NOW IT IS BUCK DANCING TIME

I listen to my Abner Jay record when my dog or my wife dies. I listen to Abner when I am depressed but want to be depressed and think terrible. I listen to Abner when I drink too much gin at the beach or when I am turning Dolores Park into a prison. I basically play that Abner Jay record and listen to it over and over and over whenever I can. It is that good. Good for living in SF or Oakland. Good for Atlanta or the China. Good for under the river, sheets, or weather. Lord forget it, just get in it.

Listen to a really good song by Abner Jay HERE.

At the Green Apples Bookstore where I work there is the Mississippi Records vinyl release of The True Story of Abner Jay. There is also the Subliminal Sounds release of the Abner Jay CD, One Man Band, which has some different songs on it, but also some of the same songs too. I suggest both because they are so great.

Choose a Book. Change a Life in Mongolia.

Our friends at The Asia Foundation have launched an online book contest to send storybooks to fourth-grade students in rural Mongolia. In the contest, you can choose your favorite among five classic stories: Corduroy, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Make Way for the Ducklings, Where’s Spot, or The Little Engine That Could. Copies of the winning book will be sent to the fourth grade class of Khishig-Undur School, a school that serves the nomadic communities of a remote area almost 200 miles from the nation’s capital, Ulaanbaatar.

Here is a video featuring the students who will receive the books and Tungaa, a graduate of the school who now works with an Asian Development Bank program that helps rural migrants adjust to life in Mongolia’s big cities. In the video, Tungaa says she is “living proof” that “a single book can make a big difference.”

Your (free) vote will not only go towards sending a child a book, but also supports the programs of The Asia Foundation. A donor will contribute $1 for every vote cast, up to $10,000. Voting ends on March 29, so choose your favorite childhood story now!

[You may remember that I blogged in December about their last contest in Bangladesh. Click here to watch the video showing their return to Bangladesh with the winning book, Harold and the Purple Crayon.]

Poem of the Week by Brian Teare

Here's this week's poem by local poet Brian Teare. Enjoy the poem and this first week of spring.

Embodiment

(White Birch)


how a birch shirks its skins : strange
grain of the language of prayer : to disturb
words addressed to where God is is
what writing is : alphabet alive beneath
the alphabet so far into whiteness
each mind to itself creation come crawling
matter out of nothing : always
longing inquiries at the threshold a question
unanswered : not skin but the look
of skin : what once overheard the talk
of God became matter : ask the birch
did the soul have a choice :

from Sight Map by Brian Teare, University of California Press (2009)

Comparisons

I was cleaning my room recently and found a number of books I haven't touched in quite some time, Margherita Dolce Vita by Stefano Benni (who I've mentioned before) being one of them. Staring at the book made me think about its plot, characters and general form which Benni forced into my brain (the big, black, giant cube), when suddenly I couldn't stop of Montreal from playing loudly in my head; of Montreal's music somehow pinpoints the exact feel of Benni's story, its perfectness is uncanny.

Books, and literature in this specific case, can oftentimes transcend (for lack of better words) the means of its original presentation (i.e. book-->music, film-->book). Jean-Phillipe Toussaint's, Bathroom, can easily be compared to John Cage's 4'33. The narrator of, Bathroom, is excited by smallest of details due to where he is: the bathroom. Cage's piece is meant for the listener's experience to be based on the sounds occurring during the performance. Both are drastically affected by their surroundings. (The photo to the right is of Cage's performance of "Water Walk" in 1960).

Most fiction written by Haruki Murakami never fails to remind me of Wong Kar Wai's films. The dreaminess which Wong Kar Wai creates visually, is akin to the emotion Murakami pens. Even the Twilight series has forced readers to look for music which emulates (in one way or another) the books.

Obviously there are far more educational studies on this topic and I may just be rambling, but isn't it the stuff like this that gets you thinking, really thinking? What books remind YOU of other ideas/music/films/art?

Books, Cops, Dissent, Food

THIS really bummed me out last weekend. Sadly I haven't been able to find a video of Ward Churchill's appearance following up on the events the next day. He was well spoken, as he is known for being.

Find me in the philosophy section. I'm going to be reading up, trying to figure out why people are so intolerant of one another.

Oh, and we do carry Lierre Keith's book by the way. And I do recommend it.

Book of the Month: Monsieur Pain

Each month, we here at Green Apple choose a brand-new book for which we're evangelical. We even guarantee the book 100% or your money back. And when we get our act together, we produce a short video about our Book of the Month. This month brings both. Yippee!

We're grateful to director/remainder guy Nick "Buzzsaw" Buzanski and filmmaker/bartender Sean Sullivan for their efforts this month. Herein they reveal the complicated process of choosing the Book of the Month.



And here is Nick's blurb on Bolano's Monsieur Pain, because it's all about the books, right?

While everyone raves about 2666 and The Savage Detectives, most people are missing the true Bolano--the finished, polished, masterful Bolano. He has been published in America by New Directions since 2003, all of them masterfully translated by Chris Andrews (who has won two awards for his translations of Bolano).

This book is a strange and funny novel of the streets of Paris in 1938. Read Monsieur Pain and you will get a sense of what the Chileans knew well before his American "fame." --NPB

We (Heart) Our New Kids' Section

Every September when we put our huge calendar selection out, we need to move things in the store around a bit to make room for them. And every year when calendars go away in late January, we need to move things back. We always use this as an opportunity to mix things up a bit- expand sections that are selling well, shrink sections that aren't. If you've been in the store at any point in the last six weeks, you've noticed that we did more shuffling around than usual. We shrunk CDs a bit, and moved old-fashioned records more towards the front of the store. Travel books moved over to the annex, graphic novels moved to the front of the store. And so on.

And maybe one or two of you noticed that our children's book section has moved. It always felt a bit cramped in its old digs, so we decided to move it up to the mezzanine and give it some more space. In the coming weeks we'll be putting down a nicer floor, get a rug for the young ones to sit on and a nicer table and chairs than the ones you see pictured here. And we're hoping to start a Sunday morning story time soon. If you don't get our email newsletter, you should sign up here.