Before I introduce you to Open Book I want you to know that Wolfgang Books will resume their month of posts this Monday evening. That said, let's get to the matter at hand.
Let's start with some sight and sound.
Open Book TV: Ishmael Beah from Open Book TV on Vimeo.
Books and authors have for a good part of this and the former century wrestled with their image. The rise of pop music and rock & roll has forever left the poet outside the house of fame or, worse still, having to borrow from the ephemeral fashions of music and movie.
Norman Mailer tried his hardest to be hip and virile, in a conflicting and ever-alternating attempt to wax Hemingway (Mailer loved to pretend to box) and to seem "down" with beatnik politicos like Abbie Hoffman. The only bookseller's conference I went to back when I was in the bookstore business left me with a comic image: A sea of corduroy jackets. Old and young alike. Corduroy as far as the eyes can see.
They're known as a signifier, and for a male bookseller it is the corduroy jacket that is donned to announce your status as a literary man. If you are a hipster, in love with your growing collection of Ikea furniture, well, then it is your clever tattoos, and carefully disheveled skinny jeans that announce to others where and what you are.
What does this have to do with Open Book? A lot. Open Book is the new LinkTV documentary series (from which the Beah clip above is drawn from) that deals with books and writers in space but not time. Location plays a pivotal role in Open Book's format and this is a wonderful thing.
The driving concept behind the show is to successfully consider the story behind the book as much as the role of the storyteller. In its first installment, Open Book plumbs the host's (Ina Howard-Parker) beloved Fort Greene, Brooklyn. New York is obviously a city with a epic literary reputation, but by putting the focus on one region we receive a provincial education of who and what are/is being created where. Is though, can be too limiting. The aspect of Open Book that I find most striking, and which directly relates to the goals of this blog, is that the show concerns itself with the has as well as the is to form a concerpt of are.
So while Open Book considers hypermodern voices and forms like the defjam poetry of Suheir Hammad and the newly percolating project of best selling novelist, Jennifer Egan, it also pauses to consider Richard Wright and Walt Whitman. Two literary legends who called Brooklyn their home and wrote of its place.
It is important after all (you knew I would take that tone at some point), to consider what has been as well as what is being now. To flavor these literary flashbacks the show calls on the concept of storytelling, borrowing the talents of actors like Jeffery Wright and native Brooklyn artist Carl Hancock Rux to lend a modern and assuredly hip (down to the nuanced cigarette smoking, which Rux has apparently practiced for years) quality to these old, true words. It works wonderfully, if at times maybe a little too Brooklyn for someone from Philadelphia.
I look forward to seeing where the show will go from this first episode. The pilot is set in possibly too familiar ground. Brooklyn has such a potent taste that someone familiar with it might be easily swayed to excess. In this sense, I am very excited to see what the show can do in a city ignorant of New York nuances like Philadelphia or Minneapolis or the harder to define spaces, like the Mississippi river or the great writers of the American plains.
In any case, Open Book does much to enlighten its viewers of what has and is happening where. It is a beautifully shot, informational new series that is a much needed help in keeping literature at a status it deserves.
Here is a link to the press release as well as sample clips from the pilot. And here is a link to the Open Book website. The show premiers today on LinkTV.
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