Jobz Are Us: The Ethical Dilemmata of the Humble Scrivener

Toiling away here in the bloggy vineyard, Your Narrator finds himself in near-constant search of gainful, remunerative scribbling. Oh sure, regaling the tens of loyal i2b followers with insight, pithYeth. Pith., andtres bon mots in return for your undying adulation is all the reward an inky wretch could hope for. But the family has this annoying tendency to, you know, eat, so I expose my tender talents to the cruel world in hopes that someone will toss a few shekls my way.That Donate button over to the right has not brought the expected riches, needless to say. The mere mention of which – the Donate button, that is – is of course, a classic example of shameless whoring, one which allows the reader a choice between casting judgement on Your Narrator or of empathizing with his plight. And, also too, this mentioning – re: the judgement v. empathy conflict – potentially instantiates a frisson of guilt in the freeloading reader, which pointing out represents a further, and perhaps more pathetic, instance of Narratory whoring.

So I troll, I dig. I hustle. And occasionally, I am rewarded beyond my wildest dreams when I find an inducement like this:

Do you love essential oils? Do you love to write about them and take pictures? [….] Essential Oil company is looking for someone who is passionate and knowledgeable about essential oils. We currently have a blog and we are looking to add guest editors/bloggers to our mix. Will will pay per post which will need to include general information about essential oils, DIY projects, recipes or other ideas. Posts must include images.

The photo at the top accompanies this hustle, which appeared on Craigslist,Pro tip. Job ads on Craigslist are maximum sketchy. I love this: in itself, it appears to have been written by a 7-year old ESL student. “Will will pay…” But scoreboard! They realize they need a writer!A plight more common that most would think, and one that goes unrepaired despite the glut of folks like me who stand at the ready to make your communications shine! Too much hard sell? Sorry, got a little over enthused.

Further, its appeal to the aspirant writer’spassion for essential oils bears all the earmarks of a near-empty paycheck for the writer’s work. Come for the oil! Stay for the love! Plus, photography!!!

Really, Your Narrator chortled heartily at this one, not even needing to get into the 4th grade trick of mis-attaching the modifier in a way that throws shade as to which is truly essential in their minds: the oil or the blogger.Fun fact: if you are picky and priggish about language and its (mis)use, you will never find yourself unamused in our culture. You may also never find yourself invited to parties and the like. Is that trade-off worth it?

But this is far from the funniest/oddest job description I’ve ever heard. Travel back through the misty clouds to last fall….

The result of a hot tip, I found myself a-phone with a marketing agency that specializes in providing ghost- bloggers/tweeters for various publishers and their author list. This allows the tormented author of belle lettristic masterpieces (as well as authors of, let us say, non-bl titles) to maintain a daily presence on the Internet tubes as a witty, friendly, ‘hey-I’m-your-old-pal here sharing recipes and anecdotes and asides as I take frequent (up to ten a day) breaks from my bl and/or non-bl musings’, when in fact, a writer working under deadline, regardless of the relative bl and/or non-bl merits of the work, definitely does not have surplus time/wit/inclination for such base-level whoring.That’s for guys like me! Thus does it fall to schlockingly underpaid ghost writers to maintain the illusion of your favorite author as an active and engaged pal with her readers, when in fact, she is likely cranking out sub-mid-list potboilers at a rate that would have made Elmore Leonard quail.

And let’s go ahead and get out of the way any illusion re: the bl and/or non-bl divide. The authors/titles are decidedly down the prestige meter here; we’re not talking anyone/thing you’d likely read about in the NYRB or NYTBR. In fact, what we had in this case was a stable of ghost-writers churning out mass-pulp fiction under specific trade names, kind of like the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys titles of my youth, but without quite as much class.

So, here I am, spinning myself as the perfect fit for the job of ghost-writing social media content for someone who does not exist but is rather being made manifest by a gaggle of scribblers who, like myself, are ghost-writing for some nom de plume who does not really exist.This delightfully meta recursion could go on forever, like one of those Nam June Paik installations with video cameras and monitors replicating into infinity. Could I get so many (imaginary) authors assigned to me that I would have to sub out the daily Intertubes witticisms to yet another level of people pretending to be someone pretending to be a person who does not exist anywhere other than a book catlague? Even more challenging: assuming the level of one’s persona-creating prowess – maybe even to the point where you’ve really devised some seriously recognizable and individuated character traits and proclivities for these authors who do not truly exist – would one also be able to deploy the epic juggling chops one would need to keep each of the various non-extant “people” sorted out in one’s daily creation of “witty, friendly, ‘hey-I’m- your-old-pal here” dispatches, or would eagle-eyed readers be able to detect your various fabricated personae bleeding one into another, thereby undermining the, not integrity, no, but the structural resilience of the whole facade. Say it with me, people, this thing is getting fraughter by the minute.

It turned out that this agency had two specific clients. One is a publisher of potboilerish steampunk thrillers, but, said the agency rep, they had plenty of people to keep that social media illusion rolling. The other publisher, said the rep, presented a little more of a challenge, and this is where she hoped I “might be able to help, but, ah, it is, well, a little delicate.”

Interest engaged! Do tell, what is this mystery challenge?

Please don’t be offended…

Offended? Damn, I’m dying to find out! Tell me, tell me, please!

…but how would you feel about ghost blogging for authors of gay male erotic fiction?

Ya gotta admit: as job-related questions go, this beats out even a gold standard like “Do you love essential oils?” by a country mile.

You would have been proud of Your Narrator. He was silky, unruffled, and decidedly unoffended. This was some kind of challenge. Could I do it? Who knew? So I exuded that reliable and unearned confidence that served me in good stead all these years.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure I could handle that. I love new challenges. But you should know that I’m a 30-year married hetero with two kids.

There was a relieved sigh at the other end of the line (apparently, the agency repWho, as it happened, was breast-feeding her child during our call, a fact that she had shared early on in our telephonic relationship for reasons that were not completely clear. But I don’t judge. I was likely in boxers at the time, myself, though there was no human creature attached to me. had borne the brunt of more than a few churchy/homophobic rants), and she said:

That’s ok. Most of the authors aren’t gay, anyway. In fact, most of them are straight women.

I allowed that this was a fascinating tidbit. Please, do go on.

Yeah, in fact, we did some market research and discovered that 85% of all our sales were to married women between the ages of 40-55. Almost all of the authors fall in that group, too.

You know what they say (and of course, they are always right): You can’t make this shit up.

So to re-cap: the job was to provide ghost writing services to authors who were in fact ghost writers themselves, writers pretending to be differently gendered and gay; straight women writing pornography (excuse, erotica) about man-on-man/men encounters for other straight women. And my role was to execute the friendly/witty/your-good-pal online personae to provide the so-called authors’ fans with a sense of connection one-to-the-other. I believe this is a situation for which the word simulacrum was specifically coined.

I did not get the gig. I guess things were already confused enough without dropping an aging, hetero, patriarchal penis person into the mix.

So next time you are spot a book like this, keep this little tale in mind. It may not be quite what you think. Or, if you are a married woman between the ages of 40-55, it might be exactly what you think.

This is not from the publisher in question, but it is pretty representative of the title list I saw.

Who needs a Jade Helm conspiracy when this kind of thing is going on?

My. Favorite. World. My Favorite World #37

Eagle-eyed readers of this here bloggy pontificatory nonsense are well aware of Your Narrator’s affection for professional tennis. It’s what makes the two weeks that wrap around Labor Day my favorite sporty time of the year. Yep, it’s US Open time.

It’s not just that your guide has attended the US Open – once at the venerable Forest Hills Club, where he had the great fortune to have the great Pancho Gonzales take a leak in the urinal next to his, and where the legendary Alan King deigned to sign his player program and flick a cigar ash in his, Your Narrator’s, general direction.

“Have fun kid, don’t get drunk.” Such a sweet man. Nah, I’m kidding. He was an arrogant asshole. But he did sign my program.

Later, at the grandly named US Open Tennis Center out in Flushing Meadows, Young Narrator watched Laver and Connors and Rosewall and Stan Smith and some perky little blond named Chrissie playing her first big match against Billie Jean, &c.

The last visit in 1985 found Your Narrator yelling for/against Wilander and Edberg, Connors, McEnroe, and that guy who sounded like a disease. Gerulitis. Yeah.

And it’s not just because that stadiumSpecifically, Louis Armstrong Memorial Stadium, nee the Singer Bowl. By another turn of fate, someone who looked just like me and had my acne attended his first-ever bigtime rock and roll show in LAMS, nee Singer. The bill was Jo Jo Gunne, the James Gang, and the frankensteinian Edgar Winter Group. The world, it is small. in Flushing Meadows sits across the concrete plaza from Shea StadiumWhere, as it happens, Narrator saw Game 4 of the 1969 World Series, but did not, repeat, did not see either The Beatles or Grand Funk Railroad., and in the shadow of the 1964 World’s Fair tower/needle/useless phallic appendage, the selfsame place where the pre-elementary Narrator discovered It’s a Small World in the Disney Pavillion. To his parents’ everlasting despair.

Nope, it’s none of this. It is that Your Narrator is a kneeling, evangelical mendicant at the Shrine of the One True Sport. You can have your teams of people running around like noggin-deficient chickens, your behemoths beating each other senseless between the ropes, your vroom vroom, hyper-steroidal go carts spinning round in circles, your various stick and ball fiasci. As much as one may like these games (some more, some less), it’s the well played tennis match that makes the Narrator’s heart fly like a vicious down the line forehand screamer.

One could go on here about Andre Agassi, or Roger Federer, or Ashe or Steffi or any of the others whose games have made the world a better place for years. One could talk about the epc amalgam of grace, power, speed, and brute physical endurance that makes this the sport worth watching above all others. But not tonight.

Because tonight, since Venus and Serena are about to face off in the quarterfinals – with Serena on a path to the first true Grand Slam in almost 30 years – well, let’s make do with one curious observation.

After years of debating the visual acuity of every linesman and umpire, of disputing and arguing furiously over close line calls (“You CANNOT be SERIOUS!”All linesmen insults are the intellectual property of one J McEnroe ), we have all gone gently into that good night wherein an impossible technology automates line calls so effortlessly that the “integrity of the game” has been purified to its most error- free essence.

It’s not that the added drama and strategy around line challenges are lost on us. It’s that we’ve been robbed of the drama and spectacle of one of our favorites being literally robbed of a point, a set, a match, all because a human being blinked or had a bee fly by or simply lacks the visual acuity to make a decent call (“ARE YOU BLIND?”). And that we have simply acquiesced, in an act of faith as deep as any Road to Damascus moment, to the power of the machine to determine our destinies. Even the most Luddite of tennis fans turns to the Chase Official Review as the Diviner of Truth. It is, in its childlike way, almost touching.

It may be more fair, but is it better? Alas, the jury is not out, but rather has bellied up to the bar to watch the Sisters battle it out. And that’s where we should all be.

My Favorite World #36

Life brings you moments, events that are pebbles tossed into our little ponds. Most of them pass by, one to the next, leaving little trace. Lots of our moments roll right by without us realizing that there was a moment at all; we may notice ripples later onSometimes years later. and wonder where they came from. Some make more of a splash, are harder to ignore. Either way, the moments accumulate and define what we become, our tastes, our habits, our passions.

And some moments land like a boulder. You see it happening, you know it’s happening, and you know that nothing is ever going to be the same again.

So it was one April night in 1979 in Athens, Georgia, when I went to hear some jazz group that was supposed to be good. What did I know? I thought Return to Forever and Jeff Beck played jazz.Hold your fire! They were/are great. But not jazz. No.

I walk in and see a stage literally covered with every imaginable gong, drum, saxophone, flute, squeaky duck, penny whistle, plastic tube, bicycle horn, &c. Seriously, there must have been a few dozen gongs and bells, conch shells, and at least 20 saxophones, flutes, and trumpets. These guys had all the instruments. The low, pre-show lighting bounced spangles of dancing coins off these gleaming surfaces. I’d never seen anything like it.

The band walked on stage, several of the musicians dressed in African tribal costumes with full face paint; one musician unadorned save his doctor’s lab coat; and the fifth musician dressed in street clothes. As per their custom, they stood silently facing the East for what seemed forever. The lights had come up full by then, and the dancing coins had transformed into a vibrant planetarium show of stars and suns. It was dazzling.

And then all of heaven and hell broke loose, with the thunder of a gong and a blasting cacophony of horns and drums and bells and godknowswhat that literally pushed me back in my chair. I held my breath almost the entire time, and when it was over I went home without talking to anyone because I couldn’t handle another piece of information of any kind. It was the strangest, most compelling and frightening and off- putting and enveloping experience of my first twenty years. It was music, it was noise, it was theater and dance and kabucki.Though I had no idea whatthat was at the time. It was multitudes. I had run headlong into what the AEC called Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future, and I knew that nothing was ever going to be the same again. That was the beginning of my lifelong obsession with jazz in general, and especially with what critics have been calling avant garde jazz for going on 60 years now.How old does something need to be before it is apres?

I had no frame of reference. Aside from the drum kit (which represented about 1/20th of the total percussion array on stage), none of the instruments were part of what had been my pretty standard suburban white boy musical diet. I had to learn about these instruments and the people who made them come alive. I would literally buy 10 albums a week, and I was borrowing and taping a dozen more. At this time, you could go to the used record store and buy LPs for 2 buck apiece, 3 bucks for a double album. It made it easy to take a flyer on something you weren’t sure about; maybe you recognized a name of someone from another album, or maybe it was just the record label, or maybe the cover caught your eye, and if a record sucked, you could trade it back in the next week for a buck credit. I couldn’t get enough.Fun fact. I bought most of these LPs from a fledgling guitar player named Pete Buck. I heard he made it kind of big later on in accounting or something.

That’s almost 40 years ago, and I remember that show and its aftermath as clear as a bell. It remains one of the handful of transfiguring experiences of my life. And it opened, in turn, a willingness to seek out different forms of literature, art, theatre, films…you name it. Seeing AEC led me to Coltrane and Miles and Cecil and Ornette and Braxton and the list never ends because I knew there was music out there that could surprise and confound me and disturb me if I just looked hard enough.

Here’s a piece from their album Nice Guys. It’s a pretty good representation of the way they would blend incredible composition and delicate ensemble playing with the wildest free jazz around, and even better, how they manage to move from one realm to the other on a dime, smooth as silk. I still have a framed copy of the cover photo on an ECM promo poster.

So thank you Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Malachi Favors, and Famadou Don Moye, for cracking my bean wide open and filling it with such a magnificent array of riddles and sounds and possibilities. I can’t begin to imagine what kind of human I would have become without this.

And thanks to Mitchell Feldman (left), the guy who made this show happen in a time and place where such a proposition – a Deep South presentation of Great Black Music – was decidedly unlikely. When Mitchell left Athens, I took over his Wednesday noontime jazz show at WUOG, Out to Lunch; this experience was probably the most valuable aspect of my undergraduate education. (Photo taken in front of the Georgia Theater the afternoon of the show.)

The video below is a 20 minute blast of AEC at their best. For a dozen years at least, whenever and wherever they took the stage, they were the greatest band on earth.

Bad. Ass. Mother. Fuckers.

Respect!

My. Favorite. World.

My Favorite World #33

Amy Shumer is funny as shit. She’s bawdy and profane and smart as a damned tack. And apparently, she’s pissed off the Disney/Lucasfilm monolith with her parody photo shoot of Star Wars icons. That alone is enough to earn her solid hero status. Hung like a goddam robot.

I wouldn’t bother to post about her because she is literally everywhere in the media these days, but a friend the other day declared, “I literally have no idea who this person is.” So on the off chance that one of my 7 readers is one of the 13 people in the world who aren’t hip to Amy, here goes.

Her “project”As the lit/art eggheads like to say. is primarily an exploration of what it means to be a young White woman in the media/world at large, the judgements/assessments of a Woman as an object first and foremost, and then perhaps having some sort of talent or other redeeming quality that might/might not deserve consideration based on whether she is hot/not hot. Also, too, whether a woman has a right to enjoy sex/food/drink to excess and without concern for what anyone else might have to say about it. At a recent awards ceremony, she declared herself well out of fucks to give, but happy to take them as she wishes.

“I’m probably like 160 pounds right now and I can catch a dick whenever I want, like, that’s the truth. It’s not a problem!”

She had been introduced by AbFab’s Jennifer SaundersAnother very funny woman who also ran out of spare fucks a long time ago., who was a puddle of hysterics by the time it was all done. I’ve also watched Shumer reduce EllenNo last name necessary! to speechlessness. She takes no prisoners.

I could recommend any number of clips as exemplars of comedy- meets-art-meets-social-commentary that deserves placement in the imaginary hall of fame occupied by Lenny, Carlin, Pryor, Rock, &c.And why, oh why, mister pale patriarchal penis person is there not another woman on that list? The problem runs deep, and it damn sure ain’t the fault of funny women like Silverman, Diller, Rivers, Boozler, &c. Mea culpa. The extended piece on rape culture in a Texas high school football team is pitch perfect; jokes about rape are pretty difficult to pull off without being an asshole, and she nails it. The pastoral luncheon with Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette celebrating Julia Louis Dreyfuss’ “last fuckable day” before she is relegated to cronedom is superb. The trial of Bill Cosby is cruel and spot on. And even better, very funny.”I believe it was my mentor, the great Bill Cosby, who said, ‘Here, take this.'”

But for my money, the best thing yet in her work is this episode-length “remake” of 12 Angry Men. The cast alone is to marvel at; it’s a sign of her clout and the respect she garners that this little show on basic cable could attract Jeff Goldblum, Dennis Quaid, Paul Giamatti,Vincent Kartheiser, Kumail Nanjiani, Chris Gethard, and John Hawkes for a single episode. But the genius is in the execution: a faux shot-by- shot remake, but instead of a murder trial, these men are to determine whether Amy is hot enough to be on television. Well does she?

Watch it. http://www.cc.com/full-episodes/d6vl24/inside-amy-schumer-12-a ngry-men-inside-amy-schumer-season-3-ep-303

My. Favorite. World.

My Favorite World #30

I’ve written before about the almost incalculable amount of great music that exists out there that most of us never have a clue about. Lately, a pal has been funneling a supply of CDs from the Clean Feed label based in Lisbon. With all the production values and eclectic tastes of the ECM or the old Black Saint/Soul Note or HatHut gangs, this label has been putting out tons of great music for almost 15 years. Most of the musicians I’ve never heard of before. Most of the names are unpronounceable – improbable scrambles of consonants and vowels and umlauts and what not. And most of the music has been knockout.

Today’s listening treasure is Carlos Bica and Azul. Carlos Bica is the bassist and primary composer. Frank Mobus is the guitarist, and his sound is more than a bit reminiscent of that Frisell character.Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Here’s a taste:

I’m not going to claim that this CD is any kind of world changer. What it is: fine playing, good group interplay, and compositions with enough quirk to keep you awake, but enough space and flow to let the improv ramble a bit. Exactly the kind of music I envision for The Jake Legg Trio, should it occur. Like this! http://www.jakelegg.com/02%20My%20Buffalo%20Girl.mp3

My Buffalo Gal, by Bill Frisell, perf. by the Jake Legg Trio

Fine music, found just off the beaten track. My. Favorite. World

My Favorite World #29

Life is busy with lots of good stuff. Big piece of this comes in multiple opportunities to make music noise. Last week, RoboCromp (The Band That Refuses to Die, Even If You Beat it With a Stick) enjoyed a two night tour of the RR Square/Gaines district of Tallahassee. Jeff and I first played together 27 years ago in a band I put together called The Hundredth Monkey.

Hundredth Monkey, w Tom King and Mike Roe – Frijolero’s, Atlanta, 1988

A few months in, Jeff and the drummer (not pictured) scarpered off to form a different band. That’s how it goes…

But here we are today, the duo project in it’s 11th year. It’s a ton of fun, and gets better all the time. But wait, there’s more!

Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel

Those dapper gents from Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel have invited me to sit in at their show this weekend in Pine Lake. We’ve played together once before in their studio, and the result is a recording with me on it that I actually enjoy listening to. Here’s a tickle:

[jwplayer mediaid=”987″]

Lots of good work going on in My Favorite World.

The only drawback: scant time to put into the longer i2b posts. But hark! I detect a gap in the crazy schedule, maybe just enough to scrawl something coherent. Maybe.

My. Favorite. World.

My Favorite World #28

Really, do I need to say anything more? OK, this:

Andy Warhol shops at the Gristedes near his 47th Street Factory in 1965. (Photo by Bob Adelman/Magnum Photos. Brett Fechheimer and the “Manhattan Before 1990” FB Group) My Favorite World.

My Favorite World #27

It’s graduation week for Röbsdöttïr, which means Memory Lane has been a road far more traveled by.

Who is this kid? I’ll let a slightly altered quote fromMy Dinner with Andre suffice:

I mean, you know, people hold on to these images: father, mother, husband, wife, again for the same reason: ’cause they seem to provide some firm ground. But there’s no wife there. What does that mean, a wife? A husband? A daughter? A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly, there’s this beautiful young woman waving goodbye, and then she’s gone. Where’s that daughter?

All leading up to this. My Favorite World. Watch out. She’s on her way.

My Favorite World #25

The A/C is busted and it’s fking hot; the dryer repairman is making his third visit in 2 weeks; I’m working under deadline on a story that just won’t gel. This post is a day late, and the grass still needs cutting. I know the rent is in arrears, the dog has not been fed in years. It’s even worse than it appears.

But it’s alright. That woman in the middle? That’s my girl.

That’s my wee baby girl in the middle. She received a Best and Brightest Scholarship award last night, somehow, despite still being 3 years old and fitting on my shoulder like a kitten, despite still being in pigtails and braces and having a broken arm, this wee baby girl has become quite the amazing young woman. I reel, I gape in amazement, I cry. I bust all my buttons.

Here’s a note from a good pal this morning upon hearing the news:

I remember when she was five: “what are you thinking about, Anna?” “Oh, I’m trying to figure out what the square root of 20 is, it has to be between 4 and 5 right?”

This kid is one of my heroes.

My Favorite World. My Favorite World #24

It’s book week at MFW!

Two great reads under my belt in the past few days – Walter Mosley’s Debbie Doesn’t Do It Anymore and Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Coming off a failed attempt at Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, it was a relief to pick up a couple of winners.

I just finished the Murakami this afternoon, and it pushed all my buttons. Deeply felt, beautifully writtenIf the translator is to be believed., and paced like a slow walk in the woods. Tsukuru is a 36 year old man who suffered a terrible sadness at age 20, nearly died (or attempted suicide) as a result, and has lived a dull and hermetic existence ever since. The book is his long-overdue journey to understand (or not) and come to (or not) a sense of acceptance. It seems that Murakami’s lifelong project is to try to make sense of loneliness and alienation, and in this book it’s no longer buried under metaphor; the loneliness is front and center this time.

It’s almost a trademark of Murakami to focus on a disaffected, emotionally frozen protagonist. He’s done it often, and well, but it never feels as if he has settled into formula, from Toru Okada in Wind Up Bird Chronicles to Kafka Tamura in Kafka on the Shore to Tengo Kawana in 1Q84. Tsukuru is similar to these characters, but distinctly his own man, no small irony with the central conceit of the novel asserting that he is inherently bland and colorless.

The endingWhich I loved! leaves many questions unanswered, and as I approached the end and realized this was to be the (ir)resolution, the sense of warmth and affection I felt for Tsukuru multiplied itself. Some people hate the unresolved ending, but I’m not one of them.Please refer to the Legal Disclaimer atThe Immunity Manifesto for details. I loved the endingYes, loved!, one of the most satisfying book closings I’ve enjoyed in years.

Previous Murakami novels include Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and 1Q84. I loved them all, and there are many more waiting for me. He’s hugely popular in Japan; Colorless Tsukuru sold over 1 million copies in the first week of release in Japan. He’s worthy of the hype.

(btw, my daughter’s English class read Kafka on the Shore last year. I was pretty excited about this and I re-read it along with her. But at some point in the reading, one of the students told her mother that there was s-e-x in the book. Said mother stormed into the school and demanded that they stop teaching the book. Sadly, the school caved. I remain furious with this meddlesome, bible banging rube. Definitely not a contributor to My Favorite World.)

There are some similarities between Tsukuru and The Goldfinch. The protagonist in each book suffers a traumatic emotional episode as a teenager. Both books explore in great detail the interiority of the main characters, and do so at a slow, nearly glacial pace. Yet Tsukuru was so compelling I read the full 400 pages in less than two days; with theThe Goldfinch, I could not wait to put it down every time I picked it up, and after 200 pages over two weeks, I finally couldn’t stand another word of it. I can’t put my finger on why, necessarily, other than I experienced Tartt’s writing as slooow for the sake of being slow, almost like a technical demonstration.Watch me! Watch me! With Murakami, the slowness had a forward rhythm to it that gave me the sensation of living inside Tsukuru’s insular and measured world; it felt like an organic aspect of the experience rather than a parlor trick.I realize I’m in the minority on Goldfinch, and do not suggest that if you liked it you’re wrong or anything like that. I might actually have liked it at another moment in my life. Books are funny that way. End of crappy comparative lit exposition…read the Murakami. You’ll be glad you did.

Walter Mosley continues to amaze. He’s written more than 45 books, and I’ve read around 30 of them. None have made me feel like I wasted my time. Debbie is about a porn megastar in L.A. who decides to make a break from the business. Mosley gets deep behind her character’s motivations and history; we get a real sense of Debbie as a person, not just, as she puts it, “a set of orifices on the screen”. Add to that a suspenseful plot and Mosley’s mastery of language and sly sense of humor…well, it’s a quick read and a winner. And as always, Mosley uses his characters and plots to examine the dynamics of life as an African-American.

Sitting at hand is the latest in Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series, number 13. Like most of his fans, Rawlins is where I first got to know Mosley, starting with Devil in a Blue Dress in the early 90s. Unfairly, this series about an accidental LA private eye in the post-WW2 era got Mosley pigeon-holed as a mystery/crime writerA genre I truly love, btw., but he is so much more. Rawlins is the author’s eyes and ears, showing and interpreting the post-war experience of African- Americans in Los Angeles.ThinkChinatown from the perspective of the black community. The plots and mysteries are always top notch and keep you on the edge of the seat, but they are in some ways incidental to Mosely’s central project – an exploration of the political and cultural factors that served to define the dimensions of what it means to be Black in White America, and what that means to his primary characters. So I read the first couple of pages of Rose Gold and began to think I should go back and re-read the series before I read this oneI first read Devil in a Blue Dress about 25 years ago., just binge it like a Netflix series. I have a huge stack of reading on my nightstand, so this feels like a scary commitment, but it might be time to re-visit the origins of Easy and Mouse and Jackson Blue.

By 1995, Denzel Washington used his clout to get Devil on the screen. In a sane world, this should have been a long-running franchise, but leave it to Hollywood to fuck up a perfectly good crowbar. Still, the movie remains memorable as the first time I laid eyes on this guy.Not entirely true. It turns out I’d been watching him for a few seasons in a better-than- average tv series called Picket Fences, but he was so completely transformed in Devil that I didn’t realize it for a while. One night while watching him play the quiet, dapper DA in the show, it hit me. His great career is no surprise…the guy had chops from the start.

Don Cheadle as Raymond “Mouse” Alexander

This was Don Cheadle’s breakthrough, as Easy’s best friend Mouse. A homicidal criminal and true blue friend, Mouse is one of my favorite characters out of any book. Denzel was great as Easy, but Cheadle just nailed this role. You literally can’t look away when he’s on screen. He is absolutely one of the My Favorite World all-stars.

All this leads me to think I should also re-read The Man in My Basement, which is my favorite Mosley to date. And that leads to the Socrates Fortlow and Leonid McGill books, and his sci- fi novels and stories, and, and, and. He has demonstrated time and again that he transcends the crime writer straight jacket.Hell, Man in my Basement is way closer to Chekhov than Chandler.

Seriously, 45 books in 25 years. That’s some badassery right there.

So to sum it all up….

Haruki Murakami:

Walter Mosley:

My Favorite World.