I’m sure that y’all know about our huge event with Chuck Palahniuk coming up on Thursday, October 20 at Hal and Mal’s! We are so excited to have Chuck in town and to celebrate Lemuria’s 36th year of business in Jackson. We are going to have some great bands, great drinks and great food but what I am really thrilled about is the opportunity to wear a costume.  I love dressing up and Jackson does not really have many opportunities to do so.

.

I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT COSTUMES SHOULD ONLY BE WORN ON HALLOWEEN!!!

I love dressing in costume because I can be whoever I would like to be if only for a few hours.  Through the years I have worn many costumes to many events.  I am a firm believer that anything can be a costume, in fact, some of my favorites I have worn were just clothes from my closet and a wig.  The dress was actually a sequined dress I wore for my debutante party and a hot pink wig…I wasn’t anything specific just glamorous!  Another time, I put an all black outfit on, a blue wig and had an invisible dog leash.  People would ask who I was and my answer was ‘the crazy blue haired lady from next door who walks her invisible dog”.  Masks are great things to have on hand…you just slide it over your head and BAM!!…you are a butterfly!

I have already started working on my costume for DAMNED NIGHT.  The base of this costume is right out of my closet but what is going to make this one fantastic are the accessories.  I have completely taken over the dining room table and there is an orange extension cord spread across the den floor so I can have my glue gun plugged in. (I’m telling you a glue gun is an essential tool in the costume creative process especially if anything has to be embellished.)  One of my #1 rules in the costume process is comfort…Never wear something you will be miserable in.  From head to toe, you must be comfortable or you will not have fun.  I march in the St. Paddy’s Day parade with The Green Ladies so I bought a pair of cheap but comfortable sneakers, painted them green and stenciled the ‘mud flap girl’ on the sides…I am good to go for the entire parade route.

I do not have a problem with store bought costumes at all.  In fact some of my pieces are store bought and I just am putting a little pizazz on them.  I like to shop at Party City on County Line Road because it it locally owned and open all year not just in the Halloween season.  Through out the year though I am looking for things that can be used for a costume.  I especially love things like hats, tights, and costume jewelry.  Just like in real life a good costume like a good outfit is nothing without good accessories!

While I am dressing as a character from Damned I do realize that not everyone has read it.  YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DRESS AS A PALAHNIUK CHARACTER! I want you to be who or whatever you want to be but I have taken the liberty to give you a few suggestions from Damned and his other books.

1. Demons or anything hellish

2. Porn Star (Male or Female)

3. Beauty Queen (disfigured or not)

4. Exchange Student

5. Bloody guy with black eye (remember the first rule of Fight Club)

I have talked to a few folks who have to work, or have class and are going to be coming straight to the party so they cannot wear a costume.  PSHAW!!  If you plan well you can do it!  I want you to go home look in your closet, check your assorted accessories and all that make-up under the sink.  Wear a base to work or class and put the rest on in the car!  It is easy and I promise you will have a great time.  I hope y’all will come to the party and that I don’t recognize you right away! HA!

JX//RX

Chuck’s Damned Book Night is Thursday, October 20th!

Not Halloween.

Costumes are encouraged but not required.

Get the details for the event here–this goes to our website.

Check in on our Facebook Event page.

See all of our Damned Blogs for the Chuck Palahniuk event.

Follow the Chuck Palahniuk Event on Twitter: @LemuriaBooks

cpcp

I finished reading Nightwoods last week, and I will for sure be recommending it to many Lemuria readers during the holidays coming sooner than we’ll all be ready! Nightwoods is fast paced, plot driven, and well written. Although I usually read psychological realism, and usually character driven fiction, I found myself really enjoying this “story”. Since I had never read a Charles Frazier novel, but had, of course, known of his fame in Cold Mountain, I knew that I was in for a treat.

Initially what captivated me were the ease and powerful way in which Frazier uses sentence fragments. Not many writers can use this art form successfully without the writing seeming choppy, but Frazier seems quite at home and comfortable with their use:

A cool November day, blue sky and sunlight thin and angling, even at noon. Leaves entirely off most trees, but still hanging tough and reddish brown on the oaks. 

As I was reading this new Frazier novel, in my mind I was subconsciously comparing the setting to some of my long time favorite plot driven novels, such as Tim Gautreaux’s The Missing, as well as Ron Rash’s Serena. Readers who liked these fast paced, often mysterious plots, will also like Nightwoods, for Frazier, who grew up in the mountains of North Carolina is an expert in placing action in colorful settings.

At the beginning, the protagonist, a no-nonsense capable “outdoorsey” woman, has received from a social child care worker young twins who are the orphans of her previously murdered sister. Never having been married, and certainly never a mother, even Luce realizes immediately that there is something peculiar about these six or seven year old twins, mainly that they don’t talk. Trying to gain their confidence and love, Luce tries all sorts of things to get the “fire loving and setting” kids to start communicating. The reader learns that they probably witnessed the murder of their own mother and makes allowances for their behavior. They are quite clever and confident and certainly not dumb!  Frazier’s use of the flashback shows perfection as the reader also puts bits and pieces together of Luce’s past, as well as the past of her new significant other, who is actually the grandson of the old man who rented Luce the old resort hotel where she lives.

Toward the end of the novel as the action and suspense rapidly increase, the reader leans forward as the twins flee into the mountains to escape their mother’s murderer. Beautiful woodsy settings, expertly and carefully detailed by Frazier add to the delight of this story. This novel is sure to be recognized nationally. After all, Cold Mountain, Frazier’s first novel was an international best seller and also won the National Book Award in 1977. Thirteen Moons, published a few years ago,  was a “New York Times” best seller.

Come hear Charles Frazier read from this new novel on Tuesday, October 11, at 5 p.m. An autographed copy of Nightwoods is a rare opportunity to be seized, as well as a chance to hear a prominent contemporary writer, a master of the written word.

Nightwoods by Charles Frazier is our October First Editions Club pick along with What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes.

Click here to read Joe’s blog piece on Nightwoods.

-Nan

Dear Listener,

With the Chuck Palahniuk event just around the corner (October 20, don’t forget!), I wanted to discuss what CP means to me. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I started reading Palahniuk.  I started with Choke, continued with Fight Club, moved on to Lullaby, found Survivor, and finished Invisible Monsters.  As a teenage boy, I became simply engrossed with the intricacies to which Palahniuk goes to utterly disgust his reader.  I loved being thoroughly shocked by the last five pages of the book.  Nothing made me happier than finishing  a book and immediately starting from the beginning to try to piece together what exactly it was that had just happened.  As I grew older, I started reading classics, and was unable to keep up with Palahniuk’s quick production of novels.  At some point in that regression of obsession, I picked up his 2007 novel Rant.  That is when everything changed.

Along with most men of my generation, time travel, to me, is a revered philosophical discussion.  Granted there is never a right answer, only illogical logic, I can have a conversation about time travel for hours and hours.  When you consider the different types of time travel (i.e. Back to the Future Time Travel, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure Time Travel, Terminator Time Travel, etc.), and the paradoxes that ensue through those types, the discussion can become complex and heated.  In Chuck Klosterman‘s most recent book of essays Eating The Dinosaur (2009) there is an essay that deals entirely with time travel in pop culture.  (And if you think about it, time travel really wouldn’t exist without pop culture, right?)  In this essay (titled “Tomorrow Rarely Knows”) Klosterman covers several classic works like H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and a 1733 novel by Irishman Samuel Madden called Memoirs of the Twentieth Century.  

He goes on to discuss the 2004 movie Primer, which looks at time travel from a very realistic standpoint. (i.e. the inventors are actually engineers, they use the machine to make money, there is technical mathematical jargon in the dialogue, etc.)  He also discusses several time travel paradoxes.  At this point in the essay Klosterman actually mentions our hero Palahniuk in reference to Rant.  Klosterman writes:

“In his fictional oral history Rant, author Chuck Palahniuk refers to the Godfather Paradox as this: ‘The idea that if one could travel backward in time, one could kill one’s own ancestor, eliminating the possibility said time traveler would ever be born — and thus could never have lived to travel back to commit the murder.’  The solution to this paradox (according to Palahniuk) is the theory of splintered alternative realities, where all possible trajectories happen autonomously and simultaneously.”

Even after reading Rant more than a dozen times, there are still facts and thoughts that pop into my head.  Every read through the book shines light on a different hypothesis on who the characters are.  Several of the characters may or may not exist as one person who has allegedly (maybe) killed several of his relatives and infected the entire world with some sort of un-treatable rabies.  In Rant, these kinds of events may or may not take place, but they are definitely told through the eyes of his friends and colleagues.  As mentioned earlier, the entire book is written as a fictional oral history.  Rarely do I pick up Palahniuk anymore, unless it is Rant.

If you want to hear more about time travel, here is an excerpt from a footnote from Klosterman’s essay:

“Before [Michael J.] Fox plays ‘Johnny B. Goode’ at the high school dance [in the 1985 movie Back to the Future], he tells his audience, ‘This is an oldie… well, this is an oldie from where I come from.’  Chuck Berry recorded ‘Johnny B. Goode’ in 1958.  Back to the Future was made in 1985, so the gap is twenty-seven years. ”

Klosterman goes on to explain that no one would refer to Back to the Future as an oldie today, even though the time spanned is very nearly the same.  He points out that “as culture accelerates, the distance between historical events feels smaller.  This, I suppose, is society’s own version of time travel.”

In this scene from Back to the Future, Chuck Berry’s cousin Marvin Berry calls him to give him an example of the “new sound he’s been looking for.”  If this happened, and Chuck Berry stole his own song from Marty McFly, who wrote “Johnny B. Goode”?

For The Chucks, Part 1, click here.

cpcp

by Simon

Editor’s Note: Kaycie, a former Lemuria bookseller and blogger pictured left, is now living in Paris while she studies French via New York University. We are lucky to feel that we have our very own Lemurian abroad, in Paris no less, and are tickled to share some of her more-or-less book related experiences from France. Enjoy.

I just made my second visit to Shakespeare and Company. If you don’t know about Shakespeare and Co., I’ll give you this brief description: it was opened by Sylvia Beach and became the hang-out for many of the 1920s expats—you know, people like Hemingway and Joyce.  That bookstore closed during the German occupation and never reopened, but the one that’s alive and well today is a tribute to Beach’s store.  It primarily sells English language books (British covers, so it’s fun to see those in comparison to the books I saw every day working at Lemuria bookstore), and they also have a reading room/library and a piano to play upstairs. I love it.

I bought a tote bag to carry my schoolbooks in and an anthology recently released by Tin House called Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Sublime from Tin House, which features stories from some of my favorites including Aimee Bender, Karen Russell, Miranda July, Kelly Link, and Lydia Davis.

Here are some photos of Meryl and me exploring the store. (It was hard to get photos inside because so many people were packed in there, but suffice to say it’s magical.)

-Kaycie

Dear Listener, When I was a freshman in high school, my cousin and I traded books.  He gave me Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture ManifIesto (2003) by Chuck Klosterman.  In return I gave him my treasured (and personally annotated) copy of Choke (2001) by Chuck Palahniuk.

Having been a Palahniuk fan, I felt like I saw through Klosterman’s plot.  I wasn’t disappointed, but I was a little disappointed.  I loved it, but was unimpressed.  I wanted it to be better.  I wanted it to be more complex.  It was Klosterman’s writing, but I wanted it to be Palahniuk’s.