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January Lassitude

Freezing mornings. Long stretches of silence. Ice-covered streets. This is a time of year I love. It’s also the time of year I go a little stir-crazy in my basement and start to think that I’ve got to get some kind of job.

Teaching. Editing. Stacking shelves. Anything seems good. Anything that will get me out into the world and interacting with people. Anything where someone is expecting me to show up.

I know. It’s not like I live on a ranch in Manitoba. I’m not drinking at 10 and eying the shotgun. And it sounds a little snobby to say that I think I need a job to mingle. I realize I’m very fortunate to still be able to live off my earnings. I know most writers would kill to have the time I have to scribble. But there it is.

Except this year feels a little different. The yearning to show up and be needed someplace is a little less acute. The cause of this might be that I’m the househusband now, and I’m doing most of the cooking, washing and chauffeuring of offspring. I’ve got a part-time job to keep me busy, and the family needs me because I’m keeping things on an even keel for everyone. Without me, there’d be a lot more frozen dinners and general screaming about where to find clean underwear.

Maybe my mind is also finally used to the fact that I go through this every January. I’ll bug friends for contacts and make phone calls and almost seriously consider interviewing for a teaching job. But now I realize that my reasons for doing so are half-assed and temporary. When March comes around, I’ll feel less constrained and a little more alive.

Right now, I’m not so productive. The writing projects I’m in the midst of feel like long slogs with no real roadmap or purpose. Piles of bookkeeping and paperwork clutter up the office like carcasses that need to be disposed of (especially now that I’ve got my e-books up and I have to start acting like a PR person, accountant and publisher). And around early afternoon, I start to think like a domestic engineer and get my June Cleaver on.

But it doesn’t seem too bad this year. I’ve got a feeling productivity will come, if I just keep pushing, and in the end, I won’t have shortchanged anyone who would hire me with my distractable frame of mind and self-centered habits.

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White Out: A Sidetrip to Starvation Lake

Earlier this fall, Bryan Gruley released the second book in his mystery series about a journalist in a small northern Michigan town. I liked the first title, Starvation Lake, very much, but like the second, The Hanging Tree, even more. Which is odd because the mechanics of the second mystery are a little less satisfying than the first. But the characters in The Hanging Tree were so deftly scripted, and their daily lives laid out with such believability, that I think the book is just terrific.

I’m not the only one, either. It was named one of the Michigan Notable Books of the Year, and listed as one of the Best Mysteries of the Year by Kirkus Reviews. There are probably a couple other accolades I’ve forgotten, but hey, call his publicist.

Bryan’s a friend of mine, so sure, I’m going to give his book a plug. But I also sincerely like these books. You don’t have to be a Michigander or a hockey fan to enjoy them (though it helps — I’m only one of those two). Bryan is a terrific storyteller with a deep personal affection for his characters and the lives they find themselves in, something that can’t be faked.

A couple months ago, I joked with Bryan about organizing excursions to Starvation Lake, Michigan, to show all the sites to the book’s fans. (Jon Berendt made this a sort of cottage industry with Savannah after writing Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.) Bryan scoffed at the idea, and made a self-deprecating comment about needing a few more readers.

But I personally wanted to see the fictional town of Starvation Lake. Somehow the descriptions in the second book challenged my assumptions and made it hard to visualize it further. The road is where? You can see THAT from HERE? Etc.

So over Christmas break on the way back from skiing up north, I took my family on a little side trip to the actual Starvation Lake. We got off US 131 in Mancelona, hoping to come at it from the north. Things were pretty snow covered up there. I don’t know how many of you live in places where there are official snowmobile paths laid crossing the highway, but there were plenty up there. We went about 5 miles, realized we missed the turnoff, turned around and went down a road that wasn’t exactly paved but had farmhouses on it. So, you know, civilization.

Well, it stayed snow covered, then it veered back west when we wanted to go south. So I forged ahead on what looked like a single-lane road, not uncommon in the country. It was pretty rutty and rocky. We passed another farmhouse or two as the trees got to be a little thicker. it was a guessing game which roads were more “official” and likely to coincide with the map. I saw some stop signs in the distance, which was comforting, but they weren’t standard size. Maybe the county was saving money on the back roads by putting up mini-signs? Some routes were very evidently for snow-mobiles, and some not so evidently.

found at Visitgaylord.comEveryone in the car but me was getting worried that we’d be sending Christmas Eve either stuck in the frost-bitten Michigan outback or in a hospital from an accident. I’ve been on slippier roads, but not recently and not sober. I turned east on what looked like a major road–by that I mean it was wide and had tracks on it and everything–and followed that winding path until we dead-ended at a small oil pump bobbing it’s head arthritically amid the snow and dried cattails.

Okay, at this point I was persuaded that maybe this Kit Carson route wasn’t the best way to go, so we tried to find our way back. I did a Y-turn at the oil pump and didn’t end up stuck. Chalk one up for 35 years of winter driving. Just before a fork in the road, we caught a glimpse of a half-dozen snowmobilers blasting through the snow about 20 yards away. I slowed and stopped and gave the right of way, as if we were both on the roads designated for us. I still resolutely denied that I was driving on a snowmobile trail. I was on the road for the oil trucks, y’betcha.

I found our way back to a road with a real name (I’m pretty good with directions), and we drove all the way back to Mancelona. But I absolutely had to see the place by now, even though it was eating into our time to return and get ready for Christmas Eve. We took another left eastward off 131 and plowed on for a few miles. The road was still snow covered, but in certain patches you could see that there was indeed a paved road under it. Such City Slickers, needing pavement! After a while, we saw the sign for a Starvation Lake supper Club (“Champs”? I don’t remember), and followed the signs. They advertised “The Best Hamburgers in the World”, and judging by the cars in the lot, they must’ve been cooking something right (unless everyone was already getting tanked up for the holiday). We were still full from the gigantic bismarcks and bearclaws we’d bought in Petoskey at the beginning of the trip home, so we didn’t stop at the bar. I drove around Starvation Lake, hoping to maybe see the Gruley name on a mailbox or garage, but it was not to be. I even looked for the “hanging tree” the book is named after, but without luck. That will have to wait for another trip.

Found at http://www.twoeyeballs.com/art/zenphoto/the-fifty-u/michigan.jpg.phpI knew there was no real town called Starvation Lake. Bryan has said he modeled the town after another nearby city. Just guessing on the map, I thought he meant nearby Twin Lake. Which is good. Starvation Lake has exactly two commercial buildings. Both taverns. Twin Lake has two taverns AND a provisions store.

Bryan must have been modeling the town after the nearby city of Mancelona. That place has brick buildings housing diners and insurance companies and hardware stores and the like. But it’s a little too big, and it sits alongside the US highway and not on the shore of a good-sized glacier-carved lake, so it can’t help in painting a mental image for me. (BTW, the actual Starvation Lake was absolutely gorgeous in the winter sunlight, sunk below the bluffs and curving subtly so it can’t all be seen from any one vantage point.) For now, it’s all in Bryan’s head, and I’ll just have to reread the books if I want a snapshot.

Photo of snowmobile trail from www.visitGaylord.com.

Linoleum print of Michigan, one of a 50-state series, found at Two Eyeballs.

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As American as the Disgruntled Loner

Been reading so much for the past few days on the shooting in Tucson, way too much. A little bit has been about the actual incident, but most of it is about trying to figure out if anyone besides the shooter is to blame. What caused him to do it? Talk radio? Mein Kampf? Mental illness? Smoking pot (Thanks, David Frum, for never ignoring the truly ridiculous)?

I’m hoping it makes people consider what kind of America they want to live in. Of course, I thought about that after the Oklahoma City Bombing, and after 9/11, that it might cause some soul-searching. I was wrong, or maybe I didn’t like the answer. Maybe the Price of Freedom (speech, guns, or from responsibility) is worth the price of a dead nine-yr-old, a federal judge, and some retirees. For some people, it probably is, but it’s time for everyone to come clean about it.

Come on, America — we KNOW ourselves. We know our neighbors and our second cousins. Do we really think that everyone here has evolved enough to resist being driven crazy by all this violent blather?

I’m glad Sarah Palin finally commented on the shooting, and not surprised that she acted defensively, meanly, lashing out against her critics instead of showing a little humanity and humility. Can you imagine what goes on in that head? Nine people dead, and still, it’s all about her. And to describe a media-manufactured “blood libel”? Good God, how ignorant. “Blood libel” — does anyone with more than a high school education vet her comments? I don’t know if I’m more repulsed by her ignorance or her narcissism, but the end result is the same. She’s shown herself to be incapable of responding to a crisis in any kind of useful way.

Of course, I don’t blame Palin for the shooting — she’s just the visible coiffed head of the GOP right now. She also happens to use violent rhetoric and images constantly, and loves showing off how poorly she can handle a hunting rifle. The whole conservative movement is to blame, for not calling out the elements within it that wave the bloody shirt and scream about revolution. I don’t blame the “Tea Partiers”–I blame SOME of the Tea Partiers who, in their rage that the country will soon have a non-white majority, wave their guns around and scream about taking their country back by force, “blood of tyrants watering the tree of liberty” and all that bullying crap. I’m glad that Rep. Clyburn from South Carolina pointed out the rhetorical calls for violence reminds him of the civil rights era, and how hot tempers and manipulative speeches can contribute to getting people killed.

Or as the guy at Driftglass said, It’s not just one of them, it’s ALL of them.

While there’s a bunch of renewed talk about gun control now, it will come to zilch. I doubt there will be even the slightest tightening of Arizona’s laws, about which I know nothing. We’ve been told giving up any gun rights will lead to tyranny, so now we’ll have to deal with the tyranny of fear.

What I would hope is that the massacre might start a conversation about mental illness and how we try and ignore it. We still don’t know if the shooter had had any type of treatment for what was happening to him, but we know for certain that nobody was surprised by his actions. His outbursts and his violent nihilism was obvious to everyone in his life, apparently. Was there any attempt to treat him? I read one story that half the people in his home county had had their treatments for mental illness discontinued this year. It’s not the common cold — you can’t tell people to “tough it out” and get on with their lives.

Ever since deinstitutionalism in the 1980s, we’ve all seen people wandering the streets who should be getting some psychiatric care. Do they all become assassins? Thankfully no, but the way we treat them as disposable is a reflection of how we value life in this country. We shouldn’t be surprised when someone acts savagely, when we treat so many people as less-than-human.

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Do I Sound More Suave in French?

Like I wrote in the post below, I was interviewed by the Swiss paper Le Temps about the whole bowdlerization-of-Huck-Finn dust-up going on. The reporter didn’t send me the PDF like she promised, so I went on the website this morning and found I’d said this:

Joint aux Etats-Unis, James Finn Garner, auteur du grinçant Politiquement correct: contes d’autrefois pour lecteurs d’aujourd’hui (traduit chez Grasset, 1995), se réjouit que la décision de la maison d’édition ait provoqué une telle polémique. «Il y a un vrai débat. Les gens en ont marre du politiquement correct. Et tout colorer en rose ne change pas le fait que l’Amérique reste un pays disloqué, inégal, encore très raciste.»

Hope I come off good. I think she’s quoting my most lurid comment, like that’s surprising or something. Here’s what Babelfish says I said:

Joint with the United States, Fine James Garner, author of squeaking Politically correct: tales of formerly for readers of today (translated at Grasset, 1995), is delighted that the decision of the publisher caused such a polemic. “There is a true debate. People have some enough of politically correct. And all to colour pink does not change yet the fact that America remains a dislocated country, unequal, very racist.”

Didn’t know my book was “squeaking”, but I’ll take it as a compliment.

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Glad to See Twain Can Still Rile ’em Up

Just got off the phone with a journalist from Le Temps, which is a big daily newspaper in Switzerland. She wanted my opinion on the bowdlerization of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has dominated the news cycle during this slow week. I’m Mr. Politically Correct, after all, so I was flattered to be remembered and asked my opinion. At least her call forced me to think a little about the plan and my reactions to it.

Of course, substituting “Slave” for “nigger” in Huck Finn is ridiculous, but like many a ridiculous plan, someone is going to try it. The professor who is editing the volume says it’s intended for the teachers who want to use it in the classroom but are worried about lawsuits. I’m sympathetic to the teachers’ potential issues, but I have a suspicion that some people want the book to be a rollicking adventure story suitable for preteens, rather than the complex and often painful book it is. It’s not a book about a cracking fun raft ride, it’s about a young orphan’s moral growth and rejection of basically everything around him.

And Mark Twain is not our more literary version of Will Rogers. Just imagine the world of American letters without him, how arid and provincial and easily manageable the remaining writers would seem. We NEED the difficult, ornery, contradictory and flawed writer that Mark Twain was, because the era in which he grew up gave us a lot to be ashamed about. A lot that we need to remember.

Twain was a stickler for language, and he had the chance often in his life to change the offending word to something else. But nothing else had or still has the punch, the sting, the stink of human hate. “Nigger” is nowhere near the equivalent of “slave” (even though someone in the NYT asked why “slave” should be considered inoffensive in its own right). Nowhere near the dehumanization, the belittling, the oppression and pain. Was America built on the backs of slaves? Yep, right up til 1865. Was it built on the backs of niggers? Even more so, from sea to shining sea, and continues to this day. And, (not to diminish what black Americans have suffered) they come in many colors.

But I don’t think this new edition will gain any traction at all. For one thing, it’s still easy to pick up Huck Finn and enjoy it, so the original version will always attract readers who want to see what all the fuss is about. It’s not a fusty old cadaver of a book, it’s maddeningly alive. And until something else comes along, like Hemingway wrote, all American literature flows from it. I tried to explain this to the Swiss journalist, but probably didn’t do it adequately. For every person who might want to change the text, there are 50,000 of them who want to preserve it. (Now, if he’d made fun of religion or capitalism in it, like he did in his other lesser-known books, it might be a different story.)

It was gratifying to hear the reporter (who sounded kind of young, maybe in her 30s) talk about how people all over Europe and the rest of the world take a great deal of interest in American culture, and the perception that if America is anything, it’s a place where freedom of speech is a paramount virtue. She stumbled a bit when she almost said, “But America is still a racist country, right?” I agreed with her partially, that some parts (not just geographical) of the country will always be racist, but more to the point, it will always be an unequal society, which is why we can’t sanitize writers like Twain.

What’s more likely to diminish racism in America, editing out one word from a novel, or having people read the novel and be confronted all its pain and cruelty? The answer is obvious.

At least all this news coverage has unearthed a Twain quote I’d never heard before, which I really like: “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”

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Great Comic Art Show Coming Up!

The show “Static Creep” will be opening on Friday, January 14 at the Los Manos Gallery in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood. It was put together by my friend Tony Akins, and will feature art from him and more than 20 artists, including:

Chris Burnham, Corinne Mucha, Jill Thompson, Gary Gianni, Andrew Pepoy, Alex Wald, Mike Norton, Hilary Barta, Dave Dorman, Jeffrey Brown, Jenny Frison, Sarah Becan, Nicole Hollander, Mitch O’Connell, Douglas Klauba, Heather McAdams, Lucy Knisley, Tim Seeley and Bill Reinhold.

If you can’t find someone in that group to love, you’re a pitiable wretch and it’s no wonder dogs and children avoid you.

Here’s Tony, speaking authoritatively in that booming voice of his:

StatiCCreep from Mieke Zuiderweg on Vimeo.

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A Monstrous Christmas Season

Spurred on by my limerick for “White Zombie”, Hilary Barta over at Limerwrecks has spent most of the season posting paeans to old horror movies. Here’s one I contributed for ol Doc Frankenstein:

His raising the dead’s not a living
and townsfolk are most unforgiving
But Doc isn’t crying
His monster’s undying
A gift that will never stop giving

Go over and enjoy the other ones.

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Free Stories for Christmas!

Some readers out there might know that every Christmas for the past 20 years or so, I have attempted to write some kind of Yule-themed story for my wife. The first story I ever had published, entitled “Jerry’s Last Fare” in the late Chicago Tribune Magazine, was also the first I ever wrote as a gift to my wife. For better or worse, I took it as an omen.

Since then, there has been a veritable Whitman’s Sampler of stories, some funny, some frightening, some strange. And since my wife is the understanding sort, she always accepts them enthusiastically, even when it’s obvious from the writing that my muse has been snowed in at Denver Airport.

Some of these stories you’ll never see, and you’re lucky for that, but a few of them aren’t bad. In fact, three of them have been set up as separate pages for this blog. It’s hard to notice the links to them at the right, so I thought I’d pull them out here:

“Mr. Dickens Buys a Comb”–in which our hero, Victorian in taste if not in time, has to navigate the perils of a megastore at Christmas to buy himself an article of personal hygiene.

“Chex Mix Confidential”–What is it about Chex mix? Why is it so impossibly addictive? Why do people get in heated arguments about the correct way to make it? This bare-knuckle police procedural blows the lid off the whole enterprise.

“The Marketeers at Christmas”–in which two nameless, shameless, witless advertising men spitball ideas about how to link Christmas with a corn-borer pesticide.

Please enjoy these little presents, and pass them forward if you do to anyone who would like them.

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Groovy Ghosts of Christmases Past

Some people’s Christmas memories smell like gingerbread, or pine trees, or egg nog.

Mine smells like English Leather cologne.

All my early childhood Christmases have melted into a blur. I can remember some gifts, and the decorations in the house (some of which I’ve inherited), but if we didn’t have photographs of those years, my memory vault would be even more empty than it is now. I remember sledding and tobogganing during the break, and trying to skate and giving up because no one would teach me and my knees couldn’t take the punishment, and hot chocolate in the warming house by the skating rink. I remember too when I was 4 or 5 and I pulled the whole tree down on top of myself. I couldn’t move, pinned not only by the nominal weight of the tree but also by the horror of my mistake and the guilt of somehow defiling our whole Christmas by my carelessness. The needles pricked, too.

Real strong memories of the Christmas SEASON, however, only begin for me around 1970. I would be 10 years old then, and whatever was going on in childhood was being replaced by hints of what teenage and adult life would bring. I had two older brothers, and watching them operate from a distance (which was the only way they’d let me) offered tantalizing hints of what was to come.

I remember shopping for my eldest brother, who would be 15 at this time. He wanted a copy of the LP “Steppenwolf 7”. It had a VERY psychedelic cover, with skulls and seascapes and the band acting tough. I could’ve bought it at Dearborn Music, a steady old store that’s still running, but instead I ventured to The Happy Apple, the “head shop” that had opened in town. Inside was run-of-the-mill hippie stuff: black light posters, clothes, candles, those brass bells on a cord that everyone was selling for some reason. They might have been selling something more illicit, but I was too young to know. All I know is, I felt pretty damn cool to be walking down our main shopping drag with the bag from The Happy Apple, with its drippy letters and fat, happy, purple, and obviously stoned apple mascot.

My next eldest brother would’ve been in junior high around that time, so he was concerned about hygiene and smelling good for the ladies. This is where the smell of English Leather comes in. I remember buying him a big bottle of the stuff, in a cedar box. There must have been six or seven ounces of the concoction, enough to supply a whole Polish disco. He might have never used it, but the smell of it permeated our dresser for years. besides, it was enough to have the feeling that I had nudged him a little along maturity by buying it for him (it was probably my failsafe present for him for years, regardless of whether he ever opened the bottle.)

Many of the other gifts of that time also had a distinct counter-culture vibe to them. Designs were getting bolder, sleeker. The Panasonic Ball radio was pretty “boss”, and lasted a surprisingly long time. Puzzles like SOMA were much cooler than the board games we used to get. Even the jigsaw puzzles in our stockings were getting cooler, in round shape with fantastical characters on them like giant Mer-men. We received macracmé belts and string art kits, because we were a pretty crafty family.

(Evidence of 1960s Christmas crafty: angel figurines made from turning down the pages of Readers Digest and spray-painting the books to make cone-shaped stand-alone items. Evidence of 1970s Christmas craft: Candles, candles, candles!)

And late at night, when everyone was asleep, I got to stay up late and watch “The Tonight Show”. It seemed like a swinging time back then. The men, including Johnny, were wearing sideburns and flashy jackets. The women were dressed up as if they were headed to a party, and everyone smoked and told double entendres that even my juvenile imagination thought were hilarious and naughty. (A year or two later, I found my first “Holiday” issue of Playboy, and enjoyed a full mental assault on what I thought grown-up Christmases would eventually be like: lascivious office parties, jazz concerts, slick cocktails, and naked women playing pool in my wood-paneled study.)

Innocence at Christmas? Sorry, it never grabbed my attention.

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Delays for “Rex Koko, Private Clown”

For those fans out there who’ve heard me mention that Rex Koko’s new adventure, Honk Honk, My Darling, would be available soon, I apologize. The chapters that I included in the Kindle editions of my other books might just be have to remain excruciating teasers for the time being.

I’m waiting on the cover art for Honk Honk, and have been for several weeks. What complicates this is that none of the e-book distributors will carry a book that doesn’t have a cover. So, I could slap up a piece of junk and try to pull in some sales, or I could wait until I get the hella-cool cover that I’ve commissioned and which everyone will go ape over. For better or worse, I’ve chosen the latter route.

The new, whizbang Rex Koko website should be up before Christmas, in some shape or form, so readers will be able to catch up on the latest news there. In the meantime, everyone will just have to sit and wait. When a writer is late with his copy, you can motivate him by screaming at him abusively until he cranks out the desired verbiage. Apparently, this tactic does not work on artists, but I have yet to figure out what does. I’m open to suggestions.

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E-Books Aren’t for Writers with OCD

It took me a while to get my e-books up on the system at Amazon, and then at Smashwords. It wasn’t that it was so all-fired complicated to do, although it took a few uploads before the layout and everything was to my satisfaction. It was easy enough to format for Kindle: All I had to do was convert it to an HTML document, and then follow their detailed instructions. Smashwords, which converts the books to the formats for Sony, Nook, iPad, and smart phones, as well as for their own sale, took a little more finessing with Word, but it was easy once I got the hang of it.

No, the big problem of launching manuscripts into electronic format is keeping your hands off the copy while you go over it. As Paul Valery (or DaVinci, or Truman Capote, or someone else, according to my extensive web research) once said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Well, with e-books, that doesn’t have to be the case now! A writer can upload revisions to his or her ebook continually. The tweaking could be endless!

I’m lucky. I had a little guideline I could follow. Since these were ebooks of volumes that had already been released, changing much copy would put me in danger of creating a book that people wouldn’t recognize when they bought it. I could have updated some references from 15 years ago (When writing the original, I thought it was funny to make Scrooge aware of the passage of time by his buzzing alarm-wristwatch. Wow, very Dick Tracy! How was I to know that I should’ve made it his cell phone? I’m not a visionary like Steve Jobs). But most of the cultural references were still valid. I don’t think I mentioned anything that screamed “Clinton Era” too much. No talk of tech bubbles or “Celestine Prophecy”.

Worse, it was sorely tempting to heavily edit some of the stories in Once Upon a More Enlightened Time. They tend to ramble on, I think, and become shaggy dog stories. Because they had been read on stage, most of the stories in Politically Correct Bedtime Stories were shorter, punchier, and clearer in what they were making fun of. But If I had begun to edit the stories to any great extent, the e-book would probably never have made it in front of the public.

So, for better or for worse, the books in the Politically Correct Storybook are almost exactly as they were when they were published in 1994-5. I was tempted to insert a new introduction for one or all of them, but then what would I do with the original introductions, which I think are pretty funny and set the tone for the books almost perfectly? Can you insert an older introduction into an addendum? Is it still an introduction if you do that? To keep things from getting messy, I chose to keep things just as they had been. Whether the books are museum pieces or still have something to say to people, is the decision of the reader.

Of course, I still had problems tinkering with the new stories and poems I was inserting in these volumes. I even had to break out the OCR software to scan my first ever published story, “Jerry’s Last Fare”, which was published in the Chicago Tribune Magazine in 1989. No electronic version of that one, obviously. There were certainly a few lines in that chestnut I would change, but cripes, there comes a time when a guy has to abandon some things, right? I figure the reader will be forgiving.

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The Continued Use of an Old Movie Palace

Last night, I went to the Winter Program for my daughter’s school over at the Copernicus Center on Lawrence near Milwaukee in Chicago. What a sumptuous auditorium that place is! I had no idea. It was formerly the Gateway Theater, the first movie palace built in Chicago for talking pictures, so the acoustics were very good and it felt very comfortable and intimate. Apparently the auditorium is busy almost every night, probably because of the dearth of midsized auditoriums on the North side. It also shows the vitality of the Polish community here. The lobby was beautifully redone and had a barmaid slinging Swarski Beer and Polish merlot.

And of course, the interior was tastefully done. Minimalist, even. With sparkling lights in the ceiling to simulate stars. (The only thing the Music Box Theater has over these guys is their cloud machine for the ceilng.)

Interior of the Copernicus Center, from their websiteGoing to the movies isn’t an event anymore. With Netflix and streaming videos, and smartphones playing movies, people can barely drag themselves out of their mancaves to enjoy the cinematic arts. But it’s gratifying to see a place like the Copernicus Center operating, because it gives a glimpse into a bygone era.

For a gallery of pictures of old, mostly empty or torn down Chicago movie places, click here. Bigger isn’t always better, obviously.

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New E-Books for Politically Correct Bedtime Stories!

The time has come to announce that my first three bestselling books — long out of print in America — are now alive again. I have done it. I have brought the dead back to life, with the help of the newest technology.

Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, Once Upon a More Enlightened Time, and Politically Correct Holiday Stories are now all available as e-books, for all you e-literate readers out there. (All you illiterate readers out there will have to content themselves with the Twilight books.)

Kindle, Kobo, Nook, IPad, mobi — however you like reading a book that’s not made of a dead tree — they’re all available. You can even buy them as pdf’s to read on your regular old computer (the free apps, Kindle for PC and Kindle for Mac, also make this possible).

And to sweeten the pot, especially for those fans who already have the hardback editions, each volume contains extra material, most of it never before seen.

To wit:

PC Bedtime Stories: the rewritten rhymes of “A Child’s Garden of Political Correctness”; the story “A Royal Revenge,” commissioned by the BBC; and the long-awaited “The Duckling That Was Judged on Its Persunal Merits and Not on Its Physical Appearance”

Once Upon: A full-length PC novella of the adventures of Pinocchio!

PC Holiday Stories: the hardscrabble story of Santa’s poor Irish childhood, “Santa’s Ashes”, written with A.J. Jacobs (The Know-It-All); and my first published story, the Christmas tale “Jerry’s Last Fare”.

Each book also contains a free chapter of the upcoming Rex Koko debut novel, Honk Honk, My Darling. Yes, fans of clown noir and pantaloon pulp, Rex Koko’s first adventure will soon be available in e-book versions. Later, I’ll also have a paperback version and an audio podcast of Honk Honk available. The only thing holding it up is that I’m waiting for the cover art. A complete Rex Koko webpage is being forged as you read this. Yes, it’s Christmas in December. Well, Christmas in EARLY December. Yahoo!

Click here to order the Kindle editions from Amazon. (You know, you don’t need a real Kindle to buy these, right? You can download the free apps Kindle for PC or Kindle for Macs, and enjoy them on your home computer. You can also read them on your phone.)

Click here to order them from iTunes. (coming soon 12/2/10 — ISBN updates processing)

Click here to order the Nook edition from Barnes & Noble. (coming soon 12/2/10 — ditto)

Click here to order them from Smashwords (all the pdfs and epubs you’d ever want).