Rich Mintz  

As someone who struggled desperately for two years to get his bookstore to break even, and didn’t succeed in doing it even for a single month — not even December — I find that this just makes me really, really sad. More on this subject after I make peace with the cold injustice of the universe.

Symposium Books delivered my order in five days, so now I have a ton of new graphic novels and plain-old reproduced comic books to enjoy. I’m starting with Julie Doucet, because I like the stuff of hers I already own….

…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 was chatting briefly online with my friend “Dionysus” and the subject of graphic novels happened to come up (I think I brought up Paul). He suggested that I check out the authors Joe Matt and Seth, and I found their books remaindered at Symposium (and remembered seeing them in the store when I was in Providence). The upshot: I spent $70 on seven books, including theirs and a couple of Julie Doucet’s and this interesting-looking thing which is remaindered at $2.98. So thanks, Dionysus!

I bought into the idea of satellite radio quite early, right around the time I moved to Atlanta in 1999. Often what brings us to try new technologies is the recommendation of others, but I didn’t need one for this, because satellite radio seemed like a no-brainer — commercial radio at the time was awful (maybe it still is, but who listens anymore?), I was living in a place where I couldn’t get consistent NPR, I missed the bluegrass and community programming on WAMU — and then this New Thing came along.

From the start, I was an XM loyalist, and not just because I knew several people who worked at their headquarters in DC (although that was part of it — and I loved the company’s roots in the District itself, where they outfitted studios in a then-ratty neighborhood off New York Avenue NE before it was obvious to everyone else that the gentrification of that part of DC would actually work). XM was the purist’s choice; in their founding narrative, which I’m sure was more than a little true, they amassed a stupefying collection of recordings, hired the world’s best music curators and on-air talent, and set out to make something worth our loyalty, in response to the appalling field of steaming manure that commercial radio had become in the ClearChannel era. Sirius, by way of contrast, always felt like a naked money play.

So XM raised a stunning amount of money (there were satellites involved, after all — and if I recall correctly, one of the early ones went off course toward Mars or fell into the sea or something, and they had to build a new one — I’m sure it’s on the Internet, you can look it up), and over the next several years, they stumbled in the direction of profitability without ever quite losing their soul. I remained a subscriber for 8 years (!), upgrading my radio once or twice. I’m no music snob — I’m not even that much of a connoisseur — but there’s music I just plain like that you can’t hear on commercial radio and that’s too much work to steal off the Internet or rip from CDs. And besides, part of the point of radio has always been that an intelligent editor programs it for you, at least in theory, so that you can learn about things you’ll like but wouldn’t have found otherwise. Services like Pandora achieve a similar aim in a different way, but I find they require too much thinking to make me happy.

With XM, I was able to indulge my love of legitimate bluegrass, and dance and electronica, and even (to my secret shame) kickass Nashville country music. (Anyone who doesn’t like Kenny Chesney after listening to this or this, or Tim McGraw after this, or Trisha Yearwood after this, needs their head examined.) I bought multiple boomboxes and accessories so I could listen in the car and at home and especially in my bookstore (Peachtree Highway Books, in Atlanta’s Candler Park, 2002-2004, R.I.P.), where I spent most of my waking hours for two years. (Yes, XM, I was an occasional terms-of-service violator, as were many, many other intown Atlanta small businesses in those exciting entrepreneurial years.)

When I moved briefly to Little Rock in 2003-4, I discovered other XM loyalists among my friends. So apparently it wasn’t just me! We traded tips and occasionally even shared equipment. XM kept me company on those long, long drives from Atlanta to Little Rock (usually with an overnight in Tupelo). And in 2005-6, as friends and I founded BusyTonight in New York and tried hard to make a go of our technology business, XM was one of the things that kept me sane during that turbulent period.

I ended up canceling my XM for a combination of cost reasons and lack of use — for a period of several months, I just wasn’t home much, in that way you can get in a city like New York before you get your grownup footing. But now I’m feeling the hankering. Among other things, I feel the lack of editorially programmed bluegrass in my life, and the podcasts I listen to aren’t doing it for me. So I think I’m going to resubscribe. I just passed four hours on JetBlue in the past 24 hours with satellite radio playing in my ears continuously — and I like it. I was worried that the Sirius/XM merger would wreck everything, but most of my old favorite channels are still there, so it’s time to give it another try.

After coming across Paul Moves Out in the massive graphic novels section at Symposium Books in Providence — populated largely by remainders, so the prices are right — I’ve fallen in love with Michel Rabagliati’s gentle drawing style, and I’m in the process of ordering everything else he has that’s in print (which appears to be at least three more “Paul” novels of like size).

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.

I read a lot of nonfiction, especially history and cultural studies, which won’t surprise anyone who knows me; I’ve been teased (accurately) as one of the few people who’d buy pay actual money for a book about the history of the Postal Service. But for any of you who think I read only nonfiction (are you listening, Boon Companion?) — well, it’s just not true. About every fifth book or so, I need to dig into a really meaty novel and not let go until I’ve eaten the whole thing.

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).

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