I sold a book the other day. I’ve sold literally, no exaggeration, millions of books in 45 years as a bookseller, but this was a unique event; this time it was a book I had…
Posts published by “Byron Spooner”
As soon as my wife Judy and I decided to go to Chicago for our vacation I started talking about going to Hammond. Judy understands all too well that some obsessions last a lifetime and…
Best Thing I Heard All Week: James McMurtry, Complicated Game. Hear them crabbers cuss the weather And they cuss the government too Nowadays crabbin' and fishin' hangin' on to a pot to piss in Is…
Back in the days right after the extinction of the dinosaurs, when I was still new to New York City, it was a pretty frequent thing to spot Robert Christgau riding his crappy-looking bike around…
Next time you see some gushing twit handing out a load of bullshit at the Academy Awards about the power of movies to 'change the world,' consider Dr. Strangelove.
To this day “Oh, Lord, it’s Jerry Lee Lewis,” or some variation of that, is probably a fairly common response to any encounter with Jerry Lee; his reputation has always preceded him. It was pretty much my reaction when I heard there was yet another Jerry Lee Lewis book on the horizon.
I met Peter Matthiessen once when the Friends of the Library were selling books at the Koret Auditorium in 2001. Matthiessen was featured speaker at a program in the “Writers of the Land” series sponsored…
Rosanne Cash’s last CD was called The List; an album of covers released in 2009 and drawn from a list given to her by her father of his one hundred essential country songs. The Man…
To me the most boring part of any biography is the beginning. You know, all that stuff about the subject’s childhood and schooling and who his parents were and what they were like and even…