Putting the cart before the.... title?

[captainsblog]

Buffalo has a long and rich literary tradition. Mark Twain once worked from here. Michael Bennett got away with his ultimate putdown Chorus Line ("To commit suicide in Buffalo is redundant") because he was born here, and even changed his name from DiFiglia to one honoring his high school alma mater. Joyce Carol Oates lived in Lockport and Williamsville, and Tim Russert's a South Buffalo guy through and through.

Yet none of these precedents prepared me for the latest literary honour to be bestowed on the Queen City's vibrant literary community, given earlier this month by the fine folk at bookseller.com:

The Independent tracks down the author behind this year's winner of the Oddest Title of the Year, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification. Julian Montague spent six years roaming the streets of America, photographing an integral element of the industrialised world: the stray shopping trolley. Montague, 34, an artist and photographer living in New York, said he was surprised to have coined the oddest book title of the year. "I was so deeply into the project I was a little numb to the fact that the title could surprise other people."

The Bookseller award is the first won by Montague's book. The author said: "It started when I noticed stray shopping carts lying around. There's an intersection where I live and there are shopping carts everywhere - in strange positions in people's lawns, abandoned in bushes. So I created a language to illuminate this peripheral phenomenon. People who have read the book tell me they now notice shopping carts where they never would have done previously."

Make that the not-so-fine folk, for Montague is living, as I do, on the Way Way Upper West Side of New York. He has several websites, either devoted to or mentioning this phenomenon, with some rich graphics of the work in question, among them,:

Taking a dip in nearby Scajaquada Creek

Coney Island, in which a cart gets Cycloned

Down the road in Rachacha- the caption doesn't say, but this looks like Lake Avenue

And speaking of questions, it is a hallmark of one of my Best Beloved blogs, Joshilyn Jackson's, to interview fellow authors on a weeklyish basis in a feature she calls "3 Questions with...."  In her tradition, and I hope with her kind permission, I am emailing Mr. Montague forthwith with my own Count To Three. If he agrees to participate, I will ask and answer; your input into the cross-examination is welcomed, but these are what I've got so far:

1) Was there a Cart Zero for this project- a specific one which you saw and epiphanied in your mind from an "oh, that" to an "oh, WOW!" What and where was it, and what was it about that subject which made it memorable enough to embark on this?

2) Buffalonians who heard of this creative effort (as I did on NPR this weekend) have also seen the more somber shopping cart news of the month- in which a member of our own fair city's Common Council "declared war" on the stray shopping cart, in the words of the local arts weekly (which also cites Montague's work). What effect do you think these objects really have on the urban streetscape, and what effect would such a ban have on your work?

3) Finally, you are a man of words as well as of images, and these conveyors of commerce go by a surprising range of regional names. Our "shopping cart" goes in other regions or countries by such diverse names as "buggy," "carriage" and "trolley"- all referring, structurally, to the identical unit. Are there regional differences in  cart abandonment? Do buggies in Buggyland suffer an easier fate because of their association with baby buggies and their rubber baby buggy bumpers?

Surely I could ask him even better questions than these. I just hope not to be so drunk that I'll call him Shirley.