Book Wrangler

November 21, 2005

By Bob Patterson

[Click on underlined type for more information.]

The intended purpose for this weekly column in Just Above Sunset (JAS) weekly online magazine is to give readers some tidbits about new books and literary news that they might not find elsewhere.

Recently we have been putting links into the column that are intended to take our readers to the particular URL on the amazon.com site where we found the search results for a particular author.  An example for this would be the link that was supposed to display relevant Amazon results for search on their site for by my brother's name: Dr. Richard B. Patterson.  When we tried that and similar links when the column had been published and we were "proofreading" the new issue of JAS, the link didn't work.  If we can't spare our readers the step of doing their own individual search on the Amazon, site, well so be it, we won't try using that kind of link in the future.

We tend to prefer to bring our readers some information about books other than the newest Harry Potter book.  We figure that most folks will find out about that before they read a Book Wrangler (BW) column.

So what kind of book do we notice when we are hunting for items for a new BW column? 

The Man Who Didn't Fit In: How Canada's Most Wanted Outlaw Began His Life of Crime by Dick North tells the story about how Johnny Conrad Johnson went from being a citizen of Norway to a fugitive from the law in the Article Circle region of Canada.  It makes him sound like the Canadian Ned Kelly.  Odds are this new book will slip under the radar for editors at Time and Newsweek, but not readers of this week's BW column.  Now, won't that make our audience feel smug? 

Clapton's Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument by Allen St. John tells (according to an ad we've encountered) the story of how Wayne Henderson "turns a few pieces of wood into a masterful musical instrument."

So what was that about literary tidbits?

Did the folks who wanted to know where Hemingway got the names for his characters ever find the answer?  Some scholars investigated the names of the folks who were his neighbors in the Oak Park house where he grew up.  Did they ever check out the names of the people who were neighbors of the cabin that the family owned at Lake Walloon?

When the TV series Twilight Zone was canceled, some stories were bought for future use, but failed to be produced and put on the air.  What ever happened to those "lost episodes?"  One of them was an "open grave" story done by Charles Beaumont.  (Tune in next week for more about the lost episodes and let's hope that in the meantime we get to read an article somewhere about them.)

Each week we also try to throw in whatever items we can find that might be of interest to web surfers (especially the one who live in the Southern California area) such as items about what will be happening with the Independent Writers of Southern California or other such groups.

"… as to the style of the Subterraneans: this is the style I've discovered for narrative art, whereby the author stumbles over himself to tell his tale, just as breathlessly as some raconteur rushing to tell a whole roomful of listeners what has just happened, and once he has told his tale he has no right to go back and delete what the hand hath written, just as the hand that writes upon the wall cannot go back." - Jack Kerouac in "Written Address to the Italian Judge" as it appeared in the Evergreen Review, No. 31, on page 109.  [We do try to go beyond "the usual suspects" when we run a quote in the BW column.]

Now, if the disk jockey will play the Baltimore and Ohio Marching Band hit from 1967, LAPLAND, we'll strut on out of here.  Until the next time, have a week full of topics that are worth debating. 

Copyright © 2005 - Robert Patterson

Email the author at worldslaziestjournalist@yahoo.com