BUDDY GUY rules. But, you knew that already, right?

In case you never heard of him, Buddy Guy is the greatest guitar player alive right now, and probably has been for a while. Uzee and I has the chance to see him play on Saturday night, and man, he was great.

Buddy's 72 years old and has been playing since the '50s, so he has, as they say, chops. For my money, his records Stone Crazy!, Damn Right I've Got the Blues, Feels Like Rain, Slippin' In, Heavy Love and Sweet Tea are some of the best records--not just blues records--ever made. He played for about an hour and a half on Saturday night, not a very long show, but what the hell, he's a senior citizen.

He also rocked. He played any number of great songs, like "Fever," "Love Her With a Feeling" and "Drowning on Dry Land," and ended with a somewhat sloppy version of one of his prettiest songs, "Feels Like Rain" that led into Ray Charles' "What'd I Say." In between he jammed on long guitar solos and played around with his keyboard player his other guitarist and even brought some child prodigy onstage for about fifteen minutes. Oh and he sings amazingly too. Halfway through "Drowning on Dry Land," he walked off the stage and up the aisle--singing and playing the whole time--stopping to flirt with the women, then walked out of the auditorium and upstairs into the balcony, where he kept it all going. They went, needless to say, nuts.

In case you need more convincing, check out some of his pages at Amazon and listen to some clips:

http://www.amazon.com/Damn-Right-Ive-Got-Blues/dp/B0007VBF24/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1206966195&sr=8-3

Rock on, Buddy! Here's hoping you play another 50 years...

Odyssey Books

First of all, a big thank you to Odyssey Books in South Hadley for hosting me, and especially to Emily their events person, who made sure that everything went off all right. It was not a huge event, there were maybe 10 or 12 people in attendance, but people were interested and lively and I think we had a pretty good conversation. I read a bit and then people asked questions, about the new book, about the book I'm writing now, about Pakistan, about the last book I wrote and so on. So it was fun, and thanks everyone for coming out.

My next "event" will be at the Borders Bookstore in Farmington, Connecticut--yup, my hometown--on Sunday afternoon, April 20th, at 2pm. This will be followed on the weekend of the 25th by an appearance at the Newburyport Literary Festival, something for which I still have no information whatsoever. I'll post it when I get it. But if anyone is in central Connecticut on April 20th, come on over to the Borders near the Westfarms Mall and say howdy.

The Saw Doctors!

Last night (St Patrick's Day) Uzee and I went to see and hear The Saw Doctors at the Calvin Theater in Northampton. Great venue, great crowd, great band. If you don't know them, and chances are you don't, they play rock & roll with a vaguely Irish twist. For my money, their best songs tend to be the slower ones. But don't take my word for it--check these YouTube videos. (These are, I should make clear, not from the concert I attended, but they did play both songs, and they give a fair idea of what the band is like.)






Bless me father for I have sinned
She has big brown eyes & silky skin
Bless me father, I couldn't resist
Father, you have no idea what you've missed...

Uzee's letter to Barack Obama

Uzma Aslam Khan has written a letter to Obama in which she asks a number of questions which, needless to say, no one in the US media has bothered to ask--but which many people both inside and outside the States would love to have answered. It's posted on the always-lively-sometimes-shocking alternative news site, Counterpunch. Take a look:

http://www.counterpunch.org/uzma03152008.html

Or there's a link from her own blog:

http://uzmaaslamkhan.blogspot.com

Please take a look... even if you're a supporter of Obama. Maybe especially then.

DON'T FORGET TO TAKE THE POLL AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE!

A hopeful sign, maybe.

So.

I wake up this morning and it's cloudy. I go to the market to shop for groceries and it's actually flurrying snow, and by the time I get out of the Big Why the snow is coming down fairly thick and I'm thinking, "Man, I thought we were done with this." More fool me. And I know I've only been here for a month and a half or so, but I've already had my year's fill of winter, I think.

So I put the food away and start walking down to the library which is about 35 minutes from the house. Still snowing but as I walk the snow segues into drizzly rain before petering out altogether. And then I'm downtown and five minutes away from the library and what do I see pecking around in the front yard of someobody's house? Robins. Red bosoms and all, two of them no less. Male and female? I dunno. But there were two, and were strolling around in the recently-fallen-now-melting-but-not-yet-fully-melted snow, looking like they expected things to get much nicer very soon. And I thought "Aw shucks. Spring is on its way, maybe."

It was nice.

Washington Post gives thumbs-up

Here's a link to a very positive, though brief, review of Monster, published in today's Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/06/AR2008030602663.html

And for those of you in western Massachusetts, don't forget that I will be appearing at Odyssey Books in South Hadley (on College Street, right across from Mount Holyoke College) on Thursday, March 20 at 7:30pm. This is a reading/q+a/book signing event. So come on down and tell me if you think the Post got it right...

The Page 99 Test

Okay, here's an interesting idea.

Ford Madox Ford apparently once said something like: "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." This is a fun idea and maybe even a true one, since certainly there are propensities that a writer will reveal on any given page, as well as particular strengths, weaknesses and so on. But is it true? Well I don't know. It's kind of like saying that any two minutes of a movie will show the quality of the whole movie, which is patently untrue (or else trailers would never give an inaccurate view of the film). Or like one joke will tell you whether you'll enjoy the comedian, or whatever.

On the other hand, there are books of mine--I'm thinking of Samson here--which do have a kind of unity in their tone and outlook and treatment, such that if you did open randomly to page 99, well, maybe you would form an accurate impression of the whole thing.

As it turns out, there's a fellow named Marshal Zeringue, and he has an entire blog devoted to this idea. He asks writers to comment on their own books' page 99, and decide whether Ford's axiom holds true or not. What a great idea. He asked me to do this for monster, and I did, and he posted it, and here's the link:

http://page99test.blogspot.com/2008/03/david-maines-monster-1959.html

If you read it and then hit "Home" at the bottom of his blog, you go to his homepage, which has not only my essay but many others by many other writers talking about their books. What's interesting o me is that there's a real range of responses to this page 99 idea. And you thought the internet was only good for You Tube...

"Maine can write, no question there."

...Or at least, so say the fine folks in Vail, Colorado, whose Vail Daily reviewed Monster and gave it a generally favorable reading. (Though they make reference to the "fundamentalist Islamic texts" that I cite in the appendix--say what?) For those completists among you, here's the link:

http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20080228/AE/257122335

It is, as I say, generally positive, though there are some weird turns of phrase in there too. Ah well... I'm guilty of that myself, from time to time.

Keep an eye on Bigthink.com

The lively and often-entertaining site Bigthink.com interviewed me while in NYC last week, and is supposedly going to post the hour-long (!) interview sometime soon. I'll post the link when it shows up, but in the meantime, the site itself is well worth exploring:

http://www.bigthink.com/

NY Times: You win some, you lose some

Janet Maslin at the New York Times has given a thoughtful, though mixed, review of Monster, 1959 in today's edition of the paper. I won't claim that it's entirely positive--it's not--but there is certainly a blend of both admiration and doubt. Anyway, it's food for thought, and she does say enough nice things to make me feel like maybe I picked the right career after all. (Your mileage may vary.) Here's the link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/books/25masl.html

Barnes and Nobles Rocks; Rhinebeck Swings

First of all, many many thanks to both the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Greenwich Village, NYC, and to Oblong Books and Music in Rhinebeck, NY, for their generosity in hosting me over the weekend. Both events went well, although both were small; maybe 8 or 10 people in the city, and 6 or 7 in Rhinebeck. But that was okay, it just added to the intimacy of the events, and gave me the chance to talk to people face-to-face, which is how I like to do it.

Above is a photo of the tremendously kind Dick Hermans, who runs Oblong Books and Music. I have to say, I've been in a lot of bookstores in my life, and this is one of the finest I've ever seen. And I'm not just saying that because they were nice to me... Oblong's book selection is outstanding, especially their fiction, and the music range is impressive too, especially for a relatively small store. I urge anyone with an interest to take a ride out through Rhinebeck sometime and check it out. Rhinebeck is a fun little town in and of itself, and home of the famous Aerodrome that offers weekly air shows using restored World War I biplanes and triplanes.

(The fact that, in the above photo, I appear to be falling asleep, has nothing to do with either the own or the bookstore, but is just the side effect of my recent change in medication. Oh, come on, I'm kidding.)

In both venues I read for about 25 minutes from the new book, then took questions, some of which focused on the material in the book (monster movies, in particular) and some which were more general about how I go about writing anything at all. (Typical question: do I make an outline? Answer: no.) People also askes about living in Pakistan, my perception of events there, and whether I thought the US media reflected those events accurately. (Answer: no.) So all in all, the two events, each about an hour long, were interesting and fun both for me and--I hope--for the people who attended.

Special mention must be made of my number one fan, Lori from Pennsylvania, who drove up from the Poconos to attend the first evening's reading at the B&N on the Upper West Side--the event that got cancelled. I went up to that store anyway, on the off chance that some people might show after reading this blog, and lo! there was Lori and her pal (now my pal too) Sunshine, looking baffled at the guy behind the counter who was explainig patiently that nope, Dave Maine wasn't due to appear that night... Anyway we ended up sitting for coffee for an hour and, once again, having a great time talking about just about everything. So that was time well spent--thanks, Lori & Sunshine.

Dec 19 Reading HAS BEEN CANCELLED

...Not by me, but there you go. The Dec 20 event at Barnes and Noble in Greenwich Village was intended to replace the reading at 82nd and Broadway, but nobody thought to tell me that.

My sincere apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced by this. If it were up to me, I'd be there anyway. Thanks for understanding and I hope to see you tomorrow.

Off to NYC

Tomorrow (Tuesday, February 19) I'll be trundling down to New York to do a couple of reading events:

FEBRUARY 19 (Tuesday), Barnes and Noble at 82nd and Broadway, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

FEBRUARY 20 (Wednesday), Barnes and Noble in Greenwich Village, Ave of the Americas at 8th Street, 7:30pm. Same deal: Reading, q+a, signing. Come along and ask me something really confrontational and snotty. Make it fun!

Maybe I'll get a photo or two from these events to post next time, along with a funny story. Hey, it could happen...

Also in store:

FEBRUARY 23 (Saturday) brings me to Rhinebeck, NY, and Oblong Books on 6422 Montgomery Street (Route 9), also at 7:30pm for a similar event. For those of you who prefer your lit'rary events outside the big city.

MARCH 20 (Thursday), in South Hadley, MA, home of Mount Holyoke College, has a reading at Odyssey Books, 9 College Street. 7:30, same schedule.

That's all for now. Hope to see you on one of these evenings.

Cooking Tips for Bachelors #4: sauteed bay scallops

Happy Valentine's Day, sweethearts.

So here I am at my mom's house in Connecticut, sitting in front of her Ferrari-esque computer (motto: "More computing power than the Apollo missions had") in scenic yet wintry Ye Olde Newwe Englande. And what better way to celebrate, um, mid-February ("only six more months till winter!") than by whipping up a pan of tasty yet delicious bay scallops, buttery and tender and melt-in-your-mouth-tastic:

1. Heat some olive oil in a frying pan, enough to coat the bottom. Drop in a couple tablespoons of butter and let it melt.

2. Dice as much garlic as you can stand, and toss that in. (I use 5 or 6 cloves.) Let it start to sizzle, then add a little salt and pepper.

3. The whole mess is pretty hot by now. Pour in some white wine, which will sizzle and snap in a most satisfying manner.

4. Add about a pound of bay scallops. Be sure to slice off the little stem-like foot beforehand, otherwise this bit will grow rubbery when you cook it.

5. Stir the scallops around in the pan for about 90 seconds. Don't cook them too much. They will go from translucent to white, and that's when you're done. If you can bother yourself to flip them, so both sides are cooked through, that's nice.

6. Remove from heat. You now have a pound of delicious scallops and a bunch of gravy. Slop it over some rice and dig in.

REMEMBER: SEA FOOD = BRAIN FOOD. THIS IS IMPORTANT, BUT I CAN'T REMEMBER WHY.

Oprah Mag exhibits great taste and discernment

Take a look at what the March issue of O, the Oprah Magazine (on sale now, BTW) has to say about Monster, 1959:

More updates

For those of you in or near to Western Massachusetts, who are uninterested or unable to get to New York this month, I will be appearing at Odyssey Books at 9 College Street, South Hadley, Mass. on Thursday, March 20 at 7:30 for a reading/q&a/signing. The phone # is (413) 534-7307. In the coming weeks I am also supposed to be interviewed for a web site called Bigthink.com, which is apparently something special (though it's new to me), and I believe the interview will be posted on the site. Besides this, rumor has it that both The New York Times and O, the Oprah magazine are due to review Monster, 1959 in the near future--like, in the next week or two. So keep your fingers crossed and think happy thoughts.

All this is in addition to the two Barnes and Nobles readings on February 19 and 20 in New York City, and Feb 23 in Rhinebeck, NY (see my entry below, at the start of January). I'm also still confirmed for the Newburyport Literary Festival, but have no specifics as to exactly what I'll be doing, or when.

I will return with a special bay scallops edition of Cooking Tips for Bachelors in the near future, so, stay tuned.

Can someone tell me what just happened?

I'm sorry... I thought you just said the Giants beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl.

So there I am, sitting in my new, temporary, sparsely-furnished living room, with a cable-less 21" TV that I had to go buy a plug-in aerial for, squinting through the snowy reception to watch the Big Game, and what do I see? Tom Brady knocked onto the ground. Again. And again. Again. Bad pass, great coverage, Brady on the ground. Repeat until bored, then watch it several more times. And it's only the first half.

What can I tell you? The Giants played better, had a better game plan maybe, and seemed to suffer from nerves less than the Patriots. You can't blame the refs for this one. So congratulations to them and their fans. (The Giants I mean, not the refs.)

On a happier note, Uzee and I spent yesterday afternoon wandering around downtown Northampton, Massachusetts, a place I"ve heard much about but had never been to before. Great bookstore there called Raven Used Books, a terrific diner called Jakes, and more funky jewellery, ceramics, art supplies, cappucino and kitsch than you can shake a Jesus Action Figure at. Yes, I actually saw the famous Jesus Action Figure in the window of one shop. "With moveable arms and realistic gliding action" or something like that. There was also a Moses Action Figure, for those of you interested in collecting the whole set.

Also we discovered, real, genuine, honest-to-God bulk tea at a crunchy health food place; Uzee was most relieved. And much more that escapes me in the pos-Super-Bowl haze of dismay that I find myself surrounded by this morning, alas.

Hey... just wait till next year.

90 minutes before the Super Bowl. And counting.

Yes, what can I say. I'm a New England boy at heart and expect I always will be. So here's hoping the Patriots pull off a terrific victory and make their perfect season complete.

In other news, Uzee and I have relocated to the US for the time being so that I can do some publicity for the new book, among other things. Some upcoming events are listed a few entries down the page; stay tuned for additional news as I get word of it.

Currently reading The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips. Oh man what a great book. Funny and smart and complicated, reads like a thriller or a whodunit but the characters are impeccably drawn. I'm maybe halfway through, so, maybe it'll crash and burn before the end but I don't think so. It reminds me somewhat of Matthew Kneale's English Passengers in its tone, and coming from me that's high praise indeed. Kneale's book is one of the best I've ever read.

BTW, this site has the time wrong. As I write this it's 4:45. Go figure.

Back from Karachi

Hello. Uzee and I have been away to Karachi for the past 10 days, which is why this blog has been somewhat neglected. But, now I'm back in Lahore, so things will no doubt get back on schedule. (Schedule?) No doubt...

I read two great books in Karachi: The Sirens of Baghdad by Yasmina Khadra and Absent by Betool Khedairi. Both are highly recommended. Khadra is Algerian-born, now living in France, and he writes a lot about violence in the Muslim world (The Attack, The Swallows of Kabul). The Sirens of Baghdad is, not surprisingly, set in Iraq during the US invasion and occupation. It gives the other side of the story, from the perspective of people who are receiving the bombs, not dropping them. Library Journal says "if it doesn't scare the hell out of you, you haven't been paying attention," and they're exactly right.

Khedairi is Iraqi-born but currently living in Jordan, and Absent is about life in Iraq in the '90s under the sanctions. It's both depressing and, in an odd way, kind of hopeful--life goes on, after all. But the way it goes on is painful, and all the more so because the pain that is being inflicted so thoughtlessly and unceasingly is courtesy of a government that claims to be acting for freedom, democracy, etc.

They are both very powerful books which will make any thoughtful person question the purpose of American policies against this very poor, very weak country.

It has become fashionable to decry the Arab world's lack of translated fiction and literature; one statistic that is quoted (by George Bush for example) is that the entire Arab world, which comprises roughly 300 million people, translates only about 325 books per year. This sounds like a cause for concern, indeed. Until you discover that in the US, with roughly the same population, the number of books published in translation is--surprise!--about 325 per year. (These figures are from Harper's magazine published a few years ago.) In fact, in the four years from 1999-2002, the US translated a grand total of 13 books from Arabic into English, in an industry that published something like 65,000 books annually.

So, you know, glass houses, throwing stones, etc.

I decided I wanted to read a few novels that were not originally written in English. The good news is, there seem to be a few floating around out there. Amin Maalouf, whom I mention below, is a great place to start, as are the others I mentioned in this post. I'll keep looking. In the meantime, I'd as everyone to consider reading a book or two by a non-Western, non-US-based (or UK-based) writer. The difference in perspective is considerable between, say, Betool Khedairi and Khaled (The Kite Runner, oy) Hosseini.

Library Journal gives thumbs-up to MONSTER

Take a look at what Library Journal said about the forthcoming Monster, 1959 in their January 15, 2008 issue:

The monster of the title, known only as "K," is an amalgam of Hollywood clichés: shaggy fur, antennae, feathers, scales, butterfly wings. He lives on an island of nuclear-test mutants, worshipped by the natives and relatively at peace, until he falls afoul of a central-casting blonde and her lantern-jawed beau in a scene from the outtakes of King Kong. It's not long before he's trussed up and carried across the ocean to be exhibited on tour for the masses. What makes this story interesting, though, is where it departs from formula. Betty (the blonde) and Johnny (the beau) have a relationship nearly as twisted as K's features. Billy, their friend and K's impresario, has a thing for money that goes far beyond mere greed. Each of the five years the novel spans is introduced with a montage of world events, focusing on the questionable foreign policies of Western leaders. Clearly, Maine (The Preservationist) intends us to ask whether the vegetarian K is the real monster. Recommended for most fiction collections.—Karl G. Siewert, Tulsa City-Cty. Lib., OK

Those folks in Oklahoma certainly have fine taste in fiction. Thanks, Karl.

In other news, Uzee's new book The Geometry of God is also garnering some attention, particularly here in the subcontinent. Here's a link to a lively and entertaining interview she did with a Bangladeshi newspaper called The Daily Star, and which was subsequently published in someone's blog:

http://kotha-chhilo.blogspot.com/2008/01/geometry-of-god-interview.html