When “Six Feet Under” was alive and well on HBO, it was “my show,” as in, “I can’t leave my television on Sunday night because my show is on.” Once, during a random online search to find out what a bird was doing on Brenda and Nate’s wedding cake (Season 5, Episode 1), I found Television Without Pity, where M. Giant was the casually cruel voice behind SFU recaps. Before M. Giant, I think I had, pathetically, started to suspend disbelief in the characters beyond the hours I was watching the show, and to forget that SFU was just a black comedy about the social psychoses of America, circa 2000. TWP was a bracing slap in the face.

So I was happy to run across “A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know From Watching Television” (Berkley Books, $14), by Jeff Alexander, aka M. Giant.

The chapter topics give you a good idea of how the book is organized , starting with “Saved by the Bell: School on TV” and “I’ll Be There for You: Friends on TV,” and progressing eventually to “Moving On Up: Unreal Estate” and “To Boldly Go: Outer Space and Science Fiction.” If you’re unfamiliar with Alexander’s work (he also has a Web site, velcrometer.blogspot), the introduction gives you a pretty good idea of Alexander’s tone: “Remember what your parents used to say to you about watching too much television? The exact words? Of course you don’t, because they weren’t spoken by famous actors in a funny way.” Read the rest of this entry »

 A small pink paperback book arrived recently, with a cover drawing of a lady (in the old-fashioned sense of that word) sitting up in bed in a pink dressing gown with fur trim and holding a martini glass. Title: “Live Alone and Like It” (Hatchette Book Group, $14). Subtitle: “The Classic Guide for the Single Woman.” Original publication date: 1936. It was written by then-Vogue editor Marjorie Hillis (1889-1971) and has a new introduction by Laurie Graff, whose contributions to contempo chick-lit include “You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs.”

I leafed through “Live Alone” expecting to find admonitions and advice that were dated and possibly offensive, therefore hilarious, and there was some of that. (Frank Crowninshield’s original intro advises the single lady to concentrate on “not talking about things she doesn’t understand to people who do, or about things she does to people who don’t” — yeah, good thing guys don’t ever do that — and “not wearing a backless gown when she has an over-vertebrate back” — words to live by.) Read the rest of this entry »

A work of fiction half-populated by historic figures can be frustrating, fascinating, or both. E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel “Ragtime,” for instance, gave  Harry Houdini a fictional role, and must have driven a generation of readers to libraries — this was two decades before Google — to learn the sordid real-life tale of the architect Stanford White, his lover Evelyn Nesbit and her jealous husband Harry Thaw.
>It can be entertaining or it can be irritating to separate the things that really happened from the things the author invented.
Among the characters in Salman Rushdie’s new novel are Niccolò Machiavelli and his secretary Agostino Vespucci; as well as Akbar the Great, ruler of the Mughal Empire from 1556 to 1605, and his wife Jodhabai, whose existence and identity is debated.
This is the time “before the real and unreal were segregated forever,” and in “The Enchantress of Florence” (Random House, $26), Rushdie makes Jodhabai a creation of Akbar; the emperor  has many wives, but he turns to his imagination to find  the perfect woman. But Jodhabai is not the title enchantress.
The story of that woman, an extraordinary beauty and powerful sorceress, brings a handsome blond traveler to Sikri, Akbar’s stately pleasure dome in the Mughal empire of India. Read the rest of this entry »

William Bearden, also, or mostly, known as ‘Willie’ or even ‘Willy,’ will talk about his Memphis Legacy Project and sign copies of his books at 5 p.m. Thursday (June 5) at Burke’s Book Store, 936 S. Cooper.
Bearden is an enthusiast and Memphis is his favorite topic. He’s created books about Overton Park and the history of cotton in the Mississippi Delta and Memphis, and he’s written and produced documentaries about Elmwood Cemetery and local garage bands. He has taken thousands of pictures of architectural details of the houses and churches in Victorian Village. That effort is the first installment in Bearden’s Memphis Legacy Project, an early result of which is Bearden’s film about Victorian Village, “The View from Adams Avenue: 19th Century Memphis,” which had its debut Saturday at the Mallory-Neely House Museum.
For more information, call [901] 278-7484.)

Have there always been numbers in book titles? Recently, every 10th book that arrives from a publisher seems to be a list. There are the “1,000 Places to See Before You Die” books, the latest, confined to spots in the USA and Canada (Workman, $20), a threat that this series is just beginning. Even the author, Patricia Schultz, acknowledges how irritating her project is in the introduction to the new one. “My previous book,” she writes, “was already keeping folks awake at night.” This seems to be just a scheme to round up the usual suspects. Where does Schultz send people who come to Memphis on their don’t-die-before mission? Graceland, the Beale Street Music Festival, the National Civil Rights Museum and two “places” called “The Memphis Music Scene” and “Memphis Barbecue.”
 I much prefer the aesthetic of National Geographic’s “The 100 Best Worldwide Vacations to Enrich Your Life” ($20). I opened it up to “Earn your elephant driver’s license,” which explains an elephant wrangling course at a camp in Thailand’s Golden Triangle. There are chapters on trekking the Sahara Desert with a camel caravan, ballooning over the Swiss Alps, walking in the footsteps of Alexander the Great in Turkey. And each section provides information about getting in touch with the people who run the services and how much they cost. Read the rest of this entry »

In April, around Earth Day, publishers sent a lot of books our way about green living. (I’m not going to say something obvious about trees dying to make these volumes and the cardboard packages they came in — people who work at newspapers shouldn’t throw spitballs.) Some of the books were boring, some were somewhat interesting and/or useful and some were really good.

 ”True Green” (National Geographic Society, $20) had 100 points to make — most so broad and sweeping that they didn’t seem to bear repeating. No. 2: Reuse. No. 3: Recycle. No. 83: Walk. No. 84: Ride your bike. Okay, we’ll try….

“The Green Book” (Three Rivers Press, $13) has lots more specific information in sections such as school, travel, shopping and sports. But it has a foreword partially written by Cameron Diaz — does she know more about conservation than the rest of us? And there are words of encouragement and cheer by Will Ferrell, Jennifer Aniston, Tiki Barber and Justin Timberlake. Huh? ”The Green Book” does contain some good advice, but it makes the annoying assumption that if we can’t save ourselves and the planet because it’s the right and cautious thing to do, maybe we’ll do it for the stars. Here’s an inspriational thought from Owen Wilson, included in this book: “I’ve even started worrying about my carbon footprint…. and it occurred to me the other day that, dammit, I AM Ed Begley Jr., or I’d like to be….”

 The three books that seemed to have the most accessible and well researched information were “Our Planet: Change Is Possible” by the MySpace Community (HarperCollins, $13), which boiled down facts efficiently on such topics as fuels, water, electronics, cleaning and well-intentioned action; “Wake Up and Smell the Planet (grist.org, $15), which is good at reduction: “Your shower is delivering 2 to 5 gallons of water per minute, and the power you need to heat just 1.6 gallons of water generates a pound of greenhouse gases”; and the best of these books, at least on the home front, “Squeaky Green” (Chronicle Books, $17), which has tabbed chapters on kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, laundry rooms, pets (”Cloves and eucalyptus oil, when rubbed on your dog’s fur, help to control fleas.”)

But to be truly grounded on the green movement, start at the beginning, with Rachel Carson’s ”Silent Spring.” The author’s obituary in The New York Times described her book’s impact this way: “With the publication of “Silent Spring” in 1962, Rachel Louise Carson, the essence of gentle scholarship, set off a nationally publicized struggle between the proponents and opponents of the widespread use of poisonous chemicals to kill insects. Miss Carson was an opponent.”  

Richard Bausch’s 11th novel “Peace” (Knopf, $20), begins with a burst of gunfire on a road in Italy during World War II. Nine American soldiers discover a German officer with a “whore” in the straw bed of a gypsy cart.  Two of the soldiers, the “Kraut” and his female companion are dead within minutes. As the remaining soldiers carry on, their thoughts about what happened fester. The three men were killed more or less by the rules, but the squad sergeant had executed the woman.

All the men have a backlog of nightmare images, scenes of horror they’ve accumulated in the previous months. The distinction between war and murder could be important, or merely absurd.

We get the story from Corporal Marson, the man who “put down” the German. He is wary of his fellow “witnesses,” beaten down by the immersion in carnage, but still sentimental about honor and God. Like any sentient being in his circumstances, he’s traumatized, a victim of a still under-appreciated disorder, once diminished by the term “combat fatigue.”  At 26, Marson has a wife and 1-year-old baby at home, and is the oldest of the men in the squad.  A star athlete in high school, he invested some years playing baseball on a farm team, and — how times have changed – he’ll regret at some point that he waited so late in life to start a family and accept adult responsibility.

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I picked up “Kreature Comforts Low-Life Guide to Memphis” at the counter at Shangri-La Records, and started to walk out the door. Um, that’ll be $5, please….  It’s on newsprint, stapled, pages about a fourth the size of a standard newspaper page. I assumed it was free. But there it was on the cover: “Still only! 5.00 Cheap!”

If your time is worth money, and you’ve got visitors who want the behind-the-scenes goods on Memphis music, this is cash well spent, although you may still need to invest in a Handymap, because there are some obscure streets in this guide. There’s Aretha Franklin’s birthplace at 406 Lucy, for instance, and 4908 Eastshore, where Jerry Lee Lewis lived with his 13-year-old cousin Myra and her parents, before he married the girl and they moved down the street to 5042 Eastshore. There’s Alex Chilton’s parents’ one-time house at 145 Montgomery. There’s an empty spot at 811 Mosby where Furry Lewis once lived; the house burned down. Someone’s done the research for you, here; you’ve just got to locate the streets.

This is a guide with opinions. On Beale Street: “If good times for you means ‘Mustang Sally’ covers ad nauseam and drinking til 5 a.m. at theme bars (legally), this is your place.” The Low-Life Guide recommends the Blue Worm and the Executive Inn, both on Airways, and Wild Bill’s on Vollintine for fun accompanied by live music. And here’s a traveler’s advisory you won’t get just anywhere: “If you’re an aspiring musician, please don’t ’sit-in’ at Wild Bill’s or anywhere else for that matter. While you may think it fun, it is so only for you. Playing at certain juke joints, blues clubs or wherever may be your holy grail, but with the exception of very few musicians out there (yourself not included) the kindness of the locals should not be taken advantage of.”

There’s also a section on dining out (”Memphis is a great grub town!”), with some interesting suggestions like the Gay Hawk on Danny Thomas, Uncle Lou’s Fried Chicken on Millbranch, Melanie’s on North Watkins. 

To find copies, go to Shangri-La Records is at 1916 Madison. Or order online from Shangrilaprojects.com
  

Richard Price’s “Lush Life,” which was lodged at No. 7 on the New York Times’ best-sellers list for fiction this week, is an immersion course on the Lower East Side of New York City, the mechanics of a homicide investigation, the street patter of cops and perps.

Don’t care about the Lower East Side, police procedures, the patois of city life? Richard Price can make you care.  The place, the people and the talk in “Lush Life” are vivid and vital; the sense that human systems are indifferent to human beings is profound.  (Click on our podcasts of the author reading from the novel when he appeared recently at Off Square Books in Oxford, Miss. Something about the Bronx accent makes this seem like the complete “Lush Life” experience. )

The prologue introduces the Quality of Life Squad, an undercover operation, in the world-weary voice of the author at his booksigning, consisting of “900 pounds of white meat with guns, sitting in a cab that fools no one.” They are the personification of the ongoing reality play that sets cops up against the rest of the world, what Price calls the police-as-occupying-army dynamic of urban life.

An innocent victim is murdered, a survivor of the crime is wrongly abused in the investigation, another survivor capitalizes on the media attention to his friend’s death. It reads like life, which, of course, is unfair. This isn’t a spoiler: As Price pointed out at his Square Books reading, this is no mystery. You know how the killing goes down and who does it from the start.

 ”Lush Life” has no clear heroes; the homicide detectives are intriguing and charming characters, who operate with the ethical delicacy of savannah predators. One of the aforementioned survivors, a character Price describes as a close stand-in for himself (his name is Eric “Cash”) is a complex of compromises and self-preservation instincts.

The thrill of this book is in Price’s dialogue, which reads like found nonfiction, as if he’s transcribing tapes of real conversations. Dennis Lehane, another master of sound-and-place reconstruction, defers to his colleague in the “Lush Life” jacket notes: “Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced.” Price himself describes his gift as a mere genetic or biological trait. He says he doesn’t want to “go all Margaret Mead on it.”: “I just have a good ear, but it’s not like I worked on it. You know, some people run fast, some people are good mimics. I’m not writing down authentic; there is no authentic.

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 Richard Price: Intro [4:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (22)

 

 The Quality of Life Squad [20:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (36)

 

 Back at the Precinct [4:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (27)

 

 Some old junkie [5:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (28)

It’s nice to know Tennessee Williams’ power to shock survives him. When the latest Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” previewed in February, audiences were distressed that that four-letter word had been imposed on the dialogue of the 1950s-vintage drama. This version, with an all-black-cast, has James Earl Jones waxing obscene as Big Daddy, but a little research by theater writers turned up the news that the words were in fact Williams’ own, added during his 1973 revision of the play. Or possibly the word ‘restored’ should be used instead of ‘added,’ since the playwright’s first ‘Cat’ used sham words like ‘rutting’ and ‘ducking’ where now that four-letter word prevails.  And surely sounds more natural and Big Daddy-esque.

Folks in Memphis who need a Tennessee Williams fix can find “Night of the Iguana” on stage at Theatre Memphis until March 30. It brings back some veterans of TM’s 2004 “Streetcar Named Desire,” including director Jerry Chipman, and actors Christina Wellford Scott and Greg Boller. (We’ll quote our theater critic Jon W. Sparks’ review of the earlier show on the playwright’s Memphis connection: ”His first play was produced at a residence here in the mid-1930s, and while ‘Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!’ didn’t set the theatrical world afire, it did give Tom Williams the urge to keep at it and to start using the ‘Tennessee’ moniker.”)

Meantime, if your longing for Williams’ way with words can’t be satisfied by one local play production, the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival starts March 26. This year it’s called “A Weekend Named Desire,” sort of an awkward title for a collection of literary panels, random master classes on the art of writing, and  performances such as “Camino Real” and ”Ignatius on Stage” (essentially just readings from “A Confederacy of Dunces”). And there’s a panel called “Sweet Word of Youth,” for young writers to read from their work in creative writing programs.

 Go to tennesseewilliams.net for more information.