent Review of Books)

James Joyce: A New Biography
By Gordon Bowker
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
608 pages
ISBN-10: 0374178720

T. S. Eliot claimed James Joyce killed the nineteenth century. And he ought to know — Eliot, reportedly, was at the scene of the crime. Some say it was a mercy killing. Some say it was an atrocity.

After it was all over, after Joyce’s work was done, witnesses testified that the literary landscape was a waste land. All genteel fiction of the past was dead, buried by a flash flood of words from the future. As critic Edmund Wilson wrote, Joyce was “the great poet of a new phase of the human consciousness.” A new literary modernism mapped — the deed was done.

Adding to the evidence, it has also been firmly asserted that Joyce’s work was obscene, pornographic. Yet he had been an altar boy, a pious young man, always at the top of his class. Accused of being crazy, superstitious, manipulative, thin-skinned, Joyce was an acclaimed genius, accomplished linguist, an experimental writer of prodigious virtuosity, a fond father, a man of extremes and excess nearly always broke, a Catholic apostate — though one with a curious affinity for the liturgy — and an exiled Irish nationalist steeped in myth and legend. It took him years to get his novel Ulysses past US Customs, requiring an extensive obscenity trial and landmark decision to make it available to the American reader.

And his long-suffering mother just wanted her son to be a nice Jesuit-educated priest in Dublin.

Didn’t work out.

What did work out was that according to just about every Literary List produced by our Top Ten-obsessed culture, James Joyce wrote one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Ulysses — that most admired, loved, hated, mystifying, misunderstood and popularly unread novel. A book that launched a million dissertations.

And now, a most rare event — a new life of a very private man who hated biographers, called them “biografiends.” Joyce was famously uncooperative, avoiding interviews at all costs. As a result, biographies of him are few and far between. Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce — invariably referred to as “magisterial,” a doorstop of a scholarly standard by which all twentieth century literary biographies are measured — was published in 1959, revised in 1982 and has served the robust Joycean industry well for many decades. Joyce, who died in 1941, would have hated it — this new one too. The fact that Joyce’s copyright expired this year certainly helped in the creation of this new biography — the Joyce Estate, led by Stephen Joyce, the great man’s grandson, has been notoriously uncooperative with writers for years.

But veteran writer Gordon Bowker’s James Joyce: A New Biography is a deft and delightful left turn, a graceful avoidance of the sternly traditional approach to literary biography. Joyce always claimed he was just part of the furniture of Dublin, a simple, everyday man, much like the hero of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. He might have appreciated Bowker’s vision:

“Sorting through the relics of a life is not unlike sorting through the tangled wreckage of a deserted house—windows shattered, rooms in chaos, bits of broken furniture, smashed china, books and papers torn and scattered, smithereens of mirrors bouncing back flashes of fractured sunlit and fragmented images. Amid the chaos we may catch a fleeting impression of what the place once was like when occupied, a presumption of lives lived, of memories stored and passions spent. Salvaging all the scattered pieces and reassembling them can only produce an approximation of the original, and the drama of ghostly existences will depend on efforts of imagination as much as accumulations of fact.”

Gordon Bowker walks through the deserted, century-old “rooms” of James Joyce’s life, duly noting the location of the furniture, the details, the fabrics, which windows or doors are closed, which ones are open. He fingers the curios on the shelf, but, unlike Richard Ellmann before him, he dares to spin the gramophone, uncover the chair in the corner and try it out, see how it feels; he sits down, noticing the view from that corner of the long-dead room. He shares it with us, helps us see the life of a great writer.

Case in point — a thrilling moment and one of the dramatic peaks of the story. Despondent, having had Ulysses repeatedly rejected in the US and England, Joyce, in 1921, goes to Sylvia Beach’s then obscure and very un-famous little bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Company, for some tea and sympathy. Bowker winds up a dramatic chapter:

“She recalled him ‘sighing deeply in a tone of complete discouragement’ and saying, ‘My book will never come out now.’ On an impulse she said, ‘Would you let Shakespeare and Company have the honour of bringing out your Ulysses?’ Joyce was overjoyed, accepting the offer immediately…[thus] One of the greatest novels of the century would be published by a woman who had never published a book before, from a small backstreet bookshop which had been in business for barely six months.”

Magic.

Ellmann, by contrast, dryly relates this epochal literary event; buries it in a long paragraph hidden within a long chapter. The facts are the same, the style and emphasis completely different. Ellmann is a stern professor; Bowker, a fervent guide.

One of the strengths of Bowker’s approach is his presentation of the roots and origins of the famous characters — Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, all drawn from the streets and people of Joyce’s Dublin, his friends, enemies, relations — we know them now, we see them. None of this, though, is particularly revelatory in Joyce studies. It is Bowker’s style and grace that illumines and enchants. You will be inspired to reread. Or first read. Finnegans Wake on the beach this summer? It could happen.

A few reservations. Bowker does not much explore the actual writing, the real scene of the crime of the century. His interest is Joyce’s “elusive consciousness.” Those looking for a bit of literary criticism, commentary on the writerly words on paper, the “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay” (Finnegans Wake), or the “ineluctable modality of the visible…seaspawn and seawrack…snotgreen, bluesilver, rust” (Ulysses), must go elsewhere. And Ellmann’s more scholarly use of footnotes and extensive endnotes are far preferable — both are frequently fascinating. Also, Ellmann’s use of a constant guide to the current year and Joyce’s age at the top of each page is very handy, as is his much more useful and fully annotated index.

But hints of the beauty of this biography are hidden in plain sight—the cover. While past books about Joyce are covered with some famous old photograph, a glimpse of a distant and vanished past, James Joyce: A New Biography is wrapped in a lovely work of art, a portrait of Joyce painted by noted artist and designer Vivienne Flesher. Based on one of those old photos and using colors reminiscent of that first Parisian edition of Ulysses, white and a blue sea green, she, like Bowker, has captured the mysterious music of the writer’s soul. His eyes, nearly blind, are the focus—they are dark but with a faraway look. Joyce saw and he attempted to make us see, which is all a writer can hope to do.

Makes one think—if this cantankerous Irishman killed the nineteenth century, who will kill the twentieth?

Symbol of Joyce - Brancusi, 1929

Live and let love

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 19:07:13 -0400

(This review was originally published in the Washington Independent Review of Books)

Let’s see, a new novel by John Irving. Wrestling? Check. Gender confusion? Check. Northern New England? Check. Vienna? Check. Bears? No. Charm? Check.

A closer look. Right off the bat, we understand the title—here’s the novel’s epigraph:

“Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented.” William Shakespeare, Richard II

Trouble foretold. That, coupled with the book’s cover, certain to prompt a double take—a faceless photograph of a slender, subtly masculine figure slipping into (or out of) a bra—and we know that we are in sexually slippery territory. I am reminded of the old Kinks song, Lola; “Boys will be girls and girls will be boys…” Or, as Shakespeare put it in that iridescent cross-dressing extravaganza, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, “thy mind is a very opal”, changing colors when viewed from different angles.

This is familiar John Irving country.

Thirty four years ago, Irving, thick-necked and wrestler tough with arms crossed and period-correct hair, glares unsmiling at the camera—it’s the back cover of his landmark 1978 novel The World According to Garp. Oozing masculinity, Irving demands attention. Hey, listen up—read this, junior! And, we did.

Garp, a wonderfully quirky novel with one or two images that have stuck with me all these many decades, pretty much kicks off with a penis joke. Though Irving, back in the day, opted for a less shocking word, at least for polite literary society—peter. The joke, something about a cabby, an injured man and the venerable Peter Bent Hospital of Boston, immediately seduced the reader, setting the story stage for the laughs, love and horror to come.

Same as it ever was.

In One Person, Irving’s grimly delightful and politically timely new novel, also begins with the male member, er, front and center and, like Garp, is the story of a “sexual suspect”—Billy Abbott. Seems that our narrator Billy, early in life a student at the all-male Favorite River Academy of First Sister, Vermont in the mid-1950s, is developing crushes on the wrong people (e.g. a certain Miss Frost, a rather formidable and imposing older librarian). Billy also has an endearing cross-dressing grandfather who is a star in the First Sister Players troupe of amateur Shakespeareans, and he has trouble pronouncing the word—penis. The plural form, penises, is a particular problem. (Has anybody ever actually used the word penises? Never mind.) Know that many penises populate these pages as we follow Billy, later Bill, through the decades up to the present day.

John Irving grips the reader in a steely polemic headlock, much softened by the storybook charm of a Vermont town inhabited by a decidedly large and alternatively eccentric cast straight out of an old Bob Newhart Show—you know the one. Yet it’s a literary grenade tossed across the reader’s table. Or Kindle. It’s no dud. It’s an important book that will become, over time, a cultural standard. In a recent email to the New York Times, Irving stated, “If, as a country, we truly stand for equal rights, there is no forgiving intolerance of our sexual differences; opposition to gay marriage is sexual bigotry.”

And that’s what it’s all about. No pussyfooting around. Even in First Sister, Vermont. As Billy says early in the novel, “Oh, the winds of change; they do not blow gently into the small towns of northern New England.”

He’s right. And the novel, which is about secrets, sexual malleability, identity, theatre, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Rilke’s terrifying angels, uncertainty, missing fathers and disappointed mothers, must traverse the tricky cultural crevasses of all of the second half of the American 20^th century and—most ominously, the worst of the ‘80s—the AIDS epidemic in all its graphically depicted horror. Told in Irving’s straight-forward sturdy New England prose, Bill, in his present-day voice of experience, looks back on his life, and, like memory itself, jumps forward, backward, weaving past and future incidents into the story, then circling back to the narrative present all within the confines of fourteen tightly structured chapters, each titled like the key words and phrases of his life. All in the pursuit of, among other people and things, Miss Frost, his father and love.

Bill, thoroughly likeable, though many times, like anybody, frustratingly evasive and a bit callow, has regrets. Mid-way through the story, he says:

“In a future novel (an early one), I would write: “Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.” (I might have been thinking of that simultaneous desire to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost, not necessarily in that order.)”

More specifically, he goes on to say that life is a “series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.” I suppose I could have written “betrayals” instead of “robberies”; in my own family’s case, I might have used the deceptions word—citing lies of both omission and commission. But I’ll stand by what I wrote; it suffices.”

But fear not, it’s not all bad news. In One Person is a lovely pleasure. Elaine, Bill’s wise, lifelong best friend, sometime roommate and sometime lover, has a profane trombone of a voice and it is with her, that bisexual Bill shares his most intimate moments

“What’s it mean?”

“Adagio means slowly, softly, gently,” Elaine answered.

“Oh.”

That would be about the best you could say for our efforts at lovemaking, which we tried, too—with no more success than the living together part, but we tried. “Adagio,” we would say, when we tried to make love, or afterward, when we were trying to fall asleep. We say it still; we said it when we left San Francisco, and we say it when we close letters or emails to each other now. It’s what love means to us, I guess—only adagio. (Slowly softly, gently.) It works for friends, anyway.

And Grandpa Harry, the gentle lumberyard owner and community theatre actor who likes to dress in his cranky wife’s clothing, is Bill’s least terrifying guardian angel:

“And what about the Madame Bovary guy?” I asked my grandfather.

“Ah, well—there’s people you meet, Bill,” Grandpa Harry said. “Some of ‘em are merely encounters, nothin’ more, but occasionally there’s a love-of-your-life meetin’, and that’s different—you know?”

But in the end, the novel haunts and seduces. The way characters say, “I saw her—she’s truly beautiful…she used to wrestle.” Or, “I’ve seen him,” Tom whispered hoarsely. “He not at all who we thought he was—he’s more like us than we ever imagined. He’s beautiful, Bill!”

Friends and lovers come and go, some lost in the storm of life, leaving the survivors to carry on, clinging to the wreckage, leaving them to see, to become, do the best they can. Late in the novel, Bill says, “My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!” Perhaps with that and a little Shakespearean peace, love and understanding we can all live and let love.