Gianna's Trip: A Recap

Zorro looks great on a National  Rifle Association flag.

[I have to fly to Amarillo tomorrow, I haven't unpacked 90% of the boxes from my move, and I can't properly display my NRA flag because Zorro is sleeping on it.  What?  Doesn't everyone own an NRA flag? Anyway, Gianna is currently hoofing it back from her second New York trip in two weeks, so I thought it only fitting that I procrastinate by posting this piece about her first trip.  Also, I think it's worth stating that even though we frequently travel for work, on these work trips we rarely have a moment to play tourist.  Days are long, the food sucks, and some days you want to give the finger to the world.  I compensate by swallowing down my rage and taunting the cat.  Gianna copes in other ways...I think she might be on the crack rock.]

Gianna:

I know how much our little Lizzy likes to keep our readers (sorry, reader) abreast of how she spends her days. I always thought my days were far too boring to share, but after reading Liz’s last account where there was not just one, but two pictures of what appears to be a morbidly obese cat sitting on a nearly empty, but buckling bookshelf--I know the camera adds 150 pounds so maybe Zorro just looks chubby--I now think "Gee, people will read just about anything."  I mean, I have a cat…plus I am going to New York City! The Big Apple, the land of a thousand bad accents, and one collectively crappy mood. So excited, picture me as Babs in the boat scene of Yentl (Papa, watch me fly!).

It's not often that Gianna
makes a Babs reference.

I mean, look out Empire State! I am headed your way with my University of Texas Press catalog, and if there is one thing I know for sure about the city so nice they named it twice, it's that they love to read about anything other than New York, written by people not living in New York. They’re a lot like Texans I guess, modest and curious beyond their borders. [If everything's bigger in Texas, doesn't that mean that Zorro is average sized?]

No line at the taxi stand at JFK--a promising start. My cab driver can’t be bothered to help me with my suitcase (perhaps sensing that it is loaded down with catalogs, advance reading copies, and cash). Hey, no worries pal, I got it; this old feminist can change a tire, put up drywall, and lift a heavy suitcase. (I can’t actually change a tire. I also cannot put up drywall and am not completely sure what drywall is. But I did carry my own suitcase). [For the record, Gianna helped to rip a hole in my drywall the other night.  If I'd actually read this piece earlier I would have watched her more carefully.]

This *might* not actually be
Gianna's taxi driver.

Halfway to Manhattan my driver asks where I’m from and when I say Texas, he makes a sad sound and then says, “Oh…George Bush.” So I say as upbeat as I can, “And don’t forget Rick Perry!” He makes another sad sound. I ask where he's from and he informs me that he's from Angola. Then he says in a voice you would hear from a preschool teacher, “That’s in Africa.” I say, “Yes, West Africa, of course.” Now I immediately regret saying this because I’ve sort of insinuated that I might know more about the geography of not only Africa, but, God help me, my own country. The reality is I can probably name five countries in Africa, and, you know, if pressed, half the states in the US. I’m very much a USA Today reader…lots of pictures. So yeah, sure enough, the old son of a bitch says “Are you familiar with Africa?” I have no choice but to say “So do you like George Bush?”

As you can imagine the conversation fizzled after that. Good thing, though, because a sporting event on the radio was about to begin and the national anthem was playing. My African pal turned it up and began to hum along. I think it's one of my sweetest New York moments ever.

After rolling up to the incredibly plush, celebrity laden, Roger Smith Hotel (new bar on roof!) and my pal once again makes a point of not even pretending to get out of the cab to help with my suitcase (seriously, I got it!) I head up to my room, drop my bags, and hit the Duane Reade. A bag of pita chips: $164, nail file: $332, and a bottle of water: $1,287. [Anyone else curious what one could do with water, pita chips, and a nail file?] Then I hit the streets hardcore. In other words, I went back up to my room and worked until 9:00 pm preparing for the next two days of meetings.

When not complaining about travel,
Gianna pitches UT Press books

I’d fill you in on the next 48 hours but most of it is even less exciting than a cat on a shelf (it’s the Elf on a Shelf for the non believers!) so let me skip to my last day. After spending $5.00 on toast (I know talking about how expensive shit is in New York is about as lame as talking about the heat in Texas…but truth is…sometimes it's just so damn hot you have to say something), and finishing my final two meetings, I shot right to the airport. Good thing I got to the there early, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to board my flight, get to the end of the runway and then be told we had to return to the gate because an engine light wouldn’t go off. Let me tell you something, if I were to turn around every single time an engine light went on in my car, I would never get anywhere!

Good news, though, they know they won't be able to fix it within two hours so they have secured us a different plane which would take off in 45 minutes. I mean, just hearing that shit you knew it was a lie. Glass half empty. We did get a $10 gift voucher though (that’s four pieces of toast y’all!). Three hours later and the only thing keeping my spirits up is Liz’s nearly constant John Travolta / massage therapist updates. [I am a wealth of information on a variety of topics.] So a little more than three hours later I am on the plane headed home.

We had to listen to the flight safety twice, and each time I could have sworn it said that the flight attendants would come by and do a cavity search. Obviously I misheard because I never did get searched. In other words…American is no Southwest.

She's the Dolly to my Latifah.
Or the other way around.

More good news, and the cherry on top of my trip was the in-flight movie. Joyful Noise (written and directed by Todd Graff of Beautician and the Beast fame) starring Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah (the greatest onscreen couple since Peppermint Patty and Marcie); I simply could not get enough. I would say it was only slightly better than watching any episode of Glee (calm down Randy, calm down). [Feel free to comment; I'll happily forward all tacky comments on to Gianna.] Thank God Kris Kristofferson had the sense enough to die in the first five seconds of the movie. Oh…spoiler alert. I want to be clear that I watched every single frame and highly recommend it to anyone stuck on a plane or in prison, if it’s free.

Side note, the original itinerary home said the flight time was three hours and thirty minutes. The flight time for the make up flight was three hours fifty minutes. A last little F.U. from the city that never sleeps.

Touche New York….touche.

Why You Should Read Flann O'Brien (and Give James Joyce the Finger)

Victoria in Dublin pretending
to break up with the statue of writer
Patrick Kavanagh. They are, however,
still seeing each other.

Official Bio: Victoria Davis holds a PhD in Irish Literature and is a manuscript editor at the University of Texas Press. "Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues is her karaoke jam. Clearly she is Irish.

What we dug up: Victoria Davis is a member in good standing with the Covenant Of Copy Editors. They worship the Chicago Manual of Style(they read it backwards over the graves of writers in order to raise them from the dead to spread the word on the proper use of the semi-colon). 

Oh, and THIS is actually her karaoke jam:

Continuing our Irish focus, here's a guest piece from Victoria Davis.

Why You Should Read Flann O'Brien (and Give James Joyce the Finger)

“We are not making any Ireland. We just live here... some of us even work here.”

--Flann O'Brien

Victoria after her covenant meeting.

Brian O'Nolan, aka Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, was a civil servant, journalist, novelist, and playwright who wrote about Ireland during the decidedly unromantic period of the 1930s–1960s. This was not the Ireland of Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, lousy with noble bards speaking the pure Gaelic, hotly chaste warrior queens, and wacky cattle raids. Instead, it was an economically depressed and socially repressed fledgling nation trying to navigate problems both inside and outside its borders while wearing the heavy mantle of revolutionary ideals. In short, it was the kind of place that writers left. Writers like Joyce and Beckett. The guys who couldn't stand the heat, and yet get all of the attention. Wankers.

Flann O'Brien

Yes…yes... Yeats and his ilk inspired a revolution with their creation of a glorious, yet pretty dang fictional past for Ireland. Joyce made the map of Dublin synonymous with modernism. Beckett replaced the city with an existential crisis. Revivalist, modernist, postmodernist…literary critics call O'Brien a "failed" dabbler in each of these movements. Why? Well, I could go on and on about all of that, but I think the short answer hinges on the long shadows cast by these other figures and that troubling word, "parody." O'Brien did indeed parody all three movements (and writers), but with a highly sophisticated grasp of their structures and tropes. And, he used these structures and tropes to critique the Ireland in which he lived and worked. AND he did it living under state censorship and the restrictions imposed upon him as a civil servant.

So, that's much of whyyou need to read Flann O'Brien… Now here's whatyou need to read:

1. An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), 1941. An Béal Bocht is widely considered one of the greatest Irish-language novels of the twentieth century. (For those of us who don't read Irish, an English translation by Patrick C. Power, with illustrations by Ralph Steadman, was published in 1996.) This darker-than-dark comic novel parodies the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area) autobiographies that were used in the Irish school system to teach the Irish language and which were known for their depictions of unrelenting misery.

2. At Swim-Two Birds, 1939. At Swim-Two Birds is O'Brien's best-known work, and it is regarded as one of the most sophisticated examples of metafiction. (If the word "metafiction" hasn't gotten you all excited, Dylan Thomas famously said that At Swim-Two-Birds was "just the book to give your sister--if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl.") The book is narrated by a college student who sets out to write a book with three beginnings--one involves a very urbane devil, the Pooka MacPhellimey; another involves John Furrisky, the fictional "son" of a disreputable and equally fictional writer of Westerns, Dermot Trellis; and the last involves the resurrection of Irish legendary figures, particularly Finn Mac Cool and Sweeney. Eventually the three main threads interrupt each other and become hilariously, sometimes violently, intertwined.

3. The Third Policeman, 1967. The Third Policeman was written between 1939 and 1940, but it wasn't published until after O'Brien's death. To put it simply, The Third Policeman is a vision of hell set in the rural Irish midlands and peopled with a narrator (an amateur scholar of a questionable scientist named DeSelby), three mysterious policemen who bend the rules of physics, a one-legged bandit, and "Joe," the narrator's soul. There is, seemingly, one storyline, but that soon becomes engulfed by footnotes explaining DeSelby's theories on various phenomena. Again, a very dark and hilarious book… and, it was featured in a 2005 episode of Lost!

Enjoy, and happy St. Patrick's Day! 

Victoria's threat to us all.

Utopia in Texas

The effervescent Karen Valby

Gianna:

When I left Random House a year ago, they made me give back my American Express and my Jeep Liberty. What I took with me, however, was better: Karen Valby’s Welcome to Utopia.

Karen Valby is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly, where she was originally given the assignment to find a town in America that had not been influenced by popular culture.

She found Utopia.

We’ve written about this book several times on the blog, but now that it is available from University of Texas Press in paperback I thought we should give it another mention.

 

Valby’s Welcome to Utopia  has been compared to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, Thorton Wilder’s Our Town, and the mother load… Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Augusten Burroughs also called it a “masterpiece of narrative nonfiction,” so you  know…if you like that sort of thing you may want to pick this up.

The paperback includes (in addition to the fabulous new cover) a new afterword that I asked Karen to write, and a reading guide that will keep your book group talking long into the evening. And you know the longer your book group talks, the more you get to drink. 

Best of 2011 Countdown: #19

We've hit the teens!

Gianna:

Trillin on Texas
Calvin Trillin
UT Press

The truth is that Calvin Trillin hadn’t realized how much he had written about Texas until the University of Texas Press approached him about putting together Trillin on Texas.  You get a feel for his affection for good old Tejas pretty quickly in these pieces.

Larry McMurtry in his bookstore.

He hits on several subjects--politics, food, humor, crime, literature.  Some of my favorite pieces in TOT (I just made that up right now on the spot!) are an essay about a murdered rare book dealer, a piece on scouting books for Larry McMurtry called "Scouting Sleepers" (a must for any book lover – great read), his un-love affair with the Bush dynasty, and my favorite is entitled "By Meat Alone," a search for the best barbecue in Texas. [Does it make me un-Texan if I admit that I don't really like barbecue?]

We miss you, Molly Ivins.

The book closes with the beautiful and touching eulogy he delivered for Molly Ivins at her memorial service. Here is a bit of the eulogy:

 “She was fantastic company. When you caught sight of her at a political convention, you realized that you were going to have some fun regardless of how long the speeches went on. When the Nation magazine’s cruise ship stopped in St. Thomas, the thought of spending the day in what is essentially a shopping mall with sun could be brightened by Molly organizing an expedition looking for what she called, as I remember, slutty shoes.”

Liz:

Daughters of the Revolution
Carolyn Cooke
Knopf

Too many people overlooked this slim novel from Carolyn Cooke, an O.Henry winner for her stories.  Daughters of the Revolution is set at a New England boarding school overseen by Goddard Byrd, but he's that sort of headmaster who doesn't see anything wrong with everyone calling him God.  Through an admissions error, the all boys school admits its first female student, Carole Faust.  Oh, and the first woman student?  She's also African-American.  It's 1968, the school--while prestigious--needs money, and, well, God's a bit of a womanizing bastard.

Carolyn Cooke

Carolyn Cooke is a brilliant writer and I really loved this book.  (Here's some trivia for Gianna: Carolyn Cooke worked for Penthouse magazine before getting her MFA.) It's sophisticated, tightly written, humorous and moving.  Daughters of the Revolution reminded me a bit of Kate Walbert's Our Kind (another great book that's worth checking out).  Book lovers are always looking for the great books that slip under the radar; well, here you go.  Also, your book group will thank me too.

Gianna: What's New From UT

The biggest change for me moving from Random House to The University of Texas Press [besides losing the best colleague one could ever hope to have in a career, me] is the vast difference in the amount of books we publish each year.  Here at the University we publish about 200; at Random House I believe the number to be in the zillions.  A bigger adjustment is the fact that we publish really amazing international art and photography books and I know next to nothing (which really means absolutely nothing) about art and photography. Now at Random House I could get away with selling the occasional art book while being dense…it's harder here. Actually, it's just harder being dense working at an academic press; I like to imagine that my new colleagues haven’t realized just how … uninformed I am about what we publish, but I am sure it was made pretty clear in the first week. It would all be easier if I were at least pretty, but alas, I am dumb and not even easy on the eyes. [Wait, what?  You're the supermodel for this blog!  Our dozens of followers wouldn't disagree.] I know, why don’t I just go buy boobs and shut up? Well, they are too pricey on book money. [Unless you're Pamela Anderson on that short-lived sitcom about a bookstore, Stacked.]

I honestly don’t remember what I was going to write about.  Oh, I was going to let you know what is coming out this month from The University of Texas Press. And when I “write” about photography and art books – I will just fill the page with pretty pictures.

West of 98 Living and Writing the New American Westby Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland

One of my favorite books on our list this season is West of 98 (Stegner is the daughter in law of Wallace by the way),  a collection of essays (and some poetry) from writers who are from or living in the West. It is filled with new visions on familiar themes such as: Cowboys and Indians, nature, landscape and general western history. In short, the theme of the book is "What does it mean to be a Westerner?"  

 Here is a sample of what this beautiful book has to offer:

“I would be converted to a religion of grass. Sleep the winter away and rise headlong each spring. Sink deep roots. Conserve water. Respect and nourish your neighbors and never let trees gain the upper hand. Such are the tenets and dogmas. As for the practice – grow lush in order to be devoured or caressed, stiffen in sweet elegance, invent startling seeds – those also make sense. Bow beneath the arm of fire. Connect underground. Provide. Provide. Be lovely and do no harm.” Louise Erdrich

“If the mountains were actually ennobling I would have noticed it by now. Everyone who can read comics is aware of the truly indigenous people of the West. We came much later, led by the US Cavalry and the railroads. As the cranky old lady at the grocer’s said, ‘The West wasn’t settled by nice people.’” Jim Harrison

“The West is about dirt. Good dirt. Rich dirt. Thick dirt. Lots of dirt. Dirt defines me. I write dirty stories.

     My people came from places where dirt was used up, the land was too crowded, or there wasn’t enough. My grandfathers emigrated from rural Japan; they were second sons from small, struggling farms, and the property would not be passed on to them. So they searched for new dirt and found it in America’s West.” David Masumoto

Stirring it Up with Molly Ivins by Ellen Sweets

If you aren’t familiar with Molly you should know one thing off the bat….she was a badass. [Amen.] She was also a hilarious writer, a civil libertarian, a thorn in George W Bush’s side (she called him “shrub,” as in "little bush"), a rabble rouser (in the best sense of the word), and Molly, well she enjoyed a cocktail.

What is lesser known is that Molly Ivins was an excellent cook; she picked up most of her skills in France. This book is an insider’s look at the lesser-known Molly, the chef who lovingly prepared elaborate meals from scratch for her closest friends. The book gives you a seat at the table to learn about the woman behind the public figure.  As a very cool bonus the book contains over 30 of Molly’s favorite recipes.  This story is told by Ellen Sweets, who was a close friend of Molly’s for years and years.  She was often in the kitchen with Molly so this is a true behind the scenes look at this amazing, powerful woman.

We lost Molly to cancer in 2007, and I can’t help but wonder what she would be writing about as our Governor runs for President.  The thought of it really makes me smile. [It might be drafts of her citizenship denunciation.  I may be projecting.]

Changes in Book Land



Hello UT Press!



The astute among the dozens of you devoted readers no doubt searching for photos of big ass steaks might have noticed the slight alteration on our little blog disclaimer.  (Did you know that our blog has a disclaimer?  And would you guess that it was added because the powers that be wanted to distance themselves from whatever might pop up here?)  Specifically, my esteemed colleague Gianna decided that the pleasure of working with me was simply too much to bear (no, really, that's what she said) and when an opportunity arose to become sales manager at UT Press, she opted to switch jobs. 

While we will continue our joint blogging, I can't pretend that the new reality is hard on me.  I've learned so much from Gianna over the last four years.  Such as....

• Everything can be construed as a "that's what she said" joke, and TWSS is our version of WWJD.  I think we need wristbands.
• If you pass something outlandish while in the middle of nowhere, you absolutely should turn around and drive back, even if it requires backtracking several miles, and especially if the spectacle could be perceived as offensive/disrespectful....like if you're photographing a 50 foot crucifix in the middle of West Texas.
• The rap classic "Dope Man" is actually a feminist anthem about the hardships of whoredom.  My former colleague preferred to recite the lyrics in the voice of Ethel Merman.
• This is the worst song ever.  And Gianna loves it....particularly the speaking parts.

• My body will be dumped from the I-10 bridge crossing the Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana.
• Be weird, try new things, but always, ALWAYS remember that bookselling ultimately involves sharing one's passion for great books.

This is the UT mascot.

It is a castrated cow.

(Let the hate mail commence.)

While we're at it, I'd like to dispel a few rumors:

• Gianna isn't my girlfriend and we aren't married.  I will survive.
• Also, she didn't die.  We still talk.  How else would I keep up with my celebrity gossip?
• Gianna wasn't my boss even though she sometimes bossed me around and once sat in my lap. (Isn't that what bosses do?) 
• We never committed a felony...we may have committed a misdemeanor or two.
• I am not "freakishly tall."  She's just obnoxiously stunted.

And some revelations:





This is the Knopf mascot.
It is the noble and dignified Borzoi.



About once a week Gianna emailed or called me asking for a copy of that email she needed and accidentally deleted.

• Mooning, according to Gianna, is not considered harassment if she's not my boss (and we've established she wasn't).

I've asked Gianna to bring me lunch at least once a week for the last four years, and every single time she's either asked me to wait outside (if it's raining or cold) or told me that she left it by my door.  I'm starving!  And I might die from exposure!

• Secretly Gianna loves me.





God help you, UT Press.