There's still time: More gift ideas from BellemeadeBooks

There's still time to find something special for even the crankiest relative on your gift list. When the weather outside is this frightful cyber-shopping makes more sense than ever -- with a few clicks Santa's sleigh can be filled with goodies and all of us can go back to dreaming of sugarplums, Rudolph's red nose, or whatever makes the season merry and bright for each of us. Here are some books reviewed by others that are worth a browse. Order these right here on BellemeadeBooks using the Amazon.com search box -- the gifts will be on their way, and your relatives won't know you never even got out of your pajamas today.

Above: The Art of Tron: Legacy, Justin Springer, et al (Disney Editions): I haven't seen Tron: Legacy yet, but I've heard murmurings from people that have, both positive and negative... however, even the negatives seem to be in awe of the visuals of the film. Sounds like the same reaction the original got, doesn't it? I've seen a lot of this art on the walls of the Art Department during my set visit last year and it was beautiful. I'm sure The Art of Tron: Legacy is filled to the brim with eye-candy, so it's an easy choice .... Animation: The Archive Series (Disney Enterprises): One of the highlights of the last decade was getting to visit Disney's Animation Research Library, a nondescript building somewhere in Los Angeles that houses all of Disney's original animation cels, painted backgrounds, production paintings and sketches. It's not common for someone outside of Disney animators to be granted access, so I feel very blessed, but even spending an hour there I only saw about 1% of what that place stored. If that. So, it was to my great surprise and happiness that I stumbled upon this hardcover series called Walt Disney Animation Studios: The Archive Series, which takes some of these amazing art pieces and in high resolution reproduces them for the masses. (Quint, Ain't It Cool News)

Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, Wendell Berry, Introduction by Michael Pollan (Counterpoint Press) If you aren't already familiar with Wendell Berry's essays and his fiction, Bringing It to the Table is an excellent introduction, and if you're already an admirer, wanting to spread the word to people on your holiday gift list, this book is a fine addition to Berry's recent publications. Born in 1934, Berry has been publishing poetry, fiction in long and short forms, and essays since the 1960s; he has been working a farm in Kentucky for about as many years. In an essay from 2006 he recalls, "In 1964 my wife Tanya and I bought a rough and neglected little farm on which we intended to grow as much of our own food as we could." Although he came from a farming background, he asked for advice from an organic gardener who was his editor at the time, and seeking out the source of that man's principles, he discovered The Soil and Health, by the British agricultural scientist Sir Alfred Howard. Berry says of Howard, "I have been aware of his influence in virtually everything I have done, and I don't expect to graduate from it. That is because his way of dealing with the subject of agriculture is also a way of dealing with the subject of life in this world." (Jim Quitsland, Sound Food)

What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation: Mark Greif, et al (n+1 Books) All descriptions of hipsters are doomed to disappoint, because they will not be the hipsters you know. But to those of you who are reading What Was the Hipster in 2050, I can only say: Everything in this book is true, and its impressions are perfect. When we talk about the contemporary hipster, we’re talking about a kind of cross-subcultural figure who emerges by 1999 and enjoys a fairly narrow but robust first phase of existence from 1999 to 2003. At which point the category of hipster seemed about to dissipate and return to the primordial subcultural soup, for something else to take over. Instead what we witnessed was an increasing spread and durability of the term, in an ongoing second phase from 2003 to the present. The truth was that there was no culture worth speaking of, and the people called hipsters just happened to be young and, more often than not, funny-looking. (Anonymous, Atomic Books)

Fishers of Men – The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest, Adam Elenbaas (Tarcher Press): The cross-generational stories surrounding Elenbaas and his father, and his father and grandfather, sanctify the Freudian influence on drug writing. From the opening chapter when his father lays bleeding, holding a hunting knife, till the final modernist resolution, redefinition of all the relationships occur. It’s very reminiscent of the poem "This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do./ They fill you with the faults they had/ and add some extra, just for you.” The Freudian model, which places so much emphasis on a child’s relationship with its parents as a foundation for personality structure, is being played out once more as a literary structure: “One of the most intense psychological settings in the world – the visionary space of ayahuasca” (201). The combination of the psychedelic experience and psychodynamic models is firm territory, not only in Fishers of Men, but in modern drug writing generally. (Rob, editor, The Psychedelic Press UK)

Brother Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation: Ann and Samuel Charters (University Press of Mississippi): ... Holmes, a good friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and a founding member of the original Beat circle in New York City, also wrote several novels that were respectably reviewed. But he lacked the charisma and theatricality of the later Beat writers, and struggled for literary success even as his friends reached explosive levels of fame. It's only because of these legendary friends, and not because of his own fiction, that John Clellon Holmes merits an extensive literary biography by Ann and Samuel Charters today. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation is unusual among literary biographies because its hero never had a breakout success. Instead, he filled out his career with dead end manuscripts, odd magazine assignments and college teaching jobs. In this sense, Brother-Souls is actually a more accurate glimpse of how most writers live than any typical biography of a famous writer. (Levi Asher, Literary Kicks)

Santa's on his way: gift ideas from BellemeadeBooks

It's fifteen days before Christmas. Did you forget anyone on your twice-checked list? Or maybe you've just decided to have another nog and wander online until inspiration strikes, and "accidentally" discover something for yourself at 3 a.m.? In any event or whichever method you choose to shop, Santa's on his way -- that nimble and quick elf waits for no one.

Here are some titles published in the past year that have been reviewed in BellemeadeBooks. Order right here through the Amazon.com search box and then relax. Have a gingerbread cookie and think how you'll be spending the plastic cash your Aunt Emily just sent in her holiday card.

Above: Drainspotting, Remo Camerota (Mark Batty Publishers) is a brick-sized photo collection of customized storm-drain covers, created in Japan for municipal waterworks. These unique artworks are presented in a less-than-coffeetable size format (six-by-six inches) that weighs considerably less than the originals. Besides being an unexpected and attractive art, the result has been a beneficial civic program, a great example of how the demands of politics, the needs of communities, and the aesthetics of art can combine -- and a reminder how rarely they do, too.

Just Kids (Ecco/Harper) is a valentine to the blossoming relationship Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe shared until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. The memoir, newly published in a paperback edition, is Patti being tough and tender, romantic in the way artists often remember their own struggle, and filled with the people who made music and art their passion in New York of the 1970s. Robert's drawing and photography develops its challenging reputation as Patti begins to sing her own music, and this became a common creative bond that propels them in their personal life as much as their careers. For Patti the book allows her to wrap her troubles in dreams, even as the threadbare bohemian life becomes a distant memory through rock and roll.

Label 228, compiled by Camden Noir (Soft Skull Press) One man's stickable art is another's graffiti; it's a toss-up if these labels by Mecro, Zoso, Kegr, Robots Will Kill! and others are permanent treasures. The disposable nature of a label suggests they're not meant to be -- the viewer's appreciation here depends on the images' inclusion in book format, away from the ephemeral encounter at street level. If the irony of this is lost on the artist, to the viewer looking through Label 228 it's an irony that assumes its own art form.

The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson (Random House) Wilkerson's approach to the story of her move back South (from Chicago to Atlanta) is a tale inspired less by Studs Terkel than Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath figures as a writing model, focusing on the stories of three main characters around which larger ideas are woven. In a nod to the book's cinematic scope Wilkinson also name-checks the director Robert Altman as a reference point of interwoven characters and their stories.

The Book of Frank (WAVE Books) CAConrad's one-man tent show of poetry is not for the faint of heart, the weak of mind, or who fear leaps of imagination. Each of his books is a high-wire act of love and transformation performed without a net -- Jonathan Williams' perceptive axiom reading makes hair grow in your palms and makes you blind seems just as good a review of CAConrad's work as any, and just as pertinent to The Book of Frank, in a new and expanded edition just published by WAVE Books.

Life, Keith Richards (Little, Brown Publishers) As it turns out, for the Rolling Stones time really is on their side after all. Determined to grow older -- if increasingly wrinkled -- with some dignity intact, Keith Richards has been wandering around the bookstores and TV talk shows with a new book in tow, disarmingly titled Life, filled with stories that somehow amaze with how different the world seemed back then. Now, when the only parental outrage Katy Perry can generate is her outfit on Sesame Street, tales of the Stones in 1960s/1970s America seem positively other-worldly.

Robert Kelly: "the incomprehensible is the only thing that makes sense"

a girl you've just that minute met

explains tenderly that she and only she

is your final descendant

come from the farthest future...

and you don't even have a now to give her.

(from Fire Exit, Robert Kelly)

The literary chameleon Robert Kelly has written of poetry: "The high tension of reading a poem is such that any reader is somehow, somewhere, secretly or otherwise anxious for The End, for the poem to end. That anxiety for conclusion is built into the nature of the lyric poem, the short poem, and we can't escape it. Poetry seems like a clash of Gertrude Stein's 'writing wants to go on' with a kind of Aristotelian 'the form wants closure' -- it may be the very tension that makes us love the delicate discomfort of the poem."

Kelly has a fifty-year writing career. His most recent collection of stories, The Logic of the World and Other Fictions (McPherson), was published in April, and Robert Coover called Kelly's science fiction novel The Book From the Sky (North Atlantic) "a vintage flying saucer .. a provocatively eccentric book of wisdom." Here is the writer's statement at this year's modern poetry conference at City University of New York, held in February.

I suppose poetry is

Listening Out Loud

And what one listens to is language --

language in one's head

(only a fool would confuse that with himself thinking

only a fool would think the things that he hears languaging in him

are things that he himself is thinking)

Most poets are too smart to believe in their own intelligence.

Witless, clueless, we await a sign.

Pindar tells us a sign is never clear (at least a sign from Zeus) --

hence the poem veers towards a kind of

lucid incomprehensibility,

[Eventually after a few hundred or thousand years we begin to comprehend the incomprehensible -- Dante, Aeschylus, Milton -- and they become classics and become of great celebrity but diminished use. But till then the texts are of great power, startling, provoking, eliciting. Some grand provokers -- Pindar himself, Li shang-yin, Lycophron, Hoelderlin, Stein -- still wait their turn, still turn us towards the poem we must write, the poem they force us to write, to make sense of what they do to our heads.]

The incomprehensible provokes the reader to acts of preternatural awareness.

This incomprehensibility factor is what the ancient Greeks called Mousa, Muse. [The Spartans -- sturdy workmen, who would have liked the sacred gizmos of Elshtain's gnoetry* -- called her Moha.] (I told her I would work her into this evening.)

The incomprehensible is the only thing that makes sense. That is, it creates sense -- the sense of something happening to you as you read.

And that's the only happening poetry has?

The luster of listening.

Or what we hear in poetry is groans from the battlefield where time struggles against space.

Kelly's own dream-like poetry is best described by the author himself when he recently wrote that "the page looked like this, in the sense that a sentence was continuing from an earlier page, but what is the earlier page of a dream? Is the answer any clearer than if I asked: what is the earliest dream?"

Kelly has written and published more than sixty books. His most recent volume of poems is Fire Exit (Black Widow Press), a group of 132 short poems comprising a single long work. For more about Robert Kelly and his work, visit his website at rk-ology.

*gnoetry: an on-going experiment in human/computer collaborative poetry composition.

A gathering tonight for Yoko in Philadelphia

Teri's Bar & Restaurant

1126 S. 9th St. (in the Italian Market)`

Philadelphia, PA

"What we do really affects the world. Most of us think we can't do anything, but it really isn't true." (Yoko Ono)

Tonight in Philadelphia there will be a gathering at Teri's Bar as a way of honoring the long and continuing work of Yoko Ono towards peace and creativity. At the thirtieth anniversary of Lennon's death it seems appropriate, at least, to commemorate the sad loss not only of a music legend, but of her loss of a husband and devoted father as well. Here is a memory by Yoko in the simple act of making tea at home with John -- and discovering that shared laughter is a bond that can survive the passing of years.

It was nice to be up in the middle of the night, when there was no sound in the house, and sip the tea John would make. One night, however, John said: “I was talking to Aunt Mimi this afternoon and she says you are supposed to put the hot water in first. Then the tea bag. I could swear she taught me to put the tea bag in first, but ...”

“So all this time, we were doing it wrong?”

“Yeah ...”

We both cracked up. That was in 1980. Neither of us knew that it was to be the last year of our life together.

This would have been the 70th birthday year for John if only he was here. But people are not questioning if he is here or not. They just love him and are keeping him alive with their love. I’ve received notes from people in all corners of the world letting me know that they were celebrating this year to thank John for having given us so much in his 40 short years on earth.

The most important gift we received from him was not words, but deeds. He believed in Truth, and had dared to speak up. We all knew that he upset certain powerful people with it. But that was John. He couldn’t have been any other way. If he were here now, I think he would still be shouting the truth. Without the truth, there would be no way to achieve world peace.

On this day, the day he was assassinated, what I remember is the night we both cracked up drinking tea.

They say teenagers laugh at the drop of a hat. Nowadays I see many teenagers sad and angry with each other. John and I were hardly teenagers. But my memory of us is that we were a couple who laughed.

"Sikander," M. Salahuddin Khan (2010): the human cost of war

With the politics of the moment obscuring the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan it becomes increasingly difficult to consider the human cost of these conflicts. The current front-page unmasking of diplomatic and state secrets through Wikileaks, and the ensuing political battle of wills, obscures the simple fact that beneath the official outrage and posturing of government officials the people of Afghanistan and Iraq must still face every day's challenges in a battle-torn landscape.

For most Americans now, the resolution of war in both of these countries seems more and more distant and perplexing, and the cost less personal, with each week that passes.

Sikander is the story of one 17-year-old Pakistani boy and his journey from a child's view of war to a man's understanding of peace. If that sounds like a time-worn tale, it's a well-told one here: the novel turns 25 years of recent Afghan and Pakistani history into a fast-paced story of family, relationships, separation and duty that readers will find familiar.

It is 1986. Sikander Khan is a young student dreaming of life in America who joins with Pakistani mujahideen to fight the Russians in neighboring Afghanistan. Returning home, he faces another kind of conflict between his heart and his head, as well as the developing political unrest brought by the rise of the Taliban who begin to reshape daily life in his home of Laghar Juy. Over a decade, as political events force Sikander Khan and his family out of their home and into exile, the story becomes a tangle of conflict, separation and chaos against a backdrop of events over which he and his young family have no control.

Then Osama Bin Laden strikes at the World Trade Center, and Sikander's hopes for a life in America are changed beyond recognition.

M. Salahuddin Khan, the author, has a quick way of weaving the complex story around this simple personal drama, even as the locales and cultures of Afghanistan and Pakistan seem remote and unfamiliar. There is much about regional and world politics, although Khan never lets the action stop: like any good storyteller he knows that the important thing is what happens next, and the writer seldom lets the politics get in the way of the story.

For casual readers -- and Khan provides a great service here -- the novel gives a detailed look at several Islamic cultures, providing a basis for understanding of the religious practices that inform decisions in daily life, and descriptions of events that are already receding into history and may only be echoes of newspaper headlines.

In its politics as well as the day-to-day relationships of Sikander and his family, the action is written without sentimentality or pretense. While the unfolding family drama is told warmly and with great affection, the excesses of the Taliban regime are described with an unblinking eye:

By September of that year, with the exception of Ahmed Shah Massoud's militia and the Panjshir Valley territory it held to the north, the country finally succumbed to the Taliban. One of their early actions after having captured Kabul was to seek retribution for Najibullah's excesses. Although he and his brother had taken refuge in the UN compound in Kabul, Taliban forces summarily dragged them both from the compound, executed them, and hanged their bodies from the frame of a traffic kiosk. This form of execution and corpse display became the gruesome trademark of Taliban retribution for others to beware.

The action sweeps from Afghanistan to Guantanamo, Applecross in Wales to Durham, North Carolina -- here the forces of war and displacement and necessary duty are strong and unstoppable. Just as the novel seems to be coming to a kind of settled peace at last, there's a final and unexpected twist that underscores the story's theme of life during a time of conflict.

In describing one man's attempt at reconciliation between his duty and his conscience, the author shows us that our own sense of right and wrong may sweep us along with a force even greater than war -- a force just as strong, and just as unstoppable.

Oprah reads Dickens: high-tea optional

Original illustration from A Christmas Carol (John Leech, 1843)

"Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail."

You have read A Christmas Carol, haven't you?

Without Charles Dickens, what would have become of Christmas --in the nineteenth century, that most somber and soberest of all religious days on the Church calendar? After the initial success of A Christmas Carol (it was published December 19, 1843, a tale written in six weeks to pay off debts) Dickens' tale of seasonal goodwill eventually became the antidote to England's Victorian gloom which, truthfully, wasn't very dark to begin with: the empire's money was rolling in from the burgeoning railways and overseas trade, and people had money to spend ... well, not everyone, as the story of Bob Cratchit and his family was meant to illustrate. The divisions of the English class system, and the poverty and hardship it wrought, were unassailable, it seemed.

Yes, I know: at this point, old Dickens seems as antiquated as the dead Marley himself, an overstuffed Victorian curio whose funny-named characters and creaking plots are the stuff of school-day dread. It's unlikely that Oprah's book club will find in either Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities much more than "old school" mustiness. She deserves an "A" for bravery, though the two books are being published together in one volume as an Oprah-show tie-in -- a merchandising feat Dickens himself would endorse.

But a far better choice would likely be A Christmas Carol: the cautionary tale of what just too much money in the wrong hands can do. Imagine what the book club could make of that discussion, a familiar theme these days it seems. The soft-hearted old Marley was dead -- and his business partner, Ebenezer Scrooge, wasn't going to part with a shilling's worth of work from Bob Cratchit even on Christmas Eve. Thereby hangs a tale of the economic system, moral values, and three visiting spirits.

I doubt that Norrie Epstein's The Friendly Dickens: Being a Good-Natured Guide to the Man Who Invented Scrooge will be included in the deluxe-Oprah package, but it does make the case for Charles Dickens in an entertaining way. The book is funny, lighthearted and full of anecdotal stories about the novels and Dickens' own life as it unfolded around his personal fortunes.

These turn out to be as complicated as the fate of any of his own characters; debt, bankruptcy, divorce ... he could have been his own best fictional creation, only Dickens was too busy knocking out the next installment of, say, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, which were published in weekly serials. Creaky plots? Stephen King must eat his heart out in jealousy. The stories sold, and how:

The serial's primary advantage was its low price. By paying a shilling a month, a reader eventually got an original, illustrated 300,000 word novel for a pound. Spread over nineteen months -- and sales for The Pickwick Papers often reached 40,000 for one installment -- that one shilling grew into a fortune, netting 10,000 pounds. ... Sales figures for a successful installment are enough to make a modern novelist weep with envy. One number of The Old Curiosity Shop sold more than 100,000 copies in one month....

All of these profits were being made as Dickens sat feverishly writing the next installment, with creditors usually knocking on the door. Here's Epstein's account of one such episode:

"Martin Chuzzlewit, his current serial, was falling in sales, and in an effort to boost his flagging income, Dickens dashed off a tale for the Christmas of 1843 in about six weeks. The manuscript for his 'ghostly little book' is a scant sixty-six pages, as compared to the usual eight hundred for the typical Dickens blockbuster, yet it is the biggest seller he ever wrote. ...

The previous summer he had visited a 'ragged school,' part of an evangelical movement to provide basic instruction to poor children. Although he disapproved of religious indoctrination, believing that the poor need a bath more than a psalm, (Dickens) firmly held that ignorance is inseparable from want.

... The sight of such wretchedness horrified and unnerved him: 'I have very seldom seen in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere, anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited by these children.' Dickens had intended a tract on education for the poor, but he now decided to write a story that, he announced with justifiable hyperbole, would hit his readers over the head like a 'sledge-hammer'."

It's another Dickensian irony that the beautifully-bound first edition netted the author only 230 pounds -- most of his royalties were absorbed by printing costs, which he had paid for himself. Dickens wrote he "had set his heart and soul on a Thousand clear," and he thought he was ruined. He packed up the family and moved to Italy to avoid creditors. Eventually, his own staged readings of A Christmas Carol made him more money than any book he ever wrote -- career-enhancing tours that likely would be in keeping with Oprah's own post-show future plans.

In the meanwhile, while we're all trying to abide our relatives and avoid the holiday fruitcake, here are Epstein's suggestions on "How to Read Dickens." High tea at four is, of course, optional, but in keeping with the spirit of things.

1) Take a Zen approach: the destination doesn't matter, it's the journey that counts. Savor each word; don't rush. And don't try to think logically! The truth is not always literal.

2) Read like a child, i.e., allow yourself to slip into Dickens' world completely. Let go of the desire to "find out what happens."

3) If you're tempted to skip something that looks boring, and it's either that or not finish the book, skip it.

4) Expect the author to make mistakes. He wrote fast. He wrote to entertain.

5) Expect inconsistency.

6) Read out loud! Dickens spoke his characters' lines as he wrote.

7) If one Dickens novel isn't to your taste, try another. A Tale of Two Cities, often the only one most people read in school, is the least Dickens-like of them all.

8) If you've read a late-Dickens novel (anything after David Copperfield, or 1850) and hated it, try an earlier one. It's almost as if the two groups were written by different authors.

The Friendly Dickens is a great introduction to those novels we were all supposed to read and seldom did. Judging from Epstein's foreboding outline of the aptly-titled, late period Bleak House -- more than 800 pages of Dickensian gloom which begins with six paragraphs describing the murky London fog -- I may save that work for January, when the Christmas bills begin rolling in.