Rich Mintz  

According to today’s Times, Allegra Goodman has a new novel, The Cookbook Collector — which I’ve now ordered. (Disclosure: Allegra Goodman and I were in college together, and we know people in common, although I haven’t spoken to her in 20 years.)

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!

All the paraphernalia. I’m still getting emailed by these people, six years later, and it still makes me miss the biz.

Yes, Kerri, I am an Amazon addict. I can’t stop! It’s too easy to see a book that looks interesting and, you know, just CLICK and wait 36 hours and have it land in my lap. So sue me.

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.

I’m on my way to Baltimore tomorrow afternoon for the Americans for the Arts convention. I do own a car, and I’d been planning to drive — I even told the parking lot where my car lives that I’d be picking it up tomorrow.

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.

Now we’ve come to the point in Museum Legs where I learn something about the human craft of oil painting: of luminescence, of glazing and scumbling, of burnt sienna. And this: “The telltale sign of a dark ground in a classical oil portrait is when the King of France looks like he has just gotten a facial.”

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.

Signs by the side of the road, NY 22 at NY 311, Patterson, New York.

I finished reading Metatropolis tonight, an anthology of interrelated dystopian-future urbanist short stories edited by John Scalzi. (I heard about it on his blog.) The book is just out in the US — I preordered it in hardcover, which gives you a sense of how eagerly I awaited it — and I bumped it ahead of everything else in the queue, even the books that I’d already started, and read it beginning to end.

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.

Today’s haul, on my desk when I got in from lunch:

This really has to stop. Doesn’t it?

The image at left is what greeted me when I arrived at my desk this morning, and it’s nothing out of the ordinary. You see, I have a problem: I’m addicted to Amazon Prime, the free-2-day-shipping membership plan at Amazon.com. For a flat $79 a year, almost every regular-stock book, and a ton of other Amazon merchandise is delivered in two days for free. In New York City, where Amazon has courier delivery, this often amounts to free overnight shipping; sometimes I order something in the evening after I leave work and it’s on my desk before I get in in the morning.

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…