this week in literature

CHERRY VANILLA: LICK ME

Barnes & Noble Lincoln Triangle
1972 Broadway at 66th St.
Monday, November 22, free, 7:30
212-595-6859
www.barnesandnoble.com
www.cherry-vanilla.com

Poet, actress, songwriter, publicist, Mad woman, and all-around good-time girl Cherry Vanilla holds nothing back in her free-wheeling memoir, LICK ME: HOW I BECAME CHERRY VANILLA (Chicago Review Press, November 2010, $24.95). Born Kathleen Anne Dorritie in 1943 and raised in Queens, Vanilla tells of a life filled with lots of sex, lots of drugs, and lots of rock & roll. A chronic bedwetter as a child, she later developed OCD, picking at cuts and blemishes all over her body. She dreamed of being in show business, first working at Madison Ave. advertising firms before getting involved in the burgeoning downtown arts scene, hanging out at the hottest clubs and enjoying a never-ending stream of lovers. She starred in Warhol’s off-Broadway show PORK and went from groupie to music publicist to poet and performer; her stories about working with David Bowie just as he was trying to break through in the States are intimate and revealing — and might come as quite a surprise for longtime Bowie fans. She talks in-depth about her desire to bed such men as Kris Kristofferson, Warren Beatty, Leon Russell, and Bowie — but you’ll have to read the book to find out which attempts were successful. Among the many celebrities she meets in her ever-evolving career, some who became close friends, others just passing through her wild life, are Mick Jagger, Patti Smith, Joel Schumacher, Debbie Harry, Helmut Newton, Joni Mitchell, Don Johnson, Melanie Griffith, Sting, Candy Darling, Ringo Starr, Angie Bowie, Rudolf Nureyev, May Pang, and Mick Ronson, and she shares some very interesting details about many of them. But Vanilla never comes off as needlessly gossipy or self-aggrandizing; instead, LICK ME is an honest portrait of a woman who knew what she wanted and went after it. The book also includes excerpts from her 1970s diaries and a sixteen-page black-and-white insert that features several shots of her in two of her favorite positions, either partially or fully unclothed. Cherry Vanilla will be at the Lincoln Triangle Barnes & Noble on November 22, discussing her outrageous life and signing copies of the book.

A TRIBUTE TO JIM CARROLL

Barnes & Noble Union Square
33 East 17th St.
Thursday, November 18, free, 7:00
212-253-0810
www.barnesandnoble.com

On September 11, 2009, poet, musician, and famed heroin addict Jim Carroll died at the age of sixty. In celebration of the publication of his posthumous novel THE PETTING ZOO (Viking, November 2010, $25.95), a group of his friends, led by 2010 National Book Award winner Patti Smith and guitarist Lenny Kaye, will gather together tonight at the Union Square Barnes & Noble to pay tribute to the BASKETBALL DIARIES author, who also released such fine albums as CATHOLIC BOY and DRY DREAMS.

THE NIB & PICK SOCIETY: FISTICUFFS!

92YTribeca
200 Hudson St. at Canal St.
Thursday, November 18, $15, 9:00
212-415-5500
www.92y.org

Everyone seems to want to get into the ring these days, as chefs, architects, filmmakers, artists, musicians, comedians, and others battle it out for professional supremacy, so why not a bunch of cartoonists? On Thursday night, seven cartoonists will compete in a draw-off at 92YTribeca, with the audience supplying the topics, creating an improv-type environment. The diverse group of contestants include David Sipress, Michael Kupperman, Emily Flake, Paul Noth, Matthew Diffee, Zach Kanin, and Drew Dernavich. Unleash the pencils!

PAUL AUSTER: SUNSET PARK

Wednesday, November 17, Barnes & Noble Union Square, 33 East 17th St., free, 212-253-0810, 7:00
Thursday, November 18, Book Court, 163 Court St., free, 718-875-3677, 7:00
www.macmillan.com/sunsetpark

Ho hum; another year, another Paul Auster novel that deals with books, baseball, and Brooklyn. But before you dismiss the Newark-born author’s latest, SUNSET PARK (Henry Holt, November 2010, $25), you should also know that it is one of the best works of fiction of this young century. For more than twenty-five years, Auster has been one of America’s most distinguished novelists, having written such superb books as THE NEW YORK TRILOGY (1985-87), THE MUSIC OF CHANCE (1990), LEVIATHAN (1992), and THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES (2005), all of which feature unusual characters caught up in unusual situations often propelled by coincidence. But as good as Auster has been over the course of his career, he has taken a giant leap forward with SUNSET PARK, a marvelously crafted tale that is about a lot more than just books, baseball, and Brooklyn.

Miles Heller is an Ivy League dropout who is still trying to deal with the tragic death of his teenage brother and has fallen in love with a high school student, Pilar Sanchez, who is wise beyond her years but under the thumb of one of her older sisters. Heller hasn’t seen or talked to his long-divorced parents since he suddenly left Brown seven years earlier; his father, Morris, is an independent publisher of highly regarded literary fiction, while his mother, Mary-Lee Swann, is a world-famous Hollywood actress about to take on the challenging lead role in Samuel Beckett’s HAPPY DAYS on Broadway. With nowhere to turn after his personal safety is threatened by Pilar’s sister, Miles, who had been working in South Florida for a realty company, rummaging through houses for valuable items after the bank had evicted the owners, heads back to Brooklyn, where he moves into a squatter’s house across the street from Green-Wood Cemetery, joining his college friend Bing Nathan, who runs the Hospital for Broken Things; Ellen Brice, a lonely painter damaged by a complicated affair; and Alice Bergstrom, a Scandinavian woman with a brutish boyfriend and self-esteem problems who is toiling away on her dissertation, which focuses on William Wyler’s classic 1946 film, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, while also working at the PEN American Center, which is trying to gain the release of imprisoned Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo (who actually was just honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in real life). Each of these characters could be the subject of their own book, as Auster fleshes them out wonderfully, getting into their psyche, not unlike how Wyler does in his award-winning movie about the effects WWII had on the American family.

Auster’s writing has always been cinematic — he has written several screenplays and directed films as well — but it’s particularly so in SUNSET PARK, as the longtime Brooklyn resident delves deep into each person’s past, bringing their fears and desires, their successes and failures, to life in long, brilliant passages that don’t want to end; the run-on sentences of the beginning soon flow into breathless narratives, one of which goes on for two and a half pages and some seven hundred words before a disappointing period finally appears. SUNSET PARK is a supremely beautiful book by one of Brooklyn’s best. Auster will be reading from and signing copies of SUNSET PARK on November 17 at the Union Square Barnes & Noble and November 18 at Book Court in Park Slope.

TWI-NY TALK AND SIGNED BOOK GIVEAWAY: PAT COOPER

Pat Cooper signs copies of his memoir at book warming party at Friars Club earlier this month (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Monday, November 15, TGI Friday’s, Penn Station, 2 Penn Plaza, Amtrak level, 5:00
Tuesday, November 16, Borders, 10 Columbus Circle, 7:00
Wednesday, November 17, TGI Friday’s, 34 Union Sq. East, 5:00
Friday, November 19, TGI Friday’s, Penn Station, 1 Penn Plaza, LIRR level, 5:00
Saturday, November 20, Uncle Vinnie’s Comedy Club, 168 New Dorp Ln., Staten Island, $35-$75, 8:00
www.patcooper.com
www.squareonepublishers.com

Born in Brooklyn to Italian immigrant parents, young Pasquale Caputo was expected to become a seventh-generation bricklayer. Instead, he took his chances onstage, where he tried not to lay bricks. Becoming a comic while still a kid, he eventually changed his name to Pat Cooper and ultimately turned into a comedian’s comedian who is not afraid to take on the system. “He has this fantastic capacity to challenge the art form, and has done so with an exquisite approach to the human condition,” Jerry Lewis writes in the foreword to Cooper’s intimate, revealing, and extremely funny memoir, HOW DARE YOU SAY HOW DARE ME! (Square One, November 15, $24.95). The book identifies Cooper’s roots in Red Hook, then traces his path from a rather brief flirtation with the military to his wild experiences in the Borscht Belt and Vegas, telling it like it is, four-letter words and all. The smooth, breezy narrative feels as if Cooper is in the room reading the book to you; in fact, he told the story to his friend and promoter, Steve Garrin, a recording engineer and producer who founded the VoiceWorks voiceover workshop. Writer Richard Herschlag then set it down on the printed page.

On November 3, Cooper launched the book with a boisterous party at the Friars Club that spilled out of the Milton Berle Room and into the Lucille Ball Room. Cooper received tributes from dean Freddie Roman, radio host Lionel, and fellow comedian Jackie “the Joke Man” Martling. Others in attendance included Marilyn Michaels, Joe Franklin, and ninety-six-year-old Professor Irwin Corey, who makes the spry eighty-one-year-old Cooper look like a spring chicken. When Cooper took the podium, he opened with schtick befitting the man whose latest DVD is entitled YOU’RE ALWAYS YELLING!, but he soon revealed his kinder, gentler side, which shows through in the book as well.

“To me, all the years that I’ve been in this business, and to get those kinds of accolades after writing a book, I was mostly in shock because I don’t expect it, I don’t look for it, and when it comes, it’s like a bonus that you never expected,” a humbled Cooper told twi-ny a few days later. “A lot of these people who were very kind to me I don’t know personally, and I was in shock again to think that’s what they thought about me, which is just an extra bonus. So, you know, you go down the road and you say you’re very fortunate, and I just hope this book says something, and I think the word is, and my friends who read the book said, it’s the word dignity, and I hope that’s what I put across. At least people will say, ‘Well, if I didn’t like the book, it had some dignity in it.’”

Cooper will be all over New York City next week, sitting in with Opie & Anthony, Alan Colmes, and Joy Behar and holding signings at several TGI Friday’s restaurants and the Borders in Columbus Circle; he will also be performing stand-up at Uncle Vinnie’s Comedy Club in Staten Island. He’ll be back on December 12 at Di Palo Selects in Little Italy, followed by the highly anticipated “An Evening with Pat Cooper” January 25 at the 92nd St. Y. His appearance at the Y should only lend more credence to those who are sure that Cooper is actually Jewish. “They believed that the skinny kid with the horn-rimmed glasses davened in the morning, did his routines on garlic and saints at night, and said the Shema before going to bed,” he writes in the book. “He was circumcised, not baptized. He was bar mitzvahed, not given Holy Communion. He dropped out of law school, not trade school.”

To enter to win a signed copy of HOW DARE YOU SAY HOW DARE ME!, send your name and daytime phone number to contest@twi-ny.com no later than Tuesday, November 16, at 12 noon. All entrants must be at least twenty-one years of age. One winner will be chosen at random. Good luck!

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

Bill Camp stars as the Underground Man in Dostoevsky adaptation at Baryshnikov Arts Center

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th St.
November 7-28, $75
www.bacnyc.org

“I am a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” So begins Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 existentialist novella, NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, which follows the rantings of a bitter, cynical civil servant who retreats from conventional society for myriad reasons. OBIE-winning actor Bill Camp and director Robert Woodruff have adapted Dostoevsky’s classic for the Yale Repertory Theatre, which will be presenting the New York premiere in conjunction with Theatre for a New Audience at the Baryshnikov Arts Center November 7-28. Camp will also star as the Underground Man in the ninety-minute production. The 2:00 performance on November 13 will be followed by a discussion with Wallace Shawn, and Emily Gould will participate in a discussion following the 2:00 performance on November 20.

FIRST SATURDAYS: TOMASELLI’S UNIVERSE

Fred Tomaselli, “Echo, Wow, and Flutter,” leaves, pills, photocollage, acrylic, and resin on wood panel, 2000 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. James G. Forsyth Fund)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, November 6, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum’s free First Saturday program for November focuses on the institution’s current midcareer retrospective of hybrid collage artist Fred Tomaselli, and the Williamsburg-based Tomaselli will be on hand to give a talk at 8:00. The evening also includes a screening of ALICE IN WONDERLAND (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, 1951), live performances by the Wingdale Community Singers, Laura Cantrell, and the Isle of Klezbos, a book discussion with Rick Moody, a lecture on Tomaselli by psychiatrist Julie Holland, a curator talk by Catherine J. Morris on the exhibit “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968,” and an electronica dance party hosted by Wolf + Lamb.