Journalist and comic book artist Joe Sacco has been rightly praised for this intense account of his time in the Palestinian territories during the first Intifada. Sacco decided from the start to tell the Palestinian side of the story — not to aim for the false balance of much of modern journalism. His graphic novel is primarily a series of interviews with Palestinians, some arranged in advance and some on the spur of the moment.

If you enjoyed Art Spiegelman’s MAUS books, you’ll probably like Sacco’s work.

Highly recommended.

Kurt Vonnegut would have been 86 today. In honor of his birthday, raise a glass to Indiana, which went blue this year. I’m sure that would have made Kurt happy.

After you lower that glass, use your hands to pick up one of Vonnegut’s books and read it.

Jen and I just got back from five days in San Francisco:

A few minutes ago, I finished reading Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes for the first time.

Don Quixote by Jason Crane

All I knew about it before reading it was that it involved a crazy man who thinks he’s a knight and attacks windmills. In fact, I thought the entire book was about Don Quixote attacking various windmills. It’s one of those books that has entered the cultural consciousness even if most folks have never read it. Fess up, did you think, when you were a kid, that the book was called Donkey Hotee? I did, and I always assumed it was because he rode a donkey. Which, it turns out, he doesn’t.

Little did I know — and even less did I expect — what an amazing work it is. It’s beautiful, comical and tragic all at once. It’s a history lesson, a visionary look at the art of the novel, and a gripping story, too.

In many ways, Don Quixote reminded me of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a work so large and full of so much of the human experience that it’s amazing to consider one person having written it. How could Cervantes and Shakespeare fit so much into a single work? And who were these men that they themselves contained so much wisdom and insight, coupled with the literary talent to set it down in works that will live as long as language? It makes blogging look a bit ridiculous, for one thing. (Hamlet and the first book of Don Quixote were published almost simultaneously. The early 1600s must have been one heck of a time in which to live and read!)

While I was reading the book, I also picked up a few critical studies to read afterward, including Lectures on Don Quixote by Vladimir Nabokov; Meditations on Quixote by Juan Ortega y Gasset; and The Western Canon by Harold Bloom.

The book seems on its face to be a comedy about a crazy man, but to me it was an indictment of a society that had forgotten its values and lost its honor. The duke and duchess who torment Don Quixote and Sancho throughout much of Book Two are villians, as far as I can tell. You’d have to be callous and sadistic to find their “jests” funny rather than cruel. However, my interpretation of the book is through my own cultural lens, and Cervantes may have been in favor of the purges of Jews and Moors that he describes, even though a modern reader can see his commentary as criticism.

In fact, Don Quixote and Sancho maintain their dignity throughout the book, and even if that dignity’s foundation can be called into question, they still come off as more honorable and worthwhile human beings than most of the major characters who try to trick or cure them.

To be continued…

A group of visionary artists and community leaders are trying to build a New Globe Theater on Governor’s Island off Manhattan. Learn more about this amazing project at newglobe.org.

BOA Editions, one of the brightest spots in Rochester’s cultural life, is moving to new digs. This is from this morning’s Democrat & Chronicle newspaper:

BOA Editions moving to North Goodman Street

Local publishing company BOA Editions will be moving to the Neighborhood of the Arts.

It is moving from 260 East Ave. to the Anderson Alley building, 250 N. Goodman St. The new address will be effective April 30.

Poet and editor Peter Conners from BOA Editions was a guest on The Jason Crane Show last year. You can check out that episode for an interview with Peter and poetry from a number of great poets.

Walt Whitman was born on this day in 1819. For more information about Walt and his work, visit the Walt Whitman Archive.

Speaking of the Whitman Archive, the NEH has offered the Archive a $500,000 challenge grant. To help them meet the challenge, please donate some money to the Archive. Thanks!

Then it was yesterday. Months of planning, literally thousands of e-mail messages, hundreds of phone calls. Dozens of readers, dozens of dinner guests, dozens of staff members, one actor. Could we really expect it to come off well?

When I finally sit down and write the story of my life, 21 May 2006 will be one of the high points. It was better than I ever could have hoped. The diversity of voices. The passion of the readers. The flow of emotion throughout the afternoon. Hail. Rain. Wind. Sunshine. (In late May!)

Then came the end of the reading. Wade Norwood was the final reader. He finished the last line — I stop some where waiting for you — and started down the stairs from the lectern. As his foot hit the first step, a wave crashed through the church. The audience of readers and listeners erupted with cheers, applause, and more than a few moist eyes, including my own. This wave of sound and emotion and joy and completion just kept building and building. It was almost too much to believe. (My hands are shaking right now as I type this.)

We took no photos, made no recordings. The event passed into the air. The sound waves are even now heading out across the solar system as almost imperceptible disturbances of whatever it is that makes up the cosmos.

I’m still awestruck at the experience. I feel so lucky to have been there, and to have been surrounded by such wonderful people. I have a debt to that room that I can’t repay.

SHOW-ONLY TICKETS: The dinner is sold out, but you can get a show-only ticket for $20. Just come to the Education Center (next to the main entrance of Genesee Country Village) before 6 p.m. See you there!

If you have a radio or computer, you can hear me tomorrow (Wednesday) at 3:30 p.m. on Jack Mindy’s show on Jazz90.1. The station is at 90.1 FM, or on the Internet.

I really love Douglas Adams. When I was in high school — or maybe junior high — in the 80′s, I discovered the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. Around that same time, my friend Steve Davis leant me a cassette tape of the HHGTTG radio series. In fact, this series of tapes has now become like the Holy Grail. The history of HHGTTG in all its forms is hard to trace — from radio to books to LPs to TV to CDs to a movie to radio again. Or something like that. Anyway, somewhere in there they re-recorded the radio series. I think they did that to switch some bits so’d they’d be more like the book. I’m still not sure whether they redid the whole serires or just parts of it, but I think that first version I heard on cassette as a teenager is still the funniest version. I guess there’s nothing for it but to check on eBay. Maybe that’s an appropriately futuristic way to find something by Douglas Adams.

Amazon.com
Sea Symphony

iTunes
Sea Symphony

Following the reading at 5 p.m. will be a 19th-century dinner and a performance at 6 p.m. by actor Will Stutts of his one-man Whitman play. Will has worked in one-man shows as much as any actor alive. He’s performed more than 1,000 times for more than one million people. Tickets for the dinner and show are $30 each, or $55 for two. You can purchase tickets by calling Melanie Baldeck at Genesee Country Village at (585) 538-6822 x218. You can also send an e-mail to Melanie.

In the weeks ahead of the reading, I’ll be taking some local poets into area classrooms to talk about Whitman and to read his work and the guest poets’ work. If you’re an educator and you’d like to know more about this free in-class presentation, call me at (585) 469-8434, or simply respond to this message.

Finally, we have a few slots left for readers on May 21. If you’d like to take part in the live reading of Song of Myself, please respond to this message as soon as possible.

I’d like to think that this is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime event that makes Rochester a special place to live, and I hope you’ll come out to support it. If you’d like to order tickets, please call soon to help us budget for the dinner.

Thanks for your continued support of my projects. See you on Sunday, May 21!

Without Evan Hunter, a.k.a. Ed McBain, there would probably be no Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, or Law & Order. The prolific novelist, who died of cancer July 6 at 78, essentially invented the American police procedural with a single pulp paperback.

The book was 1956′s Cop Hater, and it marked a decisive turn in a varied career. Hunter, born Salvatore Lombino in New York City (he changed his name to avoid discrimination), had staked his first literary claim two years earlier with his semiautobiographical The Blackboard Jungle, a look at the life of an inner-city high school teacher. It was made into a popular 1955 film starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier.

When he penned Cop Hater, Hunter invented the McBain pseudonym to protect his reputation as a serious novelist. But it turned out to be the book that established his legacy in pop storytelling. Set in a fictitious big city, the crime story eschewed the lone PI hero that had long defined the genre and instead meticulously chronicled an entire precinct’s pursuit of a murder case. The book was a big enough success to yield 54 follow-ups over the next 50 years, the best of which were crafted with unpretentious, unflinching authority. (The final installment, Fiddlers, is due in September.) And the author amusingly nodded to his alter ego’s fame by having the two ”coauthor” the 2001 novel Candyland.

For all his influence on other crime novelists and his movie legacy (which included the screenplay for The Birds), Hunter may have made his most lasting impact on TV. ”He established so many conventions that came to be gospel,” says NYPD Blue cocreator David Milch. ”If someone came to me and asked how to write a police procedural and they hadn’t already read Ed McBain, I’d tell them to take a hike.”

© 2005 Entertainment Weekly