Sundown Salon #26: SUNDOWN BOOK CLUB
DATE: May 20th - June 2nd, 2006
AT: Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA
FEATURING: Kelsey Nicholson, Ursula Le Guin, Andrew Wagner, Eric Heiman, Sasha Petrenko, Dan Spencer, Marina Macdougall, Fiona Ryan
Ten evenings of book discussions led by local guest hosts
For the exhibition at Southern Exposure, Sundown Salon will be pitching a geodesic dome tent, echoing our Los Angeles geodesic dome home-base. During the run of the exhibit, a slideshow of one thousand images from Sundown Salon events in Los Angeles over the past 5 years will be projected in the tent throughout the day. Tea will be served. For ten evenings during the run of the exhibit the Sundown Book Salon will meet from 6:00 - 7:30pm. Participants will sit in circle on the cushioned floor of the tent. A different discussion leader will be invited for each evening. This person will select the book to be read and moderate the discussion. There will be an open sign-up for each evening's book salon participants.
book salon evening # / date / day / salon host / book / author
#01 / 05.23.06 / tuesday / Kelsey Nicholson / The Areas of My Expertise / by John Hodgman
#02 / 05.24.06 / wednesday / Ted Purves / Always Coming Home / by Ursula Le Guin
#03 / 05.25.06 / thursday / Andrew Wagner / Rats / by Robert Sullivan
#04 / 05.26.06 / friday / Eric Heiman / Everyman / by Philip Roth
#05 / 05.27.06 / saturday / Sasha Petrenko / Play It as It Lays / Joan Didion
#06 / 05.30.06 / tuesday / Dan Spencer / Loft Living / by Sharon Zukin
#07 / 05.31.06 / wednesday / Fritz Haeg / The Death and Life of Great American Cities / by Jane Jacobs
#08 / 06.01.06 / thursday / Marina Macdougall / Inventing Kindergarten / by Norman Brosterman
#09 / 06.02.06 / friday / Mary & Larry Haeg / The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries / by Marilyn Johnson
#10 / 06.03.06 / saturday / Fiona Ryan / The Baader-Meinhoff Affair / by Erin Cosgrove
* Sign up for one of the 8 seats in each Sundown Book Salon: contact 415.863.2141 or programs@soex.org
* All book meetings are from 6-7:30 at Southern Exposure: 401 Alabama Street, San Francisco, CA 94110
more about the books:
#01 / The Areas of My Expertise / by John Hodgman / In the great tradition of the American almanac, The Areas of My Expertise is a compendium of handy reference tables, fascinating trivia, and sage wisdom on all topics large and small. Although bestsellers such as Poor Richard's Almanack and The Book of Lists were certainly valuable, they also were largely true. Here is a different kind of handy desk reference, one in which all of the historical oddities and amazing true facts are sifted through the singular, illuminating imagination of John Hodgman--which is the nice way of saying: He made it all up.
#02 / Always Coming Home / by Ursula Le Guin / Envisioning a possible future (and attacking present folly), Le Guin reinvents a `primitive'' past. The autobiography of a woman of the Kesh, living in the Napa Valley in a distant post-Industrial age, occupies 100 pages. If it's hard to believe in a people who use computers and electricity but plow with oxen and see wealth as giving, that's part of the point. The narrative is interrupted by poems, tales, and 'data', which demand patient pondering - something Le Guin's many admirers are certain to provide.
#03 / Rats / by Robert Sullivan / For approximately a year and half Sullivan studied rats. A modern-day John James Audubon, spending his nights in an alley with special vision goggles and spending his days hunting out the history behind the creature. Part diary, part history, part horror story, but all intriguing, he recorded his findings in Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants.
#04 / Everyman / by Philip Roth / It is the portrait of an ordinary man--he novel's title is apt--who accomplishes nothing extraordinary. Strict chronology is set aside as various episodes from the past and the present jostle for center stage. The motif of death followed this man throughout his life, beginning in boyhood, and with the advent of middle age, the frailty of the flesh, in both sexual and physical terms, is increasingly apparent to him. Despite its shortness in length and relative narrowness in scope, this novel speaks eloquently about life's un fulfillments, about making adjustments if the unfolding of one's life doesn't follow the original plan. - from Amazon.com and the American Library Association
#05 / t.b.a.
#06 / Loft Living / by Sharon Zukin / This book exposes the meeting of art and real estate markets, the happy meeting between artists' demand for housing and city officials and homeowners who wanted to 'upgrade' their neighborhoods by private market means--and how those artists were used and abandoned by real estate developers and investors who were banking on rising property values.
#07 / The Death and Life of Great American Cities / by Jane Jacobs / In this ground-breaking work , Jane Jacobs not only threw a monkey wrench into conventional thinking on the structure of cities and helped reshape urban planning, but she did so as a non-expert and as a woman–both historical taboos in the world of intellectual analysis. With flowing, descriptive prose, Jane's work leads us to think about each element of a city–sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods, government, economy–as a syergistic unit both encompassing structure and going beyond it to the functioning dynamics of our habitats.
#08 / Inventing Kindergarten / by Norman Brosterman / Adults over a certain age probably have similar memories of their first taste of school - the half-day kindergarten that featured singing, finger-painting, stories, and naptime. Whatever lessons we absorbed during those halcyon hours were not obvious ones, but we developed confidence, exercised our imaginations, and learned the basic schoolroom drill concerning school buses, milk money, and raising our hands before asking or answering a question. These days, kindergarten is a far departure from its earlier incarnation; instead of a loosely structured time to play and discover, modern kindergartens are more like First Grade 101, in which children are taught their numbers and letters and even assigned homework. Norman Brosterman, author of Inventing Kindergarten, doesn't approve. - from amazon.com
#09 / The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries / by Marilyn Johnson / A journalist who's written obituaries of Princess Di and Johnny Cash, Johnson counts herself among the obit obsessed, one who subsists on the "tiny pieces of cultural flotsam to profound illuminations of history" gathered from obits from around the world, which she reads online daily—sometimes for hours. Johnson explores this written form like a scholar, delving into the differences between British and American obits, as well as regional differences within this country. She reaffirms life as much as she talks about death. - from publishers weekly
#10 / The Baader-Meinhoff Affair / by Erin Cosgrove / In the first publication from Printed Matter's Publishing Program for Emerging Artists, Erin Cosgrove takes the romance novel for a ride through revolutionary terrain to produce a tempestuous tale of terrorism and true love. In the cloistered environment of an exclusive East Coast college, the young and the restless fall in love while romancing the ghosts of the Baader-Meinhof gang active in 1970s Germany. It’s a hilarious send up of the romance genre complete with earnest interjections from the author who supplies historical cliff notes and commentary for the confused. A page-turning tour de force of the dangerous passions and politics of the privileged.