Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Tuesday, June 19
7:30 PM
OWEN EGERTON
THE BOOK OF HAROLD:
The Illegitimate Son of God
As profound and deeply respectful as it is wild and often hilarious, this take on a modern messianic movement in suburbia confronts the inherent paradoxes, absurdities, and dangers of spirituality, while musing on the beautiful complexity of humanity and the strange and wonderful beliefs we hold.
The titular and sometimes exasperating hero of Owen Egerton’s satire is Harold Peeks, a middle-aged suburbanite living a lonely if typical modern life in the outskirts of Houston. His world feels bland and pointless until one evening, at a mundane office party, he announces to his stunned co-workers that he is the Second Coming of Christ. Oddly enough, people start to believer him
Blake Waterson, Harold’s closest friend and narrator of the novel, is as skeptical as anyone of this disheveled and disconcertingly bawdy Savior, and yet this would-be Judas is compelled to follow Harold on his two-hundred mile walking journey to Austin with a mismatched group of equally puzzled disciples. On the road, this motley crew of witnesses experience misguided converts, violent possums, and the ungrateful recipients of off-kilter healings. They also discover the inherent paradoxes, absurdities, and dangers of spirituality, as they learn that saviors may not have all the answers, and humanity is just as bizarre and beautiful as the beliefs we hold.
“An engaging exploration of everything ridiculous, horrible, and beautiful that humanity has ever been given or invented about religion.”
—The Hipster Book Club
“A lively and beautifully crafted novel about the anguish of belief.”
—Kirkus
Owen Egerton has had a varied yet illustrious career that includes employment as a secret fast food inspector, an on-air home shopping host, and a para-church youth leader. He was the co-creator of the award-winning The Sinus Show at the Alamo Drafthouse Theater, and for several years was the artistic director of Austin’s National Comedy Theater. He currently writes screenplays and performs standup comedy. He lives in Austin.
Wednesday, June 20
6:30 – 8:30 PM
NOTES FROM A REVOLUTION:
COM/CO., THE DIGGERS, & THE HAIGHT
Please join us for a celebration of the Diggers, the Communication Company, and the Haight-Ashbury of the mid 1960s on the occasion of the publication of the new book from Foggy Notion Books, Notes from a Revolution: Com/co, the Diggers & the Haight. A panel discussion, moderated by Kristine McKenna, will feature Harvey Kornspan, Claude Hayward, and special surprise guests.
The social upheaval of the sixties gave rise to fascinating coalitions and communes, but the Diggers stand apart from them all. Formed in Haight-Ashbury in 1966 by members of R. G. Davis's subversive theater company, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Diggers took their name from the English Diggers, a seventeenth century agrarian collective devoted to creating a utopian society free of ownership and commerce.
Under the leadership of Peter Berg, Emmett Grogan, Peter Coyote, and Billy Murcott – they were true anarchists, with roots in the Theater of the Absurd, Existentialism, and strategies of direct action. They coined slogans designed to prod people into participating and staged art happenings, public interventions, and street theater infused with wicked humor. The Diggers also provided free food, clothing, medical care and lodging to anyone in need as part of their effort to create a unified and mutually supportive community.
A critically important part of their methodology were the hundreds of broadsides that they regularly produced and distributed throughout the Haight, printed by the Communication Company, a maverick, short-lived publishing outfit founded by Chester Anderson and Claude Hayward. A selection of these graphically inventive, lacerating and sometimes funny broadsides are gathered together for the first time inNotes From a Revolution, which offers a fascinating and oddly moving record of the counterculture in its early bloom.
Claude Hayward was born in Brooklyn and raised in rural New Jersey. In 1963 he moved to Venice, California, where he worked as advertising manager for the L.A. Free Press, and as a contributing reporter for maverick radio station KPFK. In late 1966 he moved to Haight-Ashbury, where he partnered with Chester Anderson to co-found the underground printing press, the Communication Company, in January of 1967. Throughout that crucial year, the Communication Company published daily bulletins that were distributed throughout the Haight and unified the community. At the end of 1967 Hayward founded a commune in Covelo, Calif., and spent the next three years developing his skills as a builder and homesteader. I n 1971 he moved to a traditional Spanish Land Grant village on the Pecos River, in northeastern New Mexico, where he refined his skills as a builder of adobe houses made of sun-dried mud brick. He currently serves as the elected Majordomo of the Acequia de Tecolotito, and is president of the local drinking water cooperative that provides domestic water to approximately one hundred families.
Harvey Kornspan was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and in 1962 he earned a B.S. in philosophy and science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In August of 1964 he moved to San Francisco and enrolled in Hastings Law School; he dropped out the following year, and beginning in spring of 1965 he worked for a year as the manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. From 1966 through 1968 he was a managing partner in the Steve Miller Blues Band, and in 1969 he moved to Los Angeles, where he was a fellow at the American Film Institute from 1970 through 1971. Over the next five years he worked in film in various capacities, and from 1976 through 2008 he was director of production for advertising and promotion at CBS.
Kristine McKenna is a Los Angeles based writer and art historian, and is a partner, with Donna Wingate and Lorraine Wild, in the publishing imprint Foggy Notion Books. She has published twelve books on various aspects of popular culture of the west coast.
Tuesday, June 26
7:30 PM
An Evening of Poetry & Stories with Friends and Colleagues
D.A. POWELL
USELESS LANDSCAPE, OR A GUIDE FOR BOYS
CATHERINE BRADY
CURLED IN THE BED OF LOVE
In D. A. Powell’s fifth book of poetry, USELESS LANDSCAPE, the rollicking line he has made his signature becomes the taut, more discursive means to describing beauty, singing a dirge, directing an ironic smile, or questioning who in any given setting is the instructor and who is the pupil. This is a book that explores the darker side of divisions and developments, which shows how the interstitial spaces of boonies, backstage, bathhouse, or bar are locations of desire. With Powell’s witty banter, emotional resolve, and powerful lyricism, this collection demonstrates his exhilarating range.
“With his typical wry eroticism, an eagle eye for the places where men converge, and a compass that points always to desire, poet D. A. Powell leads us on a tour through a Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, from gay bars to bathhouses and into the backwoods.” --Vanity Fair, “Hot Type”
“Powell has a perfect ear. . . . [His] great subject is passion, in all its stages and manifestations: passion sought, spent, relived in the mind, played out in language.” -- Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
“In this, his fifth and most elegant and accessible book, [Powell] watches himself aging, his disease making off with his body, his energy and his hope—but not his humor: ‘You face your wrinkles, daily, in the mirror. / But the wrinkles are so slimming, they rather flatter.’ He entreats us, by book’s end, to ‘triumph over death with me.’ It’s an invitation—and a poet—you won’t be able to resist.”
-- National Public Radio, “Not Your Parents’ Poems: A 2012 Poetry Preview”
D. A. Powell is the author of five collections of poetry, including Chronic, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His honors include the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Commonwealth Club, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an associate professor at USF.
To read Curled in the Bed of Love is to feel the incessant tug between devotion and desire that can unmake even the closest couple. Catherine Brady’s characters are as resolute in evading middle-class conformity as they are in clinging to their illusions about love. They share the dream of love as a pure space cleared of hesitations, doubts, and regrets, even as desire forces them to
encounter what they can’t change about themselves -- and what they haven’t yet discovered. All of Brady’s stories are gritty and unflinching in their gaze, yet lyrical and rich in the imagery of stasis and change.
Catherine Brady is the author of three short story collections, one the winner of the 2002 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and another the winner of the 2010 Northern California Book Award for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in numerous literary journals andBest American Short Stories. She’s also the author of a book on writing craft, Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction, and a biography of a Nobel laureate, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco and is currently at work on a novel.
Wednesday, June 27
7:30 PM
THE ART OF MEMORY for Names, Faces, and Pretty Much Everything Else
A Short Workshop with BRENT SVERDLOFF
You look familiar
I'm blanking on your name
Remind me again who you are
Have we met before?
Ellen DeGeneres once quipped, “Scientists say we use less than 10% of our brain power; imagine how smart we’d be if we used the other 65%.” The basic memory principles you’ll learn in this workshop can enable you to sharpen your powers of observation, banish absentmindedness, and memorize anything: appointments, historical dates, names and faces, lists and numbers of any length, speeches, difficult words in English and foreign languages, and even where you put your keys this morning!
Based on trained-memory techniques dating back to antiquity and perfected by 20th-century memory training specialist Harry Lorayne, these tried-and-true methods will help you achieve success in both your professional and personal life. Amaze yourself and others with what you can do with that other 65% of your brain!
Armed with degrees in both Spanish and Romance Linguistics, Brent began his career teaching language courses at the high school and college levels, and then eventually to adults. His methods called for intense immersion in language and culture, helping students build awareness of the phonetic and syntactic patterns of language systems. Brent credits memory techniques he learned 30 years ago with enabling him to master multiple languages and hold archivist positions at The Getty Center and Harvard, where he worked with centuries-old manuscript and rare book collections. Brent has also performed stand-up comedy at clubs in Boston and Cambridge, where trained-memory systems allowed him to perform long sets. He currently lives in San Francisco, where he is the Executive Director of the Center for the Art of Translation, a non-profit that promotes international literature and translation through publications, teaching, and public events.Co-presented with the California Preservation Foundation and the Victorian Alliance of San Francisco
Tuesday, July 3
7:30 PM
RON TANNER
FROM ANIMAL HOUSE TO OUR HOUSE: A Love Story …with slides and advice!
Ten years ago, Ron and his then-girlfriend, Jill, did the impossible. They bought condemned property -- a big Baltimore Victorian brownstone – and vowed to bring it back to its original glory. The house had been home to Baltimore’s most notorious fraternity for a decade and now, wrecked and abandoned, it was filled with garbage. As if that weren’t daunting enough: Ron and Jill had been dating for only six months and they knew nothing about fixing up old houses. Friends, family, and concerned onlookers told them not to do it – they would surely lose their shirts and their love in the bargain.
An odyssey for lovers, dreamers, do-it-yourselfers, and fans of old houses, FROM ANIMAL HOUSE TO OUR HOUSE offers inspiration, insight, and hilarity as Ron and Jill hammer away at the dream of home ownership and true love.
Ron will show slides and regale us with hair-raising and hilarious tales of his adventures as a newbie renovator of a wrecked house. He has since become a licensed house inspector and is now prepared to offer advice and tips, especially for couples who take on DIY projects in their houses, wrecked or otherwise.
Ron Tanner's awards for writing include a Faulkner Society gold medal, a Pushcart Prize, a New Letters Award, a Best of the Web Award, and many others. He has won fellowships from the Copernicus Society, Sewanee Writers Conference, and the National Park Service, to name a few, and his stories and essays have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, and he’s the author of A Bed of Nails(stories) and Kiss Me Stranger (illustrated novel). He teaches writing at Loyola University in Baltimore, and directs the Marshall Islands Story Project.