Philip Roth, Indignation web cast

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A Big Thank You to Dave Schwartz

CGB would like to say thanks to Dave Schwartz for taking the time to post all week. What great reads! Make sure to pick up a copy of his book Superpowers.

Guest Blogger Dave Schwartz: Let It Be

I confess that, although I've been using a Minneapolis band's discography to title my post this week, my true love is St. Paul. This despite the fact that I've only spent about eight years living within the city limits: the first seven, and this last. I've spent most of my time in the suburbs here, in Madison, Wisconsin (going to school, off and on), and in Chicago.

It was living in Chicago that forced me to admit that St. Paul, much as I love it, isn't necessarily a "world-class" city. Even combined with Minneapolis, it's simply not on the scale of Chicago or New York, and it doesn't have the history of London or Munich or Tokyo. I enjoy books about cities--books like Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography, Andrew Hussey's Paris: The Secret History, or Fredric Morton's books about early 20th-Century Vienna. And I love Herbert Asbury's popular crime books from the 1930's, like Gangs of New York and The French Quarter, equal parts legend and history about the raucous, gritty underbelly of empire building.

St. Paul, with its shady beginnings and Prohibition-era notoriety seems ripe for a book like these. Add in things like the Streetcar Riots, figures like James J. Hill and Archbishop John Ireland, and the shifting ethnic character of the city--from the Irish rise to respectability to the destruction of the Rondo neighborhood to the new Hmong and Somali communities--and you've got the makings of a great American saga, but it may be some time before anyone writes it. Biographies seem to take about ten years to write, on average, and the biography of a city could be the work of a lifetime, I suppose. In the meantime, in addition to the above, I give you five reasons to love St. Paul:

1. Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant. The capital city took its name from this fur trader and whiskey bootlegger until Father Galtier took offense and "re-christened" the city. Working out of a cave near Fort Snelling and getting most of his business from the soldiers stationed there, one-eyed Parrant was the city's first inhabitant but left under mysterious circumstances in 1844.

2. Summit Avenue. I am perhaps biased, being a current inhabitant of the neighborhood, but if there is a more picturesque drag in any American city I have yet to see it. Most of the mansions of the robber barons (and their bankers, lawyers, managers, etc.) are still standing a hundred years later, thanks to the economic winds of fate; for the most part, when fashion and disdain for history might have demanded their demolition and replacement, there simply wasn't the money for it. Now they stand like Gothic castles, even subdivided and gone condo as some of them are, monuments to the days when the railroads made the city a boomtown. The perfect place for a quiet stroll on a summer evening, or a guided tour on a Sunday afternoon.

3. Mee Moua. In the wake of Vietnam the Hmong, allies of the Americans during the war, were given special consideration for immigration. Thanks in large part to former mayor George Latimer, many of them came to St. Paul, where they have become prominent in business, the arts, and politics. Mee Moua is an example of the latter, holding the highest political office of any Hmong-American in her capacity as a Minnesota State Senator.

4. The O'Connor System. While not precisely a thing to be proud of, the O'Connor System made St. Paul one of the most notorious cities in the U.S. during Prohibition, and added a particularly colorful chapter to its history. Originated by Police Chief John O'Connor, the system made it known to wanted criminals like John Dillinger, the Barker Boys, Machine Gun Kelly, and Babyface Nelson that they would not be harassed by the St. Paul police so long as they agreed not to commit any crimes within the city limits. While the federal government--particularly the newly-formed FBI--weren't bound by any such gentlemen's agreement, the arrangement lasted long enough for corruption to spread throughout the police department and city government. Since, during the Depression, gangsters were seen more as glamorous folk heroes than public enemies, it wasn't until the heir to the Hamm's Brewery fortune was kidnapped that the system began to fall apart and the reign of the gangsters crumbled.

5. The St. Paul Winter Carnival. When a New York reporter called St. Paul "another Siberia, unfit for human habitation," the Chamber of Commerce responded by creating a festival of winter sports and arts. That was in 1885, and it's still going today, with ice sculptures, Vulcans, and cold toes. In a way the Carnival sums up the stubborn and defensive (in the best way possible) nature of St. Paulites and Minnesotans in general. "Too cold? I'll show you too cold!" I've written more about the Carnival here, at my own regular blog, about the wacky wonderfulness of the pagan-inspired Carnival mythology, from gun-toting princes to Klondike Kates, and the special ephemeral wonder of an ice palace--may we see another someday soon.

That concludes my stint as a guest blogger here, and I'd like to thank Common Good Books for inviting me to yammer at you all week. As mentioned above, I can be found at my usual blog, so if you've enjoyed these posts you may want to check that out. If you'd like to read an excerpt from Superpowers, you can find that here. And for good measure I'll point you at this interview I did recently with Bookslut.com. Thanks for reading!

Guest Blogger Dave Schwartz: All Shook Down

It's nearly autumn, and that means football. As an enthusiast of all sorts of different things--like Nilla Wafers, Naomi Novik books, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, just to name a few--it would not be right for me to disparage anyone else's interests. But can football lovers really call themselves "fans"? "Fan" is, of course, short for fanatic. Fanatic? When there are only sixteen games a year? That's not commitment. That's not obsession. (Oops, there's that word again.) Sometimes I think the only true fans are baseball fans, because who else keeps the faith for 162 games a year?

OK, maybe soap opera afficionados. But there's a reason that Annie Savoy talks about "The Church of Baseball." So on a day when the Twins are only a game out of first place--wait, a game and a half? $&@#ing bullpen--I give you my list of the five best baseball books.

1. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy by W.P. Kinsella. While Shoeless Joe gets most of the attention (and the film adaptation), Confederacy is the weirder and more moving of the two books. Concerning time travel, angels that take at-bats, and a 2,000-inning contest between the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars and the 1908 Chicago Cubs, the story features cameos by Theodore Roosevelt, Leonardo da Vinci (as the true inventor of baseball), and of course the immortal double play combo of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. Kinsella presents baseball as magic in and of itself--unbounded by a clock, with home runs sailing off towards infinity--and this book might just make you believe it.

2. You Know Me Al: A Busher's Letters by Ring Lardner. Holden Caulfield excluded Lardner from his list of phonies, and in Jack Keefe he found his literary model. Lardner tells his stories about Jack in the form of letters from the young pitcher to his old friend Al, and Keefe's vernacular has more than a little in common with the folksy way Holden tells his story. The difference is that Keefe lacks both the angst and the self-knowledge that Holden is cursed with, and the result is often hilarious, occasionally biting, and always charming. In the canon of early 20th-Century American writers, Lardner is too often overlooked.

3. The Catcher Was a Spy by Nicholas Dawidoff. The true story of Princeton graduate, pro baseball player, and OSS spy Moe Berg. That tag line alone ought to sell you on this book.

4. Five Seasons by Roger Angell. Angell writes about baseball for The New Yorker; he's also been called the best baseball writer ever. That's the sort of claim that never goes undisputed, but there's a lot of intelligence and compassion in this chronicle of the sport from 1972-1976.

5. Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop. What if Frankenstein's monster survived the Arctic and ended up in the United States? What if it were the South during World War II? What if he became a minor league baseball player? If that sounds wacky, it isn't; it's one of the quieter and subtler books on this list, and it may well be the best. (It's a tragedy that it happens to be the only one out of print.) Bishop is a humane and thoughtful writer, and this book is not to be missed.

Guest Blogger Dave Schwartz: Hootenanny

I'm obsessed with elephants.

Well, perhaps obsessed is a little strong. I don't follow elephants home from work or schedule my vacations around theirs. I don't dream about elephants. (At least, not often.) I don't have pictures of elephants, cut out of glossy celebrity magazines, assembled into a collage on the wall of my attic bedroom. Funny, isn't it, how me telling you about the ways in which I am not obsessed is almost as creepy as if I were?

A friend of mine asked me the other day, Why elephants? The fact that I think this particular friend has asked me this question before makes me think that my friends are worried about me. It's a valid question, sure: Why elephants and not, say, pandas? Or otters?

It's true that I do have a tendency to, um, lecture when the topic of elephants comes up. Did you know that they communicate via ultrasonic rumbles which they can sense for miles through the pads of their feet? Did you know that they ignore all animal bones except for their own (and sometimes humans), and when they come upon the remains of a family member they often pause as a group and handle the bones with their trunks as if remembering? Did you know that some elephants live in the desert and dig wells, or live in forests and are rarely seen? DID YOU KNOW DID YOU KNOW DID YOU KNOW.

It's true. I can be tiresome on the subject, which is probably why "obsessed" is as good a word as any. As an obsessive, I offer you my list of the five best books I've read about elephants:

1. The Fate of the Elephant by Douglas H. Chadwick. An exhaustive travelogue on elephants by a noted wildlife author. Chadwick visits just about every place elephants live, traces the movement of the illegal ivory trade, and talks about the politics of elephant conservation in an accessible way. Smart and reverent and worried.

2. The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy. Fiction, told from the point of view of a small family of elephants struggling to survive a drought. Gowdy walks a line between anthropomorphizing and an educated guess at how elephants might think: with compassion, and intelligence, and sometimes desperation.

3. Coming of Age With Elephants by Joyce Poole. Poole, one of the original researchers on the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya (along with Cynthia Moss, below), mixes personal memoir with scientific biography here. She traces the lives of the local herds, chronicling death, birth, mating, and the direct impact of poaching.

4. Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family by Cynthia Moss. Less personal than Poole's book, Moss covers the characteristics, behavior and life cycle of elephants through stories of the Amboseli families.

5. Love, War, and Circuses by Eric Scigliano. More focused on Asian elephants than the previous three books, Scigliano looks at elephants in relation to human culture, from theories of how the clearing of the plains by mammoths made it possible for humans to thrive, to Ganesh and other elephant signifiers in religion, and the problem of elephants in captivity.

Guest Blogger David Schwartz: Don't Tell a Soul

You know what? Superheroes take themselves too seriously. Somewhere between The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight*, between the death of Jean DeWolff and Marvel's Civil War, something got lost, or at least pushed deep into the background. Don't get me wrong; the maturation of comics is a beautiful thing, and anyone who thinks Watchmen would have been better if the Comedian were actually funny is out of their mind. But there is of course something very silly about people in tights, and we forget that at our peril.

For that reason, I give you:

Five Things About Superheroes That Are Not Serious:

1. The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, by Justin Pierce. "Satirical take" does not really cover the lunacy of this weekly webcomic. Inspired by a certain DC superheroine, Wonderella is part disinterested world-saver, part celebutante, all mouth and no filter. In the most recent strip she responds to a question about her sudden vice-presidential run by saying "I've shot FIVE people in the face. That's five times as many as any sitting vice president." Pierce has just put out a book of the first 100 strips starring Wonderella and her supporting cast, which includes Jokerella, Doctor Shark, and her sidekick Wonderita.

2. Superdickery.com, by various. Before comics were dark and complicated, they were weird and random. Back in November 2004 some folks on a discussion board began talking about comics covers from the Silver Age, which took place in the years before irony, subtext, and continuity were invented. The prevailing theme of the strange covers that Superdickery displays--like this one from Lois Lane comics, this from Action Comics and this from Jimmy Olsen's solo title--was pretty clear. Superman is a d--is not a very nice person. Superdickery has some hilarious covers, not just from the Superman family of comics but from all across the Silver Age; perfect for losing hours of your life on the web.

3. Seanbaby's Superfriends Page. If you were a kid in the seventies or eighties, you probably remember Super Friends. If you're an adult now, and you've seen the cartoon since, you probably experienced the horror of realizing just how stupid it actually was. Even post-Scrappy Scooby-Doo looks good in comparison. As Seanbaby says: "the Super Friends somehow stayed alive for 10 years by hiring people who could talk to fish, match a cape to their underwear, and turn into a bucket of water." And really, that's the point of this site; documenting the pathetic powers and behavior of the Super Friends and their nemeses, the Legion of Doom. Do you think Aquaman is pathetic? (He is.) Have you ever thought about how pathetic his arch-enemy must be? Seanbaby has; not only that, he has the evidence that will make you pity poor Black Manta. After you laugh at him, of course.

4. Nextwave by Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen. Warren Ellis--best known for his gonzo science fiction journalist Spider Jerusalem and various futurist, politically and technologically savvy takes on superheroes--stripped down superheroes to their essential elements with this series, with hilarious results. "It's an absolute distillation of the superhero genre," he has said. "No plot lines, characters, emotions, nothing whatsoever. It's people posing in the street for no good reason. It is people getting kicked, and then exploding. It is a pure comic book, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. And afterwards, they will explode." I don't think I can say it any better than that.

5. Squirrel Girl. Created by none other than the legendary Steve Ditko, Squirrel Girl encapsulates all that is ridiculous about superheroes and makes it sublime. Sweet-natured and optimistic, Squirrel Girl has the power to control squirrels. Yup. She also wears a big furry suit with a bushy tail attached. That's a joke in itself, sure, but what's inspired about the character is that with the help of her army of squirrels she has managed to defeat such heavyweight villains as MODOK, Terrax, Thanos, and Doctor Doom himself. Now THAT'S comedy.

*That's right, he returned first. It's a Frank Miller thing, and if you think that's confusing you probably don't know about The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Which, to be fair, is skippable.

Guest Blog, David J. Schwartz: Pleased To Meet Me

Greetings, Twin Cities book lovers. That is, I assume that if you are reading this, you love books. At the very least you buy them, and while the link between love and money has not been scientifically proven, there are certain things that have to be taken on faith. This, at least, was what I told myself last week, while my city was under occupation by delegates and law enforcement officers from all over the country. "It will be over soon," I told myself, and in the end my faith was rewarded. I don't care what your political beliefs are--having a helicopter hovering above your neighborhood around the clock is going to disturb your sleep.

Who, you may ask, am I? I'm Dave Schwartz (though on the books it says David J. Schwartz), and I'm honored to be your guest blogger this week. My novel Superpowers, about five college kids in Madison, Wisconsin who drink a batch of home-brewed beer and wake up with a hangover and weird powers, came out in June, which is when I found out what it was about.

That probably sounds odd, so let me explain with a link. Lauren McLaughlin, author of the recent YA novel Cycler, blogged recently about how doing interviews and other publicity for her book had forced her to think about it in a way she hadn't before. She says of analyzing her own work:

I was an English major in college so this should be a piece of cake. After all, I don’t have to hypothesize what the author intended. I was there. I know what she intended.

Or do I?

I had a flash of recognition reading Lauren's post, because, like her, at some point between the conception of a work and the completion, lots of things change--at least, for me they do. Whatever my intentions were with Superpowers when I started writing it, a lot of them shifted along the way. Morphed, you might say. I blame the characters, personally. For some reason, the more real they become, the less amenable they are to fitting into grand thematic matrices. The nerve: without me these people wouldn't even exist, and yet here they are telling me their stories. That's supposed to be my job!

So I found myself having to look at my novel from a new perspective, to try to approach it as a thoughtful reader might, and some of the conclusions surprised me. Among other things, I've written a book about power that implies that perhaps the best thing to do with power is not to use it. I never had a single conscious thought about inserting that idea, but I don't disagree with it. If I'd read it in someone else's book I'd think that was pretty insightful (even if the author went a long way to say it), but since I know the author pretty well I'm not impressed. I'm not going to give that guy credit for a happy accident.

Some writers don't have this problem, I suspect. Some writers work with strict outlines, and when a character starts to wander from the narrative path they either steer him straight or kill him off. But everyone who gets as far as publication has to deal with reviews, and that's where you really get to know yourself. At least, you get to know a version of the person who wrote your book, and sometimes it's someone you don't much care for.

Reviews, in the age of instant commentary via blogs, email, user reviews, social networking, etc., are, with a few unhappy exceptions, the black hole of author commentary. Many of the writers I know are online and will happily make mention of everything from politics to traffic to that awful waitress at the restaurant last night; but while most of them will happily excerpt and link to positive reviews, it's a near-universal taboo to take on the bad ones. This is a good thing, to be clear, as the occasional head-butting between author and reader at Amazon will attest. But I only really came to appreciate how difficult it could be to keep mum about such things when my own book came out.

If analyzing your own novel is a surprising experience, reading someone else's analysis will teach you things about your writing skills, knowledge of subject matter, and motives for telling your particular story that you have probably never suspected. Taking the good with the bad, you may discover a book and an author so full of contradictions that their existence seems unlikely. A book can be both "thoughtful" and "ill-considered," both "earthbound" and "soaring." It can "zip along" and "never attain any sort of urgency." Characters can be "superbly drawn" and "remain mostly static."

Please note that I am not arguing with any of the less-than-glowing reviews. (I would, however, like to point you at some rather glowing ones, like this one here, this one, and this one.) I'm just trying to illustrate a point, one that I'm trying to prove to myself: these people opened the same book, but they all read a different one. It doesn't mean that the reviews don't matter, because even the most dismissive one has an opinion to express; but it's just an opinion, and in the end I have to weigh mine a little heavier than theirs.

So who, you may ask again, am I? I was born right here in St. Paul, and I'll be blogging a little about that this week. I love baseball and elephants (whom I consider to be non-partisan), and I'll be blogging about those things, too. First, though, I think I'll talk about superheroes, which--as you might guess from my book--I'm also a fan of. More on that tomorrow.