Franklin Crawford's long-anticipated "Aesop Cop Vol. 1" is out now, and the author will stop by for a reading at Buffalo Street Books Saturday, November 5, at 3:00 p.m. Image provided

TINY TOWN NEWS editor and bon vivant Franklin Crawford will stop by Buffalo Street Books Saturday to read from “Aesop Cop Vol. 1,” a collection of poems based on Mr. Crawford’s scanning of police radio, illustrated by Rigel Stuhmiller, a Berkeley CA artist.

The pieces in the book originally appeared in tinytowntimes.com, a blog dedicated to “Tiny News for Ithacan-Americans Everywhere.” Duly recorded, these oddball transgressions are handled with a charmingly light touch; the verses are often as absurd as the police report. Mr. Crawford has also promised/threatened that one or two of the verses may be set to music.

We caught up with the always insightful and entertaining editor over email.

Q: The new book “Aesop Cop” transforms Ithaca’s petty crimes into poetry! What is it about the police blotter that lends itself so nicely to short moral stories?
Franklin Crawford: The seething churn of human comedy is no more apparent than in that category of civilized foibles we call Crime. It is the most popular section in any daily news. To me, there is something inherently poetic about a decision to break the law. Unless you are a true sociopath, the decision to take the risk of getting away with something one knows is “wrong” as determined by Greater Society, is one of the most important acts a person can make. You go against a peanut gallery in your head as well as a very real Authority. The consequences are often severe; the payoffs usually minimal. My main interest is petty crimes. The big stuff, well, that’s not what tinytowntimes.com is all about. But even in the decision to steal a candy bar, we bring 10,000 years of drama into the moment.

Q: The crimes range from public urination and graffiti to something involving a dead weasel! Does the verse come to you in a flash or do you winnow the possible subjects down?

Crawford: Jeepers, Luke, did you read it? Definitely flash verse. It’s Aesop Cop does the writing, often referring to himself in third person. I love improv and when it works you get the same thrill as (I imagine) a petty thief gets from filching. You get away with something for nothing. I go back over them a couple times, especially in more complicated stories. In the end, if something – particularly the rhythm – is not clicking, I ask for help.

Q: Tell me about the artist involved.

Crawford: Rigel Stuhmiller is an illustrator who I met earlier this century -and what a lucky guy am I. She is a super-talented artist but what sends her into that upper echelon of creative demi-gods is her wonderful sense of humor. She understood Aesop Cop right off the bat, no need to explain. The joy of doing Aesop for me is sending these often ridiculous verse off to her and receiving Rigel’s visual interpretations. She is awesome, as the kids say. She’s also a fabulous designer and created the tinytowntimes site as a birthday gift for me. Incredible present! She’s the reason there is a tinytowntimes. Folks should see Rigel’s other work on our site: The adventures of Uncle Bodie, who is always stealing heads; Missy Hooligan’s Tall Animal Revue; and Big Huge and Little Tiny (a series that died prematurely). Her own works can be viewed at drenculture.com.

Q: The pieces come from items in the Tiny Town Times, your internet publication. Why set the web to print?

Crawford: Well, why put music on CDs? I am not that far away from a time when computers were alien objects. And Rigel’s illustrations deserve to be seen in full color on hard copy. Some day when the grid goes down we might have to look at un-illuminated manuscripts again. Aesop Cop will come to the rescue. And this is better than a coffee cup or a tee shirt advertizing tinytowntimes.

Q: Speaking of TTT, the most reliable news source in town, how is it going?

Ha! Thank you for recognizing our place in the scheme of things. When I last checked we were well over a million “hits”; of those maybe 40,000 are real visitors and about a third of these are new and genuine. That’s not too shabby for a 2.5 year old lark. We are revamping and hope to board some interns to get more writing into the site. In the beginning I did a lot of experimenting and upon review, a lot of it sucked. But several things continue to work: Adam Perl’s wonderful Tinytown Teasers, 3-up, 3-down and now we add a prize a week for those who solve the tougher ones. Folks like the slideshows of local sites and appear to favor the silent ones; Aesop Cop, of course; and short pieces on local stuff only I know about. I like to throw grouchy opinion pieces in there and we’ve recently added outtakes from Cheryl Russell’s Demo Memo — demographic data that I localize with a photo. Cherie ran American Demographics magazine when it was in town here and knows her business. We’re also looking into re-designing the site.

Q: For the reading at Buffalo Street Books, will you have other actors or just yourself reading?
Crawford: The entire staff will be there, except for performers with the Tall Animal Revue, who are sequestered at Bridge House after a rugged season. Me, Chad Coles (who handles about everything) and … Well. Me and Chad. Rigel is in Berkeley. Belinda Cho is in the clean room. Bob and Ike will be there, our new weather people. I hope Davey Weathercock will be there with Olive, the Weather Hen. Best of all the real actors — tiny towners themselves — will be there. I hope. Which is a dirty word. “Hope.” It can so easily lead to despair. The idea of course is to sell books, promote tinytowntimes.com  as well as Buffalo Street Books and to celebrate being alive on a Saturday afternoon in a tiny town.

Téa Obreht, author of "The Tiger's Wife," will read at the Cornell Bookstore Monday, April 4. Here, pictured at Buffalo Street Books. Photo by Heather Ainsworth

J. ROBERT LENNON is one of the most uncannily talented and imaginative U.S. fiction writers currently working. “Castle,” his most recent novel received tremendous praise, and “Pieces for the Left Hand: 100 Anecdotes” his collection of flash fiction, was reissued by Graywolf Press a few years back. Earlier four novels have been critical hits, but Lennon hit a home run with “Castle,” a story about a man who buys a plot of upstate land that contains an abandoned castle, and the secrets of his past.

Lennon has long been a happy fixture of the small-city culture scene (for a spell advised and assisted a Cornell student group that brought Indie rock acts like Arcade Fire and Interpol to town); watching his success is a bit like rooting for one’s home athletic team — long an underdog — hit a stride.

Saturday, April 2, Lennon will join two other local luminaries for a reading at the State of the Art Gallery. The nationally syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson, and the poet Jaime Warburton will gather for an evening of comic writing billed as “Three April Fools.” Each writer will read for 15 minutes, then spend the rest of the time hanging out, eating and listening to the comic musical stylings of Elsa and the awesomeAWESOMES. (5:00 p.m., Saturday, at the State of the Art Gallery).

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Tony Kushner, the titan of stage and letters, thinks and writes big. Best known for the two-part and seven-hour “Angels in America,” the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright has also received an Emmy Award, two Tonys, three Obie Awards and an Oscar nomination. When his most recent work was first produced in 2009 it was accompanied by a four page “pre-play chronology” and 20 pages of annotated notes (entries included everything from a biography of Angela Davis to the text of the Catholic hymn “Salve Regina”).

“The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures” which premiered at Minneapolis’ Gutherie Theatre and will open in New York City this March, was inspired by the 19^th century’s George Bernard Shaw and Mary Baker Eddy. His 1988 adaptation of a 17^th century French playwright’s work “Illusion” is due this month at the Signature Theatre.

Monday, April 4, Ithaca College will host the playwright for a public interview with Claire Gleitman, professor and chair of the school’s Department of English. Kushner will also take questions from the audience, and will also sign copies of his books following the presentation; the free public event begins 7:30 p.m. in Hoerner Theater, at the Dillingham Center.

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Last month, just before departing on an international book tour, Téa Obreht stopped by Buffalo Street Books. It came after an interview on NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” a glowing front-page review in the New York Times Book Review, and acclaim that, among other things, included being the youngest person ever named to the New Yorker’s Best 20 Under 40 List.

For all of that, Obreht was modest and very funny. Her debut novel, “The Tiger’s Wife” is spectacular: simultaneously luminous and grounded.

Monday, April 4, Obreht will join another local MFA graduate, Alexi Zentner for a reading at Cornell Bookstore. Lennon, Obreht and Zentner’s former teacher, will introduce. You’ll probably want to get there a bit before its 4:00 p.m. start time. No joke.

David Nelson Pollock, co-founding editor of "Essays & Fictions" and contributor to The Ithaca Post. Image provided

ABRAHAM BURICKSON, ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE at Cornell’s Risley Hall, has been hosting local writers and musicians, as well as staging theatrical productions, in Risley’s Tammany Café, and tonight Burickson will host fiction writers David Nelson Pollock and Megan Coe at 7:30 p.m.

Pollock is a co-founding editor of and frequent contributor to the online and print journal Essays & Fictions, and his music and culture essays have appeared in The Ithaca Post since its inception last spring. Pollock often adopts the role of satirist in both fiction and nonfiction, and he has proved adept at blending the boundaries between the two when it suits him (no, he didn’t really get an interview with Kanye West last fall). In reappropriating widespread or marginal cultural trends and transforming them into biting farce, Pollock’s stories can veer into the realm of the fantastic, creating worlds in which John Steinbeck is an expressionist painter and governments create concentration camps to house the unproductive and morbidly depressed.

Things start out bad for his characters and just get worse: mediocre academics plunge into full blown alcoholism, dim-witted wage workers emerge as pedophiles, and dominant-submissive relationships morph into outright master-slave narratives. Though his worlds are so wildly imaginative as to border on fantasy, his characters are undoubtedly purged from the American underbelly: here are narrators who are helpless and detached witnesses to atrocity. Throughout, Pollock’s caustic humor and excruciating attention to craft provide ample reading pleasure, despite the discomfort of the subject matter.

His work has appeared in publications such as the Mississippi Review, LIT, and the Red Hen Press Anthology The Crucifix is Down. He is a graduate of the New School creative writing program and will be reading from his nearly completed novel, Self Abuse.

Joining him will be Megan Coe, whose favorite subjects to write about are the elderly and peculiar environments. She grew up in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. She worked at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and is currently an MFA student at Cornell University, where she teaches a class on the short story.

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Mike Silverman, aka That 1 Guy returns to Ithaca after a magical show at Castaways last March. Photo by Ed Dittenhoefer / FreeAirPhoto

DC-based heartthrobs Scythian are Ithaca favorites, and for good reason. Offering drinking songs and sing-a-longs they know how to whip a crowd into a frothy, sweaty party (9 p.m. Friday, at Castaways)

Social Media and Electro Diasporas, a panel on (post-)regional dance musics and their transformation through the internet (2:30 – 5:30 p.m. Saturday, in Tjaden Hall, Rm. 324, Cornell)

The Grady Girls, two sisters and their two cousins, play jigs, reels and other dance songs. Family ties are important to these women who have traveled far and wide (Cork, Limerick, Spain and beyond) to study and perform the traditional music of Ireland, music that has been an integral part of their lives since day one. With fiddles, flute and bodhran, the group will perform a benefit concert supporting efforts to stop the done attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan (6 p.m. Sunday, at Delilah’s on Cayuga).

With mustaches and laser beams, That 1 Guy sounds more like a Dr. Suess story than a rock act, but Mike Silverman, will entertain and entrance you. Like a mad scientist at work, Silverman turns practically everything but the kitchen sink into a musical instrument. His show last year was one of the most impressive to come to town. (9 p.m. Wednesday, at Castaways).

I am an employee of Buffalo Street Books, having worked as outreach coordinator here for roughly the past year.  The opinions expressed below are entirely mine and not those of the owner, other employees of Buffalo Street Books, or The Ithaca Post.

Also, when I refer here to independent local bookstores, I am referring quite specifically to comprehensive new bookstores.  This is in no way meant to denigrate the importance of any of the fantastic used bookstores in town, nor of Colophon Books or either of the on-campus bookstores.

What I am going to propose here is not a bailout. The unfortunate truth is that a bailout at this stage would be a temporary fix. I am proposing that members of the community buy out the bookstore and run it on a cooperative model.

HERE WE ARE at the wake.  For the past few days, I have sat quietly by while people queue up to express their sympathies regarding the closing of Buffalo Street Books, announced last Thursday.  There have been three prevalent lines of discussion, each one of which bears a bit of looking at.

1. What the hell happened?

2. This is a terrible loss for the city of Ithaca (or the variant, this is disgraceful for the city of Ithaca).

3. If Ithaca can’t support a local independent bookstore, who can?

Yes, it is a terrible loss.  But is it a quantifiable loss?  It’s not as if it will suddenly become impossible to buy books in Ithaca.  No book that you could have gotten on our shelves will now become utterly inaccessible, I promise you.

In addition to simply providing a excellent selection of books, a local independent bookstore provides the community with readings by local and national authors, facilitates reading groups that are open to the community, hosts benefits for worthy local agencies, provides performance and rehearsal space for local theater groups and sells books to local libraries and schools at deep discount or at cost.  Perhaps most importantly, we provide a space in the center of the community where literary arts can flourish.

Of course, none of these things bring in revenue, and all of them are a little tricky to put a price tag on.  But I would submit that everyone who has ever bought a book in an independent bookstore has done just that.  If you buy a $30 hardcover at an independent rather than at Barnes & Noble or Amazon, either of which might carry the same book at 50% off, you have said it is worth $15 to you to have all of the benefits of a local independent bookstore.  If we imagine that Amazon is selling every book it has at an average of 20% off (this number drops precipitously if your interests stray from the mainstream), then by buying your books at a local independent, you are saying it is worth 20% of your book budget to have that independent there.

Beyond the concrete, there is serendipity of place unique to a local bookstore.  It’s an environment where everything on the shelf has been hand selected by someone in the store, a member of the community.  Any Borders will look like any other Borders, even if they go through the trouble of tacking on a local interest section.  In a local independent bookstore, the whole store is a local interest section.  Part of the magic of a local bookstore isn’t finding what you came in for, but finding something you never knew existed in the first place.  By providing a space for readers to meet authors, authors to meet authors, poets to meet playwrights and so on in endless combination, a local independent bookstore waters the seeds of talent within a literary arts community.

Let’s move back to question one, which will quickly bring us to question three and the variant of question two.

What happened was that the business was losing money.  Every year, something new got tried and every year, things worked out about the same.  Gains in one area were barely enough to compensate for losses in another.  And as will inevitably happen in a situation like this, the owner, who I have the utmost respect for, got tired of lifting the load by himself.

Was it a poorly run business?  Not at all.  It was innovative and perceptive in a quickly changing market.  There was a constant search for options that would save the store.  A program was developed to sell books to students on both campuses that has been wildly successful.  The store has managed to become an integral part of nearly every aspect of the local literary community, has established an online presence and has explored every possible solution that would have staved off the situation we find ourselves in now.

Believe me when I tell you that the store was in an ideal spot to survive.

Included in the options explored was the idea of converting the bookstore to a not-for-profit model.  This would mean the bookstore itself would run about the same, but the owner or our staff would run a constant capital campaign to make up the difference between sales and operating costs.  This move would have been unprecedented, but it looked to be a long road ahead and one we were unlikely to reach the end of.

The fact of it is, the market will not support a local independent bookstore in a town the size of Ithaca.  It simply won’t.  It is easy enough to blame everyone who spends their money on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, who doesn’t wear their Shop Local pin proudly, who got a Kindle for Christmas.  But that’s not the point.  If you look at the terms of the market, it is inevitable that a local independent bookstore will fail in all but the largest markets.  We can’t sell you a bestseller for 45% off.  We can’t stock every title in print and some that aren’t.  And that’s not going to change.  The market has spoken and it has said, No, Ithaca does not get to have a local independent bookstore.

But where is it written that the market dictates everything that goes on in our community?  Why should it dictate? The thinking behind Local First at its heart asks the consumer to go against the natural drives of the market (where can I get it cheaper faster bigger) and to purchase in a way that supports less concrete advantages.  In very few towns and cities has the Local First philosophy been taken more to heart.  And still the market is squeezing local businesses out of our town.

What is necessary in this case is for the community and its members to realize their power not as consumers, as players within the game of the market, but as a community.  The market says an independent bookstore isn’t possible in Ithaca.  It’s time for the community to have its say.

Ithaca, if you want to have a local independent bookstore, I’ve got one for you.  You’ve just got to come get it.

Understand I’m not talking about a bailout.  I’m talking about a community buy out.  At the end of this process, the participating community, and I’m talking a cooperative of dozens if not hundreds, would own the bookstore outright.

If you’re still reading, please keep in mind all the numbers below are highly approximate.  But they should get the idea across.

It would take somewhere in the range of $200,000 to buy out the bookstore, including everything on the shelves. For a while, I thought the way to do this would be to find ten people who truly believe Ithaca should have an independent bookstore downtown who each have $20,000 to sink in. But let’s face it, I don’t know ten people who have a spare $20,000.  But what if we think about it differently?  What if that amount was split into shares of $250 a piece.  I know quite a few people with $250 who truly believe Ithaca should have an independent bookstore. And that amount could buy them one of 800 initial shares in an organization that would buy out and then own the bookstore.  If they’ve got more, it could buy them a couple shares.

I also know a number of people who don’t have a spare $250 but still believe Ithaca should have an independent bookstore.  I’ll get to those people in a minute.

If it works, what does it look like?  It looks an awful lot like a corporation, one that would elect a board of trustees and hire a CEO.  Like a corporation, shareholders would have a stake and a vote in major decisions regarding the future of the bookstore, , and, obviously, would receive a discount on books.

Are you going to get that money back?  No more than you’re going to get your PBS pledge back.  What you’re doing with that money is helping to buy a present for your community.  You’re saying not just that Ithaca wants an independent bookstore, but that it truly deserves one and will do what it takes to have one.  And when this happens, that bookstore won’t belong to one person or a small group of business partners who have to share the heavy financial burden.  It will belong to a community of member-owners, with each member lifting the weight they can.

If it all works and Ithaca owns its own bookstore,  what does year two look like?  Or year five?

Being approximate, let’s say the bookstore, left to its own devices, faces an annual shortfall of $100,000 a year.  This, incidentally, is fractional to what an organization like the Hangar Theatre would face if their only source of income were ticket sales and they had to pay all of their ushers.  This is where the folks with more time than money become part of the project.  About half the above figure can be accounted for in labor costs, just to staff the desk.  That cost could be offset by a committed corps of volunteers, each of whom “buy” a piece of ownership with their labor.  A worker-owner would earn an equitable share of the store through his or her labor.  Essentially, if each share is worth $250, a worker-owner could “buy” a share with twenty-five hours of labor.

Which leaves us with a $50,000 shortfall.  Fundraising campaigns and member drives would have to be run periodically throughout the year, every year.  This is a daunting amount of work, but within this model, instead of a single owner and his staff of ten trying to make this happen, it would be a community of worker- and member-owners.

I’m talking about a community buy out, and one that would need to get off the ground fast.  If this bookstore closes, another one will not rise to take its place, I will practically guarantee it.  The difference in start-up cost and effort between opening a new bookstore from scratch and buying out an existing bookstore is huge.

And let me again stress, this is not a money-making opportunity.  No savvy entrepreneur is going to exploit this newly created lack in the market because there is no lack in the market.  The lack will lie in the community and it is in the community where it will be keenly felt.

There are any number of adjustments and additions that can and should be made to this plan.   I’m just throwing sparks onto a fire that is otherwise dying out.  If they catch, it will be entirely due to you.

If you believe this city needs and deserves a local bookstore;  if, like me, you are appalled at the idea of living in a city without one;  if you are ready to put your money and time where your mouth is; if you are ready for Ithaca to live up to its reputation rather than bask in it ; if you are ready to be part of a community that decides for itself what it looks like, rather than allowing itself to be shaped by outside forces …

… then let’s give it a try.

At this point, I’m looking to gauge interest.  And by interest, I mean willingness to commit financially.  I’m just a poor kid, but I’m putting it out there right now that I’m in for $1000.  Four shares.  It’s what I can afford right now.  There are 796 to go.

Bob Proehl is the outreach coordinator for Buffalo Street Books. He is the former owner of No Radio Records, and is the author of The Gilded Palace of Sin. He also writes about literature for the Ithaca Post. Anyone interested in more information or in participating should please contact me at bobproehl@gmail.com.

Amelia's blog "Drink My Words" can be found here: http://bit.ly/cIGCBC

I CAN’T READ.

I don’t mean that I’m illiterate. (To be politically correct, I should say alphabet cohesion impaired.) Rather, I’m incapable of picking up a book or a magazine and reading it cover-to-cover. Which is not good, since I’m a writer.

My excuse is that I’m a writer of short things. And short things, I read. Call it a limited attention span, or perhaps it’s a deep-seated fear of commitment. I’m not alone; most people crave immediate gratification and quick results, as evidenced by the popularity of texting, Twitter, and Facebook, IMHO. I get my daily news from Facebook, which is highly informative: road closings, birthdays, who died this week, and the elaborate details of how poor Katie Holmes’ career is being sabotaged by the press.

I haven’t bought a newspaper in years. Why would I? Browsing the Internet brings me this-just-in news eight minutes after the story breaks. I bet I knew the Oscar nominees before you did.

Sometimes I even read emails, if they’re not too wordy. I got a sales email recently that began with, “I apologize for sending such a lengthy email, but I’ve got a great offer for you.” Then she blah-blah-blahed for a full page. By the time I was halfway through it, I needed a snack.

So then I got distracted looking up a recipe for cupcakes on Epicurious.com, which led me, as usual, to the cocktail section, and this is where I clicked on some ad for skin cream. This site made me worry about an unsightly rash I’ve got, so I Googled it, discovering that it is either bedbugs, shingles, skin cancer, or an allergic reaction to Katie Holmes.

By the time I finally returned to that email, the offer was expired by a week.

My mom gave us a subscription to National Geographic for Christmas. Leah reads the articles, but I take after my dad, who tends to treat National Geographic like a picture book. The only thing missing in that publication is comics. Nothing like a good one-liner to leave you feeling complete.

When I do decide to read an actual book, I sneak into the adolescent section of the bookstore with dark glasses and my hat pulled low. If I’m caught by someone I know, I pretend I’m buying books for a fictitious niece. (And they pretend they’re buying books for a fictitious nephew.) I’m talking Twilight and Harry Potter. I’m not proud, but it’s an addiction. I admit that I’m powerless over vampires, werewolves and wizards – and my book choices have become unmanageable. Only a power greater than myself can restore my sanity. Dumbledore?

In an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air (yes, I do listen to the radio), author Gary Shteyngart said, “Everyone’s a writer. Nobody wants to read, but everybody wants to write.”

No, I haven’t read Gary’s latest book (Super Sad True Love Story) since I avoid books written for grownups. (The book trailer on YouTube is captivating, however.) Gary also referenced a literary magazine contest where all the writers’ submissions had to be accompanied by a receipt for a recent book purchase. I’d be too mortified to enter since my latest acquisition was Breaking Dawn, the fourth novel in the Twilight series. This would not be a good way to get taken seriously as a writer, unless the contest theme is adolescent fantasy vampire chick lit.

At least I do try to read, even if it is stuff for kids. Short sentences, no big vocabulary words to look up, and easy-to-follow plots. And most of the time, I can read kid books to the end since there’s plenty of excitement, romance and immediate gratification to keep me hooked until they all live happily ever after.

"I See the Promised Land: A Life of Martin Luther King Jr." by Arthur Flowers, Manu Chitrakar and Guglielmo Rossi, is available at Buffalo Street Books.

ARTHUR FLOWERS IS a novelist, blues musician and hoodoo poet originally from Memphis, Tennessee. His latest work, I See the Promised Land: A Life of Martin Luther King Jr is a unique collaboration between Flowers and Manu Chitrakar, a traditional Patua artist from Bengal; patua art is a form of narrative scroll painting. Flowers, a professor at Syracuse University, will be at Buffalo Street Books on Saturday, February 5, 2011 at 3:00 p.m. to read from the piece. We spoke to him earlier this week.

Q: How did you become involved in writing I See the Promised Land?

Arthur Flowers: I was doing a state department tour of India, one of those goodwill tours, and I was at the Jaipur Literary Festival, which is an extraordinary festival. I did my little performance – I’m a performance poet and a hoodoo-based performer – so I did my little thing and it went over very well. Folks were treating me like I was a literary guru; it was a very amazing experience. Gita [Wolf] the publisher of Tara Books approached me and asked me if I’d be interested in doing a collaboration with a Patua artist on Martin Luther King. And at the time I knew nothing of Patua art, but being asked to do a graphic novel book was interesting to me because it feels very 21st century. And also, Martin Luther King. I’m from Memphis, I was at the marches. Martin Luther King meant a lot to me, because I feel I am a voice of the delta and Memphis, and personally. So I said yes.

Q: How did the collaborative process work?

Flowers: He had done let’s say 10-15 pieces, so they sent me a PDF of what he had done and they sent me the script they’d given him. It was very rudimentary. I said, “Is this for children?” They said, “No, it’s not for children, it’s for adults, but in order for us to get the concept to him, because he’s a tribal artist, and not cosmopolitan, we had to tell it to him in a way that he could appreciate it. He really felt the MLK story and he came up with his interpretations.”

It was interesting because they were very interested in the history of the African American struggle but it was for an Indian audience. So it was two cultures. So for instance, he became very fascinated with the Ku Klux Klan. So he did more Ku Klux Klan paintings than I would have felt appropriate. But you know, you have to go with the flow. And then they had things in the little piece like African Americans learned how to sing and dance in the church, and there were thirty-five paintings of African Americans singing and dancing in the church. So then I had to do my piece. And by now I had an understanding of the Patua tradition, because they had sent me pieces, I had experienced the tradition and I was understanding it was a storytelling tradition. Basically, I had a little more understanding of Tara Books, their mission is to do traditional Indian art forms in a contemporary manifestation. I said, “Well, since he’s doing his traditional storytelling thing, I would love to try to do mine, my African American delta storytelling tradition to make it two storytelling traditions.” I come out of the griotic wing of AA literature, we feel that we are heirs to a literary tradition, and I try to make it work on the page. So I went ahead and did kind of a myth work thing on MLK, an Africa delta storyteller trying to play with the myth. I just wrote out that. And I asked them, “Am I being too down-home? Should I take more of me out and tell it straight?” And they encouraged me, “Do it, do it.” It gave me joy trying to make that storyteller play with Martin Luther King’s life as a contemporary delta storyteller trying to make it significant to the generations. So that’s what the process allowed me to do. Because of the fact that India had responded to a spiritual side of Martin’s life that I don’t experience in the United States, I was able to play with some sides that I really enjoyed playing with.

We had a couple cultural differences. Some of them were very interesting. His idea of the slave ships had Viking prows. I said these are more Viking ships than slave ships. But he’d already painted so many of them. I looked at them and was like, “Okay, I can live with that.” He had this underground railroad that was extraordinary; it had this Indian theme. It was just beautiful. And there was one time where his idea of Martin Luther King’s drum major speech was a little guy sitting playing a snare drum with epaulets. And I said “No, that’s not going to work, I can’t go to the south with this as a drum major.” So that one we had to work with. Otherwise, we just basically let the moment be the moment.

Q: And you’ve been out doing book touring on this, you started in Memphis? Was it well received?

Flowers: Well, yeah, but you know, it was Memphis, it was all the folks who know me and know what I do, and yes, it was very well received and it was a good crowd. I’m trying to do some new performance stuff with it and I tried some things and it went well. They also sent me the scroll, because traditionally what the Patua artists do is they paint the paintings on a scroll and they unroll the scroll while they sing the story. So they asked me, “Do you want us to have him do a scroll of it?” And I said no, but they kept asking me, and I realized they’re trying to send me a scroll version of the novel in the traditional art form. I was like, “Sure, send it!” So they sent it to me; I’m going to try to work it into the act.

WITH NO DISRESPECT to anyone, I’d like to point out how much harder my job here was than any of my fellow Post contributors. What does it take to listen to an album? Like, an hour? Even the Kanye album doesn’t break the ninety minute mark. And movies? Three hours, tops. And did you know if you go to an art exhibit, you get to hang out with other people, and there’s free wine?

Books, however, are long and solitary. Feel free to check the page counts on a couple of these: we’re talking big fish here. Weeks-long commitments, in some cases. And you can’t just put a book on in the background and make dinner. Books demand your full attention and will settle for nothing less.

Also, it is very difficult to dance to a book. Although if it was possible, How to Wreck a Nice Beach might be that book.

Point being, I think I’m justified coming in a few days late on this one. Books take a long damn time to read. More importantly, this is more a list of the top ten books that happened to be from this past year that I coincidentally happened to read this year. I’d love to say I had time to read Tom McCarthy’s C, Jennifer Homans’s Apollo’s Angels, or the new translations of Madame Bovary or Doctor Zhivago. I sincerely wish I’d been able to dig into Jay-Z’s Decoded or Ann Carson’s Nox, both beautiful arguments for why and how the book will persist as a physical objet, or had the patience to wade into the Mark Twain autobiography. I really meant to get around to The Secret Historian by Justin Spring and Just Kids by Patti Smith, but time just didn’t allow. So here is a list of ten excellent books from this year, all of which I swear I at least mostly read.

Citrus County by John Brandon. A hot little Virginia creeper set in rural Florida, Brandon’s second novel follows the romantic relationship two teens: one a recent transplant to the nowhere town in the Sunshine State, the other a budding sociopath who kidnaps her younger sister. More melancholic than suspenseful, the book captures the stasis of a small poor town and the poignancy of clutching young love with dark humor. Brandon’s book has the concision of a short story and the character depth of a novel, creating a cramped and sweaty atmosphere that combines Blood Simple and Dawson’s Creek.

The Passage by Justin Cronin. I know I lose all credibility throwing a vampire novel in here, but this was a pretty awesome vampire novel. As an adolescent Stephen King fan, I truly believed The Stand was the greatest book ever written. But when I returned to it as an adult, I was appalled at how poorly written the book was. Cronin’s The Passage isn’t exactly vampires by Proust (and falls into the Magic Black Person Trap that so often ensnares King’s stories), but it gave adult-me the same charge King once provided for teenage-me. Well-plotted, well-written post-apocalypse stuff for grown ups.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It’s not as good as everyone says, nor is it as bad as everyone says. Despite my overwhelming dislike for Franzen as a person, I devoured this book over a weekend. Franzen seems to have imagined a novel for which postmodernism never happened, presenting a complex family drama that yearns to be on the shelf with Tolstoy and Thackeray rather than Pynchon or DeLillo. With characters not as hateful or “quaintly Midwestern” as The Corrections, Freedom makes for a compelling bit of the psychological realism Franzen has so fervidly advocated. Is it the Great American Novel? No. Is it the Great American Novel of Affluent but Miserable White People? Possibly.

How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu. If Mengestu’s first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, was a finely crafted character study, his second is an even more delicately done study of a non-character. Jonas Woldemariam conjures up fragile and fictionalized histories for the refugees he works with, his parents and ultimately himself. Amid these spun-sugar constructs, the smallest gestures between Jonas and his wife take on unimaginable weight and a moment of near-violence becomes world-shattering. With a narrator as difficult to pin down as Dosteovsky’s Underground Man, Mengestu’s novel is stunning.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet by David Mitchell. After the narrative pyrotechnics of Cloud Atlas, the last thing I expected from Mitchell was a straightforward piece of historical fiction. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet is nothing short of hypnotic, mixing its exotic historical setting of Hiroshima just opened to foreigners with a plot involving eternal life and the intricacies of trade policy, all with an intensely poetic prose style, rhythmic and lilting. It’s the kind of book that compels the reader towards the finish, only to drive them back to the beginning to read through again.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddharta Mukerjee. It’s pretty natural to be skeptical when someone says “You’re going to love this book about cancer.” But Mukerjee’s comprehensive biography of cancer is riveting, one of those rare science books that is also a page turner. Charting various historical paths of treatment and prevention, Mukerjee gives makes a thriller out of the great medical war of the 20th century.

Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco. A comics journalist, Sacco’s earlier works, primarily Safe Area: Gorzade and Palestine, functioned as survey courses in the humanitarian crises they portrayed. But both avoided becoming dry textbooks by remaining grounded in the peculiar voice and image of Sacco himself, who spent extensive periods in Gaza and in the small Balkan town whose existence hung in the balance during the Dayton peace talks. Sacco’s cartoonish version of himself, all nose and ears, often crowded the frame. In Footnotes, Sacco examines a fifty year-old massacre many Palestinians cite as the true seed of the Israel-Palestine conflict. In doing so, he manages to turn down the volume on his own voice and listen more deeply than ever to his interlocutors. The result is an intensely humane and surprisingly balanced mediation on the nature of history, memory and conflict.

How to Wreck a Nice Beach by David Tompkins. A dizzying history of the vocoder, from its beginnings as a WWII encoding device to its incorporation in disco and hiphop. David Tompkin’s prose warps and twists, echoing off its own walls to reproduce the very effects it describes. Bouncing and veering wildly from Bell Labs in the forties to the green room at an Africa Bombaata show (and swerving off topic to include Peter Frampton’s talk box, explicitly not a vocoder), the book manages to be a history of a device and of a musical form, a beautiful cyborg of a tech book and a music book.

The Legacy by Kirsten Tranter. Tranter’s debut novel recasts Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady against the backdrop of September 11th. Which is a great way to pitch it as a movie, although might not sell you on the novel. But the concept is such a minor part of this rich and lushly written study of the relationships between three characters whose crossed desires drive the novel long before the suspense plot surrounding Ingrid’s disappearance kicks in. An examination of unrequited love (pretty much no one in The Legacy gets loved back), the New York City art world and the ability to slip into a moment and potentially disappear.

Hotel I by Karen Tei Yamashita. A collection of ten novellas, all set in San Francisco, each one launching from a particular year in the late sixties and seventies, Yamashita’s Hotel I is a fantastically complex portrait of a city in flux, delving into the lives of the Asian Americans who populate it. Big idea novels like this (each novella is accompanied by a fold-up die, each side marked with its central characters and themes) work best when they’re grounded in strong character development and Yamashita’s mastery of narrative voice and dialogue makes the more airy concepts palatable.

Honorable Mentions: I liked Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question even though I hated all the characters. I liked China Mieville’s The City & The City even though it didn’t have any characters. Josh Neufeld’s AD: New Orleans After the Deluge was great, although a little slight compared to, say, When the Levees Broke or Treme and James Sturm’s Market Day was beautiful, although not as good as some of his previous stuff. The first 400 pages of Adam Levin’s debut, The Instructions were fantastic, if a little too derivative of David Foster Wallace, but not compelling enough to make me read 800 more. Thomas Rachmann’s The Imperfectionists is a better short story collection than it is a novel, and Doug Dorst’s Surf Guru is a better short story collection than that. Luka & The Fire of Life, Salman Rushdie’s pseudo-sequel to Haroun & The Sea of Stories was off to such a good start, I decided to wait until I could read it to my local kid, but that might be a year or two off. If you ask him (or probably any eight year old), the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid is the greatest book every written. And it has a purple cover, which is an obvious plus.

Amelia Sauter read her fiction last Saturday at Buffalo Street Books. Photo by Heather Ainsworth

On Thursday, Bob Proehl read from his novel-in-progress at Tammany Cafe. Photo by Heather Ainsworth

We’re so proud to see Post contributors reading their fantastic fictions all over town lately. Last weekend, Buffalo Street Books hosted witty writer and Felicia’s co-owner Amelia Sauter, who was joined by Sara Rauch in narrating their contributions to the anthology Dear John, I Love Jane. Recently published by Seal Press, an imprint of Perseus, this collection explores the stories and relationships of women who summoned the fortitude to leave heterosexual relationships in pursuit of lesbian partners and same-sex love affairs. Sauter’s story explored the earliest days of her relationship with her partner, Leah; the women are well-known in Ithaca not just as co-owners of the popular lounge, but also as creative and innovative collaborators in music, film, and catering projects. Sauter, who writes a humor column entitled “Drink My Words” that runs regularly in the Post, warned the crowd that she might cry, but she held it together to deliver a playful and humorous reading of a poignant and touching love story.

Meanwhile, the Tammany Café at Cornell’s Risley Hall hosted local DJ favorite and literary instigator Bob Proehl to read from his short story and current novel-in-progress on Thursday. The working title of the novel, Proehl said, is DIS, an acronym for Death Information Services, and the story profiles a character who develops an Internet system for notifying members of online groups, such as gaming peers, when one of their fellow avatars has passed away; the timely excerpt seemed to splice the kind of techno-wunderkind story told in The Social Network with the paranoid cyber punk of William Gibson. A Buffalo native, Proehl’s first book, The Gilded Palace of Sin, recounts the brief career of the Flying Burrito Brothers in the late 1960s and was published in 2008 by Continuum Press; his stories appeared in 400 Words, Essays & Fictions and Stone Canoe. At the reading, Proehl misplaced his last page, but entertained audience members with a delightfully improvised summary of the excerpt’s conclusion.

Photo by Heather Ainsworth

Photo by Heather Ainsworth

Photo by Heather Ainsworth

Photo by Heather Ainsworth

The collection "Dear John, I Love Jane" is available now at Buffalo Street Books.

DESIRE CAN BE agonizing in its specificity, especially when it is unexpected or otherwise unwelcome. While we’ve all experienced what might seem like an objectless want, an unanchored craving, even this ache is bound to coalesce into a designated yearning; no sooner is a desire born than it is attached to its object. The heart (along with the stomach and various lower organs) wants what it wants.

But when the conversation about desire (or, let’s bring the big sappy guns out on this one, Love) moves into the discourse of politics, it loses its specific objects and becomes what desire is inherently not: general. This loss of specificity has numerous detrimental effects on the debates surrounding the rights of homosexuals in America.  First of all, it creates the absurd delineation wherein the right to a certain type of desire is subject to legislation. In being discussed as general, desire makes the linguistic slippage into promiscuity (general desire becomes a plurality of undifferentiated specific desires) and we end up with the longstanding myth that homosexual relationships are unstable and prone to infidelity.

But more importantly, when desire becomes abstracted, the human beings experiencing it become equally abstracted: millions of people whose loves and desires, their most personal, intense and meaningful feelings, become lumped into one group. That group is then set across the boundary implied by any binary (us/not us) and, as an abstract mass, becomes subject to derision, discrimination and violence.

The cracks in the binary walls of gender and sexuality have been showing for some time and within those cracks, ever-expanding populations push outward against both sides of the binary structure, in the process redefining labels that are lazy in their simplicity and often have the effect of distancing people labeled from themselves. In exploring the inner landscapes of women who enjoyed heterosexual relationships for a time and then went on to fully enjoy homosexual ones as well, this anthology sought to add a new literary perspective to the classic coming-out stories of consciously concealed identities and long-lasting shame and fear. Dear John, I Love Jane is a Molotov cocktail lobbed into the divide between gay and straight, and the fire it ignites illuminates the complexities of what it means to define oneself as gay or straight.

Edited by Candace Walsh and Laura Andre, Dear John, I Love Jane purports to be an anthology of women writing about leaving men for women. But like other labels, this one falls short of being all-encompassing.  The stress here is rarely on the men who are left so much as the women who are found, and while in many of the stories the woman who is found is a long-time partner, in all of the stories, the woman found is the writer herself. For a surprising number of the women in the anthology, it is the very specificity of their desire that seems to shock them awake, less a realization that they want to be with women than a realization that they want to be with that woman.

Brought together by an open call for work that drew one hundred and thirty submissions, the writers showcased defy classification or stereotype. The butch/femme binary breaks down into a myriad not of types but of individuals. Here we have a Mormon housewife, a radicalized college student, an ashram-dwelling seeker, a country musician. Journalists, college professors, bloggers and stay-at-home moms people the book’s pages, and each one defines herself in her own terms.  Some self-identify as gay or lesbian, some invent new terms for themselves (“dykeling” and “Leah-bian”, for example), and others slip the yoke of label entirely.  While certain themes recur in many of the pieces, each story is unique in voice (some, naturally, stronger and more compelling than others).

I would feel biased in saying that local celebrity and fellow Ithaca Post contributor Amelia Sauter is the standout in the group, if it weren’t for the fact that much of the publicity surrounding the book and Dr. Lisa Diamond, the author of Sexual Fluidity who provides the book’s introduction, seem to agree with me.  Many of the prize quotes pulled from the text by Dr. Diamond are from Ms. Sauter’s essay, and with good reason.  In the manner of some of the best memoirists, Sauter manages to mix a compelling level of detail with deft insight and a command of language.  Heartbreaking sentences like “I was in love, and I was terribly lonely” are personal enough to give the reader a strong sense of the narrator, but resonate at a shared level by leaving the reader space to insert their own experiences. It is precisely within a sentence like this that identification and empathy between reader and writer are cemented. If there is any one place where the overall argument of the book rings out, it is in Sauter’s reflection on her own story.

You won’t find me rewriting history to say that I was gay all along. I was straight. Now I am gay. I won’t insult my past self by saying I was in denial or confused.

While the exact sentiment is not shared by all the authors represented in Dear John, I Love Jane, it demonstrates the ease of slipping across what are supposed to be defining boundaries. Any boundary that can be so easily transgressed was probably never a boundary to begin with.

While never waved as a particularly political flag, one of the recurring themes in the book is marriage, both marriages left behind and marriages precluded by law.  Reading Dear John, I Love Jane, it’s difficult not to wonder how quickly the debate over gay marriage would be solved if, rather than deciding whether, in principle, it should be legal for a man to marry another man or a woman to marry another woman, the legislatures, courts and voting public had time to meet each couple. To hear their stories and see the map of their desire for one another, how it moves over time and across borders. And then to ask whether society had any right to stop this person, whose love is so specific, so unique, from marrying this other person, who is lucky enough not just to receive this love, but to return it.

Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben will speak at Ithaca College Thursday, Nov. 11 at 8:00pm. Photo by Nancie Battaglia

ONE OF THE NATION’S leading environmentalists, whose books have shaped public perception — and public action — on climate change, alternative energy and the need for more localized economies, will speak at Ithaca College on Thursday, Nov. 11. Bill McKibben will present “From Walden to Warming: Global, Local, and the Meaning of Thoreau in a Scary Moment” at 8 p.m. in Emerson Suites, Phillips Hall. His talk is free and open to the public.

McKibben’s appearance is sponsored by the college’s First-Year Reading Initiative (FYRI). He wrote the introduction to the 2004 edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which was this year’s FYRI selection. Following his talk, McKibben will sign copies of his own latest book — Eaarth — which is spelled that way because, he says, “We’ve already managed to change the planet in such fundamental ways that it’s not really the planet we thought we knew.”

McKibben founded the international environmental organization 350.org, which takes its name from the latest scientific data indicating that 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the safe upper limit. On Oct. 10, 2010 (10/10/10), the group organized a global day of action, with some 7,000 “work parties” in 188 countries taking concrete actions to help combat climate change.

Foreign Policy magazine included McKibben on its inaugural list of the 100 most important global thinkers, with Time magazine describing him as “the world’s best green journalist.” His seminal books include The End of Nature, widely seen as the first book on climate change for a general audience, and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, which issues a challenge to move beyond “growth” as the paramount economic ideal.

McKibben has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

Eaarth, The End of Nature and Deep Economy will all be available for purchase at the book signing.

For more information on McKibben, visit www.billmckibben.com.