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September 08, 2005
Out on the streets with you, you fucking patchoulis!
In Kirby Gann's second novel, Our Napoleon in Rags, main character Haycraft Keebler praises his fellow Montreux Old Town resident Mather's paintings for their vitality and energy:
Because you can see nothing contrived in them, he said. Nothing fabricated. They feel urgent and necessary, and what better definition of art can you devise on your own?
Like Mather (who bears a striking resemblance to Louisville artist Mark Anthony Mulligan), Gann paints a vibrating cityscape - a sort of shadow Louisville - in Montreux, his fictional city on the Ohio River. His principal setting is Old Town, the heart of Montreux, and specifically a bar called the Don Quixote ("that sumptious dive") - the heart within the heart.
Louisville residents will recognize the parallel universe as peopled with parallel characters: Beau and Glenda Stiles, proprieters of the Don Q, sound an awful lot like Ken and Sheila Pyle, the owners of the Rudyard Kipling here in Old Louisville. Other striking similarities abound, but Gann's novel is no mere roman a clef. The regulars of the Don Q are original characters in their own right, and Gann tells their story - of ambition, entropy, passion, and the frail threads that hold a community together - with precision and grace. Like Mather's paintings, the story is both urgent and necessary. Throughout the book, our hero Haycraft tilts at windmills with quixotic fervor, both leading and being led astray, and Montreux is celebrated and revealed in "messages from the collective, communal spirit of place."
Want to hear more? Pick up a copy at your nearest bookstore, and if you're in Louisville tomorrow night, stop by the InKY Reading Series to hear Kirby read in the bar that so closely resembles the Don Q.
Friday, September 9
at the Rudyard Kipling
422 W. Oak St.
Louisville, KY
7-9 pm
Absolutely free!
Kirby will be joined by Michael Jackman, Scott Ritcher, and Bryan Hurst.
Maybe Kirby will read from one of my favorite passages: Romeo Diaz exclaiming, after interrupting a clueless poetry reading:
Ha! I tell them, out on the streets with you, you fucking patchoulis!
If you have a hot English major to impress all weekend long, think about stopping by Destinations Booksellers in New Albany, IN on Saturday night (Sept. 10 - 6 pm) to see me read some poems. I'll be joined by Gwenda Bond, Christopher Rowe, and Mark Rudolph.
And if you don't have a hot English major waiting to be impressed, well, maybe I can scare one up for you.
Posted by eek at September 8, 2005 03:46 PM
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