Blogging the PEN World Voices Festival April 30-May 6

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As a member of the estimable literary advocacy organization the PEN American Center I attended a number of events during the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature last May and reported on some of them for the PEN blog*. More  than two dozen PEN members have accepted the invitation to become Festival Correspondents this spring and I’m excited I’ll again be one of them. We’ll be posting to a friendly new tumblr platform** and fanning out all over the city to participate in and cover the fifty-event literary smorgasbord with nearly 100 novelists, poets, playwrights, translators, critics, and editors from dozens of countries. There are many highlights on the program, including two with women writers that I’ll be covering on Thursday, May 3. In the first, Margaret Atwood will be discussing The Writer’s Mind and the Digital Otherworld with longtime editor and friend Amy Grace Lloyd. In 2005, I published a book with Margaret, Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005, a collection of fifty-eight pieces of her criticism and literary journalism, so it should be fascinating to hear her examine such questions as “What does it mean to write with the Web? and “How does our constant access to information and ideas affect the landscape of imagination?” The second program will be Understanding Egypt with the courageous Mona Eltahawy who I wrote about on this blog, in The Broken Bones of Mona Eltahawy, after she was beaten by Egyptian security forces, later re-gaining her freedom in in part because of global online protests, especially on Twitter.

These ticketed events will be held at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium, beginning at 6 PM and 8 PM respectively. I invite you to attend one or both of these talks. Make an evening of it! If you do choose to attend, or end up at another event during the week, please say hello. PEN encourages active literary citizenship so if you are a writing or publishing professional, and have been considering getting involved, I suggest you do so. The international and domestic work PEN does on behalf of free expression is extremely effective and important.

For my readers’ convenience, here again is a link to the Festival program.

*My coverage from PEN World Voices in 2011: 1) Getting Real with Superheroes (which was also published with PW Comics World on the Publishers Weekly website) and 2) Summoning Ghosts at The Standard 

**To read the PEN World Voices Festival tumblr please use this link. The Twitter hashtag for the festival will be #PENFest12. As soon as my full schedule for the week is available I will share it here. Meantime, here is my newly updated PEN member profile page.
// click through on share link below to see photo of Mona Eltahaway . . . //

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The NY Times Leaves out Levon, Twice

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It often takes me a few days to catch up to the weekend papers, so today, on glancing at the New York Times of Saturday, April 21, I was glad to see they’d featured Bob Dylan’s eulogy for Levon Helm that I also cited on this blog in Reflecting on The Band’s Break-up and Levon’s Death. Oddly, with the benefit of time passing, I often discover mistakes in the paper days after publication, as happened some months ago with Times coverage of the Romneys’ horses.  Sure enough, as I began to read last Saturday’s story I was surprised to see that the photograph of Dylan and The Band they used with their item didn’t actually include Levon in it. Clearly, others had noticed the error before me, because on the Times website I’ve found this correction accompanying the article where the erroneous photo has been removed.

Because of an editing error, a report in the “Arts, Briefly” column on Saturday about Bob Dylan’s recollections of collaborating with Levon Helm, the drummer and singer who died last week at 71, erroneously included Mr. Helm among the musicians pictured at a 1974 performance. Another drummer, who was not identified, was shown with the group; Mr. Helm was not pictured.

As corrections too often do, this one piles error on top of error, with the reference to “another drummer” an additional mistake. First, the bearded person seated in a hat, who the Times wanted readers at first to incorrectly assume was Levon, is not some anonymous walk-on, but actually Richard Manuel, member of The Band going back to their earliest days when they were called The Hawks. Manuel ordinarily played piano (the instrument he is actually seated at in the Times photo), but would slide over to drums when Levon played mandolin or guitar. Unfortunately, as can be seen in my photos of the item, it had no caption at all, and the Times didn’t ID any of the musicians, apparently content to let readers infer that Levon Helm was in the shot. Had the brief carried a caption this error-riddled series of cascading confusions might’ve never been set in motion, or maybe it would have anyway, since it’s obvious that whoever was editing this section of the paper knew little about The Band. To sum it up, the person vaguely implied in the Times brief to be Levon was not him, and the person described in the correction was not at the drums in the photo, but at the piano. Presumably, Levon was on stage, seated at his drum kit, out of the frame of Times photographer Larry Morris’s lens, or was cropped out of the image at some point.

As journalist and author Craig Silverman points out in his fine book, Regret the Error, which I edited and published with him in 2008, media errors are often quite avoidable, and the Times‘ multiple failures here surely fall into that category. As shown in the extensive coverage of Levon’s terminal illness and death, it is clear that there are scores of photos of Bob Dylan and The Band that include him, such as the one shown below from the Los Angeles Times. It’s a pity they couldn’t have found one like it that included Levon, either in the print edition, or at worst, even later, online where no photo now appears. An error in an obituary or a eulogy is one of the most serious mistakes a media outfit can make, and the Times royally messed up here. They owe their readers better, both in print, and online.
// click through to see all photos and captions . . .

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Dean Haspiel on Drawing (and Remembering) Harvey Pekar

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Here’s a neat visual feature by comics artist Dean Haspiel on the Trip City website detailing the different approaches and multiple takes he experimented with before settling on a final version for the cover of a 2008 Harvey Pekar “American Splendor” comic. Haspiel was one of thirty comics creators who participated in Comic New York–A Symposium that was held at Columbia in March and which I covered for PW Comics World and cross-posted about on this blog. Speaking of the late Pekar, I’ve recently received a copy of Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland from Zip Comics with art by Joseph Remnant and edited by Jeff Newelt and it’s a terrific posthumous edition of the great comic writer’s work.

And if you’re a Pekar fan–I’ve loved his work ever since he used to shop in Undercover Books, my Cleveland bookstore, in the 80s–you’ll enjoy this podcast on the Trip City website, with the voices of Haspiel, Remnant, Newelt, Zip Comics publisher Josh Frankel, and Harvey’s widow, Joyce Brabner.

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Remembering Nick Webb, a Bright Light in British Publishing

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Via the Guardian comes a lovely memorial by longtime British publisher Ion Trewin bearing the sad news that the sparkling, smart Nick Webb–who as science fiction editor of Pan Books commissioned Douglas Adams to turn his BBC radio drama “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” into an international bestselling book–has died at age 63. According to Trewin’s obit, the first book of what would become the multi-volume science fiction series sold 250,000 copies within three months of publication in 1979 and a million copies by 1984, in the U.K. alone. Meantime, in the U.S., where I was then running Undercover Books, my bookstore in Cleveland, we stacked up and sold the well-priced little hardcover from Crown Publishers, reordering it repeatedly for months.

Trewin, who now works as literary director of the Man Booker Prize, clearly knew and liked Webb, the voluble son of an Irish pop and a Jewish mom. “He had a vivid sense of humour, often word-based, and delighted in mixed metaphors, once relating hearing someone say: ‘I smelled a rat and nipped it in the bud.’ Many years later the memory would still make him chortle. In conversation he used words and phrases that were inimitably his own. The acquisition of the first Hitchhiker novel was hardly considered a big deal, he recalled, or as he put it: ‘I was not proposing that we spend serious sponduliks.'” I met Nick Webb once, at a Frankfurt Book Fair when I was with Kodansha America, and enjoyed telling him I’d sold Adams’ novels in my bookstores. I liked him instantly.

Sadly, Douglas Adams also died, in 2001 at fifty-one. Happily, he and Webb left a remarkable legacy–one of the funniest, most brilliant pieces of science fiction published in the second half of the twentieth century.

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Being a Good New York Neighbor

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I’m pleased to be featured this week in Google’s interesting Meet Your Google Neighbor program, which gives denizens of New York City and other locales an opportunity to share their enthusiasms for restaurants, merchants, music venues, bookstores, and urban activities. From the outset of this blog I’ve designed the site to span “urban life, books, music, culture, current events” so it’s very gratifying to see this blog gain more recognition via Google’s promotion. Happily, the feature includes this neat photo my wife Kyle Gallup recently took of our son Ewan and me on a boat ride around Manhattan with the Statue of Liberty as backdrop, a trip I blogged about in A Spring Sailing Around Manhattan.

 

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Reflecting on The Band’s Break-up and Levon’s Death

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Among the pieces of journalism and commentary I’ve read about Levon Helm since word of his terminal condition was released by his family last week, and then since his death on Thursday, this one by Mark Guarino is the best yet. I recommend you read it, for it captures the injustice that accompanied The Band’s dissolution, and how Robbie Robertson and the businesspeople around him really did treat his four bandmates inequitably. According to Levon, in his memoir This Wheel’s on Fire, Robbie claimed all the publishing royalties on most of their songs, compositions that had famously been workshopped by all five of them, beginning at the Big Pink house, and in later sessions. For the sake of argument, even if Robbie believed he was genuinely responsible for most of the songwriting, why not assert a claim on a larger share of the royalties and then split the remaining percentage four ways? Instead, he just walked away with it all on most of their repertoire and by the time Levon received his cancer diagnosis in 1998, he had to declare personal bankruptcy and nearly lost his house. I know Robbie came to his bedside this week, and if Levon really reconciled with him that’s great, but it’s hard not to see Robbie’s visit as some self-serving absolution. It certainly adds to the sadness of Levon’s passing to say this, but I believe it’s true.

Now, as many articles have pointed out, Levon did mount a great second act with the Midnight Ramble, the Grammy-winning albums, and playing and singing with his daughter Amy. But that happiness stands in sharp contrast to the fact that nothing like that happened for Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, and this is where Guarino’s Christian Science Monitor, “Levon Helm and The Band: a rock parable of fame, betrayal, and redemption” is most valuable.

Manuel’s post-breakup troubles ended with his 1986 suicide, during a revival tour of The Band sans Robbie. Guarino tells us that Levon is the one who found him after he’d hanged himself. As for Danko, he died at fifty-one from complications of heart disease. Guarino, quoting from the memoir, reminds us of Levon’s words: “If Rick’s money wasn’t in their pockets, I don’t think Rick would have died because Rick worked himself to death.… He wasn’t that old and he wasn’t that sick. He just worked himself to death. And the reason Rick had to work all the time was because he’d been [expletive] out of his money.” To be fair, it should be admitted too that a hard-partying lifestyle would have contributed to Manuel’s and Danko’s early demise (see Danko’s stoned moments with Janis Joplin in the rolling concert film “Festival Express,” if you have any doubt how much Rick loved getting high), but it doesn’t change the fact that playing half-empty dives to keep making a living, for a musician who once played to 600,000 at Watkins Glen with the Allmans and The Dead in ’73 (which I personally attended*), had to have depressed him and Manuel to a point where continued substance abuse was, if not inevitable, unsurprising.

All this sadness acknowledged, it is comforting to see how sadness brings us all together, bridging intervening years. After posting on Facebook and Twitter over the past week, I’ve heard from high school friends, such as Seth Foldy of Friends School and hometown Cleveland pals, like Eric Broder. Eric referred me to the Drive-by-Truckers’ Danko-Manuel song, with its haunted lyrics, “Got to sinking in the place where I once stood/Now I ain’t living like I should . . . Richard Manuel is dead”.

It was fitting to me that the family’s first message about Levon’s illness, while originating with his wife and Amy (who I had the privilege of hearing sing a few months ago with Blackie and the Rodeo Kings**, a performance I wrote about here), was immediately passed along on social media by “Bob Dylan and The Band.” And then, after Levon died, this appeared on bobdylan.com: “He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation. This is just so sad to talk about. I still can remember the first day I met him and the last day I saw him. We go back pretty far and had been through some trials together. I’m going to miss him, as I’m sure a whole lot of others will too.”

In honor of The Band and Bob Dylan, and yesterday’s Record Store Day, I’ve taken photos of all my LPs and CDs coming from their great musical enterprise, even Robbie’s first solo album. (click on thumbnails for full panorama of album images

* From that great weekend, I recall that a heavy thunderstorm with distant bolts of lightning let loose on the Saturday night, and The Band, then playing, had to flee the stage out of safety concerns. When the downpour had ebbed, Garth Hudson came out first and sat at his organ beneath a protective little canopy, launching into an unforgettable rendition of the solo that opens “Chest Fever, a song on “Music From Big Pink,” “Chest Fever.” These moments are forever captured on one of the CDs photographed below, “The Band- Live at Watkins Glen.”

**From Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Colin Linden, who knew and had played music with Levon, was interviewed by Jian Ghomeshi on the CBC Radio program ‘Q’ the day after his friend’s death, as was Garth Hudson, conversations that can be heard via this link.  // see more . . . for footnotes and photos. . .

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Jill Barber and Plants & Animals in NYC–Romance and Rock ‘n Roll

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Wednesday night was another great night for live music by Canadian artists in New York City. First stop on the evening’s program was Joe’s Pub to hear Jill Barber, a latter-day chanteuse who weaves a retro spell that even with her backward glances is always fresh and vibrant. She showed an enchanting stage presence, and her 3-piece band was superb, with Drew Jerucka on violin and clarinet; Robbie Grunwald on piano and accordion; and Steve Zsirai on upright bass. In addition to her vocals and songwriting, Barber also played a small guitar, left-handed.** She exuded a winsome charm, unselfconscious glamour, and improvised with light banter between songs. She sings in a distinctive tone that is the aural equivalent of B Grade maple syrup–my favorite–sweet and smoky. After she sang “Chances”–with its lyric, “Chances, what are the chances/The chances that I’d find you/Stealing glances across a crowded room/And taking a chance or two“–against a backdrop of plucked violin, tinkling piano, and a strange rumbling that could only be heard in New York, Jill said, “I can’t tell if that’s me trembling, or the subway.” Don’t fear, I thought to tell her, it is the #6 train. She continued, “I write a lot of love songs, I hope you like love songs.” The love song is indeed her milieu, and in her hands each one provides the listener a vivid romantic narrative. Among her most affecting numbers was “Measures and Scales,” with its minor key, old-world violin and accordion accompaniment, and haunted lyrics of a doomed love: “He plays piano in a jazz band/And I love him for the man that he could be/I asked him, if I let you, would you play me/Then delighted as he tickled every key . . . I am just a dreamer wearing sensible shoes/I still dream in colour even though I sing the blues . . . But it disappears somewhere when the music is done/Every song ever written has a final note“. Her show-stopper was “Oh My My,” with its invocation of a surgeon who may, or may not, be able to mend its narrator’s broken heart. This song had hot clarinet, piano boogie-woogie, and great sung-shouted lyrics.

Something I appreciate about Jill Barber’s musical enterprise is that though she’s cultivated this vintage atmospheric, she’s not playing it for camp humor or just capitalizing on some sort of Mad Men vibe; in fact she’s been working in this vein since her 2008 album, “Chances.” Her latest album “Mischievous Moon” has just been released in the U.S. and she traveled to this gig from Vancouver, British Columbia, where she lives with her husband, author and CBC Radio 3 host Grant Lawrence,*** to play shows in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Joe’s Pub, where I’d never been, is a handsome music room with great lighting and excellent acoustics. I had a nice time chatting with Jill and manager Evan Newman after her set, when I learned she’s also playing in New York City Saturday night in the Studio at Webster Hall. I’ll be eager to hear Jill Barber and her band again, whether it’s this weekend or another time in the future. I urge readers to seek out her music–she’s a unique talent as a singer and performer, and when I reflect that she also writes her own songs, it’s clear to me how special she is.

After that great set of music I quickly finished my drink and then–never able to get enough live music–taxied in the rain to the Mercury Lounge where the Montreal band Plants and Animals were due to go on at 11 PM. I just made it in and snaked through a full room to in front of the stage as they were strapping on their axes. The band has a lot of NY fans! Recognition applause and whoops accompanied the opening of many songs. They were tremendous, with great singing by Warren Spicer, energetic lead licks and great guitar tone from Nick Basque, and a terrific rhythm section anchored by drummer Matthew Woodley. Plants and Animals started out as an instrumental trio, and according to information on their website, lyrics and vocals came relatively late into their repertoire. As a residue of those origins, their songs are often longer than the usual pop standard of three minutes, stretching into the six and seven minute range. They really like to stretch things out and it makes for rewarding listening for the live music listener. As the last band of the night, there was no act following them, and the crowd soon picked up on the fact that they weren’t going to hustle off after a 40-minute set, as is often the case at tightly scheduled clubs. This was ideal given the band’s instrumental and orchestral instincts. With that in mind everyone relaxed and grooved to the abundance of tunes they rolled out. They played such songs from their 2008 album “Parc Avenue” as “The Mama Papa,” and “Bye, Bye, Bye,”–with a sweet autoharp bit played by Basque–and from their newest album, “The End of That” I recognized “LightShow,” “Why, Why” and the eponymous, “The End of That,” in which Grant Lawrence astutely hears a kind of Velvet Underground vibe. In short, they played a mess of songs from all their albums, and the set edged in to the 90-minute range. High fives were exchanged all around the dance floor when they finished the second song of their extended encore. Plants & Animals will be playing at NXNE in Toronto in mid-June, a festival I attended last year, and I hope to make it there again. When I do, I’ll be very excited to hear them play once more.

**Jill’s singer/songwriter brother Matt Barber, about whom I blogged after I heard him perform last year, also plays guitar left-handed. Clearly, left-handedness and extravagant talent run in the family.

***Full disclosure: Grant Lawrence is a personal friend of mine, about whom I have previously written on this blog. // click through on share link below to see more photographs . . . //

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Talking “The Cornbread Mafia” over Breakfast

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This morning I met an author whose work I really admire. My breakfast mate was Jim Higdon, author of The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate’s Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History, which is officially released tomorrow. I’d never met Jim, though I had a role in insuring that his book had a chance to get published. When I read the draft manuscript I wasn’t in a position to publish it myself, but I really enjoyed this gonzo true-crime narrative, and so recommended it to longtime Carroll & Graf colleague and friend, Keith Wallman, now an editor at Lyons Press. It was precisely the sort of book he and I combined to edit and prepare for publication many times, with books like David Pietrusza’s Rothstein: The Life, Times, and and Murder of the Criminal Mastermind Who Fixed the 1919 World Series; Barbara Raymond’s The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption; Alan Bisbort’s “When You Read This, They Will Have Killed Me”: The Life, Redemption, and Execution of Caryl Chessman, Whose Execution Shook America; and Chuck Kinder’s Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Outlaw Honky-Tonk Life, to name only four of many dozen books we published together.

I was pleased when Keith did sign up Jim’s book, and awaited word of publication plans. Turns out, I was to be involved with the book again because Keith asked if I would be willing to receive a galley, and spread some good words about the book. A month ago, I posted my full blurb ** on this site, which reads in part,

Higdon has written a speeding bullet of a book that turns [pot] grower Johnny Boone into one of the most fascinating characters I’ve encountered in years. If Hunter S. Thompson were still with us I believe he’d be praising The Cornbread Mafia and telling his pals to read it.

Despite hearing from the author from time to time over the months since the book was put on a path to publication, Jim and I had never met, so today’s meeting took care of that. He’s a Kentuckian, where his book is set, but the book is not merely a product of his local knowledge. He’s a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism where he took Samuel Freedman’s demanding course on writing narrative nonfiction books. Cornbread Mafia is deeply reported with dozens of sources, featuring a protagonist who’s a fugitive from federal justice. Jim’s a big guy with a good sense of humor and a keen focus on his work. We talked about the book’s publicity campaign and story ideas that Jim may explore for newspapers and magazines in coming months, and I snapped a photo of him before he headed up to Columbia to see former colleagues. It was fun meeting Jim, a writer I’m proud to have encouraged in his work.

** Worth noting that after I posted my blurb on March 16, I got this comment from reader Kurt Mattingly: “This book is, without a doubt, the most rivetting account of central Kentucky history anyone has ever written. Being a native Marion Countian and growing up just a few miles from Raywick (between St. Mary and Lebanon), almost completely oblivious to the “counter-culture” that was inherent basically all around me, I cannot put this book down.”

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