#FridayReads Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, artist Joseph Remnant and editor Jeff Newelt’s posthumous publication of one of the late Pekar’s last manuscripts, lovingly assembled. Also, Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Joe Jones, as Told to Albert Murray, edited by Paul Devlin–Jones was longtime drummer in the Count Basie Band, a garrulous soul.
My wife Kyle Gallup is a visual artist who also writes for LeftBankArtBlog. Her latest piece, published there on April 28, is on the New York painter Katherine Bradford, whose current exhibit at Edward Thorp Gallery is up through May 26. The work of Bradford’s shown to the left is “S.O.S., 2012.” I hope you enjoy reading Kyle’s review here as a guest post and if you’re able to, get out and see Katherine Bradford’s paintings at the gallery.
Always happy to see a story involving my old hometown Cleveland’s book culture–Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly reports that an 1886 book of natural history and ornithology, Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, a copy of which was discovered in 1995 in the library of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, is now being republished by Princeton Architectural Press. PAP’s catalog listing for the book shows that the new edition has been retitled America’s Other Audubon by Joy Kiser, the librarian who found one of twenty-five remaining copies of the rare book.
The author, Genevieve Jones, an amateur naturalist of her day, was inspired to create the book after seeing Audubon’s Birds of America paintings at the World’s Fair of 1876. She created sixty-eight original lithographs in making her book, which contemporaries described as “the most beautiful book ever produced in America.” Sadly, Jones died before it was finished and her family labored seven years to see to its completion, then underwriting printing and selling it by subscription. Only 90 copies were produced, and among the subscribers were Theodore Roosevelt and President Rutherford Hayes.
I love old natural history books, such as The Journal of A Disappointed Man by W.N.P. Barbellion, to which H.G. Wells contributed an Introduction upon its publication in 1919–a few months before the author died of multiple sclerosis at age thirty. Two sample entries from Barbellion’s youth, January 3, 1903: “Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned the idea of writing 0n ‘How Cats Spend their Time.'” and March 18, “Our Goldfinch roosts at 5:30. Joe’s kitten is a very small one. ‘Magpie’ is its name.” I have an old Penguin copy of the book and a reprint published in 1989. Then there’s Fishes: Their Journeys and Migrations by Louis Roule, originally published in 1933, which I republished as a Kodansha Globe title in 1996, with a new Introduction by George Reiger of Field & Stream magazine. A reviewer of the original edition wrote, “Will please the nature student, the Izaak Walton enthusiast, or the reader who delights in believe-it-or-nots.” Living in an age of diminishing biological diversity with an accelerating pace of extinction, it is important to be aware of species and varieties that used to be common and are no more, or increasingly scarce, and I treasure these books for aiding that effort, decades after they were first published. That’s kind of miraculous.
Some readers of this blog will have noticed yesterday that an incorrectly reported Politico story–about Barack Obama as author of Dreams From My Father–which was then inflated on the Drudge Report in to a bogus “Obama lied” meme, led to me being quoted in TPM’s story on the dust-up, because I published the first paperback edition of the book, in 1996. The TPM story ran under the headline, “‘Dreams From My Father’ Publisher: Drudge, Politico Obama Hits Bunk.”
And now today, Craig Silverman–who in 2007 published a book with me, Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Our Free Speech –writes about this situation on his blog, where he covers media mistakes and corrections, in a column, How Politico can fix its mistake about Obama book. In his piece, Craig does an excellent job taking away useful lessons from the episode that all media people and news orgs should consider following, especially on how to handle the aftermath of a mistake. For media people who care about preventing errors, and the misinformation and harm that flow from them, I urge you to heed Craig’s constructive advice.
For the record, I’ve also written about correcting the Politico error and the Drudge amplification of it here, and earlier wrote about publishing Dreams From My Father here.
Happy to be quoted at length in this TPM story by Brian Beutler about the erroneous reporting by Politico, which mistakenly reported today that Barack Obama had failed in the earliest editions of Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance to acknowledge that he created composite characters in the book. I know otherwise because I published the first paperback edition of the book, in 1996, as I have written on this blog. I contacted TPM this afternoon to correct the record on the needlessly murky situation created by the false report that originated with today’s Politico story by Dylan Byers, then amplified on the Drudge Report. You may click on the TPM story or read it below.
For the record, this is the entire comment I sent to TPM which they quote from above:
So much political news the past few days, much of it about the anniversary of the raid in which Osama Bin Laden was killed, and I’ve linked to some excellent pieces on that below*. Meantime, I really like how aggressively the #Obama2012 campaign is setting out to define Romney. While the Bin Laden dust-up is getting more coverage, yesterday there was this ad that ended with the line, It’s just what you expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account, and now today it’s backed up with this infographic I saw on TPM showing Mitt’s foreign investment holdings. One hopes that at least some press people will be asking Romney’s people about these offshore accounts, and keep them on turf they’d rather not have to defend.
Mitt had such lousy opponents in the Republican primary that I detect he and his campaign are ill-prepared for what’s going to hit them in terms of coordinated opposition messages, one layered on top of another. The copy below is straight from the Obama-Biden website, as is the graphic whose name on the jpeg is “Romney_World Map”. 
Another salutary benefit of this early aggressiveness will be to energize the DEM base, which will be delighted to see the campaign’s determination to play rough–accurate and tough. For sure, there will be people in the press who decry this aggression, but as Josh Marshall has repeatedly pointed out with his bitch-slap theory of politics, if you can make your opponent look weak, or even, in old-fashioned gender terms, “un-man him,” you’re on the way to winning your race. I’m still worried about the enormous amount of Super-Pac spending that is going to be thrown against the president (and other DEMs) but there’s no question which candidate is running the better campaign at this point.
*See this collection of excellent journalism and commentary from the past couple days:
1) David Corn’s excellent tick-tock on the Bin Laden raid and the president’s decision to launch it. PBO is a cool customer. Read this and I think you’ll see what I mean.
2) Rick Ungar’s piece on forbes.com, about what he believes is the bad character revealed by Mitt’s cheap “Jimmy Carter” shot. What’s more, I would add, it undercut his supposed point. It was stupid politics, while revealing a bad heart, at least over this.
3) James Fallows up-close recollection of President Carter’s failed raid to free the American hostages in Iran, and why Romney got the point so wrong.
4) And two pieces, one by Jed Lewison in Daily Kos, and the other by Michael Hirsh in National Journal, about the real politicization of 9/11, including Mitt’s appearance today in lower Manhattan with Rudy Giuliani.
As some readers of this blog will have noticed, I’m a huge fan of the historical detective novels by Scotsman Philip Kerr featuring his WWII-era Berlin police detective Bernie Gunther. The first, March Violets, was published in 1989, followed by The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem, the latter coming out in 1991. They became known collectively as the “Berlin Noir” trilogy. As Kerr explains in the above video from his website, he put Bernie aside for fifteen years to write other books, including the excellent dystopian thriller The Second Angel, before returning to him in 2006 with the gripping The One From the Other. With the April 2012 publication of Prague Fatale the Gunther series is now up to eight titles.
While the first three books proceeded pretty much chronologically from the early 30s through the war years, the last five books are more varied in their narrative structure. Now, Kerr often flashes back and forth between the pre-war period and the war itself to the postwar period–placing Bernie in ever more morally conflicted situations. We may find Bernie in Argentina in the late 40s, trying to keep his head down, but inevitably running smack into Nazis who’ve fled Europe, often men he’d known or had run-ins with back in the day; a prisoner under interrogation by American intelligence officials investigating Nazi war crimes; or in the company of mobsters in 1950s Cuba*, like The Godfather brilliantly reimagined. But always the narrative returns to Berlin, with Bernie working as part of the Kripo–the Berlin detective division whose operations become increasingly threadbare and corrupt as police resources and manpower inexorably flow to the war and all sorts of morally compromised scum seek haven working in the squad–or working as the house dick at the Hotel Adlon, a once-opulent now down-on-its-heels hostelry.
As is often the case in the Bernie Gunther books, Prague Fatale finds Bernie encountering a real-life figure from the Nazi era. In the new book he’s under the unwelcome thumb of Reinhard Heydrich, SS-Obergruppenführer (a General) and chief of the Reich Main Security Office (including the Gestapo and Kripo), who assigns Bernie to protect him against a possible plot on his life. In her crime column last week, the New York Times Book Review‘s Marilyn Stasio called it “a locked-room whodunit” and the series, “endlessly fascinating,” while in the Louisville’s Courier-Journal reviewer Roger K. Miller wrote that he believes Kerr is the “absolute master of the genre; no one writing in English bests him, not David Downing or Jonathan Rabb, not even Alan Furst.” He continues,
Aside from plotting and character, another thing about Kerr’s writing is simply how enjoyable it is too read his sentences. Even when writing about the most arcane and detestable aspects of the Nazi regime, the writing is lucid, fluent, and filled with vivid image-making. If you enjoy reading detective fiction, or books about WWII, and haven’t yet encountered the Bernie Gunther novels, I urge you to begin reading Philip Kerr. I treasure his work, and I believe you will too.
*In If the Dead Rise Not (2010), the sixth Gunther novel, Bernie becomes entangled with a killer named Max Reles, a corrupt American businessman colluding with Nazis building the 1936 Olympics facilities, all of them skimming huge profits from the contracting. Reles is every bit as evil as any of the Nazis who’ve ever crossed Bernie’s path. In the narrative’s flash-forward Bernie unexpectedly encounters Reles again almost twenty years later, in pre-Castro Cuba, and the reader learns that Max has come by his homicidal qualities by bloodline. In the novel, his brother was the real-life Abe Reles, aka “Kid Twist,” nicknamed for the maniacal delight he took in strangling his victims. In Weegee-era New York City, Abe Reles made front-page news as a notorious New York mob turncoat who in 1941 turned state’s evidence against his Murder Inc. confederates Lepke Buchalter and Albert Anastasio. Abe was only a few days into his bombshell testimony in front of a Brooklyn jury, when after-hours, ostensibly under police protection in his Coney Island hotel, he was flung from a high floor, dead when he hit the roof below. Some said he may have jumped, though as it turned out, suicide made little sense, logically or forensically. The certain convictions and complete dismantlement of the mob died with him. Coincidentally, in 2008 I had edited and published a nonfiction book called The Canary Sang But Couldn’t Fly: The Fatal Fall of Abe Reles, the Mobster Who Shattered Murder Inc.’s Code of Silence by Edmund Elmaleh**, so I knew Kid Twist’s story well. Since reading If the Dead Rise Not I’ve checked and double-checked, and have found no evidence that the real Abe Reles had a brother named Max. I’m really taken with the inventiveness of Kerr in creating a fictional sibling counterpart to the vicious Kid Twist in his superbly imaginative novel.
**As an addendum to this admittedly lengthy footnote, I must add that late in 2008, just a few weeks before finished copies of Elmaleh’s book were due to arrive at the offices of Sterling Publishing, where I was then Editorial Director of Union Square Press, I received word that the author had suddenly collapsed and died. Unfortunately, Eddie, as I had come to know him, never got to see a printed copy of what was his first published book. At least he didn’t die by misadventure, as Abe Reles had. Finally, as it turned out for me, my time was almost up too, not in this life, but at that publishing house. In a big layoff two weeks in to January of 2009 I was relieved of my job, a milestone I have written about here on this blog, and which has permitted me much more time to read books like the Bernie Gunther novels.
The NY Times reports that this past Thursday more than 2,000 fans, friends, and admirers of Levon Helm flocked to Woodstock, NY, to pay tribute to the late drummer, singer, and all around good man. Levon’s family prepared the palm card shown here with his picture and dates to hand out to the sad celebrants. What struck me in this story and other accounts I’ve read are the tales of his contributions to the local community–playing on the Town Green, inviting locals to attend concerts at the Ramble free of charge, and other kindnesses. He is missed by so many.
In honor of The Band’s creative musical enterprise, here’s a great video clip that combines a studio performance of “King Harvest Has Surely Come” with “Long Black Veil.” The late Richard Manuel sings lead on the first, and the late Rick Danko on the second song. Levon is drumming and harmonizing throughout, with Garth Hudson sweetening the heady sound and Robbie Robertston adding lots of tasty lead licks.
If you haven’t read my posts following Levon’s death over te past week, you may read them here and here.
Finally, it seems right to add a few lyrics from Bob Dylan, famously sung by Levon in “The Weight.”
Crazy chester followed me, and he caught me in the fog.
He said, “i will fix your rack, if you’ll take jack, my dog.”
I said, “wait a minute, chester, you know I’m a peaceful man.”
He said, “that’s okay, boy, won’t you feed him when you can.”
Take a load off fanny, take a load for free;
Take a load off fanny, and (and) (and) you can put the load right on me.
Catch a cannon ball now, t’take me down the line
My bag is sinkin’ low and I do believe it’s time.
To get back to miss fanny, you know she’s the only one.
Who sent me here with her regards for everyone.