Get Haunted at Book Launch Party for Picture the Dead

The Booksmith on Haight Street will be turned into a 19^th century spiritualist haunt on Thursday, May 6 when the author and illustrator of a new young adult novel, Picture the Dead, don period costumes for a reading of their work.

Oh, yeah. That local man of mystery, Lemony Snicket, will be acting as ghost.

The event is the formal launch of Picture the Dead, described alternately as a ‘illustrated paranormal teen romance novel,” or a book with a “Cold Mountain feel.” It was written by Adele Griffin and illustrated by Lisa Brown, who draws the three-panel book reviews for the Chronicle. She is also married to Snicket (aka Daniel Handler)

That family is known for its fun and sense of humor and the book launch promised to provide both. Those who wander into the Booksmith can try their luck communicating with dead spirits, or if that doesn’t work, get their picture taken with a paranormal being. (Snicket)

Griffin and Brown got the idea for Picture the Dead a few years ago when their two families rented an enormous house outside of Boston for a vacation. While there, they got this sense that there was another, well, non-human presence, in the house.

“We thought it would be restful but it ended up being different,” said Brown. “It felt like there was a presence in the house. It wasn’t us, it wasn’t the kids. It was like we were in someone else’s house and we were the invaders. It wasn’t sinister, but you felt you weren’t alone.”

Then Brown and Griffin stumbled upon an antique Victorian trunk in the basement. Crammed inside was an old scrapbook filled with Civil War photographs ringed in black, and “spirit photos” that purported to show the dead communicating with the living. Spiritualism and séances were popular in the latter half of the 19^th century, the pair point out on their website.

“It was almost as if it was inviting us to this story,” said Griffin.

The trunk proved to be a conversation piece and Griffin and Brown soon found themselves collaborating on a historical novel set during the Civil War. It centers around Jenny Lovell, an orphan living with her uncle and not-so-kind aunt.  When her fiancé dies in the war, she soon begins to sense that his spirit is not at rest. Jenny attempts to find out how and why her fiancé died, and her questions bring her into an alliance with a spirit photographer. Secrets spill out and soon nothing is as it appears.

The pair did extensive research for the book and based the settings and many of the details on actual events and people. Brown studied daguerreotypes from the Library of Congress and drew her illustrations using those portraits as a guide. She then put the pictures on her computer and remastered them.

The Booksmith event on Haight Street starts at 7:30 pm. If you can't make the party, Redroom.com will be streaming the party live.

Is the Book Dead? The San Francisco Version

It's become routine at book conventions, book fairs, and author gatherings to ponder the dismal fate of the publishing industry and contemplate how e-books will affect book sales.

The Mechanic's Institute in San Francisco is hosting its own version of this discussion on Thursday, and this one promises to be truly interesting.

Panelists include Daniel Handler, (author of the Lemony Snicket books) John McMurtrie, the Chronicle's book section editor, Oscar Villalon, the former editor of the book review, now publisher of McSweeney's, Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon and author of new book on blogging, Brenda Knight, an associate publisher of Cleis Press, and Annalee Newitz, a syndicated columnist for Techsploitation.  Alan Kaufman, author of Jew Boy, will moderate the discussion.

The talk starts at 6:30 pm. Details are here.

Dirty Words, more Dirty Words, and Even more Dirty Words

There were a shocking number of women – and men – in red silk corsets at Sunday night’s Litquake fundraiser. The theme was “Dirty Words: An Evening of Smut” and many participants dressed in the spirit of the evening.

The Twilight Vixen Revue – a group of four queer women who dance burlesque – started out the evening by modeling fashions by Stormy Leather, the place to go for all your dominatrix needs. This was sexual titillation at its most refined –beautiful women wearing leather corsets, silk underwear, and high heels. One even wore a mask and carried a whip.

The emcee for the evening, Kirk Read, got into the spirit as well, with black leather pants that showcased a large brass zipper from front to back. His red silk bustier (named the Sergeant Corset, retail price $365.95) had a masculine, military touch – a few rings and buckles that can be put to some other erotic use.

But the real focus of the evening was words – Dirty Words. The organizers got the title for the fundraiser from the new anthology edited by Ellen Sussman, and many of the contributors read their pieces.

The scope of the dirty words were surprising. Did you know James Joyce was a dirty old man? Well, I guess the censors of the time did, since Ulysses was banned for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1920s. Alan Black, the author of the memoir Kick the Balls, read, in his delightful Scottish burr, a 1909 letter Joyce wrote to his wife and muse, Nora Gallagher Joyce. It can’t be repeated here but I will say that Joyce was remembering certain intimate acts with Nora and encouraged her to be even dirtier. I swear he used that word over and over again.

Michelle Richmond, the author of the newly-released No One You Know, dressed demurely in a blue denim scoop-necked dress. She gave her proclivities away, though, by wearing red, open toe high heel shoes. “Whenever I read about sex I feel compelled to dress like I am on the way to Sunday school,” Michelle told the crowd. “Whatever I know about sex I learned on the Baptist Youth bus in Tennessee.”

Stephen Elliot read an excerpt from his new memoir, The Adderall Diary. While it is definitely a Stephen Elliot book – he read a scene where he went to a bondage spot and was videotaped as a submissive bottom – the book apparently also explores the murders that have tangentially touched Elliot's life. He shared some girlfriends with a man named Sean Sturgeon, the one-time best friend of self-professed wife killer Hans Reiser. Sturgeon at one point confessed to killing eight people – a lie, as it turned out. Unfortunately, Reiser did kill his wife, Nina, who had left her husband for Sturgeon. Elliot touches on all these complicated relationships in an article in Salon, but they didn’t really come into play during his reading, which was characteristically funny and uncomfortable for those into vanilla sexual practices.

The fun went on. Kim Addonizio read her piece from the Dirty Words anthology. I never knew necrophilia could be so funny. Helena Echlin's demure British accent made her lusty words somehow more respectably lusty. Daniel Handler ended the evening by reading from his 2000 novel, Watch Your Mouth. Dressed in a brown suit with white shirt in tie, his brown crew cut graying slightly, Handler’s appearance was incongruent with the descriptions of sex and mirrors and incest coming from his mouth.

There are lots of wonderful writer organizations in the Bay Area – The Grotto, 826 Valencia, Redroom.com. Writing Wild Women, North 24^th Writers (my writing group.) But no organization brings the community together like Litquake. Every year the group puts on a fabulous literary festival, once that is inclusive and daring. It creates an environment that showcases established and up and coming authors. And this year Litquake plans to have an open mike during its LitCrawl, which makes it that much more democratic. See you there in early October.