Considerations...: Tip Off Time

Word of the day : verjuice : the sour juice of crab apples or unripe fruit

Well, it was a fun weekend in Hilton Head. The weather wasn't as tempestuous as gloomy as forecasted, but it never got that hot, meaning the ocean and pool water was nippy. It was good to see the family - although it was unfortunate that my dad got so sick. I hope he is doing better today!

Gabriel had a great time, as did Daisy, who really had the time of her life. She became fast friends and lovers with Dexter and Duke.

Gabriel has started summer school today and was glad to see his teacher this morning. She hugged and kissed him and whisked him away for a morning of intensive learning and studying of the classics. Julia is now down to her final two weeks of summer classes.

The NBA Finals start tonight; I have correctly predicted 11 of the 14 series so far. It looked grim for Miami for a stretch, and going into game 6 with Boston, I thought that, even if they managed to come back and beat Boston, there was no way they would beat the machine that was OKC; it just didn't seem like the Thunder had any weaknesses. I still don't think they do, and their bench is marvelous - see: James Harden - is marvelous and clutch.

That said, I just don't see Lebron and D-Wade and Bosh going quietly for a second year in a row. It seems like it's their time, and they'll get it done against an equally fast, lengthy, athletic Thunder squad.

Prediction: Miami over Oklahoma City in 6 games.

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Monday's Author Profile was bumped back to today. The author this week?

Stewart O'Nan

Born: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1951.

Career: O'Nan, perhaps the most underrated American writer now working, had a plethora of childhood interests: comic books, Tarzan, cartoons, horror books, TV, World War II, the first novels of Stephen King. He studied aerospace engineering at Boston University and went on to work as a structural test engineer at a Long Island aerospace plant. He read voraciously - Walker Percy, William Burroughs, John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, Camus - and began writing short stories.

His wife, a social worker, encouraged him to go back to school, which he did, earning a Master's in Fine Arts from Cornell when he was thirty years old. His breakthrough success came in 1993 with the publication of his blistering drama Snow Angels, a sad, acute look at the violence that tore apart a Pennsylvania town in the mid-1970s; it was a made into a fine, if downbeat, 2008 film with Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale.

In 1996, Britain's Granta magazine named him one of America's twenty best young writers - a list that also included Jonathan Franzen. Throughout the 1990s and early part of this century, a string of acclaimed novels (often horror) followed: 1996's Names of the Dead (about a man haunted by his Vietnam combat experiences); 1998's A World Away (a World War-II story); 2003's The Night Country (a Halloween-set New England horror story reminiscent of Shirley Jackson).

In 2004, he co-wrote with his friend Stephen King Faithful, about the Boston Red Sox's (of whom King and O'Nan are diehard fans) 2004 ending of the World Series curse. O'Nan constantly switches genres, displaying a marvelous virtuosity, but it was with 2002's Wish You Were Here that he began to build his reputation as the "poet of the working class."

2007's Last Night at the Lobster, a short, great novel about a harried manager of an underperforming, about-to-close strip mall Red Lobster, was one of O'Nan's biggest hits, and it sort of set him on the path he is on now: compact, amazingly-detailed, lived-in slices of working-class, American life. 2011's Emily Alone, the follow-up to Wish You Were Here, is a year in the life of an octogenarian Pittsburgh widow. 2012's The Odds, reviewed a few months back on this blog, is a weekend in the life of a divorcing couple who try to revive their marriage in Niagara Falls.

Noted Books: Snow Angels; Wish You Were Here; The Good Wife, a 2005 novel about a woman forced to carry on through the course of her husband's decades-long incarceration; Emily, Alone (which received, arguably, the highest accolades of O'Nan's career); 2009's Songs For the Missing, a 2009 tale of a teenage girl's disappearance and the effect it has on her family.

Themes, Style, Etc: O'Nan is a fabulously sympathetic writer, almost never harshly judgmental of his characters; he's a great humanist. When you read one of O'Nan's realist novels, you'll be taken aback by how fairly he treats his characters; there are no stereotypes. His attention to details, the observation of daily life, is fanatical. Talk about lived-in! There's the sense that O'Nan has been living alongside the character of Emily (in Emily, Alone) his whole life. O'Nan has the glorious talent for making private lives - private fears, private behavior, private behavior and neurosis - interesting and vital. Most of his works are set in New England and, especially with the Pittsburgh novels, O'Nan's details (a word I keep coming back to) are glorious; it really is the details that make O'Nan as good as the authors he reads and is influenced by - John Updike, Alice Munro, etc. He makes the quotidian interesting. There are no great shakes, no big plot twists - just the hum and thrum of modern existence, an allegiance and empathy for frustrated, relatable working class people.

Why You Should Read Him: Because realism gets no better than this. American writing gets no better than this.

Books I Would Recommend: Snow Angels (***1/2); Last Night at the Lobster (*****), one of my all-time faves; Emily, Alone (*****); and The Odds (****). I'm afraid some might find his realist novels skirting the line of boring, but in his ability to delineate the fullness of life via the mundane, he is a special writer.

Books I Want to Read by Him: Songs For the Missing, The Night Country

O'Nan has taught at several universities - University of Central Oklahoma, University of New Mexico, Hartford's Trinity College - and now lives with his family and writes full-time in Pittsburgh, the city of his youth. He tours and publicly speaks as much as any author. (I just missed seeing him at last February's Savannah Book Festival!).

His website is very well-done. I like the posts about the novels and short story collections he recommends: http://stewart-onan.com/

Here's a great article on him done by the online website Salon a few months back:

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/29/stewart_onan_our_best_working_novelist/singleton/

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No reason not to plow forward with the list of the 100 Most Influential Photographers of All Time, is there?

Larry Clark (#48)

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1943, Clark (the son of an itinerant baby photographer) carried a camera with him from an early age, shooting his friends as they, like Clark, did drugs, shot amphetamines. These photos - limning the drug-induced boredom and aimlessness of the Vietnam-era midwest - went a long way towards shaping Clark's artistry. Over the course of his career, he has focused his lens on male prostitutes, hustlers, teen criminals, Washington Square Park skateboarders. Clark has always been interested in the social dynamics of young people within groups, influenced by society's image of them. The dysfunctions within families, the allure of sexuality, casual violence - these themes pop up time and time again. Clark has even directed a few films, including the controversial 1995 feature Kids, which garnered a lot of hate and hype (and introduced Rosario Dawson and Chloe Sevigny). His first two books, 1971's Tulsa and 1983's Teenage Lust (documenting Clark's move to New York City, quest for a hippie utopia in New Mexico, and coterie of hustler acquaintances in NYC), are Clark's signature works. It's incendiary stuff, often tough to look at, flirting with an almost age-inappropriate, perverse voyeurism.

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I have not forgotten our daily Soul Tracks. Today we'll go with...

The Dells' "Oh What a Night." This was their best-known song. The first version of the song was released by the group in 1956 and re-made by them, in an attempt to gain a larger audience, in 1969; the 1969 version was ranked #260 on Rolling Stone's "Greatest Songs of All-Time." The later version, which we'll hear, is more of a soul song than the doo-wop-ish original. All but one members of the 1956 version of the group was still around 13 years later. The 1969 version hit the top 10 in the Billboard Pop Singles chart,

The Dells, who formed in Harvey, Illinois, started out, as mentioned, as a doo-wop group for VeeJay Records. In the 1960s, they transformed into more of a soul outfit, recording for Chess Records. The group rarely changed over the course of 50+ years. In 2004, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jehvFHQb0uE

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This week's 5 Things...

5 Underrated Actors:

Aidan Quinn