You couldn’t make this stuff up.

A little while ago I dabbled with the idea of a slight name change, reducing myself to a pair of gnomic initials in the manner of Chesterton, G.K., Rowling, J. K., Byatt A.S., and Hartley, J.R.  (inside joke for my English readers with long memories.)  Anyway, that didn’t last too long, and here I am again, plain old Alex.  I’m pleased about this – it is my name, after all.

And then.

Imagine my surprise when I came across this:

Well, OK, I think.  Fair enough.  I’m not the only person called Alex George.  I know that.  I’m not even the only writer.  There’s an Australian botanist who has published several seminal works about Banksia.  So I didn’t think much about this new guy, until I read the blurb accompanying his book.  Here it is, in all its glory:

“Already frustrated with the socialism that is seeping into their lives, Adam and his wife Allie are forced to deal with a newly-established health care system that threatens to take from them what they cherish the most. In another part of the world, Roy, an army sergeant fed up with the corruption in Washington, is fighting for America’s freedom. At the same time, far away in his ivory tower, the president is fashioning socialist policies that threaten the American way of life. This is the world of Alex George’s “Revolt Rising.” Told in a style that is immediate and heart-wrenching, “Revolt Rising” follows the story of average citizens who are desperately trying to keep their eyes on the American dream. As it seems to pull further away from them, they find themselves raging against the leaders of the very nation they love so dearly. Rage eventually turns to revolt. After banding together with like-minded men, Adam and his army of freedom fighters find themselves in the heart of a battle that will determine America’s future. What will the outcome be? George will keep you guessing (and hoping) to the very last page.”

Perfect.  My namesake is Glen Beck on steroids, drunk, and out looking for a fight.

Those of you who know me will know that I am the living incarnation of namby-pamby liberalism, and proud of it.  But I just wanted to let the rest of you know that, well, just in case this crossed your radar, it wasn’t me.

Thanks to the excerpts that the author has made available on his website, I can report that he is no John Updike.  So at least we have that in common.

The story so far: I wrote here about my first cautious steps into the netherworld of barbershop singing.  Then earlier this week I re-posted something I wrote a while ago about rap music.  Neither genre, I will be honest, is where my natural musical tastes lie.  I do like a spot of jazz, however, and regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my occasional series about jazz treatments of pop material.  Here’s one, about a Gilbert O’Sullivan song.  And here’s another one, about an Italian jazz pianist covering The Beach Boys.  But this musical crossover happens elsewhere, too.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

Yup.  Barbershop and rap.  A marriage made in – well, you decide.

Barbershop and close harmony singing these days isn’t just about Sweet Adeline.  Groups have become much more wide-ranging in their choice of material.  Much more wide-ranging.  Given my shallow knowledge of rap and hip-hop it was probably not surprising that I wasn’t familiar with “Bitches Ain’t Shit” by Dr. Dre until now.  Golly, that guy has a telling way with words.  This is an a cappella rendering of Ben Folds’s version.  But – be warned – the lyrics haven’t changed.  You know what I’m sayin’.  It’s filthy.  Mum, you might not want to press play on this one.  (Is this what they mean by parental advisory?)

Funny as hell, though.

[Here's a blog entry I wrote a while ago, which I am re-posting now, ahead of further, related silly stuff later this week.]

I am not a real hip-hop fan.  A cursory review of my CD collection reveals precisely six rap/hip-hop albums – and probably six of the most well-known in the genre, at that.  It would be like owning a copy of Kind of Blue and calling yourself a jazz enthusiast.

My first cautious foray into rap was inauspicious, to say the least.  I’d been hearing a lot about Kanye West, and decided to check him out.  I was working in a windowless office in Jefferson City at the time, and spent many of my lunch hours prowling through the Barnes and Noble off Highway 50.  One day I sneaked past the jazz albums and instead loitered nervously in front of the rap section, like an adolescent contemplating his first illicit visit to a porn shop (I suppose.)  Finally I stepped forward, grabbed Late Registration, and rushed to the check-out.

Moments later I was sitting in my car, breathing deeply, feeling pleased with myself.  I had done it!  I had purchased a rap album!  Twenty-five minutes later, once I had wrestled the plastic wrapping off the CD case, I pushed it into the car stereo, ready for a real, modern, urban cultural experience.  Yes, I know, I was sitting in a parking lot in a strip mall in mid-Missouri, but you take what you’re given, right?  However I quickly realized something was wrong.  West’s vocals kept cutting out, as if he were rapping on a cell phone while driving through a hilly area.  Consequently the lyrics made little sense.  Every third word was replaced with a gnomic silence.  At first I thought I’d bought a faulty disk, until I realized that my delicate ears were being spared Kanye’s potty mouth.  Aghast, I grabbed the CD case and scanned it.  The little sticker I had missed in the shop confirmed my fear: I’d bought the clean version.

I was seriously bummed out.  I knew I was never going to be able to walk back into the shop and say, “Excuse me, I bought this in error.  Could I please have the version filled with gratuitous obscenities, offensive racial epithets, and misogynistic bile?”  So I drove forlornly back to the office with my incomplete, anodyne, incomprehensible purchase.

Still, I liked the CD.  Kanye’s monstrous ego was oddly appealing, and I enjoyed his use of samples of old disco tunes.  Feeling pleased with how very modern I was being, there followed further acquisitions by Public Enemy, Jay-Z, andCommon.  I still listen to these sometimes, but frankly it’s difficult.  These are not albums you can put on as nice background music while the family sits down to eat dinner together – especially now that I have learned my lesson and always make sure to buy the fully-leaded, expletive-heavy versions.  (There was one exciting moment when Dirt Off Your Shoulder popped up in a playlist on my iPod as the four of us were driving somewhere.  Christina and I both lunged for the iPod at the same time and we almost swerved off the road.)  Generally the only place I listen to this stuff is in the car, on my own.  (Listening while driving has the additional advantage of curbing my inclination to strike daft crossed-armed rapper poses, since I need to keep my hands on the steering wheel.)  But here’s the thing: I play this stuff at a very sedate volume, which I know ain’t right.  The truth is, I’m embarrassed for myself.  I am acutely aware how ridiculous I must look – a middle-aged white man, desperately hoping he’s still got it.  (And I’m sure that listening to mainstream artists like Kanye and Jay-Z is probably laughable, too – like someone with a Kenny G album thinking he’s into jazz.)

But my hip-hop listening has recently received a recent shot in the arm.  (There’s a joke there somewhere.)  My saviors are A Tribe Called Quest.  The Low End Theory is a wonderful record.  The lyrics are in a different class to the solipsistic bling-bore of modern rappers or the gangsta violence of the mid-90s.  The songs are clever and ironic, and a caustic commentary on the world they saw out of their Queens windows.  Rhythmically, some of the things the MCs do are astonishing, and it helps that they use great jazz samples as the basis for much of their stuff.   Hell, they’ve even got the great Ron Carterplaying bass on one track.  A lot of great young jazzers like Robert Glasper incorporate elements of hip-hop into their music, and if you listen to the right stuff, the musicality of it is undeniable.  Best of all, I don’t feel like such a [deleted] piece of [deleted]-up [deleted] [deleted] when I listen to it.  Yo.

Given my on-going struggle to find the right title for my book, I was excited when I read about this site.  It’s done by comedian Dan Wilbur, who might just be on to something.  The idea is that these new titles “cut through the cryptic crap”, as Wilbur puts it, and tell you what the book is really about.

I apparently can’t find even one good title for my novel, so I’m a little jealous.

Anyway, here’s my favorite:

No, this is not a review of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel – although I can’t wait to get my hands on it.  (The online book community has talked about little else for days, it seems.  People don’t know whether to celebrate Franzen as the (quite obviously) brilliant novelist that he is, or to snipe about why he doesn’t have the grace to be more grateful about all the attention he’s getting.  So what if he’s on the cover of this magazine or that?  All I care about is how good the book is.)

Anyway.  Like I said, this isn’t about that.

No.  I want to speak of a different kind of freedom here – freedom, specifically, from my own pathetic weak-will.  Thanks to the tweet of another author, I have discovered a wonderful little bit of software which will, I hope, help me finish my rewrite more quickly than I had originally hoped.  The program was written by a guy called Fred Stutzman, and it’s called “Freedom“.  It’s very simple.  You tell your computer that you want to be cut off from your online connection for a specific period of time – up to eight hours.  And, viola (as Tommy Smothers would say) – no email, no twitter, no nymphomaniac French babysitters covered in chocolate sauce internet.  Once you’ve hit the button, there’s no going back.  Well, there is – you can always switch off your computer and then turn it back on again.  But that would be cheating.  It costs ten bucks.  I tried it for the first time on Wednesday, when I was home all day writing.  And I noticed a dramatic improvement – if not in my writing, then in my focus and efficiency.

My wife scoffs at this, of course.  She finds it ludicrous that I don’t have the will-power not to go online at every available opportunity, and perhaps she has a point.  But it’s not just about lack of will-power.  Knowing that it’s simply not possible to check my email means that I don’t even think about it – and that, for me anyway, is where the freedom comes from.  It allows me to focus completely on my writing.  On Wednesday I set the program to run for 60 or 70 minutes at a time, and wrote like the devil for those periods.  It was oddly thrilling to switch off the outside world for a while.  Freedom is well named.  You can download a trial version for free – you get five uses to see if it works for you.

Highly recommended for slothful facebook addicts everywhere.

Ridiculously, school starts today.

Our children, typically, have adopted diametrically opposite approaches to the glorious vistas of educational opportunity opening up before them this morning.  Catherine is more excited than she was last Christmas Eve.  The prospect of entering kindergarten is possibly the most thrilling thing ever to have happened to her; there was much debate on the way home from a lovely evening at our friend Allison’s house yesterday about what she’s going to wear for the big day.  Hallam, on the other hand, is contemplating entry into the fourth grade with a heavy heart, worried (as always) about all the stuff he doesn’t know yet.  He, poor chap, has inherited his father’s infinite capacity for fretting about everything.  I worry for him, I really do.  (There I go again.)

Christina and I are just wondering how on earth we can possibly be the parents of a Fourth Grader.

In sporting news, the English Premier league began again this weekend, so it’s back to my usual regime of 90 minutes of solitary agony each week while the children ask why Daddy is howling at the television again.  The mighty Arsenal narrowly avoided an opening day defeat against Liverpool, but they were uncharacteristically lucky and had to rely on the opposing goalkeeper throwing the ball into his own net with about two minutes to go.  At least this time I was on the other side of such a goalkeeping howler – unlike earlier this summer.

In book news, the rewrite continues, although it slowed a little last week as I have been struggling to burrow my way out from beneath a mountain of legal paperwork that amassed while we were away on vacation.  I ran into a problem with plotting a couple of days ago and have been plundering the Old Testament in an attempt to find a way out of the hole I’ve written myself into.  I think I may have solved the issue, thanks to Samson and Delilah, of all people.  Good to know all those divinity lessons at school weren’t a complete waste of time.

Finally, on the subject of time passing, it’s been a bad few days for jazz enthusiasts.  We’ve lost two more major figures.  Abbey Lincoln, a regal and powerful singer, passed away at the age of 80.  Once married to the jazz drummer, Max Roach, she was both an important singer and member of the civil rights movement.  She participated (in an unforgettable fashion) on Roach’s seminal We Insist! – Freedom Now, which was one of the most important musical documents of the 60s – although it’s not an album that I would suggest putting on the stereo during dinner.  Here’s a link to the obit. in the Times.  And on Friday, the great jazz photographer Herman Leonard went on up to the great jam session in the sky.  His images have become such an essential part of the music’s iconography that his contribution to the art form and our perception of it is probably just as significant as any musician.  Here’s one of his most famous shots, a portrait of Lester Young.  RIP.

These days any self-respecting new novel comes with a You Tube-friendly video – presumably in the hope that it will “go viral” and become some sort of internet phenomenon.  Well, that’s fair enough in theory – the problem is that usually these video trailers are awful.  Usually they feature the author squirming in front of a camera talking awkwardly about his or her book, and obviously wishing that they were somewhere else.  Sometimes it’s a series of blurbs fading in and out with some gentle music playing behind – something that my nine year-old could probably cobble together in a couple of hours with iMovie.

This trailer, though, for all its nudge-and-a-wink knowingness, is hilarious.  Its silliness seems to be an acknowledgement of the futility of the whole exercise.  I don’t mind all the literary superstar chums hamming it up, and it’s always nice to see an author who doesn’t take himself too seriously.  I especially liked the lesson in how to behave at a Paris Review party.  And how can you resist a good (if old) Chekhov gag?

Of course, what’s so clever about the whole conceit is that this says absolutely nothing about the book.  It’s all so terribly post-modern.  Still, it was clever and funny enough to make me want to go and buy it – which is the point of it all, isn’t it?

In Monday’s post I mentioned two exciting novelists whose work I had just discovered and was devouring in huge, quietly ecstatic chunks.  Here’s more on them both.  I’ll try and write more about the stuff I’m reading in future.  Since, you know, this is a blog about books.

Emily St. John Mandel is published by Unbridled Books, a small publisher based here in Columbia, MO, which punches (pardon the pugilistic cliché) well above its weight in the literary world.  I had lunch with her editor a little while ago (clang!!) and he was kind enough to give me a copy of her latest novel, The Singer’s Gun, which I thought was unusual and brilliant.  It’s a book that defies easy description or categorization, but what I can tell you is that it’s very, very good.

While we were in Boston I found her earlier book, Last Night in Montreal, and devoured it in a couple of days.  It is still haunting me now.  The book is filled with an exquisitely mournful sense of lost connections and fleeting, unfulfilled desires.  I loved it and was very sorry when it came to its beautifully wrought, unsettling end.  Mandel is of those writers who seems incapable of writing a dull sentence.  I can’t wait to see what she does next.

I feel kind of stupid for only now discovering Jennifer Egan.  There’s been much laudatory noise in the blogosphere about her newest book, A Visit From the Goon Squad [cue instant title envy] but I started with her second novel, The Keep.  This was one of those rare books that managed to do something completely new.  I was constantly being turned about, left in a state of delicious bewilderment as I was never quite sure what was going on.  In the wrong hands this sort of metafiction, reader-teasing stuff can grate hugely, but Egan pulls it off brilliantly.  The best comparison I can make is The Magus, by John Fowles (and this is high praise indeed from me.)  Highly recommended.  I was so impressed that I went straight out and bought her earlier novel, Look at Me, and am presently being hypnotized by its enigmatic, multilinear story line.  To my pleasure and astonishment, it’s even more impressive than The Keep – which for all its cleverness seems a little one-dimensional in comparison to this one.  Egan juggles parallel, complex story lines with total ease.  She swaps perspectives and characters with an assured deftness that is beginning to get me down, just a little, it’s so good.  I’ve not finished it yet, so I suppose I should withhold a degree of judgment until the end, but my goodness, I am enjoying it an awful lot.

And damn, she writes beautifully.  Here’s a sentence pulled at random from this evening’s reading, describing New York traffic: “A clot of yellow cabs had formed, all oozing in a kind of agony toward a single destination.”   There’s page after page of this stuff.  It’s stupendously good.

Go.  And.  Buy.  Now.

I suppose it was inevitable in the wake of the massive success of the new wave (geddit?) of Old Spice adverts that others would follow, either in parody or homage.  But, well, libraries?  Actually, I think this works rather brilliantly.

Thanks to Maw Books Blog for sharing.

We’re back from a wonderful week away.  Four days with friends in Boston, then four days in Maine.  There we visited an old friend, Don, and his wife Samantha.   Don and Samantha own Rabelais Books, a bookshop dedicated (and I do mean dedicated) to cookbooks.  We loved our time with them.  I will write more about it in another post.

In the meantime, it seems like there’s a lot to report.  Up until now my posts have, more by accident than by design, usually been rather focused on a particular topic.  Today is a little different.  Rambling dialectic is the mode du jour, if you please.  I’m going to try (try, mind) to be a little more chatty and maybe not quite so, I don’t know, agenda-driven, or something.  Chill, mon.

So.  In no particular order, as they say.

• Today I signed my publishing contract with Penguin.  It’s galling to think that people give us lawyers a hard time for producing unreadable legal documents.  Ye gods.  Just in case the impenetrable legalese wasn’t confusing enough in itself, they make it more interesting by adding multiple footnotes and additional riders down the margins.  I think I may have just agreed to ship off my second-born into indentured slavery on her fifteenth birthday if I miss my deadline.
• On which subject… rather to my surprise, I was able to forget about the rewrite almost completely while I was away.  (Leaving your laptop behind will do that.)  Tomorrow morning at five o’clock I will be back at the coal face, and I am a little apprehensive, I will admit.  Everything was going pretty swimmingly before we left, and I do hope I haven’t jinxed it all by taking some time off.  Because, you know, there is a deadline, and I am actually quite fond of Catherine…
• Instead of writing or rewriting, I read like a maniac.  We always pack loads of books when we go away on holiday and then scratch our heads in puzzlement as we unpack them a week later, most of them still unread.  (Because parents don’t get to read on holiday.  We get to be parents.)  But this time I somehow managed it.  I have been gorging myself on a couple of utterly wonderful novelists whom I have recently discovered: Emily Mandel and Jennifer Egan.  I’ve written more about them both and will post later this week.
• I did a guest post about college sports (stop laughing at the back) at the always-interesting www.capturingcomo.com.
• Weirdly, our house is on the front cover of a magazine.  Well, maybe not so weirdly, since Christina is the magazine’s publisher, but it certainly feels weird.  Click here to see the e-zine, or whatever they call it.  If you click on “Homes Old and New” on the cover it will take you to the article about the house.
• As always on returning from vacation, work today was nuts.  Things have piled up, and I am not sure that I’ll be able to award myself my day’s writing this week.  Inevitably when this happens, I spend a lot of time moping about and dreaming about giving up the law and writing full-time.  But I’ve been there, done that, and I won’t do it again.  (These blogs aren’t contractually binding, are they?)

More soon.  It’s good to be back.