Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

As someone forever indebted to The Clash for introducing me to punk, I must announce that a totally awesome, comprehensive biography of The Clash’s frontman, Joe Strummer, came out in paperback this month. Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer by Chris Salewicz, music journalist and long-time friend of Strummer’s, begins with Salewicz’s experiences at Strummer’s funeral just a few years ago, 2002 to be exact, and goes on to detail Strummer’s tumultuous childhood, the intricate relationship between Joe and his brother, and how The Clash evolved over the years. For anyone who enjoys The Clash or Joe or an in-depth bio, this book is definitely a good one.

“I don’t give a damn anymore. I’ve learned not to take it seriously - that’s what I’ve learned. And I’ve also learned that because what you do is sort of interesting, doesn’t mean you’re any better than anyone else: after all, we’re not exactly devising new forms of protein. If they say, ‘Release this record because otherwise you’re career is finished,’ and I don’t want them to, then I just won’t do it. I’m far more dangerous now because I don’t care at all.”

- Joe Strummer to Chris Salewicz

Is it just me, or does Gail Collins totally kick ass?

“So a big chunk of my life is gone I can never get back,” Javal Davis said. “And the privacy that I had, never going to get it back. That was stripped from me. Marriage? Destroyed. I was ostracized on national television, you know? For what? To cover up someone’s lies, to cover up our tactics, procedures, that no one wants to own up to? My son still thinks that I was at work — he’s still too young — I’ll explain to him later on down the line, you know. My daughter, she knows. I explained it to her, and she understood. She won’t be joining the military. I don’t want to be a cop anymore. I’m done. I’m in sales. The career path that I have now, you know — comfortable. I deal with people on a regular basis. I’m not handling anyone’s problems. I’m not dealing with anything violent. So I’m business to business, all personal, ‘How you doing? I’m Javal Davis. Nice to meet you.’ Everyone’s happy. I like that. Sales. I’m a salesman.”

from Standard Operating Procedure, by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris (Penguin Press; $25.95)

Springtime means ______ (insert cutesy, frilly haiku about flowers and sunshine, etc.), or…

self-sufficiency!

• Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills, 3rd Ed. (Skyhorse, $24.95)
• The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It (DK, $30)

The change in weather, the starting of gardens and outdoor markets, and other various influences all seem to have jump-started a renewed interest in self-reliance ’round these parts. Along with the pleasant onslaught of garden-oriented titles to hit the store since March are a couple of sturdy, yet reasonably priced, hardcovers to guide those wishing to lead a more self-supportive lifestyle. If you’re looking for a comprehensive ‘how-to,’ come check these two titles out. Both are well-illustrated and thorough, and between them you can learn the basics for pretty much anything, within reason…beekeeping, spinning wool, raising and slaughtering livestock, gardening and canning, weaving/basketry, metalworks, woodworks, generating your own alternative energy…

I expect every women’s book group who’s reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle to come flocking down to 3rd Street…which is great, but please leave your chickens outside the door.

Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmer’s Markets, is back in print, in a fine paperback edition ($26); it goes on sale tomorrow (5/13).

“For anyone trying to eat locally and seasonally, Local Flavors is indispensable.”
— Michael Pollan

Miranda July’s debut short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, came out in paperback this month.  We have the neon green edition.

“When my husband saw the new short hair, he gave me the look we give each other when one of us forgets who we are.  We are not people who buy instant cocoa powder, we do not make small talk, we do not buy Hallmark cards or believe in Hallmark rituals such as Valentine’s Day or weddings.  In general, we try to stay away from things that are MEANINGLESS, and we favor things that are MEANINGFUL.  Our top three favorite meaningful things are: Buddhism, eating right, and the internal landscape.  Haircuts are in the same category as trimming the finger-and toenails, which is in the same category as mowing the lawn.  We don’t believe in mowing the lawn; we do it only to avoid unnecessary engagement with the neighbors.  The neighbors trim their bushes into ridiculous animal shapes.  Carl looked at me as if I were the neighbors, as if my hair were in a ridiculous animal shape. “

- From “Mon Plaisir”

and

“Friday night was date night, named for the date Sarah and Tom would go on while Lyon slept over at my house.  But because they usually just stayed home and fought, and Lyon and I more often went to dinner and saw a movie, date night became our code for Night of Endless Fun.  Don’t underestimate how much joy an eight-year-old and an almost-forty-year-old can bring each other.  We usually begin at Miso Happy, our favorite Japanese place.  We thought the name was terrible, but we liked the noodles.  We talked about everything, including but not limited to: My gray hairs, should I dye them?  Could I dye them individually?  Could I pay a mouse with a tiny paintbrush to jump on my head and dye them one by one?”

-From “How to Tell Stories to Children”

Once again, Patricia Pearson:

Clusters seem to disgust me. Not flocks — I don’t mind hordes of birds or bats. When my Sheltie scoots after the pigeons in the park and they take to the air, I do not, personally, experience them as “brainless assassins after my life.” No, it’s the vision of witless and aggressive reproduction that I find unnerving. Dandelions, mushrooms, googly eyes. Buzz off with the mindless profusion. I can’t stand that sense of things just … popping up all over the place. This is a subject of great interest to the scholar William Miller, author of The Anatomy of Disgust. There are horrors that have more to do with disgust than with fear, although the two emotions are closely intermingled. What disgusts us isn’t necessarily something we feel is going to harm us — we just want to distance ourselves, to recoil. We don’t want what Miller calls “thick, greasy life” to be on us, or in us. Certain substances raise the prospect of contamination or invasion. “The disgusting can possess us,” says Miller, “fill us with creepy, almost eerie feelings of being not quite in control.” Hence, some people’s aversions to mayonnaise and gravy and pond scum or, in my case, to multiplying clusters.

A Brief History of Anxiety … Yours and Mine (Bloomsbury; $23.95)

Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado and other works, has died at the age of 86.

The critic Terry Teachout writes: It is the destiny of some good novels to be perpetually rediscovered, and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, I fear, is one of them. Like William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf or James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor, it bobs to the surface every decade or so, at which time somebody writes an essay about how good it is and somebody else clamors for it to be returned to print, followed in short order by the usual slow retreat into the shadows. In a better-regulated society, of course, the authors of such books would be properly esteemed, and on rare occasions one of them does contrive to clamber into the pantheon … but in the normal course of things, such triumphs are as rare as an honest stump speech.

Here is Elaine Dundy:

Some days afterward — or maybe it was only two or three — I can’t remember exactly any more — I got out of bed one morning and found myself all alone in the empty house. I put on my bathing suit and went down to the untidy kitchen and made myself some coffee. Then I went out on the terrace and looked at the night sky. It was a morning full of clouds; the sun shining brightly one moment and hiding under pearly grayness the next. It felt doom-ridden from the very beginning, out there among the ruins — very fin de siecle, fin du monde, fin de line. Bugs were climbing all over the roses, the chaotic breezes seemed wild and unfriendly, and the grass had burned brown. It was hard to believe that it was the beginning of July, not the end of summer. I thought: is summer only a state of mind? Is it always only two months long from whenever you start it? My arms would get no browner; my skin had reached saturation point, and the sun only succeeded now in bleaching them lighter — grayer. I shivered. I might have been something washed up against the River Styx. Or maybe I was waiting to be ferried across. I put on a sweater and went down to the sea.

– The Dud Avocado

If your coffee table is feeling too barren these days, perhaps you should consider one of these new arrivals to fill its embarrassing void. Consider it a favor to yourself, and to your next awkward dinner guest who’d rather have something to read than talk to you.

Creature, by Andrew Zuckerman (Chronicle Books)
Primarily wordless, each page features an up-close, unique shot of an animal–from chimps to blowfish to doves–with striking precision (as in, you can see the animals’ individual hairs clearly) against a white background. My favorite is the rooster.

Cartographia, by Vincent Virga (Hachette Book Group)
If you go for a more text-oriented coffee-table book, this one’s a nice combo of both pictures and words. Cartographia is a sturdy collection of some of the most exquisite and historical maps in the world, housed at the Library of Congress. Beautiful and educational all at once. As the reviewer from Bookgasm.com said, “For map lovers like me, this elegant, oversized book is porn.”

An attempt at passing a building reserve levy in Missoula County — to maintain and improve our four area high schools — failed again, for the 2nd time in six months. It was to provide a total of $10 million dollars over ten years.

See, it’s not sexy enough. You need to do it like the PAC people and go for $60 million, $80 million — by the time it’s done, $120 to $200 million (with inflation and cost overruns and bullshit figured in) — and you’ve got to get some bankers and developers and large-vision economists and corporate boosters and assorted big-time arts promoters and think-tankers and civic planners and professional PAC pushers and some tired-of-driving-to-Spokane-to-see-a-Broadway-show types involved, and then you’ve got to tell everyone that you want to — please, we really need to — do it for the kids.

But a $10 million dollar school levy that’s actually for the kids?

Um, no.