Neal Pollack's The Maelstrom

I'm bound for Chicago shortly to promote the now-officially-existing Chicago Noir. Kevin Guilfoile and I will be reading on Wednesday night at Barbara's Bookstore, 1218 S. Halsted. When I last received mail in Chicago, that was still part of the old Maxwell Street District. The irony isn't lost on me (most irony isn't) that I'll be promoting a book about a vanishing city on top of the bones of that city's most emblematic lost neighborhood. Anyway, get there at 7 PM. The crowd will be extraordinary. And read Kevin's Chicago Noir story, which was excerpted in this week's Chicago Reader.

I must now hand over books 37 and 38. One is Wrecking Crew, the world's first and best punk-rock baseball book. This is a nonfiction story of a bunch of junkies, musicians, and unemployed actors who decide to form an amateur baseball team on the East Side of Los Angeles. If that description alone doesn't make you want to buy the book, I don't know what will. At last, a contemporary baseball book that lives outside the moronic "Moneyball" debate.

I'm also reading Tough Jews, by Rich Cohen. The book has been around for a while now, but one can never read enough about Jewish gangster life in the first half of the 20th Century.

There is sad news to report. Fletcher Farrington, a Savannah, Georgia civil-rights attorney, has passed away. I mention this because Fletcher was a student in my first online satire-writing class. He brought wit and perspective to the proceedings, and was a good friend and mentor to some of the younger students. Fletcher was a perfect gentleman, and he will be missed.

Posted by at 3:12 PM | Permalink

Just to see if I can still ride this horse:

Well, then, now you have Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. On the one hand, Robertson is a crazy old man. But he's a crazy old man with the President's ear. He's mouthing the rhetoric he hears from politicians during fundie Christian political retreats. In fact, it's leaders like Robertson who more or less set the White House's agenda. Robertson is just too much of an egomaniacal windbag to keep his mouth shut. And besides, it's not as though the United States hasn't assassinated a left-wing Latin American leader before.

Hugo Chavez is no hero. He is a danger to the interests of the U.S. government, particularly this U.S. government. But state-sponsored assassination, based on a fatwa issued by an independent cleric? So not cool.

And anti-war protesters are the ones being called extremist?

Also, in a more or less unrelated item, this is some scary stuff. Watch the video. The government continues to attack our right to party.

How'd I do?

Posted by at 3:32 PM | Permalink

Hey. Check out this cover feature about Chicago Noir in Chicago's New City newspaper. Good coverage beyond my wildest dreams.

Also, I have a "web exclusive" piece that I wrote for the Oxford American's Southern Music Issue. You can find that here.

Posted by at 12:26 AM | Permalink

Well, we're close enough now to the publication date of Chicago Noir so that I may begin pimping it in earnest. I'll be in Chicago over Labor Day weeekend for the Bouchercon festival, and for various readings and parties. Opening night is August 31, when my good friend Kevin Guilfoile and I will be reading at Barbara's on South Halsted. I think the listings person may be promising too much by saying you'll be hungover the next day, but maybe we'll go to a bar afterward and make some trouble.

Here's a nice review from Illinois Times, and we also got a feature in today's Sun-Times. Come out to an event if you're in Chicago or region, and be a dear and buy a book otherwise. This is sort of my "Tales From The Crypt," only that guy was better-looking.

Posted by at 4:00 PM | Permalink

Hello, prose-starved friends. I'm in the middle of a book deadline and haven't had time or even interest in posting here. But perhaps you're feasting on my prose elsewhere, like my recent Slate piece on the important topic of articles about football players doing yoga, or my final Nerve.com Bad Sex column.

There is much going on in the world, as opposed to during any other time in human history. There are hundreds of other blogs that handle the coverage better than I can, or want to. Meanwhile, I've read some more books, bringing me up to 35 for the year. There was a Hard Case Crime pulp job that was my least favorite that the publisher has put out, full of cliched characters and situations, so I shall not mention it here. I also read John McDonald's first Travis McGee novel, The Deep Blue Goodbye, because I think if I love this genre I'm supposed to do that. And I definitely liked some of the book. McDonald really hda a sense of place. But I'm tired of noir hero as existential superman. The problem with a protagonist who appears in 20 books is that his or her "adventures" in ONE of them would be a lifetime for a normal person. So I guess after a while the genre starts to wear.

What else? Arthur Phillips The Egyptologist, which was amusing for about 50 pages but after that I found it a bit over-stylized. And I read Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is a kind of environmental history book about why societies choose to thrive or fail. I think he thinks we're about to fail. It was an interesting read, if a bit textbook-y. And now I'm working on book 36, a British science-fiction novel from the 1950s called WASP, which is the best book about politics, war, and terrorism that I've read. Nothing that I've read since 9-11 describes our current situation better, which is strange, because, again, it's a British science-fiction novel from the 1950s.

And now back to my hole.

Posted by at 1:18 PM | Permalink