It Came From the Basement: "Soule's Dictionary of English Synonyms"

The latest in a new series with which I'm trying to reinvigorate the DaveTronik 2000 blog. In these posts, I will write about an item or items currently stored in the unfinished side of my basement. Many of them have been stashed in boxes for decades, waiting for this moment.

This is a book that Super Sam gave me during my intership at my hometown weekly newspaper, the Farmington Valley Herald, during the summer of 1986.

"Who was Super Sam?" you ask. His full name was Louis H. Sampliner, and he had quite a journalism and fiction-writing history, some of which I vaguely recall him telling me about. Picture Wallace Shawn, but perhaps a little shorter and absolutely much less lively, although possibly with a similar slight lisp. And Super Sam was older, as he was in his early 70s when I worked with him, and Wallace Shawn is only 79 as I write this.

Like anybody working at a small-town newspaper, I wore many hats during my internship and my employment the following year, after I graduated. I reported on town meetings (planning and zoning), wrote features about local residents, helped the sports editor cover high school sports once in a while, took photos, copy-edited news and feature stories and columns, typeset articles and picked up lunch orders from local restaurants.

Sam was a mentor to me. He taught me that good news writing was tight, concise. He would point out my editing and writing errors and patiently wait while I fixed them. He was smart and confident and sometimes a little bit cocky when teaching me things. But he was also funny and self-effacing.

He worked as an assistant typesetter, alongside an amazing woman named Sally, and wrote columns once in a while. At age 73, he wasn't there full time, but he was a well-known and respected presence in the small office. He could be grumpy and short-tempered, but he was always loveable and just about always right.

I had to set up a free trial with Newspapers.com to access Sam's obituary from May 28, 1993. He was 80 when he died, and had spent his entire adult life working with words. He was the director of the University of Hartford news bureau for many years, according to the obit from the Hartford Courant. "Mr. Sampliner, better known as 'Sam' to most students and local media representatives, was a publicist since 1946, when he founded the news bureau of Hillyer College in the basement of a Hudson Street building," the appreciation indicates. "When the college joined the Hartt School of Music and the Hartford Art School to form the University of Hartford in 1956, he moved to the Bloomfield Avenue campus. He was director until 1978, but continued to work part-time until his death."

After graduating from a New Jersey high school in 1932, he worked for Atlantic City News; Standard Magazines, a New York-based publisher of pulp magazines such as Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, per Wikipedia; and Popular Library, where he was a comic book editor, the obituary indicates. He never attended college.

Additionally, he published more than 50 science fiction and adventure stories. He is listed on Fancyclopedia as one of the hundreds of attendees of Chicon, the World Science Fiction Convention held in Chicago in 1940. Sam seems to have been somewhat on the periphery of the science fiction publishing world. I found a blog post about two Badger State writing groups, the Milwaukee Fictioneers and Allied Authors of Wisconsin, in which Sampliner is briefly mentioned. "In 1940, writer Louis Sampliner and Palmer swing through Milwaukee for Bloch, while making a pilgrimage to visit Derleth in Sauk City."

Let's break that down: Palmer refers to Raymond Palmer, an early member of Milwaukee Fictioneers best known as the editor of Amazing Stories and an author of books including the UFO-themed The Coming of the Saucers. Bloch is Robert Bloch, another sci-fi author who was first published at age 17, and was a member of the Fictioneers. Derleth is August Derleth, a native of Sauk City, Wisconsin, who was the first publisher of H.P. Lovecraft's books.

You'll notice that Super Sam is the only one of that bunch without his own Wikipedia page. Nevertheless, he seems to have worked alongside Palmer for quite some time. Addtionally, he published freelance articles in numerous publications, including the Farmington Valley Herald, the Hartford Courant, the West Hartford News, the New Britain Herald and New Haven-based The Elder.

At his death, he left two nieces, so I'm assuming he never had children.

As for the Farmington Valley Herald, I believe it was established in 1894. It went out of business in 2005. The publisher when I worked there was a wacky, energetic guy named Lou Ball, who was always the center of attention when he was in the office. When I knew him, he was in his 60s, and drove an orange Datsun 240-Z with the license plate "BALLS." He was known to dress head to toe in red-white-and-blue on July 4th, and show up in the office once in a while with an arrow through his head, a la Steve Martin. He was loud and funny and smart and most everybody loved him.

Below is a picture of me with Lou, taken at the going-away party the paper had for me when I left on my road trip in 1988.

Over the years, I have only used Soule's synonyms book infrequently. But I love coming across it once in a while, as it reminds me of my first "real" job all those years ago. And it has all the best words! Like "party-colored," a synonym for piebald and variegated.

The dictionary's namesake, Richard Soule, was born in Duxbury, Mass., in 1812, and died in St. Louis in 1877, according to Famous Americans. A descendant of a signer of the Mayflower Compact, he graduated from Harvard and worked as a civil engineer before turning toward literary pursuits. Other books he edited include Memorial of the Sprague Family, a poem, with genealogical and biographical notes; Manual of English Pronunciation and Spelling, with a Preliminary Exposition of English Orthoepy and Orthography with William A. Wheeler; and Pronouncing Hand-Book, with Loomis J. Campbell.

Giving me this book appears to fit one of Super Sam's life patterns. According to his obituary, "For at least 30 years, he wrote poems he read at special occasions and major university affairs to honor individuals."

I'm honored that he shared this book with me.

Bookin' It

I love to read but I'm not good at reviewing books. In junior high school I considered reading book reports to my classmates to be a fate worse than eating tofu-covered lima beans. Shrinking in my seat like an ashamed Rottweiler who's afraid to chase the mailman, I would agonize as student after student volunteered, hoping that somehow the teacher would exempt me. Of course she never did, and I never learned the lesson that going first means you get to kick back and enjoy as other kids stammer and turn red and tremble so badly their reports nearly tear in half.

In my adult years the fear of reading my work out loud has been replaced by the realization that I'm just not that good at critical analysis. I've always had difficulty plumbing the depths of long works of fiction, teasing out the symbolism, deciphering characters' ulterior motives or simply even remembering at the end of the book just what the hell happened in the first few chapters. These reasons attest to why I've never written a novel. I've diagnosed myself with executive function disorder.

Nevertheless, to coin a phrase, I've persisted. I've reviewed plenty of books here over the years, many of them non-fiction. Below you'll find links to three attempts. If you're so inclined, search the site for others.

April 4, 2013, Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

January 20, 2012, Myles J. Connor, Jr.'s The Art of the Heist

July 24, 2012, Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole

I've come to you today with a somewhat different approach than the longer-form reviews I've done previously. I'm going with a quick-hit approach, offering up basic reviews and also a look at what's on my nightstand right now.

Also, there will be nepotism. Well-earned nepotism.

Earlier this summer I read Andrew Forsthoefel's Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story At a Time. The author of this memoir is young and freshly graduated from Awesome College or some such institution. He doesn't know what to do with his life, so he sets out from his mother's house in Pennsylvania on foot, a rucksack across his back, with the goal of simply talking to people along his route. He figures that he can learn from his fellow citizens how they make their lives work best, and apply those lessons to himself.

I really enjoyed Walking to Listen. Forsthoefel has an easy writing style and doesn't shy away from examining his own warts. The tales of kindness and generosity offered by his fellow Americans that he shares will make you think that in these polarizing political times there is hope for our nation.

Reading Forsthoefel's book was a dangerous thing for me to do, perhaps even brave. As regular readers know, I've been working, on and off, for several years on a road-trip memoir. So reading a really good book from a major publisher about trekking across the US of A is the sort of activity that could drop me into writer's depression. But instead I decided to take inspiration from Forsthoefel's book, go back and look at my work-in-progress and make it even better.

While I was the first member of my family to publish a book -- well, since you asked: (C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity -- I will not be the first to publish a memoir. That honor goes to my mother, Joan Bogert Brigham.

Published earlier this summer, her book, Invitation to Inner Light: To Love and Wisdom...an Essential Step for Personal and Planetary Peace, is part memoir, part travel guide to Peru and part revelation. The revelations for many readers will come in learning about my mother's spiritual path and how perhaps to follow their own, similar route to "opening to the sacred seed within." The book is about following your inner voice, which my mother tunes in via meditation, to realize who you are and how to realize your dreams and fulfill your destiny. She places great weight on love and learning how to discover the light that's inside each of us. This is my clumsy attempt to translate the message of Invitation to Light, as a person who is not at all spiritual and can't relate to many of the experiences my mother has had in her 85 years.

For me, the revelations in my mother's book were more personal. I had no idea that she'd yearned since she was a teenager for a meaningful spiritual experience. I never knew what motivated her to make not one, but two, trips to Peru in the 1990's. And I certainly didn't recall all that she'd told me about her transformative experience at Peru's Machu Pichu, the sacred and breathtaking ancient Inca city in the Andes mountains.

Additionally, I wasn't aware of just how important meditation, sounding and dream interpretation were, and still are, to my mother. Sure, I've heard her talk about all of these things all of my adult life, but reading it just makes it all the more evident and powerful. The message of my mother's book -- we as humans need to look inside ourselves to find the strength and courage to love ourselves and one another -- isn't unique. But given the tenor of our times, it certainly is a message that needs repeating. I can't express how proud of my mother for putting her heart, soul and, yes, LIGHT, into her book!

A few years back, I gave my mother a copy of Mark Adams's Turn Right at Machu Pichu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time. I'm not sure whether she read it. More recently, I purchased a copy for myself, after reading and thoroughly enjoying Adams's Meet Me in Atlantis: Across Three Continents in Search of the Legendary Sunken City.

Now seemed like a perfect time to take Turn Right at Machu Pichu off my growing stack of books to read. And just as with his Atlantis book, I am getting tremendous enjoyment out of this one. Adams has a self-deprecating writing style that I both enjoy and employ myself. The basis of his book is retracing the route the Hiram Bingham III took in 1911 to expose Machu Pichu to the wider world. Adams ties his own trials and tribulations along the rigorous adventure to Bingham's pursuit, as well as to the history of the Inca people.

So far I'm loving it, and I expect that will continue.

Here's An Excerpt from My Road-Trip Memoir

Over the course of four months in 1988, I took a road trip with three friends in which we covered nearly 6,000 miles across 26 states. I have spent five years writing a memoir about that journey, which we took in a 1977 Dodge Tradesman van. We never parked the van "down by the river," but we did avail ourselves of a few campgrounds, a bank parking lot and a quiet residential street in Athens, Georgia.

The book has changed quite a bit since the first draft. I had previously outlined the basics of the story on my old blog (DaveBrigham.com, which is still active although I haven't posted anything there in years), but was unsure how to launch into my story or how to frame the tale for a book.

Initially I thought I would treat it as "how-to" guide for college students and recent grads, imploring them to postpone joining the working world and explaining to them the good, bad and ugly of taking a road trip. I quickly abandoned that idea.

Next, I worked on a thread in which I compared the difficulties I had on the trip, and have had all my life, with some of what my son, Owen, has gone through in his young life. I've always been a shy guy with low self-confidence, and Owen suffers from anxieties, and I saw similarities in how we deal/don't deal with things. But again, I gave up on that idea before too long as I realized it wasn't fair to Owen, and didn't make for great reading. I didn't want my memoir to get bogged down in too much self-analysis.

During the trip I kept a journal and recorded plenty of late-night thoughts and conversations on a tape recorder. I used these sources to write two articles for the hometown newspaper (the Farmington Valley Herald, R.I.P.) where I'd worked before embarking on my trip. I used all of those resources to create the basic framework for my book.

My memory is notoriously poor, but as I wrote, little details would emerge from the dark corners of my memory. I looked at Google Maps to refresh my memory of what landmarks we passed on our way south from Connecticut. In one case, I used Google Street View to cruise along the main roads of Athens, Georgia, and instantly an image popped into my head: driving into a bank parking lot after hours, as far away from the main road as possible, next to a retaining wall, where we'd be able to see anybody (cops, thieves, R.E.M.) coming our way.

About two years into the process (obviously this has been an on-and-off project) I felt I needed a break. I solicited friends and family to read what I had and give me honest feedback. I had half a dozen takers, and each in his or her own way provided me with comments, criticism and praise that helped move me along.

One of the comments touched on a major issue that I'd already been aware of: "you write too much about things that you didn't do, and not enough about things you actually did. You either need to fictionalize this book or make the reality of it come alive a lot more."

I had a camera with me on the trip, but I didn't learn until we landed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after three weeks that the damn thing hadn't worked. Having a few dozen pictures of the trip would have sparked my memory. None of the other guys on the trip had a camera, and their recall of events was often as fuzzy as mine.

I didn't want to fictionalize my story, so I knew I had to dig deeper, use bolder language, inject some humor and make a few conjectures about conversations that the four of us had while hanging out waiting to get into Graceland, for instance.

I am not done with the book, but wanted to share an excerpt with you, my faithful reader(s?). I've made great progress of late, and feel confident that I will put this book to bed before the year is out. So, without further ado, here are slightly more than 1,000 words that kick off the book, which as of right now is titled, Great/Dismal: My Four-Month Tour of Duty on the Battleship Patchouli. I've added links to some stuff, to give you that e-book experience all the kids are talking about.

CHAPTER ONE: I WANT A WELT

Cruising west along I-84, I was as close to carefree as I’d ever been. My buddies and I were heading for the mysterious Parts Unknown, home to certain professional wrestlers, and the place where so many others outside the ring seek adventure, knowledge or escape.

The four of us rolled in a mobile man cave filled with junk food, cigarettes, soda cans, guitars and warm clothes, leaving behind everyone we knew, our compass pointed toward freedom. Andy and Pete sang Joe “King” Carrasco’s “Buena,” which, with its sunny melody and Caribbean groove, helped us forget the bleak, late-winter scenery whizzing by the windows.

John and I sat in back, legs fully stretched, reading books and flipping through what Hawkeye Pierce called nudist magazines. While pondering certain thoughtful passages or ogling anatomical wonders, we gazed out the window, happy knowing that we were a few dozen feet lower on the latitudinal scale than when we’d started out.

Since lunch, we’d made it from Simsbury, Connecticut, where Andy and I grew up together, through the southeastern part of the Nutmeg State, and across New York’s Putnam and Orange counties, a distance of nearly 200 miles.

I barely looked out the window for the first 90 minutes. I knew the route – flat highway, small cities, suburban sprawl, the occasional old stone wall -- from childhood trips to visit my aunt, uncle and cousins in Westchester County.

Once we passed the I-684 split, however, I started paying closer attention. Almost immediately, I was rewarded with a stunning vision straight out of a Monet painting: through a hole in the clouds I spied a vivid patch of rainbow-colored sky.

Oddly, there had been no rain, and the familiar arc was nowhere in sight. This was just an anomalous, multicolored slice, like somebody had hung an LGBT flag from the heavens.

My first thought: any second now, UFO’s will dive through this seemingly innocuous little stretch of water-colored beauty and strafe us poor, defenseless humans. I imagined cars veering off the highway as saucers flooded the horizon, little green creatures zapping to and fro, military jets screaming in from nowhere to defend the planet.

Something of a UFO nut since reading Chariots of the Gods as a kid, I knew the Hudson Valley had a recent history of UFO sightings.*

Five years earlier, in 1983, hundreds of Hudson Valley residents reported a football-field sized, V-shaped craft moving silently through the night sky. The sightings made the news, and at some point I either read the story, probably in the Hartford Courant or Time magazine, or saw a report on local or national news broadcasts.**

In 1985, novelist Whitley Strieber (The Hunger, The Wolfen) claimed he was abducted by aliens in the Valley. He turned this account into the non-fiction, 1987 New York Times bestseller Communion. I read the book a few years after it came out.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the Hudson Valley has been a hotbed of UFO activity since at least the 1920’s.

I kept my eye on the colorful patch of sky, willing, almost daring, a saucer to descend. After a few miles, however, the tropospheric curiosity faded away. There would be no intergalactic battle.

My fellow travelers laughed at my enthusiasm for alien spacecraft. I’ve never seen a UFO, and don’t know what I would do if I did spot one. I just love the mystery, the sense that there’s something out there that we can’t know, that scares people in power.

I was a huge fan of “The X-Files,” and believe that if we’d traveled through the Hudson Valley at night, we might have seen something extraterrestrial. I thought, just for a moment or two, our trip was going to begin with a massively HUGE event that we’d be talking about until the day we died.

“If we see a UFO on our first day,” I thought, “then this is gonna be an unbelievable trip. Who knows what else we’ll see? Bigfoot? Ghosts? The Creature From the Black Lagoon?”

The rainbow patch was amazing but ultimately a letdown.

After the brief excitement died down, we found ourselves making “penal” jokes.

On one side of Route 84: Fishkill prison. On the other: Downstate, the place where new prisoners have a cup of coffee and a few smokes before shipping off to their new homes for, say, the next 1 to 5 years.

Located in Beacon, New York, Fishkill was constructed in the 1890’s on several hundred acres of farmland. The facility, which was originally known as the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, spreads along the highway and is creepy and imposing, the way prisons are supposed to be. And that name… ***

With its red brick Victorian buildings, Fishkill looks like the kind of place where Freddy Krueger might have been born – “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs.”

The four of us chewed over what it would be like to be in prison (“Don’t drop the soap, you’ll get penal-ized!”), and cracked wise about orange being the new black.****

Whizzing past signs warning drivers not to pick up hitchhikers, we imagined what excuses the escaped cons would give in efforts to hide their identities.

“Relax, dudes, I’m a gas station attendant.”

“This look is all the rage in Soho.”

“Nah, man, I’m in Devo.”

We agreed that of the four of us, Andy would look coolest in an orange jumpsuit.

Eventually I switched seats with Pete. In the passenger seat shooting the shit with Andy while he drove, I felt really good. We talked about girls, music, cars, baseball, girls, books, professional wrestling, girls, philosophies of life, girls, food, beer and girls.

We were on our way to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, specifically to Bucknell University, to see our high school buddy Steve.

NOTES:

*Some day, if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to purchase vinyl, cassette, CD and download versions of my long-in-the-works concept album, “Starhole,” about alien abductions, government conspiracies, pyramids and romance. I think you’ll find “Area 51 Is for Lovers” to be a particularly radio-friendly unit shifter.

**Syracuse Newtimes, November 7, 2013, “UFO’s Over the Hudson Valley” by Cheryl Costa, and BJ Booth in UFO Casebook.

***CorrectionHistory.com.

****This may or may not be true.

J. Crew: Inspiring Readers While Clothing the Moderately Well-Heeled

Like many book lovers, I heart the idea of small stores where I can browse new releases, pick up a signed copy of something by a local author and perhaps eat a locally sourced brownie or two. I used to spend a fair amount of time in Newtonville Books before this great store moved from my neighborhood, Newtonville, a mile or two up the road (and the tax bracket ladder) to Newton Centre. I still shop there once in a while, but I will forever scoff at the fact that the owners maintain the name "Newtonville Books" despite their zip code shift.

I also buy books on Amazon, of course, but I try to keep my interactions with Jeff Bezos's minions strictly on the Search and Ignore tip. If I hear or read about a book that sounds interesting, I search for it on Amazon, add it to my wish list, and then buy it somewhere else, or send the list to family members around my birthday.

Barnes & Noble, too, has reeled me in plenty of times. I even joined the store's brainwashing, er, rewards program recently.

Never in my life, before yesterday, had I leafed through a book at a J. Crew store.

Beth and I were at Legacy Place, the quaint little outdoor megamall in Dedham, Mass., where Sumner Redstone -- business titan behind National Amusements, corporate parent of TV network CBS, Paramount Pictures and scores of movie theaters across the country, among other things -- hopes suburban Bostonites will honor his father by dropping loads of cash on everything from ice cream to sweaters, Carhartt jackets to a night out of bowling. I bought a sweater at Uniqlo, despite the fact that I don't know how to pronounce the name of this hip Japanese store.

Beth picked up a few things at Athleta (which I also have trouble saying the right way) and then popped into J. Crew. Honestly, I don't recall whether she bought anything there, because after making my way quickly around the men's section and stopping in front of the "Sale" table, I found myself enraptured. Not by the autumn-colored sweater-with-elbow-patches or the brown shoes or brown belts. But rather, by a book titled, On This Site. It wasn't for sale.

An irresistible shade of light green, heavy and about the the measurement of a legal pad, On This Site grabbed me from the first image I saw within. This was the image:

As blog regulars know, I have kind of a thing for abandoned places and landscapes on the fringe (see my other blog if you're new here: The Backside of America). So when I saw this image, and quickly flipped through the book and saw similar places, as well as places that weren't abandoned or on the edges of society, but which still somehow seemed damaged, I knew I had to find out more about this book, and its author, Joel Sternfeld.

Here's part of the write-up for the book at Amazon's web site:

"Between 1993 and 1996, Joel Sternfeld photographed 50 infamous crime sites around the US. On This Site contains images of these unsettlingly normal places, ordinary landscapes left behind after tragedies, their hidden stories disturbingly invisible. Each photograph is accompanied by a text describing the crime that took place at the location."

I love the concept, but given the price of the book (almost $60 hardcover only) I doubt I'll buy it. And I love the ideas behind Sternfeld's other books, ranging from American Prospects, which is a photographic record of 1980's America, to Walking the High Line, in which Sternfeld walks New York City's High Line before it became a chic downtown park and attraction, when it was just an abandoned railway that nobody but rats and bums cared about.

I'm not a photography geek, so I'd never heard the name "Joel Sternfeld" before. But I absolutely love what he does, and am taking new inspiration to get out into the world with my camera. I've posted a ton of pictures at Flickr over the last several years, but just last month for the first time, I began offering for sale some of my pictures. Check it out here: Dave Brigham Photography.

For a look at some of Sternfeld's work, check out this link. I'd never heard of this photographer before yesterday, but I recognize some of the images at the site. You probably will to.

He/She is #1!

It's been a long, long time since I've posted. I intended to write some book reviews for, among others, Greg Olear's novel about a day in the crazy life of a stay-at-home dad, Fathermucker; Bill See's rock and roll memoir, 33 Days: Touring in a Van, Sleeping on Floors, Chasing a Dream; and David Roberts's Devil's Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy, a riveting non-fiction book that puts into a very harsh light the man who engineered the Latter Day Saints' emigration to the Utah Territory.

I gave up on them because as much as I love reading, I don't really enjoy writing book reviews, although I've posted several here over the years.

I've put a lot of my writing energy lately into my road trip memoir, which I'll post about here in the near future. I also put some energy into launching a for-profit photography site recently (check out Dave Brigham Photography).

Other things have gotten in the way of my posting here, as well, but I don't feel the need to get into that. Finally, though, I've been inspired to revisit the old blog, breathe some life into it, with just a little nugget of interest.

This week I was driving through Needham, the next town over. Owen, as he often is these days, was riding shotgun. He was plinking around on his phone as we pulled up to a stop sign. I looked at the white pickup truck in front of us and took special notice of the license plate. I asked Owen to snap a quick pic with his phone, and he did his best. Not sure if you can see what it reads:

The plate reads:

"Massachusetts"

"1"

"That's amazing!" I said to Owen. "Whose plate is that? Shouldn't the governor have that plate? Or one of our senators?"

Within 20 seconds, he'd looked up the owner of the license plate. We were like a finely tuned investigative team: wheelman and photographer/researcher.

"It belongs to a relative of Frederick Tudor," he told me, as though I was supposed to know who he was talking about, as though Frederick Tudor's name would ring as familiar a bell as "Edward Kennedy" or "David Ortiz."

I asked him who Frederick Tudor was, but Owen was back into checking flight radar on his phone, or doing Minecraft or whatever.

So today I looked up Frederick Tudor and his special license plate. Here's what I found out.

From the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles web site:

"Massachusetts first began issuing licenses and registration plates in June of 1903 as a result of Chapter 473 of the Acts of 1903. The public had until September of that year to comply with the law. The first plate, featuring the number '1' printed on it, was issued to Frederick Tudor in 1903 and is still held as an active registration by a member of his family."

How cool is that? The family has held onto the plate for 111 years! I love that the plate isn't on the governor's black Escalade, or whatever he's driven around in, or zipping around the Cape on an environmentally friendly car driven by a member of the Kennedy clan.

It's on an ordinary pickup truck. The Tudor family probably could have sold the plate and the truck to Scott Brown when he was tooling around Massachusetts in his barn coat and pickup when he ran for Senate a few years ago.

I hope the family passes that plate down for the next hundred years. Now, to find out who owns plate #2....

On the Mend

I had my surgery a week ago, and things are going better than I'd anticipated. While I'm still taking pain medication, I'm not hurting as much as I thought I would be. I was imagining discomfort and inconvenience comparable to when I had my Achilles tendon repaired 15 years ago. Thankfully, arthroscopic hip surgery is much easier to deal with.

I've been reading quite a bit for the past seven days, continuing a long streak of cranking through books. Yesterday, I finished Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away, a collection of essays that are mostly funny observations about adjusting to life in the U.S. compared to Europe.

I moved right on to David Comfort's The Rock & Roll Book of the Dead: The Fatal Journeys of Rock's Seven Immortals, which a friend of Beth's picked up from the YMCA's discard bin. Seriously. Somebody left this book behind after a workout and apparently enough time went by that the Y put it out for anyone to take.

The book spins tales of the lives and deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison and Jerry Garcia. I'm knee-deep in the Hendrix saga, which is interesting in terms of just how messed up he was mentally and pharmaceutically.

Surprisingly, I haven't been watching much TV while sitting in my living room nook, surrounded by my drugs, water, cell phone, house phone, books, magazines and computer. The only thing I've watched is some episodes of "Wilfred" from my DVR, and, occasionally, the local news.

OK, after dinner I've taken to watching "The Six Million Dollar Man" or "Charlie's Angels" reruns, but I swear, that's it. And, of course, the Red Sox.

I've also done a bit of writing. I'm working on a short story for my buddy Jim's next planned anthology, which focuses on travel. He published his first collection, Movable Feasts, earlier this year.

Much to my family's chagrin, I've been shuffling around the house, and out on the porch and front yard, while wearing my anti-embolism socks and brown slippers. I really look like an old man, let me tell ya. I believe today is the last day I need to wear the socks....

It won't be long before I'll be able to do this:

Vacation reading?

I don't consult best-seller lists, and rarely read book reviews, whether they be in the Boston Globe or Entertainment Weekly, the only two publications I read regularly that offer such things. And when the hot weather descends and it's time to hit Cape Cod for a week, I don't confer with summer reading suggestions either.

What did I read last week while hanging out on the Cape with Beth, the kids and Beth's family? A light mystery or upbeat biography? A collection of humorous short stories or a memoir about how swimming with dolphins can change your life? Not quite.

I took on Stewart O'Nan's The Circus Fire. An easy, breezy read this ain't.

The book, which came out in 2000, is an achingly complete reconstruction of the events leading up to, during and after the 1944 circus fire in Hartford, CT, that killed 167 people.

I forgot we had the book, and I don't remember who gave it to either Beth or me. I found it in the attic a while ago and put it in my pile of "to read" books. I'd cruised through August Kleinzahler's memoir, Cutty, One Rock, recently, and wanted to take on something a little weightier.

I could've chosen Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, but I knew I'd never finish it in a week. That will be my next book, after Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away, which is a collection of essays that are funny, insightful and easy on the brain.

O'Nan (author of, among many other books, Faithful, a chronicle of the Red Sox' historic 2004 season, which he co-wrote with Stephen King) obviously did a lot of research for The Circus Fire, his first major nonfiction work.

At times, I got lost in the minute details he provides about various victims, both before, during and after the fire. But for the most part, I was engrossed by the history of fires in the circus industry, the details of circus life, the individual stories of courage and heartbreak, and the amazing work investigators did to try and identify victims and solve the case.

I was born in Hartford's St. Francis Hospital in 1965, and grew up 10 miles north of the city. I recall hearing about the fire during the course of my life, but I never knew just how awful it was. Here's a video that will give you just a very basic idea of the horror:

This book is obviously not for everyone. It's a tough read a lot of the time. O'Nan gives in-depth descriptions of the horrendous scenes of struggle and escape from inside the tent; the condition of the survivors and the dead; the agonizing attempt by family members to identify the charred and mangled bodies at the makeshift morgue.

But as a history lesson, it's fascinating. O'Nan details how negligence on the circus operators' parts -- ranging from narrow entrances/exits to animal chutes that blocked easy egress -- led to so many people dying. He also spends time analyzing how people react to unexpected, traumatic situations such as fires, and how they may see flames but since it's so out of the ordinary, their brains don't register the situation right away. O'Nan also talks about how in mob scenes too many people act only in their own interest, and how they too often blindly follow what everyone else is doing, instead of considering other options of escape.

Unfortunately not enough people have learned the lessons that the circus fire offered, as evidenced by events such as the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in Kentucky in 1977, and The Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island in 2003.

You Didn't Build This, FLlW Did

After several months, I finally finished Meryle Secrest's Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, a dense, well-researched, mostly engaging 564-page doorstop of a book.

I put the book on my wish list after reading T.C. Boyle's The Women, a fictional account of the world-famous architect's tangled web of romantic relationships. Boyle's a gifted writer, and I've read and enjoyed many of his books, but while I was reading The Women, I found myself wanting to read a biography, wondering, "How true to life is this stuff? Were Wright and his wives and mistresses really as crazy as Boyle makes them out to be?"

Turns out, they were.

I'm not going to write a review of the book, because it's too damn long and I'm not a real strong critical writer. But I want to talk about a few things that I learned about Wright (who often signed his name "FLlW"), and discuss some of his amazing buildings, a few of which I hope to visit in my lifetime.

Wright was a complete and total narcissist, arrogant and too quick to judge and fight back against any perceived slight. He was absolutely terrible with money, often refusing to pay everyone from local grocers to building supply companies, and other times insisting that he be given things such as cars simply because he was famous, and the retailer would gain more value from being associated with him than they could if he paid them.

He fell easily for those who flattered him. It was not difficult, especially if you were a woman, to manipulate him.

Wright insisted that nobody had influenced his use of open floor plans, cantilevered roofs and non-traditional materials in the houses he designed, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Many of his buildings, especially houses, suffered from leaky roofs, drafty windows and poor heating and cooling systems.

Still, there's no denying Wright's incredible vision, and his tenacity in getting projects done the way he wanted. He is one of the most well-known architects in the world, alongside I.M. Pei, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Gehry.

Many of his most fantastic projects were never built, such as Washington, D.C.'s Crystal Heights apartment, hotel and shopping complex, and of those that were, many have either been torn down, or destroyed by fire or natural disasters.

Just last month, a house that FLlW designed for one of his sons in Phoenix was saved from the wrecking ball.

But, thankfully, so many great houses, office buildings and museums that he designed still stand.

I've been to New York City with my family each of the last three Aprils, but somehow have never made it to Wright's Guggenheim Museum. The next time I go to the Big Apple, I'm definitely checking out the museum.

Taliesin West, Wright's second home, is located in Arizona. I haven't been to the Southwest since my brief time living in New Mexico in 1988. It's time for a return, with the family.

Wright's primary residence for decades was Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin. This building fascinates me for its architecture, of course, but also because the home was the place where Wright spent much of his adult life, where he designed so many projects, where he mentored architects and others in the building trades, and where tragedy visited his family on too many occasions (fires, murders).

Finally, I have to visit Fallingwater, the amazing house that Wright built over a river in western Pennsylvania. Just take a look at the video above, and at the pictures at the house's web site and you'll understand why I want to go.

(C)rock Redux

Today I received a small advance from Plus One Press, which will be publishing one of my short stories in the soon-to-be-available Tales From the House Band, Volume 2. The anthology features stories from numerous genres, with wildly varying themes, but all of them focused on music in one way or another.

I forget how I found out about Plus One's first volume of the series. But as soon as I did, I zipped an email to the publisher asking if there was room for me in the next volume. She said yes, so I sent her one of the stories from my first book, (C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity, for her consideration. She agreed to publish it, which naturally made me very happy.

I didn't have to write a new story, which was a plus. There was some back-and-forth editing between the publisher, a third party and me. But in the end I think my story -- "Three Times a Lady Sniff," about following the Butthole Surfers -- is better.

Subsequently, I did a little research into the first volume. Plus One is a small publisher that issues books by the owner, Deborah Grabien, and other authors. The only reviews I could find online of the first volume were written either by authors who had stories in the anthology, or their relatives.

Still, the possibility of getting one of my stories published alongside those of other writers is a great opportunity. As with a compilation album (do they make those any more?), a short story anthology gives artists the chance to get themselves in front of people who might never have come across their work otherwise. So obviously I'm hoping those who buy the second volume might at some point buy my book as well.

Stay tuned for news about the publication date.

Sell! Sell! Sell!

I've been thinking for a while about trying to make some money off all the pictures I've taken over the last few years. I'm not fooling myself; I know I'm not a great photographer, but I think I've got a few images that would look cool on certain products.

So I've begun building up my product line at Zazzle. For the past two years I've been selling 30 different t-shirts associated with my first book, (C)rock Stories: Million Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity. I bought one and awarded one or two others as prizes while promoting the book, but until recently hadn't sold any.

Out of the blue two weeks ago Zazzle sent me an email letting me know that I'd sold three shirts. I have no idea who bought them, but it put the idea back into my head that I should sell other stuff.

I'd uploaded some images a while ago but let them linger without doing anything. So today I started matching images to products. The process is very easy, but finding the right picture to go with the right product takes a bit of time.

The first one I made was a note card featuring a picture I'd taken on Cape Cod two years ago:

You can see it here.

The next one I did was a coaster featuring a shot of my electric blue guitar and amplifier. Check it out.

I've got no shortage of images to select from, but I have to be careful not to upload pictures with potential copyright issues. I tried to post one of an MBTA subway station, but it got bounced.

For now I'm just testing things out, but in the near future I'll add more images to more products, and see what works and what doesn't.

Now, for your viewing pleasure, the Butthole Surfers.

Inspiration

When I first started reading Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running I got bummed out. A friend had given the book to me because he knows I'm into running and writing, occasionally at least, and Murakami's book is about how he connects the two.

I didn't know Murakami from a pothole, but I was anxious to read the book. The book is thin, and after just a few pages I could tell that I liked the author's style, albeit style translated from Murakami's native Japanese.

But after just a few more pages I reached a crossroads: keep reading and feel really bummed about the fact that I haven't been writing much, and that I've put my running on hold because of a nagging groin injury, or plow ahead and try to get something out of it.

I chose the latter path and am certainly glad I did.

Murakami has an easy way of writing, but he's very straightforward about how hard he works at it. "I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity," he writes. "To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort."

He puts the same effort into running. During a 62-mile race, he feels his entire body breaking down. And as so many long distance runners know, Murakami's battle was as much mental as it was physical. He comes up with a mantra to get himself through the roughest miles: "I'm not a human. I'm a piece of machinery. I don't need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead."

Repeating these lines and narrowing his focus to the three yards in front of him, he plods forward. Finally, at mile 47, he "passed through something....After that, I didn't have to think anymore."

He is upfront about aging (he was 56 when he started writing the book; he's 63 now) and how he has to lower his expectations for training and running or doing triathlons. He admits to his quirks (he can be somewhat anti-social, not unlike a lot of writers, yours truly included), discusses a few hobbies (he's a major, major record collector) and makes a book about running and writing flow by very easily and quickly.

I certainly plan to read some of his fiction now that I've read his memoir.

As for what I got out of the book, there are two answers. First, I realized that I have to keep myself in shape until my groin feels better, so recently I started going to the gym regularly for the first time in five years. Second, I started working on a memoir of my own.

I know, I know, the memoir market is tighter than Monty Burns' wallet. Everybody and their brother, mother, sister, father and backwoods cousin has put out a book in recent years talking all about drug addiction and recovery, setting up schools in Afghanistan, traveling to Venus with their pet monkey, ad nauseam.

So what do I have to add to all this? I don't know, but I'm working on it.

I'm mining material I used for some of the stories in my first book, (C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity. Yes, I'm churning through the tale of my four-month odyssey in 1988 on the road from New England to New Mexico and back.

Four years ago I posted a 10-part series on my old (but still active) blog, DaveBrigham.com, looking back 20 years to the trip I took with three buddies in a 1977 Dodge Tradesman van. I remember at the time that my buddy Jay Kumar said something along the lines of, "You should put that stuff together into a book."

Well, it takes me a while, but I do listen to my friends. My buddy Ric Dube, like Jay, a former coworker at Webnoize, told me after reading some of the original versions of my (C)rock Stories, that if I could get 15-20 really good ones, I'd have a book.

I've been having fun going through my original blog post and adding tons of details from my journal, two newspaper articles I wrote during my journey, and from my cobwebbed memory. I'm also adding background info about places we visited, as well as updates about some of them, and delving into my childhood, my personality and my previous experiences and how they played into the trip.

Ideally, I'll publish the book as an ebook. Thanks for the inspiration, Haruki.

(I wrote this post a few weeks ago and in the meantime have finished Murakami's book and have moved on to Jack Kerouac's On the Road: The Original Scroll. After college, and before going on my above-referenced road trip, I read the originally published version of the classic book, which edited out the names of Kerouac's friends, as well as many (if not all) of the sex. I'm thoroughly enjoying this livelier version.)

Book Review: "Occupants" by Henry Rollins

I first heard Black Flag nearly 30 years ago, when I was in high school. I was a huge fan of the band through college and for the few years beyond. I saw them twice, and became quite enamored of their lead singer, Henry Rollins. I bought a few of his books, and saw his post-Black Flag band, the Rollins Band, during the brief time I lived in Albuquerque.

In more recent years, I've watched a few episodes of his talk show on IFC, enjoyed his talking head appearances on a variety of networks, and jumped in the wayback machine to watch old Black Flag clips on YouTube.

The only movie of his (and there are many) that I've seen is "Heat," which I didn't like and forgot that he was in. So I'm quite familiar with the man and his output. I'm a fan, although I don't always agree with what he says, and I sometimes get sick of hearing him go on with his strong opinions.

Having in recent years tried to develop an eye for photography, I decided upon learning that Rollins was to publish a book of photos, that I needed to own it.

The photos are by turns heartbreaking, bizarre, beautiful, humorous and uplifting, and always imbued with a sense of humanity. Because Rollins is a man who loves to talk and write, there are of course short essays accompanying each picture.

As he says in the beginning of the book, "I thought it would be pretentious to release a book that only had photographs...So I decided to write something for every photograph."

Great idea, indeed. As someone who publishes a blog featuring pictures of the lesser-seen parts of these United States (The Backside of America), I'm a big believer in words matched with photos.

But Rollins's accompanying write-ups are not at all what I was expecting. I was hoping for explanation, rather than stream-of-consciousness ramblings. Some of them work, some of them don't, but none of them tell me what, who or where I'm looking at. I'm a journalist at heart, and I need that information.

Still, there are some cool shots in the book, and certainly plenty of things to think about as far as injustice, poverty, war, decay, beauty and the human spirit go. Do the photos shock or amaze? No. Does Rollins bring fresh perspective with his words? Nope.

Will this book sit under a coffee table (I know, they're supposed to be on the table) along with my other big books -- "Lost Boston," "The Big Dig," "Lost America" and "Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution" among others -- to be pulled out and reviewed once or twice a year? Yeah, sure.

At the very least, the presence of "Occupants" in my house will provide a few opportunities for me to expound on the virtues of Black Flag to my kids, and maybe even their kids.

Book Review: "After Lyletown" by K.C. Frederick

Most people do things when they're young that they regret later on in life, whether it's driving drunk after a party and taking out somebody's mail box, getting a tattoo on your face, or buying a Haircut One Hundred Album.

In K.C. Frederick's "After Lyletown," Alan Ripley's past holds an event of heavier consequence. As a grad student in the '60s, Ripley fell in with a radical crowd that plotted to knock over a gun store and pass along the weapons to black communities struggling for their civil rights. Hardly a committed revolutionary, Ripley is less in love with the idea of arming minorities than he is with the woman who hatched the plot.

As fate would have it, he gets neither the woman nor the chance to prove his loyalty to her plan. A case of appendicitis lands him in the hospital when the caper goes down. Things go badly; one man dies and another ends up in jail for a long stretch.

Twenty years later, Ripley is a successful lawyer living in the suburbs of Boston with his wife and son. His life is comfortable. Until Rory, the man who spent several years in jail over the failed weapons heist, rings him up.

After Rory entered the story, I spent much of my reading time expecting something big and bad to happen. And while it never does, Frederick develops great suspense. What does Rory want from Alan? Why does Alan hide his past from his wife? What will happen when she finds out about this dark chapter of his life? Will Rory blackmail Alan and ruin his married and professional lives?

Rather than add more violence and crime to the initial, and crucial, episode, Frederick builds the story by gradually filling in the details of Alan's past and present. In some ways, he's like a reformed convict, although he didn't take part in the failed plot, and didn't serve jail time. He realized that his hospitalization was a gift, and that he needed to mature, and use that opportunity to help people. Sure, there was a failed marriage. Sure, he's not always sure he's doing the right thing in his job. But that's what makes him such a human protagonist.

"After Lyletown" springs from a revolutionary era in the United States. The book succeeds, however, because Frederick understands the quiet moments from which real change occurs: poor decision-making made in the name of love, guilt kept close to the vest, blind faith that an associate with a chequered past won't ruin one's life.

Frederick does a great job of bringing the reader into Alan's convoluted life, and reminding us that we cannot, ultimately, escape our own history.

Extra! Extra! Blog All About It!

Seven weeks after I sent an entry to the Indie Books Blog, today is the day they feature my book, "(C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity."

You can read my blurb here; if you haven't bought the book yet, there's a "buy" link at the bottom of the post.

Thank you.

As you were....

Sell! Sell! Sell!

I had big dreams when I published my first book: I wanted to sell 500 copies over the course of the first year. After eight months, I've sold less than 1/5th that amount. Sure, I knew the first 50 or so copies would be the easiest ones to unload. I promoted the book via Facebook and word of mouth and during the first few months sales were relatively brisk, mainly to friends and family. My book was in the top 10 sellers for a short time on Booklocker, the print on-demand company I used to put out my book.

All along, I was concerned that I would run out of energy and motivation to continue marketing the book. And sure enough, I did. I never thought I'd get rich off the book, but I've always hoped to at least break even. But I wasn't willing to do what I needed to do to boost sales, i.e., contact all area independent bookstores; mail out review copies blindly; push myself on local media outlets; walk around Boston with a sandwich board sign (and nothing else!) featuring the front and back covers of the book.

Of late, however, I've been pushing the book a bit more, and sales have increased a little, which is nice. I've sold a few through the Newbury Comics chain of stores in Massachusetts, had two books places in my locally owned bookstore, Newtonville Books, and seen a few copies fly off the digital shelves as well.

With summer coming to an end, I'll have more free time to promote my book, and work on other things, such as my two children's books, my novel/concept album project, and an article about a mystery in my hometown of Simsbury, CT, that I wrote about here last week (see August 24, 2011, "My Nascent Archeology Career").

So, in case you haven't gotten the point, I'd like you to go out and buy my book. Or, if you've already bought it, please recommend it to your friends and family.

As they used to say on the Bartles & Jaymes commercials, thank you very much for your support.