Rich Mintz  

This morning after WaterFire we had a walk around downtown Providence (now the Downcity Arts District), and I have to say things are looking better than they were a year ago. Shops and restaurants are filling in. There’s a big new coffeehouse called Small Point Café on Westminster. Tazza Cafe, where we had breakfast, has renovated (quite handsomely) since last year — the restaurant interior shots from below are from there. It’s gone upscale, but in the right way. (The thing that looks like a steampunk torture device is a halogen coffee siphon, but I mustn’t mock, as I ordered and enjoyed a cup of hipster pourover coffee.)

Most businesses I remember from a year ago are still open (although Farmstead Downcity, the cheese shop, is apparently closed). The excellent Symposium Books is still open, with its unusually broad collection of books (including a lot of bargain-priced remainders) on design and design philosophy, graphic novels, and other creativity-friendly offerings. All things considered, the neighborhood feels marginally more livable than it did a year ago, which is a good sign.

Also, Olga’s was hopping on Sunday morning, with every table in the garden filled with people with fabulous glasses who looked like they were up late designing their own bicycles.

Michael and I went up to Providence again this weekend for WaterFire — what is this, our fourth time? fifth? — and it was as magical as ever. Watching a line of burning braziers over water in downtown Providence, in the middle of the Providence, Woonasquatucket, and Moshassuck rivers, while listening to music and watching costumed persons and passersby do their things, evokes millennia-old cultural memories of convening water and fire and music and ceremonial dress at occasions of public importance. WaterFire is one of the few cultural experiences I’ve had that speaks to people of all ages and social backgrounds — everyone just understands that coming down to the river to look at fire and smell smoke and listen to music is an emotionally meaningful thing to do. If you’re a human being, it’s accessible; even if you don’t “get art,” you get it.

WaterFire wouldn’t work in New York — everything in NYC gets too gigantic too fast, and everyone takes it too seriously, and besides you’d need cordons of policemen to keep hoodlums from dropping Pepsi cans full of gasoline onto a burning brazier from whatever the equivalent of the Steeple Street Bridge is. Providence is at just the right size (and inclined just the right way, with its sizable community of creative professionals and future professionals) to turn out a large crowd, week after week, of people who will treat WaterFire as something proprietary to the local public, worth partaking in and supporting and stewarding and respecting.

As guests of the Brazier Society (we won the raffle last season), we had the chance to ride slowly down the length of the installation in a small powerboat, with 6 other guests and a boatman, listening to the sounds and looking at the fire and the crowd, watching the other boats, observing the fuel boats as they kept the braziers stocked with fuel. Afterwards, I lit a lantern in Memorial Park (for a $5 donation) in furtherance of an important private wish of mine (no, I won’t tell), and we spent most of the next two hours walking up and down and around.

Now I”m home, but my hair still smells like woodsmoke and I’m still hearing the crackle of sparks, and I’m looking forward to my next lighting.

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!

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).