Rich Mintz  

This passage excerpted today by Ezra Klein from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy — which I tried and failed to get through more than once about 25 years ago — has spurred me to give it another try. So, good job there, Ezra.

So I came home tonight after 4 days and 3 nights away: 2 full days in Boston, followed by an overnight in Providence for WaterFire (about which more tomorrow), followed by a leisurely drive home with long stops in Jamestown and Newport, Rhode Island (about which ditto).

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.

WaterFire returns to Providence, Rhode Island this Friday evening with the first lighting of the season, and we’re taking a quick overnight trip to the Creative Capital to enjoy this incomparable nighttime festival event that we first experienced during last year’s National Arts Marketing Project annual meeting.

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.

I spoke too soon. By page 82, she’s skipping down the sidewalk singing loudly, trying not to step on cracks, observed by startled passers-by.

Reading Stephen Benatar’s Wish Her Safe at Home. Protagonist is supposed to be going crazy (in the intro, John Carey said it was one of the most disturbing books he had ever read, and was blackballed by the 1982 Booker Prize committee), but I’m already on page 76 and so far she hasn’t. There are signs she’s a little off, to be sure (on page 56, waiting in a drugstore, she says “I executed a few unobtrusive dance-steps which scarcely moved me from the spot”), but so far nothing particularly disturbing. But I’m ready…

(Warning: if you read past the third paragraph or so, you may feel you’re seeing a spoiler or two; although I’m not saying anything here that the author didn’t say out loud in his lecture before I read the book, and it didn’t bother me none.)

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.

I bet you didn’t know there was a Brooklyn ukelele craze, did you? Well, surprise — Brooklyn’s gone crazy for ukeleles!

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

Yes, it’s here again — the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament begins tonight and runs through the weekend at the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott. About 800 of the best crossword puzzle solvers from all over the world, including yours truly, will be competing for standings, recognition, and prizes (of no material value). 90% of the roughly 100 people on Earth who create crosswords in English will also be there, along with more press than you might expect.

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.

As much as I respect Jeff Bezos (as you know if you follow my Twitter feed, he’s now my primary source of physical media products, and on top of that he’s now selling me hair gel and Chex), this well-intentioned comment from his recent Newsweek interview (probably tossed off at a particularly aspirational moment in a particularly breathy chat about the Future) doesn’t seem to me to correspond with reality as we all know it, unless you take an uncommonly generous view of “eventually”:

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.