Cultural Sponge - The Joe Pagetta Blog

We put so much pressure on the narrators of the books we’re reading. From the get go, they can make or break the story they’re telling. In the four narrators I’ve met in the last three books I’ve read, one taught me empathy, one made me laugh and want to cook (though not what he was cooking), one charmed me with her passion to make it on her own, and one, well, let’s say hope I never meet him again.

Perhaps it was just having seen the extraordinary documentary “The Horse Boy,” about a parents’ search for a cure for their son’s autism, that made me particularly empathetic to the plight of the narrator Christopher Boone in Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. There’s a subject interviewed in the film who says that there is nothing wrong with people with autism. They’re just different kinds of human beings. That comment stuck with me as I read the book. Christopher has Asperger’s Syndome. His parents are separated. A dog has been murdered in his neighborhood and he must find out who did it. He counts cars on the way to school, their colors dictating what kind of day he’s going to have. He does math in his head to relax himself. By taking us inside Christopher’s mind, Haddon has created the most memorable character, in a book that I’ve read, since Owen Meany in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Like everyone around Christopher, we need to have patience with him. He’s our narrator after all, and the only way we’re going to get the story. But he never asks for it. He knows his limitations and what he must do, and that’s why we empathize with him. Even when we start to sense where his detective work will lead him, we still understand his needs and support him. What’s most wonderful about the book is how, in empathizing with Christopher, we empathize with those around him as well: the father who is trying his best, the mother who had to be honest with herself, and the neighbors saying and doing the things they think are best for Christopher. The novel is an absolute joy to read. I loved it.

If you’ve fantasized about living in Italy (and who hasn’t?), you’ve certainly read Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun, or Ferenc Máté’s The Hills of Tuscany, or one of my favorites, Robert Hutchinson’s When in Rome. If you’ve read James Hamilton-Paterson’s hilarious 2005 novel Cooking with Fernet Branca, though, it’s not all villas and helpful villagers and handsome guys named Marcello. Sometimes it’s shady realtors, annoying neighbors, eccentric Italian film directors, late night helicopter visits and too much of the medicinal digestivo of the title. That’s fine by me.

Hamilton-Paterson gives us the story through alternating narrators. First is the culinary adventurous, borderline-sinister Gerard Samper, a celebrity sports figure ghost writer about to embark on an autobiography of a boy-band-star wanting legitimacy. Marta is his neighbor, an emigre from Central Europe working on a film score for a famous Italian filmmaker. While Gerry is busy being appalled and irritated by just about everyone, whipping up the most ridiculous recipes — one of his early ones a Garlic and Fernet  Branca ice cream meant to scare his neighbor away — Marta is stealthily taking advantage of Gerry’s unique vocal stylings to inform her new score. We get both sides of the story. It’s Gerry that truly makes the book click and gives it its snap, while Marta provides the saner counterpoint, especially when observing Gerry.

I read the book on the beach, where I think it’s meant to be read. It’s light, laugh-out-loud funny and hits the spot. You’ll still want to live in Italy after it, perhaps even moreso. In a moment of synchronicity after, I was in a local liquor store looking to replenish my stash of the Italian digestivo Amaro — it’s hard to come by in Nashville — when the salesman and I started talking about other herbal Italian after-dinner drinks. He said, “there’s another one, like Amaro, that Italians drink. What is it? I can’t think of it.” He was racking his brain when I responded, “Fernet?” “Yes! That’s it. Fernet Branca!” I had never heard of Fernet Branca until the book

It’s been almost twenty years since Douglas Coupland published Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture and popularized a name for those post-boomers among us born between 1961 and 1981. We were cynical and sarcastic. Disaffected. We watched too much television when we were kids. Consumed too much music, gave the world MTV, Madonna and Nirvana and would be the first generation to make less than our parents. We liked The Replacements and wondered why they weren’t bigger. We were artists, by default.  So what has become of us, other than our hoping to come across a Hot Tub Time Machine? According to Jeff Gordinier in the enjoyable X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Suckin,’ we did OK, sorta. He reminds us that much of the golden age of the internet was created by Xers. Many great world-changing non-profits are helmed by Xers, as is our nation. President Obama was born at beginning of the generation, in 1961.

If we look to Sam Lipsyte’s novel, The Ask, we’re still cynical and sarcastic, and making less than our parents. In fact, we’re assholes. And Miles, the narrator of the book, is our living embodiment. An artist who never really succeeded — he doesn’t paint anymore, anyway — he now helps young artists reach their dreams by working in the development department of a small liberal arts college. The title of the novel refers to the all-important pitch that development folks, at universities, non-profits, cultural institutions, hospitals, etc., make to potential donors. It’s “the ask,” and the donor is “the ask.” Miles isn’t so good at it. After saying something inappropriate to the student daughter of a major donor, Miles is fired, only to be asked back when Purdy, a potential major donor and former classmate of Miles from college, personally requests him. After that, it’s all a bit convoluted. Purdy’s got a son whose legs have been blown off in the Iraq war and is blackmailing him. Miles marriage is falling apart. There’s a guy who builds decks and has an idea for a reality show. Purdy’s son crashes a cocktail party and yells, “Daddy.” It’s all too much really, and should sound the death knell for any attempt at art about the generation. We may not be that interesting. Miles knows this too, and in chapter twenty-five, Lipsyte delivers a zinger of dialogue. In a conversation with his supervisor Vargina (pronounced just like you think it is), Miles asks:

“No. I mean, if I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me , to identify with me, right?”

“I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can’t think of anyone who would. There’s no reason for it.”

Bonus “Thought on What I’ve Been Reading.”

I don’t read many business books, but every now and then, one piques my interest. Seth Godin has legions of fans, and I check in on his blog fairly often, but Linchpin is the first of his books that I’ve read. Like most other business books, there’s much that applies and much that doesn’t. While early chapters didn’t speak to me, the remainder of the book is an inspiring gem that will get you working on new projects (”projects are the new resumes,” Godin tells us) and approaching your current job with renewed vigor. We’re all artists in Godin’s view, and once we accept that,  we’ll be better prepared to work in the new economy.

Everyone is connected in Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, one of the most beautiful contemporary novels I’ve read in years.  But characters aren’t connected in the way that, say, they are in the film Crash. Yes, they cross paths, but it’s art  –  a man walking, dancing and even bouncing on a tightrope suspended between the Twin Towers — that is the backdrop for all their lives.  Using Phillipe Petite’s iconic walk on August 7, 1974, McCann tells us the fictional stories of a myriad of New Yorkers — natives and immigrants, blacks and whites, men and woman, established and on the fringe.  It takes place in a Big Apple of a different era, when taking the subway two more stops could drop you off in a completely different world.  And like the Towers’ role in the excellent documentary of Petit’s walk, Man on a Wire, they are a characters here too, though not in a nostalgic way.  As one reviewer wrote of Let The Great World Spin, the best 9/11 novel takes place more than 25 years before it happened.

I think what’s so masterful about the novel, and what moves me the most, is that each character, like the funambulist based on Petit, steps out on to their own tightrope. Whether it’s the Irish immigrant Corrigan, a monk of the order of the Franciscans who ministers to prostitutes in the Bronx, or his brother who can’t help but be inspired by Corrigan’s selflessness and what seems at times like blind faith, or the group of mothers from different backgrounds who gather to mourn the sons they’ve lost in Vietnam. The characters in Let the Great World Spin are creating a kind of performance art of their own. Fittingly, it’s an artist who feels responsible for the death of Corrigan and a young prostitute that takes a risk by going back, and finds redemption in both herself and Corrigan’s brother.

With each move these characters make — the simple offering of ride to an unfamiliar neighborhood; the major leap of adopting orphaned children; the dragging of a young girl into a life of prostitution by a mother who knows no other option — is a step on the tightrope, a bounce on the wire,  a dance with destiny. But unlike Petit, sometimes the walker don’t make it back from the wire to the ledge. That is the risk they take, and that, I think, is what the tightrope walk that shadows everyone in the novel represents, the risks we all take, every day, to love, to live and to connect, and make art out of our lives.

The woman of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help are risking everything in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Young, idealistic and gutsy Skeeter Phelan, and the maids (”the help”) she encourages to share their stories of working for white families in the segregated south, could be killed for what they’re doing, and they know it. If Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Towers is the backdrop to the character develop in Let The Great World Spin, it’s the murder of Medgar Evers that looms heavily in the lives of the characters in the The Help. It’s a high wire act of the tallest order, and it’s nerve-wracking, oft-times riveting and extremely entertaining. Work of fiction? Psuedo-memoir? Anthropological study? You be the judge.

I learned about The Help after a conversation with John Seigenthaler, journalist, former administrative assistant to Senator Robert Kennedy, founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center and long time host of A Word on Words on Nashville Public Television. We were talking about the Southern Festival of Books last year, and I asked him if there was anyone he was excited about, and someone I really shouldn’t miss. He said “Kathryn Stockett” without hesitation, and added that The Help was a wonderful book. When a man who risked his own life on the Freedom Rides in the 60s recommends a book dealing with segregation in the south, you listen.  Stockett was great at the Festival, and I quickly picked up a copy, then already in its 30-something printing. Oddly though, for a book that popular, I not only hadn’t heard of it, I didn’t know anyone who read it or was reading it.  Until, that is, I’d mentioned it, especially to women. They either read it, were reading it, were planning on reading it or knew someone who was reading it, like the book was a secret being passed around. Reading it, especially since it seems to be a book being read mostly by women, feels like being granted entrance into an exclusive club, with millions of members.

Being an English major is like being in a secret club without the handshakes and fancy rings. We’re a strange bunch, with strange sensibilities and fixations.  I wonder though, if all these years I’ve been part of the club, I carried some mark of exclusion. How does one be an English Major, and not get around to reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita,  one of the greatest English language novels of all time?  Well, be gone, mark of exclusion!

Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Lolita is a doozy — a big, heavy, monstrous (Humbert Humbert is a monster, after all) work of genius. A single read, just to grasp the narrative, is not enough, so I hope to return to it someday. When I read Ulysses in college, I needed an entire other book to help me get through it. It’s a shame, though, that I don’t read books with that kind of attentiveness anymore. There are too many other books to read, and too much life to live and work to do — and no tests to take. But I imagine this book would become more and more enthralling with deeper study and subsequent readings.

Without that additional attention, though, it’s still unquestionably a masterpiece. Talk about taking risks. The book is fearless. There’s no need for me to mention plot points in a classic, but if all you know of Lolita are watered-down pop-culture references, you’re doing your senses a great disservice. It’s really a road trip novel, through America, through the English language, through storytelling, through wit and humor; through our own fears, wants and desires. Then imagine that road trip turns into a crash course for your sensibilities, testing the limits of what you believe is possible in a work of fiction, and what you’re willing to let the (admittedly unreliable) narrator get away with. I can’t imagine any artist, even a funambulist for that matter, approaching their work the same after reading Lolita.

In no particular order, and for no particular reason, here are a few of my favorite things from the world of culture in 2009. (Caveat: not a “best of,” mind you, just some stuff I liked.)

(Book) The Song is You - Arthur Phillips: A book about music, passion, relationships and family that felt completely contemporary; completely now; without overtly being about now. A beautiful and unique novel.

(Film) (500) Days of Summer: A fresh, sharp and stylized take on romance that was above all else, fun. I’d watch it again, and again.

(Film/Concert) Anvil: The Story of Anvil / The Anvil Experience at the Belcourt: Easily one of the best documentaries, and maybe movies in general, about rock ‘n’ roll. But then add the band performing after it, and it was truly an amazing experience. My wife on her feet shouting “Metal on Metal” was alone worth the price of admission.

(Concert) Leonard Cohen at TPAC: A dream, really, to see and hear Cohen perform, in what may have been one of the best sounding-concerts I’ve ever been to in a large venue. It was everything I had hoped for, and so much more.

(Film) Prodigal Sons: This film will be rolled out nationally over several months in 2010. Yes, it’s about a transgendered woman going home to be part of her high-school reunion. Yes, it has something to do with Orson Welles.  That’s only the half of it. Ultimately, it’s about love and family, and the lengths we go to, to keep that family intact. Kimberly Reed’s heart is huge.

(Concert) The Non-Commissioned Officers at the Nashville Film Festival Closing Night Party at Mercy Lounge: Though not the official closing-night event (that belonged to the excellent Long Players performance of the “Easy Rider” soundtrack), the Non-Comms performance at Mercy Lounge was triumphant. Make-Out With Violence, the film for which the band composed the music, had won the top prize at the Festival. The soundtrack won the best music-in-a-film prize.  The guys in the band were in the movie. Someone’s mom got up to sing. It was a celebration. It was thrilling.

(Film) Adventureland: As far as major releases go, this one slipped under the radar.  A completely charming coming-of-age vignette worth a viewing, or multiple viewings, if you missed it. Excellent performances all around.

(DVD) The Hold Steady - A Positive Rage: A short documentary packaged with a live-record from a band that made me believe in rock ‘n’ roll again. It’ll make you smile, especially when the band and the audience start fast-clapping.

(Essay/Book) Eating Animals - Jonathan Safran Foer: The first chapter of this book was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine, which I where I first read it. The chapter stands alone as a beautifully-written essay about our relationship to food. The book itself alters that relationship.

(Television) Mad Men Season Three:  While season two moved slower in order to better develop the characters, season three was a roller-coaster ride. The final episode made it worth the trip. I’ve had a theory that the majority of us are either Don or Betty. This season moved me closer to a better understanding of my own theory.

(Television) Masterpiece Mystery / Wallander: A gorgeously-shot series based on the Henning Mankell novels that was so well done, you could easily get lost in the photography and forget anyone was killed. Kenneth Branagh was brilliant as the down-and-out lead character.

(Concert) Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Sommet Center: What can I say? I’m certain the Boss and the Band are only getting better. This may have been the swan song for the E Street Band on tour. They played Born to Run in its entirety.  I wanted to come out of my skin. It was transcendent.

(Film) Food Inc.: If you eat food, or know someone who eats foods, or are responsible for the food that someone else eats, this is a must-see-film.

(Songs): “”Give Me Tomorrow,” Willie Nile; “Wilco (The Song),” Wilco; “Hysteric,” The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “I and Love and You,” The Avett Brothers; “Queen of the Supermarket,” Bruce Springsteen, “The Fixer,” Pearl Jam; “Haven’t Met You Yet,” Michael Buble*.

*I feel I need to clarify this last one a little, because it seems a little not like the others. I was in Italy in the Fall on vacation, and this song was everywhere, so I think I associate it with a wonderful memory. But it’s also a perfect slice of pop songwriting and production, with pessimism giving way to optimism in the lyrics, the indiscriminate use of the word “kid,” and a trumphet solo — a friggin’ trumphet solo! — in the middle. How can that be bad?

Bonus - (Book) Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann: Although, as of this posting, I haven’t finished Let the Great World Spin, I’m almost certain I’ll have it read by the end of the year. I’m also almost certain, based on what I HAVE read, that it will be one of my favorite things of the year, and maybe the decade.

There’s much to think about after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s excellent new book, Eating Animals. More than a work of advocacy, it reads as an honest exploration into the dilemma of eating meat that the author promises from the very beginning. We’re left to weigh the new knowledge we’ve gained against the knowledge we kind of knew was already there.  Perhaps I should say “I” instead of “we.” You see, I know where Foer is coming from. I may not have a child, but since my college days, my relationship to eating meat has been alternately tenuous and voracious, but never indifferent.  There was always a part of me a little unsure as to whether or not I should be thinking about the meat I was eating. If the part about “should be thinking about” sounds convoluted, well it is. Again, never indifferent. I went a full year in my 20s not eating meat at all. And it wasn’t that hard, especially if you continue to eat fish or animal products like eggs, milk and cheese. Since that time, I’ve sometimes avoided it and sometimes sought it out – quests for perfect BBQ in the south can turn into ritual. As someone who enjoys cooking, I’ve breaded it, grilled it, marinated it and served it up. I eventually found a position I considerable agreeable: “conscientious omnivore.” For the most part, when dining out and I had an option, I chose a non-meat, or sometimes fish option.  I avoided fast food restaurants all together. At home, rarely meat, sometimes fish, mostly neither. When dining at the homes of family or friends, I ate what was offered.

After reading Eating Animals, I’m not sure that this position is agreeable anymore.

Foer gracefully points out, though, that eating isn’t simply about what you put in your mouth. Eating is about family and culture.  It’s about the smells of childhood, and memories of family dinners. While steak was a rarity in my house growing up, my mother’s meatballs were the best (and I see fellow Italian-American men nodding in agreement about their own mother’s meatballs).  I used to help my father roll small meatballs to toss into his escarole and bean soup. Now that I think about it, my mother’s meatloaf was ostensibly one very large brick-shaped meatball. And I remember once when my grandfather – perplexed that I wanted a hamburger – made a very large meatball and smashed it into a paddy. “THIS, is how you make a hamburger!” he said. He was right. It was the greatest hamburger I had ever eaten, and a favorite story I’ve told dozens of times. But we didn’t just eat variations of meatballs, of course. My mother would often bread chicken or pork cutlets, or throw some pork or sausage in with the sauce (or gravy if you’re from the Northeast).

As someone who now carries on the Italian-American cooking traditions I learned as a kid, I’m grateful that deciding to become a vegetarian would be easier than if I came from a different tradition. But it would still be difficult. Eggplant dishes, broccoli rabe, stuffed mushrooms, any number of pasta dishes, etc. are not a problem. Switching to vegetable broth for tortellini soup wouldn’t be a big change, but what to do about the pancetta, or bacon, in my beloved – and admittedly famous – pasta e fagiole? And if there’s any meat I do get a craving for, it’s the cold sliced kind that I spent my teen years piling up on sandwiches when I worked at the deli in my neighborhood. I love my prosciutto, and mortadella, and capicola and sopressata. As far as animal products go, my mozzarella, and ricotta and provolone. This stuff is more than meat or animal products; they are my connection to my father and grandfather; to my ancestry.

So is there a middle ground?  Does knowing the sopressata I’m eating comes from a pig that was not factory farmed make it less objectionable to me? I don’t know for sure, but maybe a little. What’s impossible to know is if it did indeed NOT come from a factory farm. Odds are, especially if you’re eating poultry, then pork, then beef, that it did. Are you a betting man?

What I do know, is that Eating Animals has raised the conversation to a new level for me. It’s a conversation that started almost 20 years ago, was put on the backburner, and in recent years, brought up again with the watching of “Food, Inc. and the reading of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Foer is the first one to add to the discussion the aspects of culture and family, and in section 4 of the “Storytelling” chapter, turn that discussion into poetry.  The middle of the book is heavy, and that’s what makes it extraordinary.  He sets it up beautifully, tells you where he’s going to go with it, and then takes you out eloquently. The writing alone in the last section is worth the barrage of facts and horror that come at you through the middle.

I’ve written before in blog posts about the risks one takes when entering a movie theatre, going to a concert or opening up a book. There’s a chance you’ll see something, or experience something or read something that may alter you in small way, challenge your way of thinking, even change everything. I’ve always liked that. When opening Eating Animals, you know what you’re getting into it – none of what Foer writes should surprise you – but you’re not sure how it’s going to affect you. To put yourself in that vulnerable position is a good thing. Most people, I imagine, don’t want to, especially when it comes to the subject of eating meat. That alone says something.

But if anything, just imagine, as Foer writes, “what kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat…”

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Summer reading is a ritual for me, especially for that week in June or July every year that my wife and I vacation on the beach. I always have a “to-read” pile going, but in the weeks leading up to the vacation, a separate “to-read on the beach” pile emerges. These books are rarely what you’d call “beach reads,” but serious literary fiction I look forward to spending quality time with. I have a special relationship to these books, because the way they are read, intently and without the distraction of the day-to-day, burns them more deeply into my conscious. In previous years, those “beach reads” have included The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway and Keith Katchik’s work of Buddhist fiction, The Hungry Ghost. All had a profound affect on me when I read them.

This year, of the half dozen books I brought with me to the beach, I chose two to spend the week with: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Arthur Phillips’ The Song is You. Let me say first that reading books that take place in New York City (even in the past, as Pete Hammill’s North River, which I also read last year, does) is bittersweet for me. I still love New York, where I spent so much of my life before moving to Nashville in 1998. Being taken back there in fiction, to walk the streets and see the sights and hear the sounds, is both sad and wonderful. But my life is in Nashville now, and I’ve accepted that.

Both Netherland and The Song is You take place in New York. September 11, 2001 looms heavily in Netherland (it’s been called a post-9/11 novel), but it’s there too in Phillips’ novel, just not as overtly. That they both take place in a post-9/11 New York is no big deal. Plenty of books do. Besides, as one critic pointed out, isn’t all fiction published after September 11, 2001 post 9/11? What’s weird is that I inadvertently chose to read two books with protagonists who are estranged from wives named Rachel. Coincidence?

The obvious similarities end there. To draw more parallels would be pushing it, but if pressed, I would say that they both have protagonists trying to recapture something they once had before they can ever reconcile with their respective Rachels. For Netherland’s Hans van de Brock, it’s his youthful days as a cricket player. For The Song is You’s Julian Donahue, it’s a hipper, younger, passionate version of himself. Both of them find their muse in people with big dreams.  For Hans, it’s Chuck Ramkissoon, a hustler whose lust for life is so engaging and insatiable, and whose dream of building a world class cricket stadium in New York City so inspiring, that our protagonist is blinded — as are we — to that fact that Chuck may only be a hustler and gangster.  Their relationship most closely resembles that of Nick Carraway’s enamoring of Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and O’Neill means for us to see it that way. In one poignant scene, Chuck carelessly stands in a cemetery on a gravestone engraved with the word “DAISY.” If you hadn’t figured out by then what the book was aspiring to,  it couldn’t have been made clearer.  I wasn’t sure what to make of it though. Was it merely an homage to Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel, like playing a Sinatra song if you’re gigging in Hoboken? If you dare to tread into that territory, must you give a nod to the greats that came before you? Or did it have some more prescient meaning regarding the American dream?

I love The Great Gatsby. It’s one of my favorite novels and one I reread every couple of years. It takes guts to tackle the Great American Novel, and even more guts to model it after Gatsby. Fitzgerald knew what he was doing, and so does O’Neill. The result is a beautifully written and exhilarating novel that paints New York in an entirely new, and very likely, more honest way. It’s New York through its new immigrants eyes; the price of the American Dream reconsidered. Post-9/11 or not, if Netherland is not The Great American Novel, it’s definitely a Great Novel about a new America.

For The Song is You’s Julian, his muse is a young Irish singer-songwriter named Cait O’Dwyer. An emerging artist who has just signed a major record deal, Julian catches Cait on the way up, at local club shows growing increasing crowded as her fame spreads. He’s immediately taken with her, both physically and spiritually. What ensues is a kind of cat-and-mouse love affair, where one moment you’re rooting for them, the next you’re worried that your own emotions have blinded you to the fact that Julian may be a crazed stalker. This is especially true when some signs Julian believes come from Cait — and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here — actually come from his wife Rachel.

Where The Song is You truly shines is in its depiction of how we age in a modern world. What happens when we get older, and are no longer the hip, cool, with-it people we once were. What does the iPod library full of music that came out twenty years ago say about us? Do we, and should we, reinvent ourselves? Does music still matter? Or rather, does what matters to us about music, matter to anyone else?

Even though I’ve been in rock bands, and have played music for a good part of my life, I don’t like rock and roll fiction. Except for maybe Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones, most of it tries too hard to be authentic. But Phillips has the ear for it, and never falls into the bad rock and roll fiction trap, delivering a heartfelt narrative on the power and pleasures of writing and playing rock and roll. In the process, he makes a pretty good case for listening to it as well, especially on an iPod.

So how to appreciate music, in a passionate way, and still age gracefully? That’s up to you, but putting some music from bands and artists younger than you on your iPod is a good start. Just don’t fall in love with them.

While leaving us guessing and often breathless chasing a love affair not meant to be, Phillips also gives us a lovely meditation on family, whether it’s his relationship with his father, his brother, or his estranged wife.  Clearly, it was Julian’s father’s love of Billie Holiday that instilled in his son a love for music.  And it’s a book such as Phillips’ that reminds me why I love reading and why it’s so rewarding. It’s a fantastic and very contemporary novel.

Special kudos also to Phillips, a real life former Jeopardy champion, for giving us in his brother the most shockingly hilarious scenario for a disgraced fictional Jeopardy champion. That part I’m definitely not spoiling. You just have to read it and come upon it yourself.

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It Happened in Italy: Untold Stories of How the People of Italy Defied the Horrors of the Holocaust by Elizabeth Bettina

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m not the kind of person who can talk to just anyone. I make friends fairly easy, but in a crowded room where I don’t know anyone, I’m more likely to grab a drink, open a book, and keep to myself (which is why the idea of “networking lunches” at conferences makes me nauseous). It’s not that I don’t like people. I do. And I genuinely enjoy talking and getting to know them and making connections. I’m just not very comfortable forcing it. I’m better at it when it happens naturally — or naturally for me at least. I’m also a little sluggish on acting on some of the things I consider doing. I’m not afraid to jump in and get on with it, but I sometimes lack a little motivation on the front end. Which is what makes Elizabeth Bettina’s new work of non-fiction cum memoir, It Happened in Italy, so fascinating.

In a book that purports to tell the “Untold Stories of How the People of Italy Defied the Horrors of the Holocaust,” as its subtitle suggests, Bettina really tells us the story of how she gathered the stories, and how valuable it is to make connections. It’s as much about her as it is the Jewish people who survived World War II by being interned in concentration camps in Italy. And while at first it’s a little off-putting, even mildly-irritating, it soon becomes exhilarating and inspiring, and even refreshing in the manner in which it tells us these stories.

Imagine a story told something like this:

“Oh My God, so I look at the picture and I say to myself, ‘what’s a rabbi doing in this picture,’ and I call my friend and I tell him he has to sit down, and I’m thinking I’m just a nice Italian girl from new york who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood and then there’s the pope and the cabs and the mayor is wearing a Miss America sash and, can you believe, they went for ice cream? No one went for ice cream in Auschwitz or Dachau. And there’s a synagogue and they’re playing soccer and the Italian police shrug and we get some espresso and Oh My God, I couldn’t believe it, I’m on a plane to Nashville and the guy’s mother was in Campagna and she lives in Queens and it’s in my neighborhood and there’s an accordion player and the guy at the Vatican does a hand motion and we walk past the Swiss guards and oh my God, imagine my surprise….”

I’m over-simplifying of course, but you get the idea. Bettina’s story reads like she’s sitting across from me and we’re sharing a bottle of wine and every time she gets to a photo in her story, she just happens to have the photo with her and pulls it out of a bag to show me. It’s a conversational way to tell a story, and while nothing can truly overshadow the amazing stories of the survivors that she pulls together, the narrative device — delivering them in the voices of the survivors as she discovers them — works.

What we get is not only the inspiring stories of people who survived the horrors of the Holocaust, and the courageous stories of those who risked their lives to save others — namely Giovanni Palatucci — but we also get an inspiring story of someone who decided she was going to do something, and did it. When Bettina first came across that picture of a rabbi on the steps of the Church of San Bartolemeo in Campagna, Italy and soon learned of the thousands of Jews interned in dozens of Campo di Concentramento in Campagna and throughout Italy who survived simply as a result of being interned in these camps, she knew immediately she had to tell their story. Why? As Dachau liberator Jimmy Gentry tells her, “it is a story of goodness amidst evil. You must tell this story. If you don’t, who will?.”

So I thank Bettina for not only telling the story of Giovanni Palatucci, and the thousands of “other Palatuccis” (as the book jacket summary tells us) that sheltered and helped Jews throughout Italy. As a first generation Italian-American, it’s a proud reminder of the true nature of my descendants. I thank her also for telling her story. So many times I find myself inspired and moved, and decide that something must be done or a story must told, and I do not follow through. It Happened in Italy is a reminder of what we can accomplish when we do, and why we must.

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I was given a wonderful book for my birthday last week by my dear friends Pouria and Jenna Montazeri. Love’s Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition, translated by David and Sabrineh Fideler,  is “a comprehensive Collection of Sufi poems  by Rumi, Hafiz, and many others.”

Finding myself unable to sleep tonight, as is often the case in the weeks leading up to the Nashville Film Festival, I decided to take some of the book’s poems in, and was immediately impacted by their simplicity, beauty and timelessness.

The third poem in the book is the great Rumi’s poem “The Same Language,” with its wonderful line:

The universal language is authentic insight.

To be one in heart is surely superior
to only speaking the same words.

I wish I had that poem several months ago when Nashville was in the throes of an “English-only” debate, but that would have only wrongly commandeered a poem that speaks of so much more. It’s just as appropriate in the confines of the home as it is within the Turkish border.

I realize quickly these are not poems to be paged through quickly, but savored slowly.  A few pages later, I’m slowed to a crawl by the Hafiz poem, “The Glow of Your Presence.” It’s a short one, so I hope David and Sabrineh Fideler don’t mind me quoting it in its entirety.

Where have you taken your sweet song?
Come back and play me a tune.

I never really cared for the things of the world.
It was the glow of your presence
that filled it with beauty.

It’s how I’ve always felt about the music I create, and expresses the words I’ve been searching for to explain where that music has gone for the last couple of years. I really haven’t truly written and performed for a couple of years now. Perhaps this is my new prayer.

So when it’s late at night, and you’re reading poetry, and you come across something like that, what do you do? You need to tell somebody, and there’s no one to call. So you post a blog, which among its many uses, is still good for doing what it did originally — providing a place to share your thoughts.

The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries by Marilyn Johnson

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
What a find! In need of a literary diversion, I picked this up at a bookstore in Atlanta simply because it seemed quirky enough. It’s fantastic. It may be a book about obituaries and obituary writers, but it’s more a book about celebrating life and great writing. The obituary section is now often the first section of the paper I turn to, and I read them with a new appreciation. Highly recommended, especially these days when the longevity of newspapers is in jeopardy, and the economy has us looking inward at the way we’re living our lives.

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So last night, in anticipation of seeing the film THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, I reread the short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, on which the film is based. It’s not very long, and after finishing it, I flipped through the rest of the pages of The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald to see if there was something else I wanted to get into that I either hadn’t read or hadn’t read in awhile.

There, at the beginning of the short story “Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar,” was the most perfect little paragraph about New Jersey:

Parts of New Jersey, as you know, are under water, and other parts are under continual surveillance by the authorities. But here and there lie patches of garden country dotted with old-fashioned frame mansions, which have wide shady porches and a red swing on the lawn. And perhaps, on the widest and shadiest of the porches there is even a hammock left over from the hammock days, stirring gently in a mid-Victorian wind.

To someone not from there, it can often be hard to explain the many paradoxes that make up the Garden State.  I think this paragraph sums it up quite well.

In no particular order, and for no particular reason, here are a few of my favorite things from the world of culture in 2008.

(Book) Junot Diaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: I think this came out in 2007, but I read it this past summer. What I don’t know about books and literature could fill volumes, but this one felt like a game changer. One of the best books I’ve ever read.

(Film) Man on Wire: An exhilarating and inspiring documentary that plays like a mad cap heist film. Doubles as an unsentimental and fitting tribute to the industrial beauty and power of the Twin Towers. See it.

(Concert) Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Sommet Center in Nashville: I’ve seen Bruce and the band many times, including in New Jersey, and this was the best show I’ve ever seen.

(Album) The Hold Steady - Stay Positive: As long as rock ‘n’ roll this good exists, that won’t be a problem.

(Book) Richard Price - Lush Life: Like all great fiction, this love letter to the The Lowest East Side is really about us, and “the aspiring” whatever that lives inside us. It’s also about cops, drugs, guns, the projects, money and America. Great fiction by a master storyteller.

(Television Show) Mad Men, Season Two: It was easy in the perfection that was Season One to get caught up in the style and dialogue of the show. In Season Two, the drinking and smoking and womanizing played second fiddle to the developing psychological profiles of the characters. It’s when things really started getting interesting.

(Concert) Levon Helm’s Ramble on Road at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville: I thought nothing could top Helm at the Ryman in 2007. Until I saw Helm at the Ryman in 2008.

(Album) Marah - Angels of Destruction!: One of my favorite American rock bands delivers what may be its finest album.

(Album) Warren Pash - Plastic Rulers: I’m not sure if the record is one of my favorite things, or the fact that it’s finally out is one of my favorite things. I think it’s both.

(Book) Jonathan Miles: Dear American Airlines: A slim novel, alternatively hilarious and heartbreaking, and unique throughout.

(Essay) Jonathan Franzen’s essay on New York in State By State: A Panoramic Portrait of America: The most fascinating interview with a geologist you’ll ever read.

(Film) Young @ Heart: I’ll tell you right now, you will cry, maybe harder than you’ve ever cried before. You will then wipe your eyes, take a deep breath, and decide to embrace life.

Bonus Favorite Thing:

(Literature) Barack Obama’s Speech On Race: This really doesn’t fall into a book, film or music category, but someday, it’ll wind up in an anthology of great speeches in American history, making it literature.  I’m just getting a jump on it.