1. Ban the guns.
2. The door opening, and the kids looking up.
3. Oh, god, scratch that.
4. Annoyed with the reporters, scrambling for information, who have no choice, no role here but to offer their first reactions. They lack the same talents I do.
5. But I’m watching anyway.
6. The best kid friend I have is just at the right age to have been in the room.

I don’t know that adding these to the soup helps much. I just keep hearing Adrienne Rich, who I’m working on a thing about. “The waste of my love goes on this way.” It’s a poem about something else but about this too.

I’m going for a long walk today. Hope you go outside, too.

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To hear Jean Shepherd tell the story, click here. Those of you who do not live in New York will find his observations about the New York publishing culture’s fetish for lists entertaining. He credited the success of his hoax to the fact that, “the people who believe in lists are asleep” at the hours at which his show was broadcast.

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People were talking about money and writing this week as they do any other and I happened to be researching a subject adjacent to the NYRB’s founding and came across this note, in David Laskin’s Partisans, about the start-up process:

The articles [for the first issue], written gratis on extremely tight deadlines, descended on the editors in an avalanche.

The early issues of the NYR, in other words, relied on the generosity of writers. It was a passion project. It’s worth considering. There continues to be this idea that there was a golden age where everyone was paid what their work was worth. The marketplace is a hostile place for a writer, of course, now, and no one would argue that fees are down from what they once were. I’m just saying: here’s a beacon of hope for people who feel their work is not being adequately compensated; for most work people have really, truly, wanted to do, it has never been the case.

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2. Not long after I graduated from hoarding old Sweet Valley High paperbacks, I bought a beat-up, mass-market paperback copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I had little interest in reading it; I’m not sure I ever did. I bought it because inside the front cover was the stamp of “Shakespeare and Company, Paris.” I was only seventeen or so but I knew what that meant. It was from That Bookstore. I had to have it, though the cover was falling  I kept it for years until it disappeared in a move. I like to think a mover kept it for himself. I can make peace with it finding that kind of home.

Years later, after I lost it, I learned that That Bookstore closed in 1941, long before Pirsig published Zen. (The one that now bears that name in That City does so as a tribute, and occupies a different adress.) Whatever hands it passed through were latecomer ones, impostors. I am not sure if that makes it better or worse.

3. More recently, at the Strand, in the basement (the basement is truly the best part of the Strand, you have missed something if you don’t venture down there), I bought a copy of James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. The dust jacket says it would have cost me $4.50, brand new, in 1961. Inside the front cover is the stamp of the “Negro Book Club.”

The Negro Book Club, as it turns out, was a subscription service started in Harlem in 1960. In 1963 the Times reported that the club had 4000 members. In August of 1961, when the second printing of my Baldwin book happened, it was probably smaller. The real push to publish books about black history, and black civil rights, only hits somewhere at the end of the decade. This book is a hardcover but later the appetite was for paperbacks, because they were “readily accessible for lower-income ghetto dwellers and for students,” Mel Watkins wrote. (He’d once sold books for them himself.)

4. Abebooks provided me a first edition of Magic Portholes, by Helen Follett. It cost me about $10.00. You don’t know who Helen Follett is; that’s okay, you shouldn’t. She’s a travel writer from the 1930s who is connected to some research I’m doing for a book I’m hoping to publish someday. She worked with Armstrong Sperry on the illustrations of this book. Sperry was a famous children’s illustrator who drew one of the first images of Tarzan, and then went on to write his own Newbery Prize-winner, Call It Courage.

The illustrations in Magic Portholes are… of their time. The book is about the author’s trip to Barbados and Saint Lucia and eventually through the Panama canal. The illustrations are racialized in a way that makes me loath to read this book in public, in a way that I think we would try to erase if we republished the book today. But sometimes they are beautiful, too.

5. I have an omnibus copy of Mary McCarthy’s memoirs, which were published as three separate books: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood; How I Grew; Intellectual Memoirs. In the general book-reading population, McCarthy’s been half-forgotten, though likely not so much by people like you and me, but she was popular enough in her own time that it was worth the while of the Quality Paperback Book Club to stitch this together. I do mean that word “stitch” literally. Each of the three books is typeset in a different font, and paginated as a separate book.

It’s a garbage edition, in other words, not meant to last long. And yet I like it this way. It’s like someone could not bear the thought of one’s consuming these three books apart. And the cover image, of McCarthy as a Vassar co-ed: like a thing designed to insist that she, as Alison Lurie once put it, was “a totally new type of woman who stood for both sense [in the form of a hefty book] and sensibility [in the prettiness of the picture].”

6. My copy of Anne of Green Gables, the one my dad read to me, is worn and fragile and the binding, a cheap 1980s mass market quality, is slowly going to dust. But it is the only copy that feels right to me. A friend has been bothering me to live up to my promise to acquire her daughter’s first copy but when I go into stores I can’t quite close the deal. Modern covers of this book are so garish. I’ll see one in a store and all get almost angry. They don’t look right. It sounds ridiculous but I have a near-religious conviction that Anne should be faded and worn. This book once was new but I never knew it that way, and it saddens me.

I have high hopes for where it will go. The only place I can picture handing it off is my deathbed, but perhaps it should, like all my other books, be bequeathed to a store.

If any still exist by then.

***

First image in this post via. The others are the author’s. 

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Here is Reuters’ latest rundown of the state of affairs.

Here is an analysis from the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

Here is al-Jazeera’s.

Here is the New York Times’ take.

Here is the Guardian’s.

Here is Tablet magazine explaining why some of the Times’ and the Guardian’s coverage is a problem.

The BBC has gathered some voices from both sides of the conflict.

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Among the sort of people who can recite the coming fiction titles in the publisher’s catalogs from memory, she doesn’t have much of a profile. Obscure is the wrong word for it: her non-fiction had the New Yorker and a Macarthur genius grant behind it. But until now she hasn’t been quite the household name that say, Susan Orlean is. People haven’t made movies from Boo’s articles, perhaps because generally (though not universally) her reporting is on poverty and lacks uplift of the tidy-ending variety. Awards are as awards do, but here they’ve done well, I’m telling you, by perhaps finally bringing you into her arms.

Anyway, if the NBA and my vouching for her is not enough for you, I suggest you read the long excerpt the New Yorker ran earlier this year here. Or this older piece, about a high school in Denver. Or, my favourite, this one about the lived effect of marriage incentives.

Reported non-fiction is a bit of a stepchild in the fiction world, I find, further away than memoir or even opinion/essay from the source of what most “literary” writers want to do — write novels. I can’t seem to discover the root of the aversion. In the best articulations I’ve heard, it’s some combination of (a) non-fiction is easier and therefore lesser and (b) it’s hard to make the real world interesting. The inherent contradiction there seems to be lost on most people, and that’s not to mention the fact that a fair amount of fiction is derived from — if not precisely a mirror image of — the real world anyway. And anyway who wants to live in their own head exclusively? I certainly don’t.

Elif Batuman, awhile back, had that anti-MFA piece in the London Review of Books, the gist of which was: the problem with writing school is that it doesn’t engage writers with the literary tradition, to learn something other than how to learn about writing. In the years since that came out I’ve thought she was half-right and half-wrong: we’d be better off if we all looked outside, yes. But reading a book isn’t the only way to do that. Walking out and looking around is another.

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The collection contains the famous bits from Ephron’s stints at Esquire and New York. The essay about her small breasts that lead her to conclude, of the complaints of big-breasted women:

I have thought about their remarks, tried to put mysef in their place, considered their point of view. I think they are full of shit.

The one about feminine hygeine sprays that contains this immortal anecdote about the male equivalent:

The skin-patch test, according to Dr. Earl W. Brauer, Revlon vice-president in charge of medical affairs, “was not done on the penis but on an area where it can’t be tampered with. We do a closed-patch test. The product is kept in place under a closed patch for two days. It’s a much higher concentration and we learn much more from such a provocative test.” But isn’t the skin of the penis different from the other skin on the male body?” “Yes,” said Dr. Brauer. “It’s thinner skin and there are more active nerve endings. No patch tests were done on the penis. It’s not necessary.”

She diagnosed, early-on, the kind of ridiculous excess that makes reading even the best magazines occasionally infuriating, by way of the examples of the new city magazines like the one that sometimes employed her, New York:

People who would not be caught dead subscribing to House & Garden subscribe to New York magazine. But whatever the quality, the serious articles in New York have nothing whatever to do with what that magazine is about. That magazine is about buying plants, and buying chairs, and buying pastrami sandwiches, and buying wine, and buying ice cream. It is, in short, about buying. And let’s give credit where credit is due: with the possible exception of the Neiman Marcus catalog, which is probably the granddaddy of this entire trend, no one does buying better than New York magazine.

To which I’ll add, though the Rumpus lacks any real interest in plants, chairs, pastrami sandwiches and the like: anybody writing ought to read these. They’d gone unjustifiably out of print.

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