I will say that Amazon’s search-and-browse interface is more lightweight than Netflix’s, which I’ve never particularly liked. But I won’t be canceling my Netflix membership quite yet.

But one of the most formative experiences of my creative youth was taking pottery classes at Everywoman’s Village, the hotbed of ’70s do-your-own-thing women’s liberation on Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys.

The Village (not just for women, although mostly so) was like a cross between an ashram and the Learning Annex, with a dollop of macramé and a soupçon of consciousness-raising stirred in. They offered classes in all sorts of arts, crafts, and life skills, from the pottery and guitar classes I took to more practical skills like typography and layout. As importantly, in those late-’70s days when self-actualization was in the air, they embodied a vision of life that’s not so different from the Brooklyn of Etsy and homebrewed beer and curated moustaches. It was a place where people who had started off narrow, or with limited options, came to open their minds; the sorts of people I remember from my classes were like the women in 9 to 5 — which was a journey of self-actualization, too. The closest contemporary approximation I can think of is Brooklyn’s Third Ward, but the Village seemed much more politically charged.

Physically, Everywoman’s Village was a collection of modest beige stucco bungalows on an asphalt lot with some patches of scrubby grass, surrounded by cinderblock walls. (I’d call the style “High 1960s Community College Annex.”) It was a simple place, some studios and classrooms with metal folding chairs. But the vision transcended the surroundings. The colorful murals, like other wall art of the 1970s, put ideals and social commentary right in front of you in visual form. (Sandy Bleifer’s Can of Cardines, under the Hayvenhurst Avenue overpass of the Ventura Freeway, is from the same time period and only about two miles away.) And while on the grounds, you felt like you were part of a grand experiment in community — a crowdsourced place, back in the days when “crowdsourcing” required you to get an actual crowd all into the same place at the same time.

The Village is long gone — there’s a cheap-looking newish hotel on the site, verified by this Google Street View picture of the “Kauai Surf” apartment building I remember from just outside the back entrance to the premises, right behind where the pottery bungalow used to be, where my mom used to pick me up. But I think of it from time to time. It had a cameo in the script of Boogie Nights, so I know I’m not the only person who remembers it.

There’s not much left online, but the image above of “housewives on the way to practice yoga at Everywoman’s Village” will give you the flavor. More images from the same series here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

This long LA Times story about the purpose of orchestra conductors explains that the conductor is what overlays the music with an interpretation. Apparently orchestras can play without a conductor, but they usually aren’t very good; even if they’re technically proficient, which important orchestras always are, the music often sounds mechanical and soulless without the interpretive overlay of the conductor’s vision.

The article also confirms something that I sort of suspected, which is that most of the baton flourishes that mean anything to the orchestra are referring to points of musical interpretation that have already been discussed and rehearsed in regard to this particular performance. So a particular wave of the baton doesn’t mean, say, “tremolo” to every orchestra across all time, like a sign in ASL; rather, it means something like “ok, now! — do that thing we did in rehearsal at this point,” or “ok, the thing that’s called for in the score around this point starts… now.”

I’ll try to think of something pithy to say about this, but in the meantime I just thought it was interesting.

…but I had no idea she was so … you know, graphic. Doucet’s subject matter in this book is more freewheeling with regard to sex, sexuality, gender, fear, and the unconscious than you normally see even among “experimental” cartoonists. In virtually every panel (indeed, in everything of hers I’ve ever seen), she draws herself, or some alternate version of herself, and in very few of them do things seem to be going well for her.

Below I’ve provided links to three panels which, believe it or not, are among the three least edgy panels in the book. Don’t click if you’re not a fan of the names of body parts, anthropomorphized plucked chickens, or the F word. (I was careful! Because I’m a nice guy, Julie is fully clothed in all these, and I spared you “male Julie copulating with female Julie,” “body part, yes the one you’re thinking of, severed by a jackknife,” and so forth.)

Julie in the kitchen after a long night (warning: contains expletives you can’t say on TV)

Julie and her woodland friends (warning: contains creepy-looking beaver-type creature with a coffee pot)

Julie concerned about her anatomy (warning: refers to a body part that rhymes with “Regina”)

All duplicated without permission, and deliberately (yeah, right) blurry so that you’ll run out and buy buy buy and make Julie Doucet a rich woman. Here’s a link to all the Julie Doucet you can possibly want to see in one place.

I think everything I said before still holds. In fact, I found myself tumbling through it faster and faster as I got deeper and deeper into it, taking more for granted about the fictional universe and thus able (eager) to eat my way through it and bigger and bigger bites.

This is what happens when you get far enough into a book with a plot that is rolling forward of its own momentum toward a foreshadowed end state, even (especially) if that foreshadowing is ominous and grave: you can’t wait to get there and see how it turns out.

I wasn’t quite satisfied by the ending, but I enjoyed the experience so much — and felt the characterizations of the four major personalities in the book were so richly fleshed out — that Amis can be forgiven that.

Buy, read, enjoy.

Paul Moves Out

This one is the story of a young graphic designer from Montreal in the early 1980s, a time of promise and hope (remember the early 1980s, when I was only a few years younger than Paul) — going to school, first love, first apartment. It’s more than a little arch (despite the deceptively simple happy-face panels), encompassing Adult Themes (or at least Young Adult Themes) as well as lots of detail-filled daily life in Montreal, a city I’ve visited half a dozen times. (There were a few locations in this story that even I recognized.) In many ways it reminds me of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, but with a measure of darkness leached out of it.

I’ve mostly avoided graphic novels in the past because they’ve typically either seemed intolerably preachy or schmaltzy (remember Maus?) or required a concordance to keep the backstory straight (remember, you know, anything ever published with a superhero or an orc in it?). The Boon Companion’s been pushing me to read The Sandman for about three years, and it’s sitting right here behind me. Maybe if I start with something gentle and visually rich like this, I can graduate to the harder stuff.

This, and a lot more like it, is published by Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly Books.

The last meaty novel I read, back in the spring, was Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War, really six novels, comprising her Balkan Trilogy and her Levant Trilogy. Spanning the years from just before the Second World War through roughly the end of it, these books are the thinly fictionalized account of what she and her husband lived through as British citizens in Romania, Athens, and Egypt as the war coursed through the region. But the war came to an end, and so did the books, and I went back to my regular diet.

I tried a couple of novels in the intervening months, but nothing seemed to stick.

But last week in Providence, at Myopic Books in Wayland Square — along with a biography of Alexander the Great and a book on Southern culture — I picked up a copy of Martin Amis’s London Fields, which I’ve been meaning to read for the better part of a decade. I started it and quickly got drawn in, and am finding myself carving out a little extra reading time every day. Now I’m 200 pages in, and well immersed.

The experience of a long-form novel is something you don’t get on the Internet (although, of course, you do get other things from the Internet), and it’s only in the most immersive nonfiction (like Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, which I loved) that you get anything that approaches it. You build around you a personal perspective on the venues and trajectories in the novel, come to inhabit the characters’ motivations and to see them from all sides, to anticipate and fear their interactions. You live for a time in someone else’s world. And if (as I did with Manning’s six novels) you come to be comfortable there, it’s a moment of great sadness when you come to the end, especially if you’re reading a dead author who’s not going to be producing any more.

Until I finish, I won’t say any more about London Fields itself, except to say that it takes place in London and it’s more substantive than I expected from the playful Amis (son of Kingsley Amis, whom I can’t endure).

I’ve enjoyed every published word of Goodman’s, from her stories in the New Yorker to the most recent Intuition — she is one on that short list of authors whose books I’ll order in hardcover the moment I hear about them. If I had to pick one novel to take to a desert island, it might well be Goodman’s Paradise Park, the raucously funny yet serious and thoughtful story of a young woman hungry for spiritual meaning. I liked that one so much I gave it as a gift to a dozen people that year. Aside from the stories themselves, I always learn about something new from Allegra’s books — about the Jewish communities in Hawaii and Brooklyn and the Catskills and Miami, for example. (This is something Goodman has in common with Philip Roth, an author you wouldn’t otherwise associate her with — I learned more about the glove industry in Newark, New Jersey from reading Roth than probably everyone who will ever read this blog post put together has ever known about it.) So go buy her new book right now!

In theory I get around to reading all these; in practice, I read the ones that look interesting and accumulate the others until the next winnowing. But at least I got to touch them and look at them. That’s something, isn’t it?

Today’s arrival, which someone from one of the many urbanism lists I’m on recommended: My Kind of Transit: Rethinking Public Transportation in America, by Darrin Nordahl.

But now that it’s time to go, I don’t feel like driving. It’s going to be 93 degrees tomorrow. And I don’t have air conditioning. And I have a full morning, starting early. And there will be traffic and I’ll be on I-95 for three hours. And the train is so convenient! Even with the schlepping to Newark and the waiting for the train, I’ll be in Baltimore a full hour earlier on the train, and I’ll travel in air-conditioned comfort…with wireless Internet.

So I’m leaving the car in Brooklyn, and taking the train.

There are things I might want to do in Baltimore that would be easier with the car, but so what? I’ll just do other things instead. Or, like, I’ll hail a cab — just like I would here at home if I found myself in Williamsburg at 1am. It’s not a deal.

When a book makes you want to go directly to your nearest art museum, stopping on the way home at Pearl Paint, you know there’s something to it. And this is just a side conversation, in the middle of an essay about exhibit labels…

Dear editor of New York: The Novel for Kindle — the person whose name you render as “Marion ‘The Swamp’ Fox” is not a fictional character named Marion Fox; he is Francis Marion (1732-1795), known as “The Swamp Fox” for his elusiveness, an important historical person of the Revolutionary War era and one of the great heroes in whom South Carolina takes pride. There is not a schoolchild in South Carolina who has not been told, in hagiographic fashion, of his exploits. Indeed, I would wager that if you (yes, you) have only heard of two South Carolinians who died before you were born, one of them is bound to be Francis Marion. (The other is probably John C. Calhoun.)

The fact that this editor would think “The Swamp” is conceivable as a nickname for a historical person may suggest that Amazon’s ebook production is being outsourced to some country where knowledge of English is, shall we say, contingent. Or perhaps it’s just a typo in the original, but that seems exceedingly unlikely, as this is a reputable novel that seems to have been carefully copy-edited on the whole.

I wasn’t disappointed. This is a kind of sci-fi I’ve always liked: urban and social in orientation, set in a future or alternative present that’s a recognizable evolution (or imaginary transformation) of our own. In this case the transformation is far less than you’d see in, say, Ursula Le Guin; this is fully recognizable as our realistic near future, the way that (say) Oryx and Crake is.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s nanotechnology here and there, along with Internet goggles (described in detail as to their function) that would fit right into a Rudy Rucker or Cory Doctorow story.

The basic premise is that we’re in a postindustrial near future, or at least that resource shortages and climate change and the inevitable social strife have started taking their toll. The oil-based industrial economy is obviously still functioning in the background, to some degree for some people, but we’re a fair distance along a long road of decline toward Jim Kunstler’s post-industrial America. And those who can are taking refuge in isolated, protected urban arcologies — built around or on the bones of the old American cities — that are very different from one another.

According to Scalzi’s intro, the five of them got together ahead of time to set the ground rules and define the rough social structure of their not-too-distant-future world, and although the five stories are very different, there’s enough thematic continuity running through them that you do indeed feel like they’re five different takes on the same set of social conditions in the same world at the same time. Great job.

Bonus: implied gay social relations in two of the stories, in both instances treated so matter-of-factly that I almost missed it and had to back up to be sure. Go team!

Incidentally, this project was an audiobook first and a book afterwards; to some of you that will be notable, but as I will never have either the time or the patience for an audiobook, it’s merely one fact among many others to me.

This really has to stop. Doesn’t it?

I’ve always been a big bookbuyer, but with some guilt. (And to keep the guilt down, I steer many of my purchases to Half.com, now an eBay service, and to Amazon Marketplace, where I can buy for less and often benefit a smaller business.) After all, I have like a zillion books already — there’s a whole wall of them right behind me — and something like 70 percent of them I haven’t read all the way through.

Well, it turns out Amazon Prime’s free shipping has eliminated much of the residual resistance I had to buying books I wasn’t sure I’d get around to reading. For a few months I’ve been trying out a policy of “if you think you want to read it, just order it at the first inkling; don’t worry about the price,” just to see what it did to my spending; I have ended up spending more on books than I did otherwise, but I’ve also gotten more satisfaction, and the increased spending is at a level I can live with — in fact, I don’t think it’s the most I’ve ever spent on books.

Since I have everything shipped to the office, between Amazon and Half.com the books tend to pile up. So yesterday I packed a sack full of the most recent acquisitions and hauled them home. (Bonus plug: join the Arts Action Fund, a project of Americans for the Arts. It’s free!)

And when I unpacked, here’s what I had:

I’ll gloss all these books tomorrow — for now, let’s just revel in the awesome absurdity of that photo and the pitiful addiction it makes manifest…

I came into an empty house, full of thoughts of all the taped TV I would watch and all the blogging i would do (not to mention all the email i would answer) …but by the time I’d had a shower and a few minutes of AC had cooled down the house (just taken the edge off the heat, really), the only thing I felt like doing was sitting in my orange chair, with the windows open and a cup of coffee on the table, and reading. And that’s how I’ve spent two solid hours. No TV, no Internet, no music — just me and the NYT, the latest issue of New York, the first chapter of Parrot and Olivier in America … Oh, and the cat, but she’s just sitting over there on the back of the couch, watching me read.

In fact, I’m so committed to the serenity that I’m writing this entry on the iPad. The Mac is faster, and it’s sitting right over there — but it feels gentler to type on this little device on my lap instead.

When I was younger, I spent quiet time like this a lot, and now I rarely do, but I miss it and should make time to do it more.

If you’re new to WaterFire, here’s what happens: after night falls, volunteers in small boats light and tend wood fires in 100 braziers placed in the middle of the three rivers that flow through downtown Providence. Music plays, and thousands of people from Providence and the surrounding area converge on the waterfront to stroll, eat street food, and enjoy the sights, sounds, and scents of a large and memorable public event. At our last visit, we were fortunate enough to be guests in a gondola, which floated past three dozen of the braziers, upriver and then back down again, amid sparks and smoke and autumn drizzle. But even from shore, WaterFire is a thoroughly impressive sensory experience.

I particularly like WaterFire because it’s emphatically not a commercial event; it’s a spontaneous gathering of people from across the community to participate in a cultural happening (with free admission, courtesy of commercial and institutional sponsors, of the City of Providence and the state of Rhode Island, and of the dozens of volunteers who tend the fires, staff the boats, and advise and assist attendees on land).

Friday’s lighting starts at 8:16pm (sunset) and the fires will be burning until midnight. Bring a jacket; the evening will be breezy. If you’re within travel distance of Providence, consider making the trip; and if you enjoy what you see, please make a contribution to WaterFire.

In Even the Dogs, Jon McGregor has done something remarkable: he’s written a novel about heroin addicts, and heroin addiction, that I’ve actually read through to the end. And I read it through not in small doses, but in one sitting (with, admittedly, a long break to sleep, wake up, and spend a day at work).

Addiction is not a literary topic I have ever thought I was particularly interested in, especially because most fictional treatments of addiction and other conditions of mental illness are so untrue to life. They’re either mawkish or romantic, or they’re unrealistically redemptive, or they fail to capture the mundane lived reality that underpins the life of even a “crazy” person.

Compare Next to Normal, last year’s “acclaimed, groundbreaking musical” with a “thrilling contemporary score” that “pushes Broadway in new directions.” NtN, of course, is “about” bipolar disorder, and it (apparently, and I say this because I couldn’t bring myself to sit through it, although I endured endless plot summary from my excitable friends and on the Internet, and saw the production number at the Tonys) celebrates — nay, fetishizes — the condition and the “conflict” it causes and the “consequences” in its wake. Forgive the grumpy-old-manitude, but as one of the people I know who lives with a chemical imbalance said to me, more or less, “I can’t imagine feeling anything other than anger and frustration as a result of seeing that show.” People living with untreated or untreatable mental illness don’t romanticize it at all, as far as I can tell; it’s just there, an unavoidable pain in the ass, an inconvenient handicap that insists on being reckoned with just as you’ve finally managed to put it out of your mind, an inhibitor and complicator of social functioning, a monkey on your back that you never adjust to and will never get rid of. People with mental illness of course come to terms with the way God made them, and learn as best they can to accept themselves the way they are (what else can you do)?… but their success in building happy lives, if they’re lucky, doesn’t eliminate or even neutralize the pain and dislocation that they feel; it’s all jumbled up together.

Ditto with addiction. And McGregor (whom I heard speaking about the book here in New York at the Center for Fiction) has told a very clear, plain, believable, and not at all romantic story about addiction and addicts on the street — about their pain, their realism, and above all the daily schlep that is their lives. This despite a narrative form that is unusual, experimental, even a bit magical. As the characters remark time and again, it takes a lot of work, daily grinding work, to hold yourself together if you’re addicted to heroin and living on the street, and these people (and they are very much fully realized people) plod through it (each in his or her own style) with a determination that is to their credit. A bleak novel, a novel whose protagonists are largely unsophisticated and one that does not resolve in a satisfactory way; but I laughed out loud at least a dozen times, and was gripped through to the end.

It’s no surprise to me, having seen no fewer than two wild ukelele solos at the talent show during the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

A Small-Sized Mystery
by Jane Hirshfield

Leave a door open long enough,
a cat will enter.
Leave food, it will stay.
Soon, on cold nights,
you’ll be saying “excuse me”
if you want to get out of your chair.
But one thing you’ll never hear from a cat
is “excuse me.”
Nor Einstein’s famous theorem.
Nor “The quality of mercy is not strained.”
In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.
In this world where much is missing,
a cat fills only a cat-sized hole.
Yet your whole body turns toward it
again and again because it is there.

Reprinted without permission from The New Republic, February 18, 2010.

Jane Hirshfield on Wikipedia | Jane Hirshfield at the Poetry Foundation Web site

For those who are joining us late, I ranked 364th in the world in 2007, 257th in 2008, and 189th in 2009. My goal this year is to break 150. I’m afraid rising much closer to 100 will be very difficult, as at that point you start to enter the range of the brilliant misfits who dominate the world of puzzling, which (for all my many charms) I am afraid I am not one of. (Or am I?)

After an informal social puzzle competition on Friday night, the winnowing begins in earnest on Saturday, with 6 competitive, timed puzzles (in a hotel ballroom set up like the room you took the SATs in), scored according to an arcane formula (which every single participant could explain to you from memory) that balances speed against accuracy. One final qualifying puzzle follows on Sunday. By convention, puzzle 2 is difficult, puzzle 5 is absolute and obscene torture, and puzzle 6 is an entertaining schmaltzfest by New York magazine crossword constructor Maura Jacobson, who has had a puzzle in every competition since the very first. Interim rankings are posted two or three times during the day on Saturday, so that the obsessives in the competition (i.e., everybody) can micro-obsess about their micro-standings throughout the whole damn weekend.

The top three by rank in each of Divisions A and B will competitively solve an eighth championship puzzle on a whiteboard up on a stage on Sunday beginning around noon, with live play-by-play announcing by NPR’s Neal Conan and crossword constructor Merl Reagle. The championship puzzle has three different sets of clues, of different levels of difficulty, for the three divisions. In Division A, college prodigy Tyler Hinman, professional crossword puzzle contestant Trip Payne, bookish “Wordplay” star/fashion plate Ellen Ripstein, and eternal Catholic schoolboy/crossword constructor Francis Heaney are all favored. (Yes, there is such a thing as crossword tournament VIPs; see “briliant misfit,” above, which most of them would consider a compliment.) This event is not technically open to the public, but security is not tight by that point in the tournament — if you’re in New York, adventurous, and up early on Sunday, it’s quite an experience. (Just don’t expect to see me on the stage.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, crossword puzzle people are very heavy drinkers — I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow was the busiest night of the year in the hotel bar.

If you’d like to try your luck, puzzle #1 from last year’s tournament (PDF) is here. If you think you’re good enough to place in the top half of the Tournament pack, you should be able to complete this puzzle with no errors within about 10 minutes without breaking a sweat.

Do you think that the ink-on-paper book will eventually go away?

I do. I don’t know how long it will take. You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world. That’s not going to go away; that’s going to thrive. But the physical book really has had a 500-year run. It’s probably the most successful technology ever. It’s hard to come up with things that have had a longer run. If Gutenberg were alive today, he would recognize the physical book and know how to operate it immediately. Given how much change there has been everywhere else, what’s remarkable is how stable the book has been for so long. But no technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.

Do you still read books on paper?

Not if I can help it.

The Kindle, the Internet, all this is very nice. But around the world today there are somewhere in the range of 3 billion people (give or take a billion or so) for whom a Kindle is not even remotely in their foreseeable future. (And there are probably 50 million such people, at least, in the United States.) It seems to me that as Bezos formulates his predictions, he’s simply overlooking about half the human race. For another generation, two generations, maybe much longer and possibly forever, the book will almost certainly kick the Kindle’s ass as “preferred reading technology” for those 3 billion people.

Not to mention that there are many (many) contexts in which reading is called for but an electronic device is impractical, even here on the Lido Deck where all of us technoelitists spend our time.

Even in the most aggressive Kindle-adoption scenario I can imagine, it is virtually inconceivable to me that the printed book will somehow “go away” within my lifetime. Printing and distribution economics will change for sure, but until someone comes up with something that beats the book for durability, versatility, and simplicity of OS, it’s still going to be part of the mix, and for many, many people it will be the only part.

Note: I don’t own a Kindle (although I’ll buy one as soon as Bezos puts one on the market that isn’t an aesthetically and visually horrifying experience to use). I do, however, read books (purchased from Bezos) from my iPhone, and I’ve had some good experiences with that. Maybe the Magical Apple Tablet that’s arriving Any Day Now will square the circle for me.