nick

One of the earliest memories I can recall is riding around in my dad’s car while he sang, atrociously I might add, along to the Beatles. It was all down hill from there. Before I discovered how much I love deftly crafted written words, I fell in love with music. I was practically weaned on classic rock. Zeppelin, Sabbath, the Beatles, Dylan, Hendrix….I can go on and on. And then I became the proud owner of a CD player and I found out about liner notes.

Tulsa ’s quaint, Episcopalian university sure has produced some remarkable people. A Hall of Fame football player turned U.S. congressman, the pioneer inventor of voicemail technology, S.E. Hinton who authored the book on which Coppola’s seminal film The Outsiders was based (which also, incidentally, made the Admiral Twin drive-in a national landmark), and even Blanche Devereaux from the Golden Girls.

I once worked in a used bookstore here in Tulsa. Between customers, I ate the peanut butter, crackers, and ramen noodles the owner had stashed behind the desk. I pretty much worked solely for free books. By the end of my tenure there I had a pile of b-movie SciFi, Louis L’Amour paperbacks, and some weird, hippie esoteric fare.

Anyone who’s followed this blog knows my love for Cormac McCarthy and knows how over the past year I’ve become a big Spaghetti Western fan. Well, Novella Carpenter might as well pull up a chair and sit with my all-time favorite macho-masculine-tough guys. Novella is the author of the latest book I read, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer.

‘Dude, Fight Club totally ruled.’

No doubt you overheard this direct quote, possibly dozens of times if you saw the Chuck Palahniuk adaptation in theatres. I didn’t see it in theatres, and I heard it about 30 times more than I wished.