American Born Chinese: Origins

As we get closer to the next book club meeting (December 16th), I hope that people have been picking up and enjoying Gene Yang's American Born Chinese!

Seeing as how the book features a sometimes surprising and unusual mix of Eastern and Western religions, I thought I would pass along this link. It features some interesting and illuminating explanations of Yang's motives both in creating this book and in deciding to offer his own take on the Monkey King legend.

Have people been enjoying the book? Anybody especially liked or hated it so far?

YES, the whole party *was* a little blurry

Well, congrats on another successful book club, Team Brooklyn Book Club!

Brian Francis Slattery might be pretty excited to hear that, as we are a book club full of literalists, Spaceman Blues not only inspired alien cupcakes,

but spaceship cookies as well!

(Or maybe he would be horrified. WHO KNOWS??)



Regardless, we all had a pretty good time, even though not everyone ===>
loved the book. Which I think is a pretty big thing to us to have overcome as a club. Obviously, now we are in the real meat & potatoes section of a book club, where certain people's true loyalties become apparent, and other people (The Lins, mostly) are never invited back because they are philistines.






Another one of my favorite things about book club is the way certain people get all dressed up and even put on fresh nail polish. Some people are REAL LADIES. Who can appreciate works of literature like Spaceman Blues. (Unlike some people.)
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Also, Megan made her special Mexi Roll-Ups (pictured) and black bean dip!



All in all, an excellent showing, everyone! I really appreciate all of the people who made the trek to Brooklyn from other boroughs. And special thanks to Yen for the salmon roe--the first I've ever had--and Marc for the Jamisons, which made for a nice switch from bubbly when it became Sunday afternoon, and really served to drive home the idea that Sundays are for relaxing.

December Book: American Born Chinese

All you lovers of the Monkey King (of which there are apparently quite a few in our group) take heart, the December selection for the book club will be American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang! The book is what those in the 'biz call a graphic novel, so hopefully there aren't too many members of the book club scared off by books with pictures in 'em.

The meeting will be at my place this time, within the historic "Kensington District" of Brooklyn on Sunday, December 16th. Obviously, this being so close to Christmas, beware of my patented "Landon's Own Egg Nog." The special ingredient is...poison! No, wait, I mean whiskey. Yeah, definitely whiskey. Not poison. That would be ridiculous.

Do: Please organize your mad tornado of words

I should have known when I looked at the cover of Spaceman Blues. A review from Harlan Ellison says about the book, "What a breathless, mad tornado of words." If only I had taken Mr. Ellison's warning. And so, here I am, breaking two of Josh's Dos and Don'ts for book club members. I am still 60 pages away from finishing the book, and yet have not stopped complaining. While I do not have any constructive questions to ask Brian Slattery, I do have specific and thoughtful words of advice for him. Not that he should take literary advice from me, who has and never will attempt to author a novel (or even a "love song" as he calls this book) but I suppose I'm just feeling mean-spirited.

Dear Mr. Slattery,

Do: Please organize your mad tornado of words. Many metaphors don't make sense. "Hunger that could break a horse" does have a ring of intensity, but has no meaning. Metaphors should help a reader more clearly understand your message, and are not simply an opportunity to wax poetic. Also, you're breaking Josh's "don't be pretentious" rule.

Don't: Ask me to fall in love with a character who I only meet for the first page and a half of your book. I would much more gladly follow Lucas to the seedy underbelly of New York, learning about his interesting childhood and his struggle to un-do what that cult did to him.

Do: Imagine and describe a fascinating New York distopia coexisting with our current New York. No complaints there, yet.

Don't: Throw inconsistent wacky rules into our real New York. The (upper) New York City in Spaceman Blues has no rules by which its governed. It's mostly our New York, with many accurate details I appreciate, but with confusing (not charming) exaggerations. Party-goers fling themselves from the rooftops, holding on to bedsheets to guide them to the sidewalk. People are referred to as floating a few inches off the ground. Just decide if that's a metaphor or not. I can live with the purple raincoat dudes riding on hover crafts...IF it freaks everyone out because they have never in this world seen anything so strange. Alternate realities do need rules, so we can believe in them.

Do: Give people imaginative names if they live in Darktown. Ringo 5 and Sid 69 are fine down there, but topside, detectives Salmon and Trout are getting on my last nerve.

Don't: Introduce a new character every other page if all you are going to tell me is who their grandfather was and in what manner this new character will die in 8 years. It distracts me and when I'm distracted I tend to fall asleep. Which could be one reason I'm having a hell of a time finishing your novel. I mean, "love song."

Sincerely, a woman who will now possibly be banned from future book clubs,
Clara

Who's Coming to BookClub?

I wish we were reading this in Summer. But it will be a cozy meeting at Ami's this Sunday. Who's in? Comment here to RSVP for the best bookclub discussion of Spaceman Blues ever. I only have 20 pages left! How are you all doing?

The Do's and Don'ts for a Successful Book Club

Do: Actually read the book. A pretty basic one. A book club can’t sustain itself for long when only one or two members have actually read the book while every else is just pretending. One of the dirty secrets of every book club is that only half of the participants actually finish the book. Try to be that person at least, say, 40% of the time.

Don’t: Act pretentious. A big reason why people are taken aback by the idea of a book club to begin with is the residual annoyance of the guy or girl in your English class that answered every question and tried to lamely shoehorn James Joyce or Neitzsche into every discussion (even though everyone knew they had barely read them). Part of the fun of book clubs are the digressions (philosophical or otherwise) that take place, but nobody likes a one-sided, pretentious rant about some tangential topic. As a recoving member of this group, I speak from more experience than I'd like to admit.

Do: Drink early and often: Everyone is a little too polite during the first half hour of a book club. Those who didn’t like it don’t want to offend the ones that did, those who did don’t want to get too over the top in their praise. The solution: liquor. Lots of it. It loosens everyone up, helps people to be a lot more animated, and also allows them to be way more honest than they would be otherwise. Plus, it really wouldn’t be a very good book club if no egos were bruised along the way.

Don’t: Meet at a bar. Another lesson learned the hard way. The book club I was in during college would meet in the evenings at the bar, and (at least for me) it was a total disaster. For one thing, we met at our favorite bar (the Peanut Barrel), which meant that we recognized practically everyone that came in and had to either a.) ignore them or b.) stop what we were doing to chat. Inevitably, half the group would be some combination of drunk, playing pool, or trying to meet women by the time an hour or two had passed, while the rest of the group would be trying to lamely forge their way through some half-hearted discussion of the book.

Don’t: Pick a long book. This is a book club killer. Everyone’s busy and barely has time to read the books they buy for themselves, let alone the book club choice. Anything over 300 pages will, most of the time, annihilate the discussion. Not only will most people not read anything that long (or won’t have the time to finish), but anything too long is just too grand in scope to be adequately covered in a book club anyway.

Do: Meet in the Afternoon or Right After Work. This rule might apply just for me, but I can’t really think straight until about 1 PM. Any book club meeting before that and I’m pretty worthless. Similarly, the later it gets at night the more people start getting tired or their minds start to wander towards what they have to do the next day. Right after work or at 1-2 PM on the weekends is really the best way to go.

Don’t: Make fun of the book that the chooser picks (too much). Believe me, this one can come back to haunt you if you ever end up personally picking a book for your book club. Books are way more personal than TV shows or albums, and people don’t generally take too kindly to getting teased for their choice. Most people are polite enough to just trash the book itself if they don't like it; but, inevitably, someone always gets careless and crosses the line by insulting the person that choose the book. If they’re anything like me, they’ll want revenge, and they’ll be looking to get it when your own book choice comes around.

Do: Keep going even if you don’t like the book choice. Gut it out. Try to read the book, and, if you don’t like it, at least try to think of an interesting reason for not liking it. A little hate can go a long way, which is why everyone who knows Dale Peck’s book Hatchet Jobs thinks it’s just about the funniest collection of essays ever assembled. This rule might actually be the most important one, as so many book clubs get fractured by people picking and choosing which times to go. Inevitably, it leads to too many catch-all, populist book choices that attempt to appeal to everyone but actually appeal to no one. Anyway, at the very least, come for the booze.

The Mole People (They Live Underground)

I have to follow up my post yesterday with one about the other aspect of living underneath New York City: the underground homeless.

The joys of Darktown stand in stark contrast to the nonfiction profiles of NYC's fabled underground homeless--regularly referred to as the Mole People. I've read Jennifer Toth's (supposedly) nonfiction account of life in the subway tunnels, and seen the documentary Dark Days, created by a man who lived in one of these underground cities for two years. And holy cow, are the bleak.

Apparently, living underground as a homeless person is a step up from living homeless on the streets: there's a roof (of sorts) over your head. Occasionally, you're able to steal water and often able to steal electricity, so there's amenities like lights and television. The title of the documentary Dark Days comes from a description a former homeless man gives of his years living in the tunnels (this is totally paraphrased): 'Living it, when I was in it, it didn't seem so bad. But now when I look back, I see that those were some dark days.'

So, obviously, there's a disconnect between what really happens to those who live underground and what we'd like to imagine living underground as being like. This was even evident in the descriptions that the underground homeless would give Jennifer Toth of areas that she couldn't go to, that were "just a little further underground":

More plausible than Ghost Cliff is the huge underground room "with a piano and tiled floor and mirrors all around" that Jamall says he found. An elderly homeless woman later described to me a similar room in which about fifty homeless people live. She adds a fountain to the decor. "Fantastic," she said.

Toth mostly gets called out on her complete credulity of these stories when she's criticized about her book, and fairly so. It seems pretty obvious that a room like this--piano and fountain and all--simply can't exist. But if we accept that this meme of a vast, unpopulated underground space is so pervasive in our culture that even the people who really live underground believe it--I think that's really fascinating.

The Dirty, Filthy Underground

Hands down, my favorite part of SPACEMAN BLUES is the depiction of NYC's literal underground. I love the idea of a city below the city, preferably one that involves juke joints, bathtub gin, and the hard-partying folks that refuse for some reason to live in apartment buildings with the rest of us.

Right after this novel caught my attention, there was a fantastic article in the City section of the times about urban explorers, which is a fancy term for people who like to hop around below the streets of NYC looking in old subway tunnels and forgotten basements, generally for the sake of art. What I like about this article--and how I saw it relating to SPACEMAN BLUES--is the portrayal of underground New York City as a place outside the limits of most people, for the unique few. What does it mean to be both a part of the city but voluntarily removed from it?

In both SPACEMAN BLUES and this cult of urban explorers, the city underground is a glorious place. Not everyone is allowed to experience it, much in the way not everyone is allowed to experience the 'aboveground' New York, one that professes an ignorance of the below-ground sections of the city--partly because no one they know could tell them about it, but primarily because they don't care to know about it and via their position in society are allowed to profess ignorance of it. It becomes a metaphor for the culture of our city, for the way one can choose to experience only part of New York City. Both Wendell Apogee and the urban explorers in the NYT article are unique because of their position in both the surface world and the core and in the fact that they choose to experience both.

Interesting, right? What's your take on the idea of a city-beneath-the-city?