Santa Fe artist Lauren Camp sent this fabric postcard a couple of years ago. Another Camp piece, Loudest Noise, showing Thelonius Monk, is used on the cover of Ask Me Now, Conversations on Jazz & Literature, edited by Sascha Feinstein, a poet and English professor. The book is a series of interviews Feinstein did with 20 writers, poets, record producers, and others, all with a visceral connection with the music and the men and women who make it. I started making a list of favorite interviews: Dan Morgenstern, John Sinclair, Sonya Sanchez, Philip Levine, Gary Giddins, Haki R. Madhubuti---then realized that I had learned something wonderful from each and every one of them. For the serious and casual jazz lover, this is a great book and one that can be read over and over.Another book I turn to again and again is The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, a brilliant writer and Polish Jew who was shot by the Nazis in 1942. A collection of autobiographical short stories loosely stitched together, the book is about the 'private' world of Schulz's boyhood in the Polish town of Drogobych. In language that is poetic, imaginative, and immediate, Schulz describes how his shopkeeper father slowly descends into madness, hatching rare birds in the attic, talking with tailors' dummies, and becoming obsessed with cockroaches, while his mother withdraws into indifference. Like the Street of Crocodiles itself, though, nothing in the book is quite what it seems. Once home to dark, exotic cinnamon and spice shops, the street becomes a tawdry thoroughfare of cheap pleasures. Sleepy, provincial Drogobych, meanwhile, takes on the sudden, swirling urgency of van Gogh's Starry Night. A marvelous blend of memory and fantasy, Street of Crocodiles brings to life a world that was in transition and was soon to be no more.
