Our Book Club: Book Selection & Organizational Issues

[Ellen (tellyouwhat)]

One more day of voting, right?  The announcement is in the daily sheet

[dejavu]

One more day of voting, right?  The announcement is in the daily sheet

Oh, dear, I think the voting is over now, but I guess we'll have to wait for Michael to make it official.  I'm getting confused now. 

P.S. I went ahead and ordered Jesus' Son; and Dave, just FYI, I finally set up my Amazon account and ordered through your store, too.  Three books and a Brokeback 2007 calendar.

[michaelflanagansf]

Jesus Son won - voting ended this morning.  Yeah!  [Does this mean I should put Salman Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses' in the next poll for equal time?]

[dejavu]

Please!   

Serious question: 
The original poll that had Jesus' Son said "not religious."  Do you/Dave know if the character is Hispanic?  (Jesus is a common Hispanic name, no religious connotation.)
 
And in that case should we be pronouncing like the name like (Hispanic) Jesus Alou of baseball: 
            "HAY-soos" or "hay-SOOS" -- rather than "JEE-zus?"

Just wondering for when I mentally read that name.  Thanks.

[michaelflanagansf]

Please!   

Serious question: 
The original poll that had Jesus' Son said "not religious."  Do you/Dave know if the character is Hispanic? 
And in that case should we be pronouncing like the name like Jesus Alou of baseball: 
            "HAY-soos" or "hay-SOOS" -- rather than "JEE-zus?"

Just wondering for when I mentally read that name.  Thanks.

The name of the book is a quote from a Lou Reed song - 'Heroin' which first appeared in recorded form in Jan., 1967 on the album 'The Velvet Underground & Nico'.  The pronounciation is the anglicized version, not the spanish pronunciation:

HEROIN
 I don't know just where I'm going
But I'm gonna try for the kingdom, if I can
'Cos it makes me feel like I'm a man
When I put a spike into my vein
And I'll tell ya, things aren't quite the same
When I'm rushing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus' son
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

I have made the big decision
I'm gonna try to nullify my life
'Cos when the blood begins to flow
When it shoots up the dropper's neck
When I'm closing in on death
And you can't help me now, you guys
And all you sweet girls with all your sweet talk
You can all go take a walk
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I'd sail the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land here to that
In a sailor's suit and cap
Away from the big city
Where a man can not be free
Of all of the evils of this town
And of himself, and those around
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know

Heroin, be the death of me
Heroin, it's my wife and it's my life
Because a mainer to my vein
Leads to a center in my head
And then I'm better off and dead
Because when the smack begins to flow
I really don't care anymore
About all the Jim-Jim's in this town
And all the politicians makin' crazy sounds
And everybody puttin' everybody else down
And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds

'Cos when the smack begins to flow
Then I really don't care anymore
Ah, when the heroin is in my blood
And that blood is in my head
Then thank God that I'm as good as dead
Then thank your God that I'm not aware
And thank God that I just don't care
And I guess I just don't know
And I guess I just don't know

There is a review of the song here:

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE4781DDD4DA97F20D4853C45D9A370F329D754F58050234558C0B13E4F8F0278E440ACC6CFB3E577B479A9B327AE5E0AD9CBE7469CA1&sql=33:xtoibkj9fakv

[Dave Cullen]

yea!!!

i had almost given up hope.

can't wait to join the discussion on this one.

excited about rereading it, and hearing what other people think of it.

and thanks for the lyrics and review, mf. i'd been meaning to look that up. don must have gotten a lot of chuckles out of that title. the first impression most readers are likely to get from the title is about as far from the actual reference as my little brain can imagine.

---

i found that critic's take on the heroin issue in the song Heroin kind of odd, though. he says, "While "Heroin" hardly endorses drug use, it doesn't clearly condemn it, either, . . . the notion of a rock & roll song discussing a dangerous drug without openly condemning it was practically the same thing as a ringing endorsement."

i don't think that's a fair representation. it makes it sound as if the song does nothing to promote the joy of the drug. i'd say it presents both high and low points. parts of it make shooting up sound glorious, other parts make it sound pitiful. he's "as good as dead," but also thanking God to be in that state. people are going to hear the parts they want to hear, and disregard the rest. (in particular, they're going to hear the mesmerizing descriptions and not necessarily buy the narrator's conclusions.) Twenty five years later--I didn't hear it till I was in college--it's still probably the most alluring ad for heroin i've ever heard.

this book, on the other hand--i don't think it will make anyone want to do heroin.

[Dal]

^^^^^^
Oh yeah  thanks guys!  That "Jesus' son" has been tickling around in my head, but, sure.  Great great song actually.  I must say,  always found it terrible in a sort of Les Fleurs du mal way.  "Terrible" not as in "lousy quality," but "frightening and awful."  Maybe a little like "Hurt" that Johnny Cash covers so well. 

Amazing that a little plant makes a chemical that locks on to our M-receptor and thereby screws so many things to high heaven.

[michaelflanagansf]

i found that critic's take on the heroin issue in the song Heroin kind of odd, though. he says, "While "Heroin" hardly endorses drug use, it doesn't clearly condemn it, either, . . . the notion of a rock & roll song discussing a dangerous drug without openly condemning it was practically the same thing as a ringing endorsement."

i don't think that's a fair representation. it makes it sound as if the song does nothing to promote the joy of the drug. i'd say it presents both high and low points. parts of it make shooting up sound glorious, other parts make it sound pitiful. he's "as good as dead," but also thanking God to be in that state. people are going to hear the parts they want to hear, and disregard the rest. (in particular, they're going to hear the mesmerizing descriptions and not necessarily buy the narrator's conclusions.) Twenty five years later--I didn't hear it till I was in college--it's still probably the most alluring ad for heroin i've ever heard.

Well...what will and will not make people want to do heroin is up for debate - and I don't think you need to have something that is a 'ringing endorsement' to get people to want to do it.  There is a certain negative allure toward self obliteration involved with junk that means you don't exactly have to show the person in a pleasant state in order to allure people who are interested in that drug.  'Drugstore Cowboy' (which again, isn't a ringing endorsement) even made me a little itchy.

Of course for anyone who has had a habit seeing practically anything can put you over the edge - I knew ex-junkies that were stimulated by 'Trainspotting' - and again, not a ringing endorsement.

But I quite agree about the song - after all, he does say it's his wife and his life.  I've always thought 'I'm Waiting for The Man' was a more negative portrayal ('feel sick and dirty more dead than alive').

And I can't wait to read that part of the book - I'm a big Burroughs fan - saw him read at least twice and got him to sign a bunch of stuff - for example under a photo of him with a shotgun in the RE/Search book I got him to sign 'I've seen more death than the law allows' from 'Place of Dead Roads'

[dejavu]

Okay, well, this book's topic seems stranger and stranger to me -- I don't think I'm going to fit in on this one.  But I'll try to keep an open mind.  And Dave, yes, I hope you can carry some of the discussion and enlighten us old fogies. 

[mary]

Well, I look forward to this book as well - it's one of the only ones on the list I haven't read, though I had been up for re reading any of them since it's been a while for most of them

[michaelflanagansf]

Okay y'all, I think I'm going to put up the December poll shortly.  [Like maybe Monday].

[michaelflanagansf]

Okay - I'm archiving the old last poll here:

Jesus' Son: Stories - Denis Johnson     - 7 (31.8%)
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene    - 3 (13.6%)
Perfume - Patrick Suskind    - 0 (0%)
Dirt Music - Tim Winton    - 4 (18.2%)
Magician's Assistant - Ann Patchett    - 6 (27.3%)
Three Junes - Julia Glass    - 1 (4.5%)
Of Love and Other Demons - Gabriel Garcia Marquez    - 1 (4.5%)
Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson    - 0 (0%)
Lucy Gayheart - Willa Cather    - 0 (0%)

[michaelflanagansf]

Here are the descriptions for the books in the sixth poll:

Amsterdam: A Novel - Ian McEwan

From Publishers Weekly
As swift as a lethal bullet and as timely as current headlines, McEwan's Booker Prize-winning novel is a mordantly clever exploration of ethical issues. Two longtime friends meet at the cremation of the woman they shared, beautiful restaurant critic and photographer Molly Lane. Clive Linley, a celebrated composer, and Vernon Halliday, the editor of a financially troubled London tabloid, could never understand Molly's third liaison with conservative Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony, who is angling to be prime minister, or her marriage to dour but rich publisher George Lane. Mourning the manner of Molly's agonizing death, which left her mad and helpless at the end, each man pledges to dispatch the other by euthanasia should he be similarly afflicted. Immediately afterwards, both Clive and Vernon are enmeshed in a crisis: Clive must finish his commissioned Millennium Symphony so it can premiere in Amsterdam, and Vernon must grapple with the moral issue of publishing photos of Julian Garmony in drag that George has discovered with Molly's effects. The clash between whether the demands of pure art are more valid than political accountability and financial solvency soon assumes a larger dimension that turns Clive and Vernon into bitter enemies and inspires each of them to seek revenge by the same means. McEwan spins these plot developments with smooth alacrity and with acidulous wit, especially focused on the way shallow and mediocre people can occupy positions of power and esteem: "In his profession, Vernon was revered as a nonentity." His ability to sculpt a scene with such arresting visual detail that it assumes a physical dimension for the reader are undiminished.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day comes a devastating new novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss. As children Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.

Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special–and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is another classic by the author of The Remains of the Day

Microserfs - Douglas Coupland

With his nose to the zeitgeist, the author of Generation X again examines the angst of the white-collar, under-30 set in this entertaining tale of computer techies who escape the serfdom of Bill Gates's Microsoft to found their own multimedia company. The story is told through the online journal of Danielu@microsoft.com, an affable, insomniac, 26-year-old aspiring code writer. Together with his girlfriend Karla, a mousy shiatsu expert with a penchant for Star Trekky aphorisms, and a tight clique of maladjusted, nose-to-the-grindstone housemates, he relocates to a Lego-adorned office in Palo Alto, Calif., to develop a product called Object Oriented Programming (Oop!), a form of virtual Lego. Much of the story concerns the the Oop! staff's efforts to raise capital and "have a life" amid 18-hour work days. Dan's journal, like much prose on the Internet, abounds in typos, encrypted text, emoticons for happy and for sad-and random snippets of information, a format that suits Copland's disjointed, soundbite-heavy fiction. Yet the randomness and nonlinearity of cyberspace hobble narrative. Amid endless digital chitchat and pop-philosophy, this novel's more serious ruminations about the physical and social alienation of life on the Information Superhighway never achieve any real complexity.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde

Surreal and hilariously funny, this alternate history, the debut novel of British author Fforde, will appeal to lovers of zany genre work (think Douglas Adams) and lovers of classic literature alike. The scene: Great Britain circa 1985, but a Great Britain where literature has a prominent place in everyday life. For pennies, corner Will-Speak machines will quote Shakespeare; Richard III is performed with audience participation … la Rocky Horror and children swap Henry Fielding bubble-gum cards. In this world where high lit matters, Special Operative Thursday Next (literary detective) seeks to retrieve the stolen manuscript of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. The evil Acheron Hades has plans for it: after kidnapping Next's mad-scientist uncle, Mycroft, and commandeering Mycroft's invention, the Prose Portal, which enables people to cross into a literary text, he sends a minion into Chuzzlewit to seize and kill a minor character, thus forever changing the novel. Worse is to come. When the manuscript of Jane Eyre, Next's favorite novel, disappears, and Jane herself is spirited out of the book, Next must pursue Hades inside Charlotte Bront‰'s masterpiece. The plethora of oddly named characters can be confusing, and the story's episodic nature means that the action moves forward in fits and starts. The cartoonish characters are either all good or all bad, but the villain's comeuppance is still satisfying. Witty and clever, this literate romp heralds a fun new series set in a wonderfully original world.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Dirt Music - Tim Winton

The stunning new narrative by Australian writer Winton (The Riders, nominated for the Booker), a tale of three characters' perilous journey into the Australian wilderness in efforts to escape and atone for their pasts, may just be his breakthrough American publication. At 40, Georgie Jutland, former nurse, inveterate risk-taker, incipient alcoholic and lifelong rebel against her prominent family, has moved in with widowed lobster fisherman Jim Buckridge, "the uncrowned prince" of the western seaside community of White Point. Although Georgie devotes herself to Jim's two young sons, their relationship is uneasy and somehow empty. When she's drawn to shamateur (fish poacher) Luther Fox, who breaks the law to keep his mind from tragic memories, the lives of all three begin to unravel. Lu, the lone survivor of a disreputable family of musicians who specialized in dirt music (country blues), is a memorable character, vulnerable and appealing despite his many flaws. When the White Point community resorts to violence against him, he heads into the tropic wilderness of Australia's northern coast, and the plot begins to challenge CBS's Survivor. With masterly economy and control, Winton unfurls a story of secrets, regrets and new beginnings. His prose, sprinkled with regional vernacular, combines cool dispassion and lyric concision. Geography and landscape are palpable elements: as the narrative progresses, the atmosphere shifts from the austere monotony of a seacoast battered by wind into spectacular gorge country, the bare desolation of the desert and the terrible heat of the tropics. But it's each character's inner landscape that Winton authoritatively traverses with his unerring map of the heart.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.


The Magician's Assistant - Ann Patchett

For two decades, Sabine has loved the magician Parsifal and served as his assistant. Theirs is an unorthodox relationship, however, for Parsifal loves men. When Parsifal's lover dies of AIDS, he marries Sabine so that she will be his widow. When Parsifal dies, Sabine receives some surprising news about his will. Believing her husband to have no living relatives, she is shocked to learn of a trust fund established for a mother and two sisters in Nebraska. When his family contacts her, she introduces them to the Los Angeles Parsifal. She then visits them in Nebraska to discover the truth about the man she loved and thought she knew, gaining insight into herself as well. Well written and full of interesting twists.

Three Junes  - Julia Glass

The artful construction of this seductive novel and the mature, compassionate wisdom permeating it would be impressive for a seasoned writer, but it's all the more remarkable in a debut. This narrative of the McLeod family during three vital summers is rich with implications about the bonds and stresses of kin and friendship, the ache of loneliness and the cautious tendrils of renewal blossoming in unexpected ways. Glass depicts the mysterious twists of fate and cosmic (but unobtrusive) coincidences that bring people together, and the self-doubts and lack of communication that can keep them apart, in three fluidly connected sections in which characters interact over a decade. These people are entirely at home in their beautifully detailed settings Greece, rural Scotland, Greenwich Village and the Hamptons and are fully dimensional in their moments of both frailty and grace. Paul McLeod, the reticent Scots widower introduced in the first section, is the father of Fenno, the central character of the middle section, who is a reserved, self-protective gay bookstore owner in Manhattan; both have dealings with the third section's searching young artist, Fern Olitsky, whose guilt in the wake of her husband's death leaves her longing for and fearful of beginning anew. Other characters are memorably individualistic: an acerbic music critic dying of AIDS, Fenno's emotionally elusive mother, his sibling twins and their wives, and his insouciant lover among them. In this dazzling portrait of family life, Glass establishes her literary credentials with ingenuity and panache.

The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles

American novelist and short-story writer, poet, translator, classical music composer, and filmscorer Paul Bowles has lived as an expatriate for more than 40 years in the North African nation of Morocco, a country that reaches into the vast and inhospitable Sahara Desert. The desert is itself a character in The Sheltering Sky, the most famous of Bowles' books, which is about three young Americans of the postwar generation who go on a walkabout into Northern Africa's own arid heart of darkness. In the process, the veneer of their lives is peeled back under the author's psychological inquiry

The Sheltering Sky is a landmark of twentieth-century literature. In this intensely fascinating story, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures.

--Tobias Wolff
"[The Sheltering Sky] is one of the most original, even visionary, works of fiction to appear in this century."

The Little Death - Michael Nava

This murder mystery about a gay public defender in the San Francisco area is distinguished by good writing and by skillful adaptation of the genre's traditions. Lawyer Henry Rios's loyalty to wealthy wastrel Hugh Paris, with whom he once had a brief affair, strongly recalls the male bonding in Raymond Chandler's classic The Long Goodbye. In both there is a sense of the protagonist as a lost soul trying to justify another person's existence and thereby his own. Through legal documents as much as police work, Rios tracks the murder's clues back to Hugh's family and its conflicts between old money and opportunists, both so greedy and eager to control the family fortune that they will sanction any form of legal trickery, corruption, even murder. Particularly striking is Nava's vision of the legal system as a true instrument of justiceignoring distinctions of position, wealth or sexual preference.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc

The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene

How does good spoil, and how can bad be redeemed? In his penetrating novel The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene explores corruption and atonement through a priest and the people he encounters. In the 1930s one Mexican state has outlawed the Church, naming it a source of greed and debauchery. The priests have been rounded up and shot by firing squad--save one, the whisky priest. On the run, and in a blur of alcohol and fear, this outlaw meets a dentist, a banana farmer, and a village woman he knew six years earlier. For a while, he is accompanied by a toothless man--whom he refers to as his Judas and does his best to ditch. Always, an adamant lieutenant is only a few hours behind, determined to liberate his country from the evils of the church.

On the verge of reaching a safer region, the whisky priest is repeatedly held back by his vocation, even though he no longer feels fit to perform his rites: "When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. Wasn't it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake? even if they were corrupted by his example?"

As his sins and dangers increase, the broken priest comes to confront the nature of piety and love. Still, when he is granted a reprieve, he feels himself sliding into the old arrogance, slipping it on like the black gloves he used to wear. Greene has drawn this man--and all he encounters--vividly and viscerally. He may have said The Power and the Glory was "written to a thesis," but this brilliant theological thriller has far more mysteries--and troubling ideals--than certainties. --Joannie Kervran Stangeland

[michaelflanagansf]

Here is the schedule for reading 'Jesus Son':

Week 1 - November 6th - 12th - we will discuss the stories 'Car Crash While Hitchhiking', 'Two Men' and 'Out On Bail'; Week 2 - November 13th - 19th - we will discuss the stories 'Dundun', 'Work' and 'Emergency'; Week 3 - November 20th - 26th - we will discuss the stories 'Dirty Wedding', 'The Other Man' and 'Happy Hour'; Week 4 - November 27th - December 3rd - we will discuss 'Steady Hands at Seattle General' and 'Beverly Home'.

[mary]

Here are the descriptions for the books in the sixth poll:

michael it is just too hard to choose - I've read 4 of the selections and would love to discuss each of them, or do I vote for one I haven't read and hope I have time to read it by December? 

pensive..........