Interview: King of Rags By Eric Bronson @VBTCafe

Title: King of Rags

Author Name: Eric Bronson

Author Bio: Eric Bronson teaches philosophy in the Humanities Department at York University in Toronto. He is the editor of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Poker and Philosophy (Open Court, 2006), Baseball and Philosophy (Open Court, 2004), and co-editor of The Hobbit and Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy (Open Court, 2003). In 2007 he served as the "Soul Trainer" for the CBC radio morning show, "Sounds Like Canada." His current project is a book called The Dice Shooters, based loosely on his experiences dealing craps in Las Vegas.

Author Links - The link for any or all of the following...

Facebook: King of Rags | Goodreads | Amazon

Book Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: Neverland Publishing

Release Date: May, 2013

Buy Link(s): Amazon

Book Description:

King of Rags follows the life of Scott Joplin and his fellow ragtime musicians as they frantically transform the seedy and segregated underbelly of comedians, conmen and prostitutes who called America's most vibrant cities home. Inspired by Booker T. Washington and the Dahomeyan defeat in West Africa, Joplin was ignored by the masses for writing the music of Civil Rights fifty years before America was ready to listen.

Excerpt One:

Whenever he had a difficult decision to make, Scott set himself up on the small hill with high grass and wildflowers. In the starlight he was especially careful not to disturb the patient, purple flowers. A traveling white schoolteacher once read to his class the story of the heliotrope from Ovid's

Metamorphoses. Derided by the world and scorned by her lover the Sun God, a poor nymph keeps her eyes ever fixed to the sun. Streaked with purple, she is covered in leaves and flowers, roots that claw their way around her helplessness, forever binding her to the earth.

"'An excess of passion begets an excess of grief,'" the schoolteacher quoted. "Don't reach so high. You'll be much happier if you lower your sights."

But there was something about the nymph's undying faith that touched him inside. She refused to be stuck here in this world, and that refusal brought hope along with the pain. Scott thought he understood the nymph's eternal conflict. His music wouldn't right the wrong, but it might help ease the loss. Long after the sun abandoned her, Scott sat among the heliotrope and played for her his coronet.

The hill had a further advantage: it overlooked the new train station. He was there one December day, ten years earlier, when the first Texas & Pacific railway pulled in from Dallas, on its way to Fulton, Arkansas. Since then his father had taught him to play the violin, banjo and coronet, but none of them could take him beyond his colorless world. Maybe the trains couldn't either, but the tracks held that promise, going outwards, ever away. His mother believed the coronet was

the Devil's instrument. Scott disagreed. Any instrument that brought relief to others was useful. It shouldn't much matter who was dancing at the other end.

Under the wavering light of a half-moon, Scott played with all the sounds of the night: the high-pitched melody of cicada bugs over the running bass line of lumber cars and freight trains, garbage crates and short hauls sounding their syncopated iron rhythms: boom-chugga boom-boom: boomchugga boom-boom. The music of the night trains was the sound of waiting-waiting and waning and wasting away. The greatest secrets in life, Scott knew, lay not in the music or the

people who played it, but in the short, silent spaces that sometimes fell unexpectedly off the beat. The Stop Man taught him that without hardly even saying a word.

Author Interview:

The Avid Reader: What inspired you to write King of Rags?
Eric Bronson: I've always felt most connected to rhythms in language. My mother used to read me poetry before sleep. Rather than put me to sleep, Romantic poets like Henry Longfellow awoke my imagination with their stories and especially their musical language. The first time I was read The Wreck of the Hesperus ("Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,/ With his face turned to the skies,/ The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow/ On his fixed and glassy eyes."), I knew I would always live with words.

The Avid Reader: When or at what age did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Eric Bronson: Probably in 2nd grade. That's when I first experienced its practical benefits. A friend and I were allowed to leave class to write detective stories in our school's learning center. I learned then that you didn't have to do what others were doing if you could write. Ten years earlier, Charles Bukowski was amazed that writing could save him from a repetitive job at the post office. I get that.

The Avid Reader: What is the earliest age you remember reading your first book?
Eric Bronson: I don't remember the age, but I remember the colors. I remember going to the library and the excitement of picking out books. Yellow books mostly. The hardcover Curious George books were lovely. Later I discovered the blue hardcover Hardy Boys books. To this day, I always judge a book by its cover and its color.

The Avid Reader: What genre of books do you enjoy reading?
Eric Bronson: I'm not bound to any one particular genre. But I generally go for characters that struggle in both worlds: the everyday, ordinary kind of madness and the more eternal pursuit for something more - more lasting, more meaningful, more kind. Right now I'm very much enjoying Proust, how the smallest toy sold at a carnival can set him swirling into slow transcendence. I'm also really getting into Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's comic book, Transmetropolitan. Even the protagonist's name, Spider Jerusalem, speaks well of both worlds.

The Avid Reader: What is your favorite book?
Eric Bronson: Probably Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. A "whiskey priest" on the run in search of a kind of grace. "Our sins have so much beauty," he says.

The Avid Reader: You know I think we all have a favorite author. Who is your favorite author and why?
Eric Bronson: Willa Cather and Joseph Conrad. Cather for the dignity and the darkness in her characters. Conrad for the crazy desperate language, the relentless search for a moral code amidst a never relenting storm and sea.

The Avid Reader: If you could travel back in time here on earth to any place or time. Where would you go and why?
Eric Bronson: I'd go to Chestnut Valley in St. Louis in the early 1900s. Specifically, Babe's brothel. Bad whiskey at the bar. Fat Mama Lou on the stage, singing her filthy late-night stories. I'm over in the corner at the piano. There's ragtime in the air and a cigarette in my mouth.

The Avid Reader: When writing a book do you find that writing comes easy for you or is it a difficult task?
Eric Bronson: It's not that hard when I'm writing. The hard part is getting there. You have to shut the door to the outside world if you really want to get inside it. But the music of modernity is so seductive. It's too hard to keep it out. And with two small kids, a working wife, and a daddy daycare, all flights of fancy must be routinely scheduled and are regularly grounded.

The Avid Reader: Do you have any little fuzzy friends? Like a dog or a cat? Or any pets?
Eric Bronson: None inside the house. In the forests outside my house in rural Ontario, the cayotes keep me company late at night. They're not friends exactly. Smaller, fuzzier things constantly try to eat their way into my house. But they're not friends exactly either.

The Avid Reader: What is your "to die for", favorite food/foods to eat?
Chewy, slurpy things. Like seafood gumbo, noodles, or cartilage. My eating habits are more hyena than human.

The Avid Reader: Do you have any advice for anyone that would like to be an author?
Eric Bronson: I'm not a big fan of "being" anything. Instead of wanting to be an author, try wanting to write a story. It's a lot easier. So many people who want to be writers spend too much time sharpening their pencils, buying expensive software, or going on benders a la Hemingway or Fitzgerald. Write stories instead. And when you don't feel like writing, go create your own stories. I've never been a believer in writing all the time. Language needs life, air, and chance encounters. That's the good news.

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