Don't Try

"Don’t try" is written on Charles Bukowski’s headstone. Someone asked him, “What do you do? How do you write, create?” and Bukowski said, “You don’t try. That’s very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality.” You make and wait. Bukowski split his time writing thousands of poems, hundreds of stories and six novels while paying the bills by working at a L.A. post office. He’s the poet laureate of wage slaves, boozehounds and hard women. Born Into This documents Bukowski from the nothing days to being an internationally selling poet through archival footage and interviews. Tom Waits, Bono, Sean Penn and Lawrence Ferlinghetti all make appearances. No doubt, Bukowski was a dirty old man, but he was also an occasionally brilliant writer.

National Book Awards and New York Times Notables

If you were held spellbound by the documentary film Man on Wire, you’ll already have a connection to the 2009 National Book Award winner for fiction.  Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann is the story of a diverse group of New Yorkers who are touched by Philippe Petit’s highwire dance between the Twin Towers in 1974.  In the nonfiction category, T.J. Stiles won for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Other finalists:

[Fiction] Lark and Termite, American Salvage, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, and Far North
[Nonfiction] Following the Water, Remarkable Creatures, Fordlandia, and The Poison King 

Also making news are the 100 Notable Books of 2009, an annual tradition of The New York Times.  Take a look, and let us know which ones are deserving and which titles were overlooked!

Do you know what you are eating?

Where does our food come from? It is strange to learn that when you walk into a supermarket and see thousands of products, only a handful of companies own each and every brand. The documentary Food, Inc. interviews folks like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan to help decipher who supplies our food. Factory farming and genetically modified foods are studied as is the well-being of not only those that eat the food, but those that package it. Similar to the movies Supersize Me and King Korn, Food, Inc. examines the high cost of inexpensive food, but with a wider view of the problem that even includes praise for unlikely corporations that take positive steps towards using organic products…like Wal-Mart.

The Emperor of the United States

Patty of the Fiction/AV/Teen Department recommends Norton I, The Emperor of the United States by William Drury:

In 1859, Joshua Abraham Norton audaciously declared himself “the Emperor of these here United States” and the “Protector of Mexico.” Emperor Norton walked the roads of San Francisco with an elaborate blue uniform, a sword, and perched on his curly hair was a beaver hat with a crooked peacock feather. Currency was printed with his likeness on it that was accepted at local establishments. Emperor Norton ordered decrees on a regular basis (though Congress and the U.S. Army consistently ignored them) and Mark Twain, Neil Gaiman and Robert Louis Stevenson have all based characters on him. In Norton I, William Drury examines the life of a loveably odd man who caused 30,000 people to flood the streets when he died.

Outsider Architecture

Rhinestones, construction paper, sequins and glitter cover a house in McComb, Mississippi. Mystical sculptures took over a dilapidated country house in France. There is a concrete park along Highway 13 in Wisconsin that houses visual representations of everything from the chariot race in Ben Hur to Abraham Lincoln. Self Made Worlds is a photographic examination of obsessive environments and those that create them. Religious inspiration, dream instruction and eccentric insight are often the cause of these meticulous, passionate forms of outsider architecture. Brief, respectful essays tell the background of each shell garden, art yard, mosaic home, windmill park and modern, teetering castle, making this book more art review than “freak-show.”

How to Be Wealthy and Wise

Here’s a premise for a book: Take a random walk among America’s wealthiest neighborhoods, knock on the doors of millionaires, and ask those strangers about their personal finances.  What do you think will happen? 

It may sound like a misguided prank, but who better to give advice on making money than those who are most successful?  It’s an idea both absurd and brilliant, and (lucky for us) it worked!  Armed with only paper and pen, journalist Ryan D’Agostino approached 500 doors and interviewed 50 willing participants, including a man in suburban Chicago who made his fortune peeling shrimp.  In Rich Like Them: My Door-to-Door Search for the Secrets of Wealth in America’s Richest Neighborhoods, he compiles the wisdom that was shared in an engaging and easy-to-read narrative.  You don’t have to be born with a special gene for success.  You need only benefit from a good long walk.

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

Vaudeville did rise and vaudeville did fall. Popular entertainment went from on-stage to on screen. Idols from the cabaret era went from full-houses to being shelved under forgotten, as was the case with Long Tack Sam. The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is Ann Marie Fleming’s attempt to write an illustrated memoir, a graphic novel extraordinaire, that would bring her great-grandfather back into the lexicon of pop culture. With the use of photos, timelines, illustrations, handbills and newspaper clippings, Fleming traces Long Tack Sam’s life, from his birth in 1885 in a rural Chinese village, to his rise as a premier acrobat and magician, to his renown as on opening act for the Marx Brothers and even as a mentor to Orson Welles.

The Photographic Equivalent of a Steinbeck Novel

‘Round the beginning of the twentieth century the railroads stitched an iron track out West. The government assigned railway companies millions of acres of land for transportation development. Railroads then had excessive land and track, but were short on folks to use it. So the railroads advertised and sold land near their routes to homesteaders for next to nothing. All the homesteader had to do was contract to be on the land for at least five years and “improve it.” Only Nebraska, Montana and the Dakotas were harsh lands. When the railroads died out so did the small towns every ten miles down the track. Tony and Eva Worobiec document these forgotten towns in their eerily beautiful photography book, Ghosts in the Wilderness: Abandoned America.

J.R. Brinkley: The Heal-All Huckster

According to John R. Brinkley, goat glands reinstated, revitalized and cured over twenty-seven ailments from emphysema to the baby-making vigor of both men and women. Brinkley started a sixteen-room clinic in Milford, Kansas in 1918. No matter that Brinkley operated while inebriated and hadn’t finished his degree at a reputable institution, Brinkley gave folks what they wanted, a glass half-full of hope. When Brinkley wasn’t recklessly implanting goat parts into people, he was broadcasting prescriptions on the radio without ever having met his patients to diagnose them properly. Meanwhile, Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association and quack buster extraordinaire, had had quite enough of Brinkley’s fraudulent medicine. Charlatan recounts Brinkley’s sordid career and Fishbein’s obsession with exterminating it.

The Daily Grind

Take one masterpiece of American oral history, put it in the hands of today’s most interesting cartoonists, and what do you get?  Studs Terkel's Working: A Graphic Adaptation.  Terkel initially spent three years talking to people in a wide variety of occupations to see what they actually did all day and how they felt about it.  In this visual adaptation, hand-picked artists not only stay true to those original interviews but also enhance them through unique styles of illustration and lettering.  Edited by Paul Buhle and orchestrated by Harvey Pekar, Studs Terkel’s Working is a tribute to working men and women of all types.  Whether blue collar, white collar, wage slave, or executive, you’ll find a voice in these pages that has been brought to life in startling black and white.