Judge a tree by its fruit

Oakley Hall, one of the founders of the Squaw Valley Writers Conference passed away this week. His most famous book, Warlock, demystified the West, decades ahead of Annie Proulx, or even movies like Unforgiven.

Though he’s widely respected in literary circles, he’s not exactly a household name, but many of his students are. Writers like Michael Chabon, Richard Ford, Amy Tan and Alice Sebold––who’ve combined to sell 50,000,000 books, win the PEN/Faulkner Award, a Nebula Award, a Bram Stoker Award, and oh yeah, a pair of Pulitzers.

I met him when I attended Squaw in 2006 and he was incredibly cool, completely genuine and an all around fine man.

There's even a band named after him. How cool is that?

Oxymoron of the day: Utah Jazz

Seattle jazz legend, Oscar Holden, makes an appearance in HOTEL, courtesy of his daughter, Grace Holden. Thank you Grace!I still don’t get it. In 1979, the NBA allowed the New Orleans Jazz to move to Utah, but along the way someone thought it’d be a jim-dandy idear to retain the team name. Thus, one of the whitest, blondest, Osmond-est cities in America, known for its famed Tabernacle Choir, inherited a runaway jazz legacy. Granted, I have an affinity for Salt Lake City, which is a truly lovely place, but that’s like moving the NBA’s Miami franchise to Alaska and calling them the Anchorage Heat. It…just…doesn’t…make…sense.

Why the weird jazz rant, you ask? Well, partially because my beloved Seattle Supersonics had an apocalyptic year (20-62!), but also because I just got HOTEL back from my copy editor.

I was expecting the normal grammatical stuff, hyphenation fixes, foreign words, unique words, etc. What I wasn’t expecting were these amazing lists of all the places and people mentioned in the book, fictional or otherwise––especially the names of musicians from Seattle’s west coast jazz scene––from the Camelot of swing jazz to the 60s and beyond.

Names like Overton Berry, Wanda Brown, Buddy Catlett, Ray Charles, Webb Coleman, June Duprez, Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Herman, Dave Holden, Oscar Holden, Harold Huber, Helen Humes, Quincy Jones, Palmer Johnson, Artie Shaw and Leon Vaughn.

I mean, I thought I was weaving a little in, just as a subtle jazz backbeat––but instead it’s like a walking bass, roaming throughout the entire book.

Maybe it’s because my family used to eat at a fancy Chinese restaurant that was once a jazz club where Count Basie played. Or maybe it’s because I turned my chopsticks into drumsticks, despite my grandmother’s warnings that doing so was bad luck. Who knows? I think I’ll play some Nina Simone and think about it for a while.

(And if you like Nina Simone, who completely transcends jazz, you'll love Orange Mint and Honey, by Carleen Brice).

One million dollars––what’s that in Canadian?

When I was a kid, the UPS man meant one thing—comic books. My grandmother would wake at the crack of dawn and descend on garage sales like Ghengis Khan pillaging the Khwarezmid Empire. She’d strong-arm some poor fool into parting with them for pennies. Then she’d send ‘em my way. I loved getting those packages so much that if my mom had suggested I go as the UPS man for Halloween, I’d have happily obliged.

Now the UPS man brings me marked-up manuscripts, checks in big fancy business envelopes, and occasionally books. (Not mine…soon).

This week the Man in Brown brought me an Advance Reading Copy of Andrew Davidson’s, The Gargoyle. Don’t know if you heard about it last year but The Gargoyle made headlines when Davidson’s agent turned down a $1,000,000 preempt offer––because as Doctor Evil learned, one meeeelion dolarrrs just doesn’t go as far as it used to.

Davidson’s agent was revived with smelling salts shortly afterwards and negotiated a deal for $1.2 million, not counting foreign rights, movie rights, etc. Needless to say, it was big deal for a debut novelist, from Manitoba no less. (If you don’t know where Manitoba is, you go to the end of nowhere, turn left and it’s on your right. Can’t miss it. I’m joking. Put the hockey stick down, eh! I live in the hinterlands of Montana for Pete’s sake).

Anyway, since I've been given a free copy of a book that sold for a million dollars, I feel somewhat compelled to read it—the curiosity factor alone will drive sales. Kind of like the movie, Waterworld, now that I think of it.

So far I’ve read up to around the $300,000 mark and it's pretty darn good...

Dead men (normally) tell no tales

"Gee, no thanks mister, I don't need a ride to the candy store."You’ve probably seen, heard or read about Vladimir Nabokov’s son deciding to publish his late father’s last “novel”—thirty years after his death and three decades after his father had instructed his family to destroy it.

The “not quite finished manuscript” entitled The Origin of Laura was actually a set of 138 index cards. Now those cards will be published as a matter of public interest and financial, I mean, scholarly importance.

I have mixed feelings about this, because hypocritically, if another Tupac album were discovered in the dustbin of some So-Cal recording studio, I’d jump on it. But Nakokov didn’t want this book to be seen in a state of undress. It doesn’t seem right, no matter how many literary purists want to get their greedy hands on it like Humbert on Dolores Haze.

I’m not a big Nabokov fan, so maybe I’m just biased about the whole thing. Trivially though, he did live in my former hometown of Ashland, Oregon for a summer, back in 1953––waaaay before my time. Ashland is where he finished Lolita, collected butterflies and undoubtedly creeped out the local babysitters.

But back to unfinished business, would you want your rough draft published posthumously? Your diary? Your personal letters? Your email?