Book
Liesel Litzenburger:
Now You Love Me
(Three Rivers Press, Feb, 2007)
Reading Liesel Litzenburger’s short-story collection is like taking an extended trip to Point Harbor, Mich., with a wise and wisecracking 9-year-old girl and her quirky family. Without the filter of adult presuppositions, Annie Child sees most grown-ups as people who “like to be left alone,” and The Sound of Music as “a movie about a lady who lived with nuns and then went to live with a family…and the children sang songs standing in straight line.” After Annie’s father abandons the family, younger brother Gus rebels – calling adults by their first names and wearing a gorilla suit to the movies. Their free-spirited mother’s manic brushes with depression culminate in the Pushcart Prize-winning title story, involving a hotwired vehicle and a wild road trip. The final vignettes, in which the mother is wooed by a hapless but hopeful suitor, are riveting. While these 10 linked stories don’t offer the complex plot twists of a novel, they do offer insightful glimpses into complex familial relationships in small-town northern Michigan, circa 1976.
Bottom Line: “Northern Exposure” meets northern Michigan. –Lori Hile
Book
Alison Swan:
Fresh Water: Women Writing
on the Great Lakes
(Michigan State University Press)
The Chinese consider water a female element. So Alison Swan was on to something when she asked 35 women for essays on the Great Lakes. Swan drew mostly from academics, so some of these essays are autumnal reflections, workshopped to drabness in creative writing programs. But there are writers with stories to tell, and the language to tell it. Anne-Marie Oomen’s “Water Birds” is only a page long, but it’s about “afternoon delight” in the Lake Michigan surf, and the particular problems of cold-water lust. The best essays look at the Lakes not as vacation backdrops, but as natural forces ordering our lives. The Latin word for island is insula. That makes perfect sense after you read about Kathleen Stocking’s visit to Bois Blanc, in Lake Huron. Drinkers in the island’s lone tavern treat her like an oddball missionary and debate whether the winter population is 37 or 42. Reading Donna Seaman’s “Reflections from a Concrete Shore” reminds us that Chicagoans set their moods by Lake Michigan. Seaman first saw the lake in December, when it “looked like the surface of a distant planet, Neptune perhaps.” By summer, the water was “deeply turquoise, silky, gently breathing, rippling and dimpling, somehow sweet and expectant.”
Bottom Line: There’s an essay for every season on the Lakes, from placid July to turbulent November. –Edw
Music
Eddie J
Tosi’s Restaurant and Lounge
(4337 Ridge Road, Stevensville)
Eddie J makes a whole lotta music. Each weekend, he becomes a veritable one-man band at Tosi’s in Stevensville, Mich. His fingers tickle a computerized keyboard that can replicate almost any musical sound, from orchestral strings to a Jimi Hendrix guitar lick. He covers the likes of Lou Rawls, Earth, Wind and Fire, the Temptations, Frank Sinatra – even Peggy Lee. His elastic voice rides the notes from soulful falsetto to deep bass. And when it goes soft and low, you’d swear Barry White was whispering in your ear. Eddie J keeps the joint jumping Friday and Saturday evenings from 7 to 11 p.m. By this time, many patrons have mustered the courage for some night moves on the tiny dance floor. As of January 1, Tosi’s Restaurant and Lounge is smoke free. Now that’s reason enough for you smokeless lounge lizards to get out and shake your booty again.
Bottom Line: Baby, it’s cold outside, but not when Eddie J’s music turns up the heat. –Gail Isaacson
Radio
Radio Harbor Country
106.3 FM
“Language In Array”
(Sundays, 6 p.m.)
It’s not often one hears the late Basil Rathbone on the radio. The English actor, best known for playing Sherlock Holmes, spoke in the sort of plummy, orotund voice employed by foppish movie villains who pull their gloves off one finger at a time. Rathbone’s readings of Edgar Allen Poe were the highlight on the Halloween edition of Radio Harbor Country’s “Language In Array,” Columbia College professor Sean Francis’ salute to “poetry, drama and oratory.” Francis likes to find a seasonal hook for his programs. A week later, he was celebrating Guy Fawkes’ Day, Election Day, and the birthday of “the playwright, fictionist and he-man laconic actor, Sam Shepard.” To honor the latter, he played clips from Shepard’s performance as General Garrison in Black Hawk Down. And to get listeners in a political mood, Francis put on an old LP of actor Ed Begley Sr. reading a Massachusetts congressman’s harangue against Louisiana statehood. No great orator himself – he has the voice of an adenoidal teaching assistant – Francis occasionally recites poetry. Usually, though, he leaves it to the pros.
Bottom Line: No one expects a DJ to sing. Just to have great taste. –E. McC.
Website
ABSOLUTEMICHIGAN.COM
Do you need the websites of every bed-and-breakfast in Saugatuck? Are you trying to find a golf course in Benton Harbor? Do you want to watch the live web cast of a high-school mock election in Leelanau County? We didn’t want to watch, either, but that’s an example of how thoroughly absolutemichigan.com covers Michigan – from Monroe to Ironwood, from New Buffalo to the Soo. Absolute Michigan’s news digest is as likely to link to a cranky blogger as a daily newspaper. Its history page will inform you “Why We Are Called The Wolverine State.” The daily photo goes beyond the calendar classics – beaches, birches, The Bridge – to bring you a Detroit water tower, or a “ghost” haunting a train station. Our favorite feature is the Michigan Blog List. That’s where we discovered the Detroit Blog, whose author explores the ruins of his faded hometown. And for awhile, we were following the sour musings of Holland’s Reluctant Michigander, but he either went offline, left the state, or both – leaving West Michigan without a voice in the blogosphere. So if you’re reading this, get on the Internet, start a blog, and let Absolute Michigan know what you’re up to. Why should Detroit have all the good websites?
Bottom Line: Lives up to its motto, “All Michigan, All The Time.” –E. McC.
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