blues

January 25, 2021

Blues Brothers Backpack

It was a bright frosty urban morning and I walked to the post office to mail some of my books to new readers. Somehow they keep finding me and I express my highest gratitude for their support. It keeps Nestucca Spit Press in business and 2021 promises to be our most ambitious year yet.

So there I was sporting my trusty corduroy coat and Fort George stocking cap when I heard music, what vaguely sounded like soul music, coming from across the block. I looked that direction and spotted a rotund masked man carrying a backpack strapped over his shoulders. Dangling from the backpack was a tiny speaker that was blasting—if blasting is the word—out the music.

I heard horns and the unmistakable swagger of instrumental soul music. I couldn’t place it, but then I did. It was a tune from the Blues Brothers’ Briefcase Full of Blues. I could not believe my ears! What in name of a cocaine-addled John Belushi was this man broadcasting this classic album through a tiny speaker dangling from his backpack during the middle of a pandemic and not long after a thwarted government coup?

Hot damn! I love this album and used to own it. Jake and Elwood and the all-star band backing them! Play it Steve! The suits! The blow! The harmonica riffs! The mad dancing on the SNL skits! Oh to listen to this CD again. I can’t download it because I have never downloaded a single music track in my life and never will. A man can only buy Exile on Main Street so many times!

What the hell! I thought. No need to find the CD. I’d just follow the man and listen to the entire album this fine morning and then mail the books later.

I was positively giddy at the prospect!

Support Meditations Blog

The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.