B-Side Books

B-Side Books: Essays on Forgotten Favorites
John Plotz, editor
Public Books Series
Columbia University Press (June 1, 2021), 271 pages
Kindle edition $11.99, Amazon paperback $26.00

I suppose you need to be of a certain age to get the “B-side” reference in the title unless, as a post-baby boomer, you’re familiar with how popular music was recorded and distributed in the fifties and sixties. I shudder to think that I am of a certain age, but if the shoe fits…

I remember well going to the local record store to buy the latest hit on a 45 RPM single vinyl record. You bought the record for the hit on the A side, but there was, of course, always a song on the flip side. Sometimes the B-side song became a hit as well, especially for artists like the Beatles. Other times it was a good song that never became a hit. Sometimes it was simply forgettable.

The reference in the title of the present book is to that second type of B-side song, as the subtitle suggests. The book groups its essays by genre, for example, Childhood, Other Worlds (science fiction and fantasy), Comedy, Battle and Strife, etc. The book selection is rather odd, with a disproportionate number of the books including either weird supernatural phenomena or heavy violence.

The only book in the collection that I have read is An American Childhood by Annie Dillard. What this book is doing as part of a B-side collection I have no idea. The book was well covered and well received when it was first published in 1989. It is currently available in hardcover, paperback, a Kindle edition, and as an audiobook. It is a delightful memoir in which Dillard, among other topics, lovingly recalls how her mother (very much alive and well at the time of publication) took delight in playing practical jokes and in cheating at board and card games.

The bottom line for me is that if you enjoy the weird, offbeat, and slightly warped you might take a look at B-Side Books. Otherwise, you will have lost nothing by skipping it.

Everybody Behaves Badly

Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises
Lesley M. M. Blume
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (June 7, 2016), 373 pages
Kindle edition $10.16, Amazon paperback $10.69
Kindle edition purchased on sale for $1.99

I am not a big Hemingway fan, and I didn’t especially enjoy reading The Sun Also Rises for my American Novel class in high school. However, I am always interested in reading about the American expatriates in Paris in the 1920s and I very much liked A Moveable Feast, a collection of Hemingway’s recollection about those years that was published posthumously. And I also enjoy behind-the-scenes narratives. So when this book showed up in one of my e-book sale emails for $1.99, I decided it would be well worth the price.

Blume does a thorough job of portraying Hemingway’s early career starting with his days as a newspaper reporter and takes us through the publication of The Sun Also Rises and up to the stock market crash of 1929, when the Americans headed home.

What is noteworthy about The Sun Also Rises is that the characters are drawn from Hemingway’s crowd in Paris, and many of them are so thinly disguised as to be entirely transparent to anyone knowledgeable about that scene. In more that one case Hemingway infuriated those so portrayed. In particular, Hemingway based much of the novel on a trip the group took one year to Pamplona for the running of the bulls and the bullfight festival there, an event that Hemingway loved. The subjects, however, rarely appreciated the way in which Hemmingway portrayed them.

The author provides a detailed portrayal of the life Hemingway and his wife Hadley’s lived before the publication of the book, and how they survived on very little money, much of what was available coming from Hadley’s trust fund. Blume portrays Hemingway as being interested in promoting his own brand (long before that phrase came into use) and in ensuring his circle was well aware of his machismo. He also was not particularly interested in being faithful to Hadley, something she tolerated until they finally agreed to divorce around the time The Sun Also Rises was published.

If you’re interested in the story behind what went into the creation of at least one novel, Everybody Behaves Badly is good reading.

The End of the Golden Gate

The End of the Golden Gate: Writers on Loving and (Sometimes) Leaving San Francisco
introduction by Gary Kamiya
Chronicle Prism (May 25, 2021), 203 pages
Kindle edition $8.99, Amazon paperback $14.46

It should be no secret that I love San Francisco. Having said that, I have not spent as much time there as one might expect. Most of my time in The City has been on 19^th Avenue, from the end of Interstate 280 to Park Presidio, and then across the Golden Gate Bridge to U.S. 101, heading to points north. Still, I have been to Golden Gate Park a handful of times, visited the Convention Center, and Terry and I have seen Phantom of the Opera (three times) and the revival of A Chorus Line at the Curran Theater while staying across the street at our favorite hotel, the Westin St. Francis. And I have worshipped at Grace Cathedral one time (or perhaps twice). Still, of all the trips I have made and the places I have stayed, San Francisco represents only a small percentage.

That does nothing to diminish my love for the city, of course, so when I read about the publication of The End of the Golden Gate it immediately popped to the top of my reading list. The subtitle accurately depicts that content of the book. These essays, well written, all of them, are about coming to San Francisco, living there, often leaving the city, and sometimes returning. There is a lot of reflection about how the place has changed.

One writer recalls people telling him how he arrived in San Francisco, too late. How it is no longer the same:

“I once did a show at Vesuvio Cafe with Allen Ginsberg opening with a new poem. Margaret Cho dropped in to try out some new material. Kirk Hammett from Metallica and Jerry Garcia played folk songs on acoustic guitars. Annie Sprinkle did a visual history of porn, and wow, was it visual! Armistead Maupin sat in the back writing a book that ended up being Tales of the City. And unbeknownst to all of us, Willie Mays and Rick Barry were in there the whole time.”

Me: “Um, I don’t think that timeline works.” Them: “You missed it, man. It was so cool.”

While a couple of the essays are written by people of an earlier generation, many of the pieces are written by millennials. They see San Francisco differently than I do. For me high tech was rooted in Silicon Valley and only much later started sprouting up in San Francisco. For many of these writers San Francisco was made less livable by gentrification, by the arrival of tech start-ups, and yes, by buses transporting high workers (in part responsible for the gentrification) to firms like Google in Silicon Valley, all of which helped contribute to less affordable housing and a higher cost of living. But even those who moved on loved the city they left.

These essays portray San Francisco with all of its faults. One Black author writes angrily about the subtle racism there, and how she felt compelled to do her grocery shopping at the Sprouts in Daly City to avoid suspicious stares at an upscale grocer in The City. Still, for these writers there is plenty to love about San Francisco, and I enjoyed sharing their experience.