Sunday, September 23
Literature Alive! a program of The Center for the Arts presents
Wordslingers 2007
Oakley Hall the Man,
Oakley Hall the Band
7:00PM, $18 in advance, $20 at the door

'Warlock' the 1959 classic Western based on Oakley Hall's Novel Staring - Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, Dorothy Malone and Anthony Quinn Saturday September 22 at MIDNIGHT The Del Oro Theater, Grass Valley, CA Box Office opens @ 11:30PM Tickets:$7.75, Seniors: (62) $5.75 For info: (530) 273-6932

An evening celebrating Oakley Hall's works, with readings by
Oakley Hall and others and a performance by the band Oakley Hall.

“...narrative that throbs unmistakably with the hum of a really big talent.” - Chicago Tribune

“Oakley Hall is among our most absorbing novelists.” - Los Angeles Times

“Brilliant…brings Cormac McCarthy to mind. No account of the fictions of the American West can be complete without reconsidering this revelatory novel.” - Publishers Weekly

“Very fine…one of our best American novels…we need voices like Oakley Hall’s.” - Thomas Pynchon

Literature Alive! has long wanted to honor Oakley Hall (now a Nevada City resident) - novelist, teacher, co-founder (with Blair Fuller) of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, now in its 38th year of writers' workshops.

Oakley Maxwell Hall (born July 1, 1920) was born in San Diego, California, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and served in the Marines during World War II. Some of his mysteries were published under the pen names "O.M. Hall" and "Jason Manor."His books focus primarily on the historical American West. His most famous book, Warlock, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958. The film adaptation of the same title was directed by Edward Dmytryk. In Thomas Pynchon's introduction to Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, Pynchon stated that he and Fariña started a "micro-cult" around Warlock.

Another novel, The Downhill Racers was made into a film starring Robert Redford in 1969.

After the death of Wallace Stegner, Hall was considered the dean of West Coast writers, having supported the early careers of California novelists such as Richard Ford and Michael Chabon. San Diego, and Hall's one-time neighborhood of Mission Hills there, serve as focal points of two novels: Corpus of Joe Bailey and Love & War in California.

EMILY WILSON The band Oakley Hall was formed about five years ago. Leader Patrick Sullivan (bottom right) said he admires the author's work. A novel idea: band is named after author Oakley Hall has a band named after him. Based in Brooklyn, the six-member group has recorded several CDs of genre-bending music: country, rock, folk, psychedelia – “cosmic Americana,” in the words of one reviewer. Hall, 86, said he's traded e-mails with the band and the group has sent him some records. “I think the whole thing's wonderful.” He said they got interested in his books because they are fans of author Thomas Pynchon, who has called “Warlock,” Hall's 1958 Western, “among the finest of American novels. ”No one from the group responded to an e-mail request for an interview, but in comments posted last July on the music Web site Daytrotter, singer Patrick Sullivan had this to say about why the band is called Oakley Hall: “I liked the cadences in his name a lot. It seemed to suggest something regal, American, and mysterious, simultaneously. I've read a handful of his novels and was attracted by the realism and grit of his vision of the West. With 'Deadwood' and Cormac McCarthy, the idea that the West was brutal is pretty much a cultural given now, but he was a few decades ahead of the curve. 'Warlock' is killer. He may have been one of the first guys to de-mythify the frontier. “He's also a cool guy. We've struck up a correspondence. His wife even recently came to a show of ours in San Francisco. ”Hall said he wanted to go to that show in San Francisco, too, but he was sick. He was tickled to learn that when his wife, Barbara, showed up at the concert hall, Sullivan ran across the street to a Walgreens store and bought her some earplugs. – JOHN WILKENS San Diego Union Tribune

Oakley Hall the Band

The 100 Best Songs of 2006 - ROLLING STONE

"Perhaps the best live rock band in NYC…" - New York Times

Top 50 Albums of 2006 - UNCUT

Springing from 60's west coast legends like the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Bros., the Charlatans and Moby Grape, adding elements of X, Neu, the Feelies, and Fairport Convention, Oakley Hall is a roots rock sextet that refuses the dictates of stale No-Depression-era norms. None of the six members hail from Brooklyn originally - instead coming from all over the northeast and rural south: Florida, Maryland, Mississippi, New England, New York and North Carolina. Although arriving from far flung corners, in Brooklyn, they’ve bonded together over the common loves of close harmony and electrified strings, an insatiable musical curiosity, and the need to raise a racket on stage.

Songwriter Pat Sullivan founded the band in the early winter of 2002 and immediately recruited friends bassist Jesse Barnes, fiddler Claudia Mogel and banjoist Fred Wallace to join what was then a ten-piece freak country free-for-all. After paring down the original line-up to six, Oakley Hall finally jelled in the latter half of 2004 with the recruitment of drummer Greg Anderson and singer-songstrix Rachel Cox (a former subway duet partner of Sullivan’s). His swinging drum-style and her undeniable pipes lit a fire under the recently streamlined crew and a new energy emerged. Wallace, tired of being lost in the din of drums, strung a fender like a banjo and plugged in, while Mogel got a Marshall stack to keep up. The new line-up hit the ground running and recorded Second Guessing a mere month into their tenure. The record was released in January 2006 on Amish and garnered raves. Their newest release, Gypsum Strings, finds them at the peak of their powers.

www.oakleyhall.net
Oakly Hall on www.youtube.com

Literature Alive! is a program of the Center for the Arts.