Amongst the incalculably lengthy list of authors who have not received their due (also an incalculable notion) you will find, with regularity, the name of Padgett Powell. Powell (Edisto), who teaches at the University of Florida and has collected plaudits from Ian Frazier and Barry Hannah to Saul Bellow, has a new fiction out that his publisher labels “an exuberant book” and a “wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language,” and about which Richard Ford blurbs, “If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel (and maybe they did. Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell’s.”

And what is this “bebop solo of a book?” Well, it seems the authorial conceit exhibited in The Interrogative Mood (Ecco) is that its 164 pages are composed entirely of questions—a literary feat you may or may not find engrossing. Despite the well-intentioned promoters hyper-enthusiasm for this tome, this “playful and profound book” may not be the best access point into Powell’s oeuvre, since it is a huge deviation from the lyricism exhibited in his past work. And then again its originality puts it in a class by itself.

In the Important to the Book Industry venue, Josh Emmons intones the book is:

…a fearless meditation on the sublime and the trivial, a hydra-headed reflection of life as it is experienced and of thought as it is felt. With echoes of the Tao Te Ching, “My Funny Valentine,” Pascal’s “Pensées,” “Green Eggs and Ham,” Annie Dillard’s “This Is the Life” and countless other quests for conviction that secretly understand and depend on the futility of such quests, it is wondrous strange.

True enough. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 6, 2009

One of the more poignant scenes in Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Conformist (based on the Alberto Moravia novel of the same name) has the character Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) recalling his father’s account of living in Munich in 1923 and encountering a diminutive, mustachioed man who would get up on the beerhall tables and harangue the besotted celebrants. This display, of course, amused the mug-klinking revelers. You can guess who that public speaker was.

Speaking of the Know-Nothing Party, rabble-rousers can be amusing, I suppose, until they are not. Glenn Beck falls into that niche, and as far as I can see the only useful service he provides is as a goad target for the acerbic wits of the likes of Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann. Or this beauty.

All of which is maybe beside the point, which is that Beck has published another title under his name, Arguing With Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government (Threshold Editions), again in collaboration with Kevin Balfe, who happens to be senior VP of publishing at Threshold.

The book as well as the marketing campaign is eerily clever, and illustrator Paul E. Nunn and designer Timothy Shaner have created and assembled an entertaining graphic presentation with whoever does Beck’s ghostwriting (Balfe?). Here’s the publicity schtick:

Glenn Beck…has stumbled upon the secret formula to winning arguments against people with big mouths but small minds: knowing the facts. And this book is full of them… Idiots can’t be identified through voting records, they can be found only by looking for people who hide behind stereotypes, embrace partisanship, and believe that bumper-sticker slogans are a substitute for common sense. If you know someone who fits the bill, then Arguing with Idiots will help you silence them once and for all with the ultimate weapon: the truth.

And if you accept that, welcome to the Know-Nothing Party. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 5, 2009

Saying someone needs no introduction used to have some validity—before life in the post-industrial world went all 365/24/7 on us. Now the exponential explosion of sense-wracking gossip, trivia, ED adverts, and religious poppycock renders that gesture anachronistic. Nonetheless I would love to think that Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five), who died in 2007, needs no introduction—at least to people who find their way to this outlying outpost.

Let me take care of a couple things on my left-wing, arugula-eating agenda by bringing an unintentionally amusing obituary of Vonnegut to your attention. This in the they-would-be-viewed-as-amusing-if-they-weren’t-so toxic category and a case in point of one of Vonnegut’s Swiftian bon mots from Cat’s Cradle:

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before… He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

Well anyway, a new volume of Vonnegut short stories has been assembled: Look at the Birdie (Delacorte). Anthologized here are 14 previously unpublished stories (festooned with the author’s chirpy line drawings) written just as Vonnegut was liberating himself from the grind of his servitude to General Electric. The stories are nascent exemplars of Vonnegut’s humorous humanism and are well worth any reader’s time. But what I found especially edifying was the facsimile of a letter he wrote to a friend in 1951 on where his writing was going:

…the obvious alternative is, of course, something to please The Atlantic, Harper’s or The New Yorker. To do this would be to turn out something after the fashion of somebody-or-other, and I might be able to do it. I say might. It amounts to signing on with any of a dozen schools born 10, 20, 30 years ago. The kicks are largely on having passed off a creditable counterfeit. And, of course, if you appear in The Atlantic or Harper’s or The New Yorker, by God you must be a writer, because everybody says so. This is poor competition for the fat checks from the slicks. For want of anything more tempting, I’ll stick with money.

And he did. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 4, 2009

At almost any given moment one may stroll the streets of urban America (unfortunately, I can’t speak for the hinterlands) and observe what appear to be human beings perambulating (the boulevards) while staring at their palms. This, you may guess, is the voodoo mojo of the smartphone in action, which some commentators may point to as one more sign of the decline of civilization. Not wanting to be identified as such a naysaying declinist, I would more point to a startling and hazardous symptom of a diseased body politic: namely the renaissance of the Know-Nothing Party (in mid-19th-century America also known variously as the American Party or the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner).

Today the appellations “right-wing nutjobs,” “Republican noise machine,” etc., injudiciously fail to take seriously the nasty pathology gaining traction in the land and certainly don’t address the objective conditions that allow it to escape its petri dish of disease to infect large numbers of otherwise healthy citizens. Thus it is a small comfort to read someone intelligent and humane addressing the rising tide of our troubles.

Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy, best known for her Man Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, has a new collection of essays, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Haymarket Books) that (ironically) Time magazine hails as “Gorgeously wrought…pitch-perfect prose… In language of terrible beauty, she takes India’s everyday tragedies and reminds us to be outraged all over again.”

The irony being that if you replaced her examples and case studies and applied them closer to home, Time would either ignore Roy or work to defang and declaw her.

In the book’s introduction, “Democracy’s Failing Light,” Roy explains:

…Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly—our nearsightedness? … Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost.

It would be conceit to pretend that the essays in this book provide answers to any of these questions. They only demonstrate, in some detail, the fact that it looks as though the beacon could be failing and that democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would…

…The essays do have a common thread. They’re not about unfortunate anomalies or aberrations in the democratic process. They’re about the consequences of and the corollaries to democracy; they’re about the fire in the ducts…

The inimitable John Berger commends Roy:

The notion of Democracy and the pleading for human compassion first came together in Sophocles and the Greek tragedies. More than two thousand years later we live under an economic world tyranny of unprecedented brutality, which depends upon the systematic abuse of words like Democracy or Progress. Arundhati Roy, the direct descendant of Antigone, resists and denounces all tyrannies, pleads for their victims, and unflinchingly questions the tragic. Reflect with her on the answers she receives from the political world today.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 3, 2009

Inexplicably, 27 years after passing to his glory, there are only a handful of biographies of the great American jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. To paraphrase an obscure rhythm and blues tune, Monk was an original original who ranks with John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis as an innovator and singular personality. As the Thelonious Records web site notes:

With the arrival [of] Thelonious Sphere Monk, modern music—let alone modern culture—simply hasn’t been the same. Recognized as one of the most inventive pianists of any musical genre, Monk achieved a startlingly original sound that even his most devoted followers have been unable to successfully imitate… His commitment to originality in all aspects of life—in fashion, in his creative use of language and economy of words, in his biting humor, even in the way he danced away from the piano—has led fans and detractors alike to call him “eccentric,” “mad,” or even “taciturn.” Consequently, Monk has become perhaps the most talked about and least understood artist in the history of jazz.

Now comes historian Robin D.G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press) whose decade of diligent research includes previously inaccessible Monk family archives of papers and recordings to correct the skewed and distorted conventional wisdom on Monk. From the prologue, Kelley explains:

Thelonious Monk was very much of the world, at least until mental and physical illness finally caused him to withdraw, making his world seem much smaller, self-contained, and at times impenetrable. For most of his life he remained engaged and fascinated with his surroundings. Politics, art, commerce, nature, architecture, history were not beyond his ken, and Monk was the kind of man who loved a good debate, despite stories of his inability to communicate. Fortunately, many of his close friends and family members have been willing to share their stories, most of which have never been told before in print. They reveal a startlingly different Thelonious Monk—witty, incredibly generous, intensely family-oriented, curious, critical, and brutally honest. In addition, Monk himself was frequently captured on tape telling stories, debating, or just shooting the breeze.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 2, 2009

Po Bronson first came to my attention with his 1995 lampoon of the insular world of bond-trading, Bombardiers. My next awareness of him came in a conversation with novelist and Iowa Writers’ Workshop mentor Ethan Canin, who spoke highly of Bronson and, if memory serves well, suggested Bronson was an impressive polymath—which seems to be borne out by Bronson’s subsequent CV.

A founder of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, a children’s soccer coach, and having written the bestselling What Should I Do With My Life? (and three other books) and until 2006, served on the board of directors of Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, he has turned his considerable acumen—in collaboration with Ashley Merryman, who runs a church-based tutoring program for inner-city children in Los Angeles—to a supremely important topic examined in NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children (Twelve).

Essentially, the argument—exposing fascinating anomalies such as cross-racial friendships decrease in schools that are more integrated—and assembled evidence asserts that “many of modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring.” Mostly because we ignore the science that updates our knowledge of childhood development and such.

Unlike the junk science and pretentious claptrap found in the parenting/self-help section of bookstores, NurtureShock is an exploration, not a manual—one that continues in the ongoing discussions at its web site and other forums. Its a subject, whether or not one is a parent, it would do well to ponder. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 30, 2009