Needs a good edit.

Everyone likes cookies.

2008-12-11T09:35:00.000-05:00

This week sucks. Here's something tasty and off-topic. The electronic equivalent of comfort food, or something like that.

Bailouts, muffins, plumbing...I don't know...

2008-12-10T12:45:00.001-05:00

I have to share a thematically appropriate nugget of a Times article about writers and their plight, which should be in Sunday's Book Review. While I can't decide if any of it's uplifting or motivational, it's a little bit brilliant, and I particularly enjoyed this:

A bailed-out writer would no doubt for many months continue to begin conversations with phrases like “I just had a great idea for a n—.” A custodian would intervene here and offer to end the sentence more constructively with something like “—new kind of delicious muffin?”

And you know, especially in light of this article from last weekend, maybe Greenberg's plan is the way to go. Because yes, yes: Joe the Plumber, of lore, has a book deal. Oh, and the book is just about out already. I'm in publishing. I know what that means about the book. But that's not even the point. I mean, really: where to start? What is the point?

LIFE; nothing about my own

2008-12-09T12:24:00.001-05:00

I'm clearly a failure at consistent blogging.

So here's something quick and cool: through the magic of Google, you can suddenly search LIFE's photo archive--millions of shots organized by decade, going way, way back, promising to fascinate and keep you from losing your mind in your cubicle, if you're like me.

See?

Text encountered on the job, #7

2008-11-20T16:41:00.003-05:00

Old McPharaoh had a tomb, E-I-E-I-O.
And in his tomb he had some grapes, E-I-E-I-O.
With a squish-squish here and a squish-squish there,
Here a squish, there a squish, everywhere a squish-squish.
Old McPharaoh had a tomb, E-I-E-I-O.

I kid you not.

Oh, the poor kids.

Two items of note

2008-11-20T10:24:00.003-05:00

My former boss--of peach schnapps fame--just told me about a neat online book resource I hadn't known about: abebooks.com. It's a user-friendly, deal-laden marketplace that offers lots of perks and filters and charms, and there's purportedly free shipping to boot. (I was about to get excited about its viability as an alternative to Amazon, but I just read that Amazon is acquiring it. It's not that I have much against Amazon, really--like Starbucks--but given the option, I'd rather support something independent. Still, this site has been around for a long time, private and apparently thriving, and has much to set it apart.) You can search and browse signed books, first editions, out-of-print books, used textbooks, and rare books in addition to new, and they're all coming from smaller booksellers. And there are powerful search features and interesting browsing categories.

So I started nosing around the award winners this morning when I should have been working, which suddenly made me remember something important (in my world). And relevant!

The National Book Award winners were just announced. I'm more of a fan of the National Book Award and Pulitzer than I am of the literature Nobel and hit-or-miss Booker. It's worth noting that the comprehensive list of past winners and finalists is a great place to begin a next-book scavenger hunt--you know, that intoxicating process whereby you find that some reputable source has touted the worth of a book whose premise or subject catches you, and you bounce around reading different reviews and end up scrawling an illegible list of might-buy titles and trotting into a good book store and holding it up to the shelves, hoping to settle on just one or two, vowing to be very discerning and frugal.

This might merit another trip to the book store for me tonight.

When the time comes to pack up my belongings and move again, I'm going to curse myself for this. Books are deceptively heavy. Deliciously heavy.

The bewhiskered and their pretty books

2008-11-19T13:16:00.003-05:00

So this past weekend, a whole little convention dedicated to the sale, trade, deep love, and petting of old books came to the Hynes Convention Center here in my charming city.

My book store-haunting habit meant that I was alerted to this weeks in advance. I did what had to be done: imported the only other person I know who is as excited as I am by the prospect of a convention hall full of antiquarian* books and manuscripts. Let's call her J. She drove all the way from Jersey, where she wins her bread in nerdy ways I applaud.

We kicked things off by listening to a nervous man with a pocket watch tell about the history of letterpress printing, complete with slides. He's from Maine, and he does good work. In a sleepy, geeky sort of way, it was fascinating.

And then, giving new meaning to the analogy of a kid in a candy store, we darted from vendor to vendor in the main hall with unsuppressed glee. We touched a lot of really expensive, really old, really good-smelling books. And we stared at the ones we couldn't touch--stuff so old and rare it kept blowing our minds, until seeing signatures from guys like George Washington and printed matter from the 1500s became routine.

What we didn't quite get over was the fact that every proprietor present was a slight variation on the same man. Every stall had in it, on a stool or in a corner or pacing the perimeter or seated nearby eating soup, a gray- or white-haired man between the ages of, oh, 60 and 75. It's like they have a secret club, a secret culture. A frat. A pact. A cult. Something, because the more of them we saw, the funnier it became. Picture men with beards that beg to be called "whiskers" wearing tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses that would be cool on the faces of hipsters but are, on these serious book men, clearly there for functionality and to complement their non-ironic tweed blazers.

As J pointed out, this begs a question: what becomes of this specialized field, this community of like-minded and like-bodied gentlemen, when their clocks all run out? Are there apprentices, members of a new generation ready to step up? Because we didn't see many.

Ah, but this is supposed to be a happy occasion. So in sum: this was a fabulous use of a few hours on a rainy Saturday, particularly when followed by the kind of lingering, impassioned North End pasta feast that gets you gesticulating and leaves you stuffed. Such days make me ever more the Boston apologist, and ever more the book lover.

*I live in mild but perpetual fear of mispronouncing words that I only hear in my head most of the time. You know you've been in this situation. Well, it's particularly embarrassing when you're an editor. Yeah. So my inner voice was saying "an-ti-CARE-ee-un," but hesitantly--fast and sort of slurred in the hope of avoiding listener scrutiny. As it turned out, J shared my hesitancy--and my pronunciation. This was a comfort. Well, we were wrong. It's more like "an-ti-QWAR-ee-un." I hope this footnote spares someone an awkward moment someday. Let's face it: if you're going to bust out the word "antiquarian," you'd really best be saying it right.

Smart like a fox

2008-11-14T13:08:00.002-05:00

Grunt. Too busy with work and life lately to write about work and life.

Not too busy to maintain some basic level of my cubicle Times-reading habit between manuscript files, though, which today yielded this article about education. (The loyal reader out there who'd probably most applaud this one is in transit to Boston as I type, happily, but it should be more generally consumed and applauded, and so I post.)

Unrelatedly, before I return to the manuscript, I have to offer the following definition for a verb I use too often to ever be truly cool in this life, which sort of made my morning. (Before a certain transformative hour when the coffee kicks in and I'm mentally limber, it doesn't take much to make my morning.) And so:

skulk |skəlk|
verb [ intrans. ]
keep out of sight, typically with a sinister or cowardly motive : don't skulk outside the door like a spy!
• [ with adverbial of direction ] move stealthily or furtively : he spent most of his time skulking about the corridors.
• shirk duty.

noun
a group of foxes.

Text encountered on the job, #6

2008-11-07T17:18:00.001-05:00

I have much to ramble about--a great book, among them, and, um, reactions to a pretty epic historical moment--but that's going to have to wait until I have more time. What can't wait, however, is the presentation of today's abundant crop of manuscript nuggets.

They are elderly women, and so I imagine that when they were young, they didn’t have telephones.

Hans took my book. “[Short WOL],” I said. “[Short WOL],” he answered. When I told my sister about it, she said, “[Short WOL].”*

“I can’t believe you’re wearing that!” Mom shrieked.
“What? I’m comfortable!” Dad replied.
“I will not be seen with you in those zebra-print pants!”

“My sister sat on my sandwich on the bus,” Justin explained. His face was the color of the strawberry jelly in his lunch.
“Why did she do that?”
“Because I sat on her sandwich first,” he said, and sighed.

*[WOL] = write-on line, in student-text manuscript

Never jump into a pile of leaves with a wet sucker, and other lessons

2008-10-31T10:09:00.004-04:00

I've had to spend my weekday hours breadwinning instead of blogging lately, but today really warrants a pause--a slightly grander and more celebratory pause than the kind I've been allowing myself most of the working week, which have consisted of the giddy, guilty inhalation of fun-sized candy while hunched over proofs.

I love Halloween.

I used to plan the costumes elaborately. I'm not talking princesses. At age nine, the getup involved traffic-cone-orange spider tights under cutoffs, topped with a faux-bloodied shirt on which I'd painted tire tracks. I think I billed myself as a run-over corpse. One year--a middle school year, in my defense--found me constructing an elaborate cardboard torso with noodly arms and a hole at the base. I buttoned the thing into my father's trench coat, stuck my head through the hole so the torso towered on my shoulders, and rigged it so the arms cradled my head. I was a seven-foot headless person. With braces. With bangs that I curled as if my social life depended on it.

One year in early high school when Halloween fell on a weekday and it was cool to dress up, to my own nervous delight and the confusion of others, I came as the opposite of myself. This meant a short skirt, a lot of makeup, hair that was teased or crimped or otherwise abused into large defiance, probably a padded bra, and the conspicuous absence of books.

My best costume made an appearance two years ago, when, after visits to Goodwill and greater Boston's Halloween mecca, the incomparable Garment District, I became a park rangerette. The basics: a short khaki skirt, flesh-colored fishnets, knee boots, a well-stuffed forest-green shirt, a National Park badge that took all my atrophied arts-and-crafts skills to create, a plastic rifle that made cartoon gun noises, a wig with long, flaming-red hair that I put in pigtails, and a big-brimmed hat that said SMOKEY. The prize for these efforts: one of the better pictures of me that's been taken to date.

I think the two greatest Halloween rituals--the ones I still try to approximate, the ones that still leak happy nostalgia--are 1) the careful sorting of one's caloric bounty, and 2) the annual viewing of the brilliant 1966 Peanuts Halloween special (which I let myself do only once a year). Both yield about twenty minutes of predictable bliss. The best parts: stacking Reese's products by type, and the segment where Snoopy becomes a World War I Flying Ace. When he's skulking around the sleeping, war-torn French countryside to that eerie music, I squeal, without fail. And it's rich with life lessons ("I've learned there are three things you don't discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin," etc.).

One sad part about growing up is that the ghost story collections that once got toted to every sleepover, that were busted out the week of Halloween and read by flashlight to great effect, no longer have the spooky draw they once had. But for the kids in your life, or in the hope of approximating some of that old feeling, my favorites were these: In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (and its sequels; these are the ones with the drippy illustrations that still have the power to scare me).

But I've grown up. There's trick-or-treating in my office today. It extends to baked goods, including the goopy concoction I'm eating as "breakfast," which came from the math department and contains booze.

My delightful immediate boss, E, and I have donned cat masks and were spooning this up just now when I told her that I was having trouble tasting the peach schnapps. At that moment, the math director--who made the stuff--walked by.

"Oh, there's more in my office if you need it," she said, as if I'd asked for salt or pepper. "Kahlua, too, for the chocolate one. Big bottles."

My director, my real boss, is out today.

There are no fewer than two Sarah Palins in my office today.

One Lady Editor just gophered over the cubicle wall and said to a younger, shy, non-costumed editor in a sweater vest, eagerly, cheerfully, "Are you Joe Biden?"

[Pregnant pause.]

"No."

And it's still morning.

Text encountered on the job, #5

2008-10-23T15:29:00.001-04:00

[begin boxed text, kidwrite font]
When I finally reached the front of the line, the lunch aide plopped a warm, delicious-smelling chicken patty on a paper plate and slid it to me.

The words are coming out all weird...

2008-10-21T11:34:00.007-04:00

I need to give a quick, belated nod in the direction of Amy Hempel, an important voice in the world of short fiction and one I'd ignored until a few weeks ago.

If you, too, have ignored her, I really suggest immersing: get the big 2007 collection of her stuff, the one with the dog on the cover, and dive in. (Dogs appear throughout her work, and despite being a cat person, I can appreciate the role they play--they're often subtly integral to a story. With Hempel, I get the feeling that everything's intentional, just about every word, which is underscored by the fact that many of her stories are just a page or two long. I might not exactly grasp that intent, sure, but everything contributes. She's an artist.)

I hustled through this collection--which spans many years of writing--much more quickly than I expected. I'm very glad to have read it, and I'm still thinking about moments or moods she's created. Much of it resonates. It's warm and unsettling stuff at once.

I've arrived at this: For all Hempel's intentions and precision, the best word I can come up with to describe her writing more generally is atmospheric. You never really know her characters, and yet you know them intimately. You get vivid flashes of context, but the bits of specificity don't add up to any whole you can envision more clearly than a foggy lake or an Impressionist painting.

That impression might have been influenced by the fact that I was listening to Radiohead for pretty much the duration of this reading process. I'm not sure why. I rediscovered The Bends and had it on loop for a week. This is an interesting combination.

Some days I wonder if I could freelance as the book world's equivalent of a sommelier. I've given this more than its fair share of thought. What better thing than to be a "trained and knowledgeable [book] professional, commonly working in fine [book stores], who specializes in all aspects of [book] service"? You know--matching books to moods and tastes and places. Offering advice about reading books in sequence, clustering thematically, maximizing the impact of the writing for the reader. Pairing books with music, food, and, um, wine. I already do this.

If only the task lent itself to wielding a special tool, like a corkscrew, and pouring with a little earned gusto. And had a name, preferably French.

Livrerrier? No. That makes me start to dislike the letter r, pronounced or not. Bouquinnier? I'm really not up to this challenge on an overcast Tuesday morning.

"Hunger," history, and a guest 'stache

2008-10-16T11:40:00.009-04:00

I just gulped down--oh, the irony--a beautiful little 2003 novella by Elise Blackwell, Hunger.

This was an accidental discovery. The other day, I had my nose inches from an eye-level, early-alphabet shelf in my scone-pushing local book store's fiction section, which I haunt, and there it was: this pretty little book. It passed all of my quick selection checks, and I was hungry and listening to my gut. So it followed me home.

What caught me about this book was the premise. What Blackwell is doing here is something that Jim Shepard--a brilliant, cynical, mustachioed man whose workshop I was lucky enough to take a bunch of years ago, my school's resident fiction writer--is the current leading master of, I think. Shepard's recent story collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway (which was, deservedly, nominated for a National Book Award), features some of the best examples of it. He'll take a brief, memorable, highly visible and specific historical moment--often disastrous ones, like Chernobyl, the Hindenburg, an Alaskan tidal wave--and, after intensive research, explore it nimbly through the eyes of one or two secondary participants or victims, using the moment as a larger-than-life frame for his own quieter, very human story. It helps that he's an irritatingly excellent writer. (I think my favorite story of his is "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay," in this recent collection--a book that makes a great gift for a literary male in your life, by the way.)

So, along these lines, this is what Blackwell does. She got interested in a pretty dark historical moment--an extended one--that presented a unique moral dilemma and set of themes, and she explored it through a secondary character. It's a simple enough backdrop: a seed bank at a botanical institute in World-War-II-era Leningrad, whose collection the scientists who worked there tried to preserve intact as they and the city around them starved during the two-year seige. It's not a happy topic, but she treats it with compressed power and grace.

I'm moved--and very impressed. This prompted me to learn more about the context. It's sticking with me--not strongly, but in a small, rich, diffuse way. There's a lot buried in this book, stuff about appetites and memory and love.

This is Elise Blackwell's first novel of three. She studied under Michael Chabon, I just learned. And, fittingly, she's the daughter of botanists. (I like botanists. Particularly paleobotanists.)

It's worth reiterating that this is also a beautiful book in literal, visual terms. The cover design and font choices throughout are simple, arresting, and elegant. It's all done in a way that complements the content, and the total package is really winning. Ah, I love book design.

N.B. 1: Typo count for this edition: 1*
* But it's in the back matter--a reading-group discussion guide in which a page reference is given for a quote, but was left as a "000" placeholder. I know all too well how easily this can happen, because it has to be inserted pretty late, so I don't count this as a strike.

It's...science!

2008-10-15T08:43:00.011-04:00

I'm always ready to celebrate those who celebrate words, whether in work or play.

Here's a little golf clap for the places where words and science intersect--and the people who probe fun things there. It's a New York Times article from today.

I'm also bolstered by the note it ends on, regarding couples, and I feel justified in substituting "years" for "months" (because I feel a certain entitlement when it comes to words and bend them to my will, at will):

“The more similar they are in terms of language,” Dr. Pennebaker said, “the more likely they are to be together several months later.”

Brief, justified quasi-public whining

2008-10-13T10:22:00.007-04:00

It's Columbus Day. It used to be a holiday at my company.

It's not anymore.

Upside: no traffic.

Downside: irresistible urge to run away.* Escaping would be efficient with no traffic.

This would make a good getaway car. I saw it parked in Cambridge not too long ago, walked right up, and just pretended I was a tourist taking pictures of anything a little unusual. It's conspicuous for a getaway car--but go big or go home, right?

Ah, going home. Don't mind if I do...

I feel some book recommendations coming on. If one can't actually run away or escape, a book's the next best thing--and why not a book that sort of deals with escaping or running away? It's stretching the thematic connection, but not by much: Columbus sort of ran away.

Here are a few that come to mind:
Plainsong, Kent Haruf
Away, Amy Bloom
Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner
The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wallace Stegner

Yeah, so. Happy Columbus Day.

*When I'd run away as a kid, it would be to the far end of the street--an unpaved part we cleverly called the "dirt road"--with my leggy best friend, who liked to lie benignly and steal my toys. I'd tie an orange and a book up in a bandanna, then string that on a big stick and sling it over my shoulder like a cartoon hobo. We'd walk down the dirt road, sit in the woods, hiss at each other to be quiet, and share the orange. I'd read. Eventually my friend would get bored and lie a little. I'd believe her--there were trolls and hobos in the woods, you'd die if you ate the seeds from the orange by accident--and we'd creep home, the urge to escape out of our systems.

I'm not sure how to apply this lesson/memory to my current situation. I blame a lack of imagination and a hissing grown-up voice telling me to be happy that I'm gainfully employed. Ah, adulthood. Upsides: now broccoli isn't creepy, NPR isn't boring, and boys aren't gross. Downsides...well, to pull from my bag of manuscript editing tricks: [3 WOLs].

Text encountered on the job, #4

2008-10-09T00:24:00.000-04:00

Listen to the caption: This beautiful butterfly sips juice from rotting fruit.

Point to the giant balloon in the photo. What kind of animal is it? (a mosquito)

On behalf of local book stores

2008-10-08T09:24:00.003-04:00

As long as I live near an independent book store with some character or charm, I can probably weather anything. I like to think this.

There are two near me now that I head to when I need any of the things that being in one for a while gives me. There's good stuff inside: calm in the familiarity of the place and known books, that addictive curious-creative energy in the novel (The author makes a joke with words!), hope in the idea that a small book-based business can hold its own, license to loiter and discover, a little escape from time and the grind, interesting people to study and brush shoulders with, decent staff recommendations, a feeling of community, some local flavor.

And good coffee, often. At the one closest to me, some of the best scones in Boston, even.

If I moved alone to a new city, I'd get to know it by visiting all its little book stores, and I wouldn't be that lonely. It'd be a therapy of sorts, I like to think--like driving alone with no destination and the music turned up, only less, um, hermetic and fraught with hazard.

There's probably one near you. Want a book? (Who doesn't?) These stores need your business now more than ever, I suspect. And check this out: you can find local independent book stores easily just by going here. IndieBound is bringing all these little shops together, and, I hope, making them stronger.

I have fantasies about opening or owning one of these. I can't tell if it'd be good for me in many respects, but, you know. I dream.

Here, roughly in order of proximity and preference, are my favorites in or around Boston--many of which have used-book sections (two, memorably, in basements) and are open late for the pleasure of people like me. Many of them host fabulous readings on a regular basis and offer great e-mail newsletters that keep you current on all things bound. They sponsor events, host book clubs, have inspired children's nooks, write blogs, keep green, all sorts of good things. Their websites are really worth checking out, if you can't get there to skulk around the stacks in the flesh.

Porter Square Books
Harvard Book Store
Brookline Booksmith
Newtonville Books
Globe Corner Bookstore
New England Mobile Book Fair
McIntyre and Moore Booksellers

Before all the frost

2008-10-07T10:44:00.005-04:00

I spent last weekend the way at least one weekend per October should be spent, for anyone in--or within a few states of--New England: frolicking in Maine.

Vermont's my first choice.* But Maine's a close second, and when you have the chance to truck up to a charming farmhouse outside Portland with a pile of good old friends--particularly when said farmhouse belongs to the affable parents of one of those friends, whose mother is an established children's book author and has turned one whole room into a library, and they've been hosting a Harvest Party, complete with hand-pressed cider, homemade donuts, and injury-studded backyard football, for the past twenty-odd years--you go to Maine.

You've got to do this while there are things being harvested, while there are apples on the trees and warty gourds for sale and flowers blooming still. If you wait past October, you'll be too numb to properly frolic. Even with cool hobo gloves. (I went to school in the Berkshires, where there are days when liquid freezes in your nostrils--fun, briefly, the first time. These days are not far away.)

A true October frolic must include the upbeat consumption of at least three of the following: a Cortland or McIntosh apple, a fall baked good (choose one: cider donut, pumpkin or apple pie, some ugly-delicious cobbler or crisp), nature (choose one: go hiking, make noise in dry leaves, stare at trees that have turned new colors and comment on them), good company, and, of course, a book. Wear a sweater and rag socks for full effect. Bonus points for proximity to a golden retriever and for wearing an L.L. Bean product made of fleece.

What's a good book for this time of year?

Any story collection from Alice Munro. If you haven't discovered her, oh God. Go slowly. You can start anywhere. Get a compilation (Carried Away), or start with one of her recent collections (Runaway), or dip into an old classic collection (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Friend of My Youth, The Love of a Good Woman...you can't go wrong). Or wait until this comes out on October 28!

Reading her stories--if I can use a tired analogy, because it's mid-morning and I'm tired in my cubicle--is like drinking really good wine. Nurse a glass and pay attention, and you'll start to feel it warm you up, wake you up, make your senses that much more acute, make you appreciative both of its quality--the hint of magic about it, how it couldn't be anything but itself, couldn't be made better or different--and the quality it lends to your lens on the world for a little while, or lastingly. She writes mostly about rural Canada, which isn't that far removed from rural upper New England--and in terms of tone and mood and pace and depth, everything she writes is just right for this time of year.

*If you can get to Vermont: my favorite part is the stretch along Lake Champlain between Middlebury and Burlington. Highlights include the Shelburne Museum, the Lake Champlain Chocolates factory store, quaint downtown Middlebury (chock full of local art), and the fun shopping on Church Street in Burlington. (And yes, the Ben & Jerry's factory of lore is close enough to warrant a visit; it's a fun tour, and you'll leave with a sample in your stomach, a picture of your head stuck through a hole with a cow or Ben or Jerry, and a cute little button, of which I have several, one twenty years old. I'm a veteran.) Go while the leaves are gorgeous. It's the most peaceful place I know, the upper parts of Vermont. The air smells clean and you feel so raw and alive. It always makes me itch to write. (It's clear why Breadloaf is where it is.) It makes me feel calm about the world. That's a good thing these days, right?

Text encountered on the job, #3

2008-10-02T11:31:00.001-04:00

Let's make believe we are small tomato plants. (Crouch.)

If the ostrich is ornery, what might it do? (It might run away or not let a person put the saddle on it.)

Now let’s pretend you are a wrangler lassoing a heifer. (Demonstrate.)

Celebrating the Depression

2008-09-30T12:12:00.012-04:00

Timely typographic note: if the New York Times main-page headline is in all-caps and centered, something messy has probably hit the proverbial fan.

It was capped and centered yesterday, accompanied by a neat little plunging line graph that conjured up--as if it weren't already looming--the quaint specter of the Great Depression.

I try to keep cheerful while big things crumble, so I've had the New Deal on the brain lately, along with art deco, soup, Steinbeck, Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, and frugal adventures in canning. I'm nostalgic like this. And I have a serious thing for the Thirties. If we're going to keep evoking the Depression, let's look on the bright side, yes?

I feel like it's as good a time as any to celebrate the burst of creative productivity that a couple of WPA programs fostered. (I have private little celebrations of this kind on a semi-regular basis, usually when my procrastination needs are deep or I don't have enough to do but can't leave the cube.)

It's kind of a well-kept secret, but an increasing amount of this material is available electronically--dangerously addictive for those like me who thirst for this stuff, but also, I think, a good way for anyone to redirect some economic jitters into a more hopeful channel by dipping into some relevant collective memories.

First, in the interest of thematic unity, I've got to [rakishly] tip my plumed fedora to the Federal Writers' Project. Brief history lesson: From around 1935 to the start of American involvement in World War II, the government funded writers, historians, journalists, art critics, cartographers, and other sorts of sexy luminaries to draft things like local histories and ethnographies, to capture folklore, to document the way people lived across the country. This yielded a series of state guidebooks, most famously, but there was a lot more to it. Participants included the likes of Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Elliston, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Steinbeck. The Library of Congress--whose website, it should be known, is a gateway to endless treasures for the print geek or Americana enthusiast--offers manuscripts short and long, of all kinds, for the peeking.

Now, then, some other Library of Congress organizational efforts you really shouldn't miss:

The Chronicling America project lets you view newspapers from 1880 to 1910; this should come with a warning label aimed at junkies like me.

You can browse the Printed Ephemera collection, which has all sorts of digitized old paper things--menus, tickets, catalogs, ads--going back, I kid not, to Revolution-era stuff. Absurdity.

Lastly, talk about a timesink: if you're at all into documentary photography, you might just love poking around this giant, categorized database of Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information photos from 1935 to 1945. You can search by location, too--try places you've been, the place where you grew up, places you imagined as the settings of novels. There's a streamlined series here, if you'd like a more focused tour, which includes work by people with names you know: think Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange. It's such good stuff.

Here's to no more all-caps centered newspaper headlines. Here's to weathering our century's version of this storm, at a time when people no longer wear cool hats by day to help them stay dry and proper. Somehow, I think it might help to look back at when they did.

N.B. 1: You'll forgive, I hope, the fact that I'm illustrating this post with pictures I had on hand that felt fitting, even though they're not from quite the right time. Well, the old photo on the chalkboard isn't, at least: it's from a cross-country roadtrip my great aunt took in the early '40s (she's on the left, looking away, and check out that car!). The old Paymaster check machine, though, might be--I saw it in an antique store and didn't ask, and after a lot of hunting just now, I still can't figure out how old that model is (Series 8000, sources say). But hey, let's pretend. The tone is right.

Text encountered on the job, #2

2008-09-26T13:42:00.014-04:00

This is a good crop for a Friday.

This boy smells a stinky fish. Say it with me: stinky fish.

I can tell the alligators are mad. They have their arms crossed. (Demonstrate.)

(Point.) The author makes a joke with words!

A dark dark chocolate secret

2008-09-25T20:38:00.004-04:00

So as not to just blog-blather indiscriminately about my tame, tame life, you'll note that I'm trying to maintain something of an editorial-geek theme here. But digressions about good things that enhance activities related to that theme are justified, I think. Especially if the digressions relate to things that are delicious.

What makes editing or reading better? Wine, I know. That's my first impulse, too. But what word-nerd companion substance is almost as ideal and can also be consumed openly, say, at the office? Chocolate.

Begin digression. It's timely: I just got a shoebox-sized package in the mail--heavy, wrapped in brown paper, stuffed with cold-water packs the way, my lab-dwelling friend tells me, biological supply shipments are--and what's inside begs to be shared.

You know, the Hershey bar has its place: in smores, in plastic pumpkin buckets. And there are times, I admit with some shame, when I just need a handful of fun-sized Mr. Goodbars like nobody's business, or like an old man. (Am I the only one who associates Mr. Goodbar with old men--that, Butter Rum Lifesavers, and peanut brittle? Is this wrong, morally or factually?) (More or less relevantly, a certain old man I knew and loved apparently had a secret habit of shoplifting Hershey bars. But I digress.)

Yes, Hershey makes products that have a niche. But compared to the chocolate I've been having lately, all that stuff is sweet, sweet wax.

Taste this stuff and you'll never go back. Well, as long as you like and appreciate intensity in your chocolate experience, that is--and like it dark.

Its makers: TCHO, a tech-savvy San Francisco start-up company "founded by a Space Shuttle technologist turned chocolate maker and a grizzled industry veteran who set up chocolate factories for 40 years from Costa Rica to Germany." Couldn't have made that up if I tried. Grizzled is so underused.

Play around the website; there are more nuggets of that nature. This is a company that describes chocolate in terms of "varietals" without pretension and describes itself as "scrappy." It claims to be in the business of creating "new rituals for sharing chocolate"--which is inspired and true. That's how I encountered it: through a curious, generous someone who could appreciate the quality of the stuff and the spirit of the enterprise, who gave me squares to suck on with a touch of reverence. I had to order my own. And bring it to work.

It's only available online, and it's still in a "beta testing" phase. It comes in plain paper pouches, all secret-mission style. It's an affordable splurge. It spreads through word of mouth. It tastes really good. Don't chew.

Incidentally, it goes well with good red wine. And/or a set of proofs, a good book, a friend. I was not paid for this endorsement, but oh, TCHO, I would giddily accept another cold box of secret chocolate to test for you. I am, after all, in the business of quality control.

Text encountered on the job, #1

2008-09-25T11:19:00.014-04:00

I bring you the first in a series of away-message-worthy excerpts from the weekday plenty that crosses my desk: my latest favorite line(s) in the stuff I edit by day.

If I've learned one thing in my young professional life, it's this: when you pull lines from teacher edition wrap copy out of context--particularly when that copy is teacher scripting for, say, the kindergarten classroom--mild to moderate humor ensues.

Sometimes you have to make your own fun.

Here's my highlight from yesterday:

Now, wind and puma, make your noises.

Installments to follow as available. It's unpredictable, the harvest.

Rejoice, feast: it's National Punctuation Day!

2008-09-24T09:08:00.019-04:00

Well, according to this guy, today--more or less officially--is a holiday.

He even has a plan for its proper celebration, in case you need guidance. It involves sleeping late, consuming baked goods, possibly baking questionable question-mark-shaped meatloaf, perhaps wearing a muscle shirt or wife beater, and gleefully correcting public punctuational blunders--because who doesn't love that? Win friends!

This is good. Yes.

Now it's just a matter of hunting for a patron saint.

Wait, maybe there's already an appropriate one. I've never hunted for a patron saint before. It's time. To the Interwebs!

[musical interlude]

Oh hell yes. I've got him: John Bosco (or Giovanni, or Don, if you prefer), patron saint of editors and printer/publishers!

And look at him in that portrait. Formidable--he won't stand for typos, no. He's a humorless Joe Pesci, with some Pope Benedict and a hint of mischief about the eyes. Dude's name could be a little more interesting, though; I mean, lighthouse keepers get Venerius the Hermit.

In sum: I should have gotten the day off. Right? I'm an editor.

Bosco. Little help, bro?

For an unhinged Tuesday, a beanpod and books

2008-09-23T10:25:00.016-04:00

Say it's a weekday morning, a Tuesday. It's starting to feel like fall, a happy thing if your life feels ordered; cold New England air makes you feel alive, with purpose.

This morning, less so. You wake up unrested and cold, well past when you should. Traffic numbs your limbs. You forget the color of your shirt, and when you check, it's wrinkled. You missed a button. The radio has no good news. You're a little late to a job that has long since ceased to challenge, wanting a muffin, lacking a muffin.

Office coffee. The sky's so blue you wince when you look. You need to do laundry, vacuum, iron, call your grandmother, run errands, run, achieve something. But it's Tuesday, and you've got to sit and swivel for many more hours, hoping you're given something to edit. The sky stays behind glass.

When it's like this, think of basics. Like these beans: summer's over, but before it was, a friend brought back a bag from a farmer's market. They were perfect: the curl at the tip of the pod, the speckled beans in a row, the neat pretty package, the art and order. Little functional things you can make a little bit yours, familiar things with still some capacity to surprise as they fortify.

Like some books. Think of books.

For a day like this, with that feeling of unraveling stale routine, I think of two. For the comfort of watching the pieces of a broken woman's life recombine--comfort in the order of your own life by comparison, comfort in the escape of this other's compellingly fluid instability--try Lorrie Moore's Anagrams. For the flip side, the comfort of watching a strong girl assemble the pieces she's given into a good new life--and for the guarantee of getting from even a few chapters a lot of hopeful spirit--go with Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees.

"Helvetica," my kind of visual ode

2008-09-18T09:30:00.001-04:00

Some Thursday morning like this one a few months ago, I was sitting in this swivel chair, probably drinking the same mediocre office coffee out of the same big sassy mug, when I overheard, through our shared cubicle wall, the neighboring Lady Editors discussing a documentary about fonts.

Conversations among these Lady Editors occur often and right near my ear. But, ever adaptable, I've developed a strong chatter filtering system that allows me to ignore the verbiage and continue editing, even without headphones and music, unless a keyword signals that I should start processing what I hear (which means most talk of TV, illness, wardrobe, babies, and dieting gets neatly muted, unless the system malfunctions).

So, rewind: a documentary about fonts? Yeah, ding.

One of them had just watched Helvetica and said it was time very well spent. Granted, these are editors; while my people aren't--alas--involved with fonts the way designers are, we like 'em. Some of us like them more than others, in an embarrassingly amateurish but nonetheless geekily impassioned way.

But for whatever reason, I didn't get around to watching this cool little film until this week. It's done well, and it's interesting enough to satisfy more than impassioned geeks. Its reach has actually been really broad for a documentary, which is refreshing to see. See it. You'll see Helvetica everywhere afterward, and you'll notice and appreciate fonts more than you did before. Even if your pre-viewing level of enthusiasm was like mine, and you were worried that taking it any higher would make nearby others uncomfortable.

Me, I'm a Garamond girl at heart, for the record.* But it's incredible to think about the proliferation of Helvetica (it's only been around since the '50s!) and to better understand its impact on visual culture. Watch this movie and you can't help but tap into a little of that wonder.

N.B. 1: According to urban legend, studies have shown that college papers written in Garamond earn better grades. I'm still searching for decent documentation, but I'm willing to believe this.

On scribes

2008-09-16T09:40:00.008-04:00

My lovely coworker and benevolent immediate boss, E, mother to my favorite kid of all time, just showed me her weekend project: addressing a set of wedding invitations in the sort of elegant hand rarely seen today outside of, well, the wedding industry (or cemeteries, chiseled on old headstones, or antique stores, scrawled in old journals and cookbooks which I am not allowed to buy, though such self-prohibitions never really take).

She took a class at one point, E explained, and this got me thinking: what a neat little hobby for a detail-oriented, print- and word-obsessed girl looking for new creative outlets but horrified to the point of total blockage by blank canvases. I imagine the hobby progression to move something like this: calligraphy, paper-making, book-binding. Then I get off my ass and take another fiction class. Then the ball is rolling.

A little excited for a Tuesday morning, caffeinated, I wheeled closer and confided in E that if I'd been alive a handful of centuries ago, and a dude, I'd have been a scribe. No question. I've thought about it. (I waste much thought.)

"Oh, me too," she said. "A monk."

I hadn't thought about the monk part, but the robes would be comfortable. I told her as much.

"But the benches would be cold," she said. And she hadn't considered that.

But the robes, I told her. The robes would be billowy and warm, and there'd probably be some kind of hot, sloppy porridge. Over a hearth. And we'd sit on our cold benches with our sharp nibs scratching at handmade paper, transcribing great works by candlelight, the original publishers. We'd probably go blind, like Venetian lace-workers, and we'd smell and be all inky, but it'd be a good short life.

"And oh, there'd be ale," E added.

So here's to bringing back dying arts. I should go write a real letter, perhaps on company time. We'll see about the class.

What to Read When, Part 1: small-town Americana series

2008-09-10T14:31:00.005-04:00

Were the properly outfitted DeLorean to show up in my driveway, preferably with the wild-haired scientist, I'd hop in immediately and head somewhere pretty bland-sounding. I've thought about this.

No great-historic-event voyeurism here; that's not, as my reading habits might suggest, how I roll. I'd go back to the places I imagine when I pick up an old handwritten cookbook in an antique store (as I did recently in Savannah, and oh, if only I'd parted with thirty bucks, I could have kept it and made lots of goopy nostalgic puddings), or when I sort through old American stamps (as I do more often than I care to admit), or when I pick through abandoned old photographs of strangers. Or, of course, most urgently: when I read the right book.

An Illinois farm in the 1920s? Yes, there'd be pie! A small Ohio town at the turn of the (last) century? Think of the people-watching, the hats and beards and gossip!

So in the continued interest of sharing the fruits of my obsessive print-hounding nature with the similarly afflicted, I present the first installment in what I hope to be a series of thematic book journeys. This list is a special one that's taken shape in the past year, as one of these books has led me to another and each has illuminated part of the really important whole they collectively represent.

These are not books for those who crave splash--action and noise and showy stuff. This is, across the board, good writing that gets at something unique to the twentieth-century American experience. Together, these books form a portrait of American culture--a still-relevant portrait of a common recent past--unlike that which can be formed through any other means. Novels allow for a guided trip through this kaleidoscopic past and place that, I think, brings us as close as we can ever get to having lived then and there, to having known it. In the process, the trip informs and contributes to the lives we're leading, American or otherwise--because, as good fiction, these novels also tap into a lot that's universal.

Try some or all of these, particularly in sequence. They're all relatively brisk reads. It's not a comprehensive list, and the big titles are absent on purpose. Something subtle links these books, something definitively--if often disturbingly, though sometimes also affirmingly--American.

Set 1900 to 1930s:

Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
Turn-of-the-century Ohio. Brilliant little connected portraits of a town's inhabitants. So influential. Published 1919.
A Death in the Family, James Agee
1915, small-town Tennessee. What the title says, but you still need to read it. Gentle and tough, a few days in a life. Published 1957.
So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
1920s, rural Illinois. Quiet, humbly potent little story, very evocative of place. Published 1980.
Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara
1930 Pennsylvania. WASPy suburban discontent. Spare, just dark and gritty enough, with one deftly thrown martini. Published 1934.

Set 1940s to 1960s:

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
1955 Connecticut. This will take off when a possibly unfortunate movie version starring Leonardo DiCaprio comes out next year, but don't be put off by that: it's the quintessential suburban-1950s-discontent novel. Published 1961.
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
1955, rural Iowa. One of my favorite novels. Very slow and gentle, not for everyone, well worth the time. A memoir from an old dying pastor to his very young son. Won a Pulitzer. Best consumed while listening to the Dar Williams song "Iowa," I discovered accidentally. Published 2006.
Nickel Mountain, John Gardner
1950s, the Catskills. Strange, raw book about a kind, obese middle-aged diner owner who marries a pregnant teenager. Published 1973.

Set 1970s to 1990s:

Light Years, James Salter
1960s to 1970s, upstate New York. Painfully gorgeous collage of two lives, a marriage, richness and emptiness, rootedness and restlessness in a time of American transition. It's sad and slow and oh, it's James Salter. This is how I feel about him. Published 1975.
Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver
1980s, small-town Arizona. This may well be my all-time favorite novel. I read it every summer. It's like a friend. It makes me cry. It's about a memorable loner, memory, family, love, human things. It's kind of perfect. It took me several reads to come to these conclusions. Published 1990.
Plainsong, Kent Haruf
Ambiguously '80s or '90s, small-town Colorado. Really a beautiful little story about a pregnant girl and human decency. Published 1999.

Praise for old typewriters

2008-09-03T23:39:00.017-04:00

I have little to say about the kid-in-a-candy-store feeling I get when I spot an old typewriter for sale. At least my book-buying compulsion hasn't yet led me to splurge on one, but the impulse is there. I hover, I pet. I inevitably stare at the thing and have a wistful moment, imagining myself a chainsmoking alcoholic writer in another decade, all brooding and misunderstood, epic-haired, old before my time, pecking away to great effect, whiskey in my coffee. Then I hover and pet some more, and apparently take pictures. The newer of these machines (what do you think, from the sixties?) was in an antique store, the older (forties?) in a delicious used book store--both in Savannah, where I went roaming again over a long, sweaty, well-companioned Labor Day weekend.

Rediscovering couscous!

2008-08-26T15:49:00.011-04:00

I'm not a particularly good cook. I have not earned the right to improvise, and yet I do it. The results--only occasional to begin with, because I'm lazy and eat like a bachelorette--aren't usually inedible, but they also aren't generally tasty.

This makes last night something of an exception worthy of later duplication attempts. It was my turn to make dinner for friends and I only had an hour after work to do it, so I poked around a little and cobbled together what sounded like the tastiest elements to liven up a very easy base: couscous.

A box of the funny grain had been squatting in my cabinet for a few weeks, a well-intended impulse buy at Trader Joe's. I'd forgotten just how easy it is to make couscous--and how full of potassium and protein and other good things it is, and, when you combine it with enough compatible stuff, how it can turn into nutritious chick food that even pleases big hungry boys. It can be kind of dry, but if you make it with orange juice and fluff it up with Greek yogurt and jam in fistfuls of fruit, it gets much better. Ah, and pack it full of almonds. Almonds make everything better. But that's a topic for another day.

1 1/2 cups dry whole-grain couscous
1 1/2 cups orange juice (splash or two more)
2/3 cup (or more) raw slivered almonds
1/2 cup (or more) dried apricots, chopped
2/3 cup (or more) unsweetened dried cranberries and/or golden raisins, microwaved in 1 cup water for 1 minute
1 teaspoon cumin, 1 teaspoon cinnamon
3 scallions, thinly sliced, with greens
few pinches of salt
few splashes of olive oil
one small tub 2% plain Greek yogurt
1 can chickpeas, rinsed
2 ripe mangoes, diced

Boil orange juice with a pinch or two of salt. Once it's boiling, add couscous, stir well, remove from heat, and let sit, covered, for 5 or 10 minutes.

In a little bowl, stir spices into yogurt, with another pinch or two of salt. Transfer the couscous to a big serving bowl, drizzle some olive oil into it, and exercise your arm stirring in the chickpeas, chopped fruit, almonds, scallions, and yogurt mix. Fluff and chop until everything seems well distributed. Add more salt if you're like me, plus a splash or two of olive oil if it seems dry.

Serve at room temperature over bed of fresh spinach, and top with good diced mango. A raspberry vinaigrette that isn't too sweet or dominating is nice drizzled on top. This is also good stuffed into multigrain pita with spinach and dressing or hummus. Serves 4 to 6, with leftovers depending on hunger and size of participating boys.

"A Sport and a Pastime"

2008-08-22T17:40:00.013-04:00

I just discovered James Salter.

Oh my God, this man can write.

I can't stop thinking about A Sport and a Pastime. I'm bathing in it--not in a warm-hug way, more like lying in lukewarm water that raises the hairs on your arms, unable to get out and weirdly happy about it.

This book's power sneaks up on you. It almost made me cry this morning on the train as I went to work. This is what I mean when I say that some books plunge me into a post-book twenty-four-hour mourning phase. There I am exchanging the usual pleasantries with people in the office kitchen, talking about coffee and weather and babies, and I'm on autopilot. You don't understand, I want to tell them. Go read this. And at the same time, there's some mysterious competing voice: Don't you go near this.

You hear books described as haunting far more often than is warranted, but it applies here. Salter's prose is intense, potent. It lingers, sticking with you like a smell each time you stop. And then afterward, the whole book lingers. It lingers like an ache. It's like--God, what's it like? Really old, good liquor, like scotch or something, just an inch of it straight in a plain glass, rich amber and so strong and rare you have to take little sips, and its effect hits you like a punch partway through and then keeps building, really taking shape after you've finished, slapping all your senses around. Except it's more potent than that. This sticks with you longer, sticks in deep. At least, it'll stick with me, and I'll read it again.

Oh, the dog-ears. My copy's a mess. I made little noises sometimes after a sentence or a passage. I was that girl who walks around with an open book, bumping into stuff. I wanted to read the whole thing aloud to someone. (Who on earth would let me do that?) It begs for it sometimes. And yet it's utterly unflashy. This is delicious writing, quietly and sometimes painfully illuminating. This is why I read fiction.

I was reading reviews, and people have likened Salter to parts or combinations of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Flaubert, James, O'Connor, Cheever, others. But he's not really like anyone. He's between Hemingway and Fitzgerald, closer to Hemingway, if setting those two up along a continuum helps at all, but it doesn't matter. I saw him called "a writer's writer" somewhere, and I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it seems fitting--it's hard to pinpoint what makes his writing so strong, and the subtlety of his art is probably best appreciated slowly by those who intimately know and love the craft.

I'm not big on plot summary--probably because I'm not big on plot--but this book is a bit of a story within a story, with the outer narrative frame rough and unreliable in really interesting ways (about which I have some half-formed theories), and the inner narrative, which doesn't even really take off until a third of the way in, raw and erotic and frank and wrenching. It's all set in France, mostly small-town France, in the sixties. (Salter wrote it in 1967, and the time setting is both critical and almost irrelevant, somehow, at once.)

Of course, it's looking at love. It's short and pretty straightforward, seemingly, but so much is packed into it. The basics: the guy's a beautiful, brilliant, well-bred Yale dropout in his early twenties who's drifting around Europe looking for his future, and the girl's French, a pretty, quirky, lower-middle-class small-town eighteen-or-so-year-old who's both worldly and innocent. There's lots of sex. Potent, necessary, painful, gorgeous, graceful, funny, awkward, radiant sex, in turns and in combination, seen from a distance and up very close. It's essential to this book, and wow, what Salter does with it.

What he does with everything. Dialogue! Descriptions of people! Oh, I have to quote some. Like this:

The debris of a great star. Narrow lips. The face of a dedicated drinker. She constantly piles up her hair with her hands and then lets it fall. She laughs, but there is no sound. It's all in silence--she is made out of yesterdays.

Or this:

She glances up. There are terrible moments in which one sees love with cold eyes. Her face is a shopgirl's, Dean can see it plainly, pretty but cheap. He is overwhelmed with impatience. He wants only to be gone from here. They have somehow made him into a delinquent. Anne-Marie says nothing. She can smell his anger. Her hands are hidden in her lap.

Or this:

Dean is looking at himself in the mirror while she undresses. He is naked. He stands full on, his hands at his sides. He sees himself as a different person. He is delighted with his thinness, with his hair which is too long, and with the triumphant reflection of himself. He is aware of her moving about behind him, but it is his own nudity he is interested in, a nudity which the glimpses of her presence make thrilling. He discovers himself in her presence, that's the thing. It is the reflection all others must play against. He is pleased with himself. His prick seems murderously large.

A reader could dissect this book endlessly--seeing the brilliance of its foreshadowing, analyzing the construction of mood in a few deft strokes, tallying its delicate selection of details and noting what motifs emerge, like sickness and death, truth and fiction, hot and cold, the masculine and feminine--or not dissect at all, letting all that just wash by, content, enriched, immersed.

Writing about writing

2008-08-21T16:26:00.009-04:00

I'm a sucker for books about books--books about reading and writing, the craft and art and love of those things. My favorite is Anne Fadiman's beautiful, beautiful little collection of essays on her own book-love, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. (If you know a book-lover in need of a gift, give this. I got my copy as a present from a smart fellow book fiend, and I'm still grateful.)

Anyway, I read a somewhat-lukewarm but intriguing review of James Wood's new little book about books, How Fiction Works, and I thought: welp, I'm his target audience, so I guess I'm obligated to go buy this and read it. Like, tomorrow. (This is why I have a shelving problem.)

I really enjoyed some parts--it charged me up in the beginning, as he dissected random useful chunks of good literature, and made me think and flex some flabby lit-crit muscles. Other portions were tough to get through, a little dry and overblown. On the whole, it's worth reading. It made me feel some odd combination of gratified, sleepy, literarily sheltered, sharpened, and dumb.

There are some memorable and clarifying moments. I liked this passage in particular--one I've dog-eared and intend to revisit, kind of a sip of good writing coffee:

We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right word or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality." (p. 182)

Quenching thirst in Montreal

2008-08-20T22:55:00.029-04:00

It was sort of a whim, driving up to Montreal last weekend in a car that's past its prime. By whim, I mean there were only a few days of planning involved (and I'm a planner). The small resulting crises were an expected consequence, easily overcome, part of the fun of being spontaneous. Right? Because driving to Canada on a whim, in my book, is always a good call, always to be encouraged. (In this case, it was also a kick in the butt to renew my passport, which expires this year and features a picture of me at 16, with long hair and large eyebrows and big smile and sleepy eyes, that gives the impression of an innocent workaholic stoner, though I was only two of those things.)

And so I got to practice my atrophied French for a few days, in good company, and do little more than stroll, drink, eat, and watch the Olympics through a milky lens of Canadian patriotism.* Didn't hit the tourist attractions; been to some before, didn't really have an agenda this time. Instead, with an accomplished amateur beer brewer at my side, I began a half-assed effort to sample as many local beers as possible (buffered, as needed, by the sobering influences of poutine).

One can maximize exposure to different beers with samplers, les verres de dégustation, like the one shown. It's a safe bet that I'm going to like most good porters and stouts I try, but this is a nice way to suck down those and still branch out. With dwindling ambition and time, these sampling efforts of mine were mostly limited to the Rue St.-Denis, but if you find yourself there, here's where to stop--all beer-focused, unintimidating, unhurried, pub-like places. A series of three makes for a reasonable evening.

Les 3 Brasseurs, which has other locations, too, and was featuring a really good hoppy blonde monthly special they'd dubbed houbloneusse, which I think just translates to "hoppy," but is really fun to say (and to drink out of big heavy pint glasses that you just want to use for sloshing, clanky toasts, over and over again)
Bières et Compagnie, classier, more unique, known for its mussels, which I did not consume, and for its beer menu; we stuck with local stuff, all really good; it's a small bar, lots of tables and booths, neat cozy atmosphere
L'Amère a Boire, a bigger place with its own extensive beer list, which is very fun to attempt to translate while one quenches large thirsts with the products it describes (but the stout is way too sweet)

In sum: mm, la bière.

*While watching Canadian TV, unrelatedly, I kept seeing ads for a show called Little Mosque on the Prairie. I read up on it a little; seems interesting, but also seems like something that couldn't make it here in the States.

Good stuff (in moderation): poutine

2008-08-20T22:21:00.008-04:00

Maybe if I'd better managed my intake of tasty local beer along St.-Denis, I would have had the sense to take a picture of the sloppy heap of caloric delight that is poutine when an authentic plate of the stuff was in front of me last weekend, before the forks went in and it got even uglier. I did not. So instead I offer this, from a restaurant sign on the way out of Montreal, because any ramble about poutine, in all its lumpy, leggy, curd-and-gravy glory, really requires a visual.* And perhaps an accompanying snack.

So, I love Canada. It's a little bit of a big calm cold rural mystery, of course, but what's not to love? And it gave us all Alice Munro. Yet I made it to age 26 without knowing that many gentle folk up north--especially in Quebec--have long been scarfing down this beastly king of comfort foods: fries topped with gravy topped with cheese curd. Oh yes. Special gravy, a vaguely translucent brown kind. Special cheese, a squeaky salty chew, sort of like fresh mozzarella. Sounds gross and compelling, doesn't it?

Let's be clear: I like mixing foods in offbeat and delicious ways, but I trend toward the nutritionally redemptive a lot of the time. I slather hummus on apples. I gobble brown rice with a little salt and dollops of organic strawberry yogurt. Out of a big coffee mug. At my desk at work. That said, I can appreciate a good non-redemptive combination as much as the next comfort-seeking Canadian.

Not gonna lie: it's tasty. It's a fun thing to sample from multiple places in Montreal. I had it first avec poulet and then in its unadorned normal state. It's a good thing to share. Maybe not a first-date food, fair warning--but otherwise, a good thing to share.

It's almost embarrassing to order this, I'll admit, and quick sleuthing tells me its origins are humble. But I actually first encountered the stuff at the bar of a swanky little restaurant in Cambridge last summer, and while it's unusual to find it in Massachusetts, it's apparently increasingly common to find highbrow gourmet versions of poutine these days. (This just led me to consider, with gratitude, the recent proliferation of truffle fries--another thing I first encountered recently at a little pub in Cambridge--and now I'm doing that introspective faux-beard stroking of the cartoon villain-mastermind. Are you pondering what I'm pondering?)

* Never seen poutine in the flesh, as it were, and want to know just how pretty it is, and how much variation exists? First, swallow the mouthful of whatever you're drinking. Then do a Google images search for "poutine." It won't disappoint.

The glory of blimps!

2008-08-13T20:58:00.010-04:00

This is just a Wednesday night wine-enhanced* embracing of eccentricities, or maybe just a wine-induced guilty confession prompted by my recent Cape-and-Islands weekend, but here goes nothing: I love blimps.

No, more than you think. More than acceptably. If I see a blimp, I can't help but stare at it--occasionally to the point of dramatically tripping over my own feet and sprawling like a sitcom character or, though I'm too young to fully appreciate the origins of the reference, Gerald Ford. Spotting a blimp while jogging, as happened a few weeks ago, is dangerous for me. In addition to staring, even if I don't trip, I at least gleefully point out the blimp's bloated presence to my poor companion(s) frequently enough to annoy.

So you can imagine my delight when I noticed this, perhaps my favorite of all blimps I've seen--the Hood blimp; look at its perfect blimpish font!--from the ferry on the way back from Martha's Vineyard last Sunday. It proceeded to trail us to shore and circle Woods Hole, where I, standing in line for the bus that would shuttle us back to the parking lot from the ferry, could stare at it all I wanted, safe and stationary and quite pleased with myself for snapping its picture at such close range. Just look at it!

N.B. 1: Apparently I'm not entirely alone in this Hood blimp fixation.

N.B. 2: Brief Interwebs research tells me that the Hood blimp crashed in 2006! It's not funny, but I have to say, this article's picture--with the poor injured blimp hulking in the forest--is pretty hilarious.

N.B. 3: More extended Interwebs research tells me that as of 2005, there was only one active female blimp pilot in the world. I bring you my favorite excerpt from the Boston Globe article about her work:

Her parents were actually relieved when she became a blimp pilot. ''My sister ran off at 14 or 15 and joined the circus," she says. ''Which is where she met her husband, who is a clown."

* No, not one of the pricey highbrow bottles I brought back from California, though the temptation was great. I've taken to buying a bottle of drinkin' wine--its own category, really--at Trader Joe's over the weekend and nursing it after work during the week. Very helpful by Wednesday, I must say. (Gleeful ramblings about my love for the good Trader forthcoming.)

Breaking a sweat in Chilmark

2008-08-10T23:01:00.016-04:00

I've been ramping up the running lately, occasionally with good company (a novelty, as I've never really had anyone to run with)--so when a portion of said company recently invited me to tag along for a 5K race down on Martha's Vineyard, I gulped, quietly discovered that this is a less ambitious undertaking than it sounds, and thought: well, okay. Sure.

Why had I never tried this before? I've always treated running--and by that I mean jogging, let's not kid ourselves--as a way to stay cheerful, in decent shape, and calm (or, at times, sane). It's been a solo thing to the beat of embarrassing music, therapeutic with no competitive element. But, from what I heard and read, trying the Chilmark Road Race seemed like the ideal way to ease into a more goal-oriented, festively communal sort of running.

It was. It's a thirty-years-strong Vineyard tradition: something on the order of 1,500 people (1,620-ish this year, I think) descend on sleepy Chilmark looking sporty and do everything from sprint to stroller-push toward a finish line 3.1 hilly miles down the road. It's an all-ages, all-levels, sunny, sweaty extravaganza, and you walk away with a cool t-shirt, complaining hamstrings, and, if you're lucky enough to have done this in gorgeous weather with some great people and have bettered your own hoped-for time, a big toothy smile.

I wish I'd had a place to stash a camera, because the atmosphere would have been nice to capture, but the ferry back to Woods Hole delivers some nice views like this, looking back at the island. The clouds were that perfect cottony kind, the sky blue like you colored it as a kid, the weekend the sort that makes you stop and blink every so often and think: at this moment, right now, I am happy. And I liked the silver lettering on the outside of the ferry building.

Rainbow count for the weekend: 2 (no joke).

Good place (in moderation): my cubicle

2008-08-08T00:10:00.029-04:00

A new blog, a flurry of July postings, then weeks of neglect: it's predictable enough. The lull since then has been a more general life-lull, the kind that sidelines me periodically and brings out my inner girly hermit, and, unsurprisingly, it's work-related.

At an educational publishing development house, the work is project-based. Stuff has a way of hitting in waves. You learn to hunker and slave until the thing has crested, and then you shake yourself off like a gross wet dog and face a stretch of cubicle-based boredom until the next wave hits.

(Note: the wave pattern applies also to babies and baked goods. For a three-day stretch, bagels and donuts will be waiting to spike your blood sugar at every turn, and then there'll be a dry spell just on the rainy Wednesday afternoon when you'd give your big toe for a cookie. The staff is predominantly women, and they tend to become pregnant in trios. I've been around for at least three such waves, and when they're announced, after the group cooing subsides, inevitably, one veteran lady editor will grin and warn the masses not to drink the water. The joke is no longer funny. It wasn't funny the first time.)

So my latest lull-inducing work wave has just crested, and I've logged some serious cubicle time recently. I'd rather not calculate the percentage of my waking hours spent there, but as sick as I get of being in the office, it should be noted that my cubicle is a good place. Good to the point where I was nominated at our last holiday party for something like the Best Decorated Desk award. I didn't win: my decor includes no Red Sox fandom-level indicators.

My space is by a full wall of windows; I'm lucky, there's light. I share a spacious alley with one of my All-Time Favorite People, a lovely mentor-mom-sister-manager-friend we'll call E, and we inherited a vine-sprouting plant that coils along the back wall of our cubicles, lending things a lot of great green charm. I keep my desk just short of compulsively neat. The walls feature the following (because I'm in the mood for list-making):

A plywood piece of "art" from some craft sale in Harvard Square, with a diagram of an amoeba that labels, in a gentle sans-serif font, such elements as "food vacuoles," "pseudopods," "granular interior," "clear outer layer," and "temporary rear end," all of which I interpret as poignant but muddled commentary on the modern American condition and individual struggle

A framed closeup of my cat, a big tabby beast who's now 12, asthmatic, and fangless, from 1999, a bit of an ironic nod to the framed-pictures-of-children desk-decor convention of old

Propaganda from my endearingly snooty alma mater in the form of a pretty calendar; no, I won't donate, and in my line of work I may never be so inclined

A few postcards from the fabulous Edward Hopper exhibit at the MFA last summer

Some vintage postcards of Boston and San Francisco

Some artsy pictures I took last summer while peacefully roaming Maine

A bright red bumper sticker from Woodman's, a mind-blowing seafood place in Essex for which I have such nostalgic, greasy affection, it brings me to eat otherwise vile mollusks

A scroll that my father brought from a business trip to China, with two red fish painted on it that have a deep meaning I can't remember, so I have to invent a meaning when someone asks (let's say it's team-building for bonus resume points, how about)

A little bulletin-board spot where I've tacked up a couple of inspired scraps, including a fortune ("Some men dream of fortunes, others dream cookies") and my friend's favorite New Yorker cartoon (three lemmings at the edge of a cliff, one facing the other two with a cigarette in its mouth, saying, "You guys go ahead. I've decided to smoke myself to death.")

And I've got one shelf (shown). Nonperishable whole-grain foodstuffs and reference books live there--the most beloved, of course, being the Chicago Manual of Style--as well as my desk mascot of choice, this anteater character. He came from Australia last summer, carried by a very cute boy. Whenever the child of a coworker visits the office, I try to score the anteater a name, but so far I've gotten nowhere. Beady eyes aside, this nameless dude's a looker, and I pose him, and he quietly mimes his encouragement when the waves hit.

Ah: the editorial life, demystified.

Murakami's gift to the loner-writer-runners

2008-08-07T22:59:00.011-04:00

I've been sucking down an accidental series of good non-novels while I'm between fiction picks, in large part because I got frustrated after starting like three novels in a row that I ended up discarding. (As mentioned, I'm picky, and I have new license to abandon.)

One such happy discovery was Murakami's humble new little memoir about his life as a novelist-runner for the past quarter-century, and it's a quick, smooth, inspiring read. I'd stumbled onto a good review before finding it recommended at one of my favorite local book stores almost the next day, and the purchase was instant. I've had running and writing on the brain lately--they're compatible therapies, hard-earned drugs, tough and satisfying twin outlets that have always appealed to the best and worst in my wacky makeup. I'm just an aspiring amateur in both areas; that's putting it generously. But reading about them in combination, particularly in such frank, eloquent, and motivating combination, was a heady rush. I'll read this one again. This book makes a lot seem possible for the aspiring amateur.

N.B. 1: Typo count for this edition: 1-ish (and I think I'm a little bit in love with the translator).

"Yellowcake," and book-hugging preamble

2008-07-15T23:20:00.020-04:00

This isn't a review; I don't really do those. It's just sort of Part One of me talking about books. That is something I do.

So, the 24 hours after I finish a novel are telling. If it's been a tough slog--and I recently freed myself from that self-imposed you-must-finish-this-book-once-you've-started rule; if I've gone the whole way, there must be something really redemptive--I might feel just relief. I might be satisfied, add it to my overflowing shelves (I buy instead of borrow when it comes to books, and I have domestic fantasies of a book-walled room with a rolling ladder), and sleep well. I won't dwell on it. I'm content with what it's added to me as a whole.

Or I'll react, quietly, involuntarily, for the next day or two. The right reaction means the thing has some special qualities, and I'll either read it again, recommend it to people, put it on my special shelf (which has sprouted an annex stack on my bedroom floor), or some combination thereof. I'm really picky, so books that make this cut are rare. But I also put a geeky amount of legwork into choosing what deserves my valuable reading time, so that (plus the license to abandon partway) means it's likely what I'm reading is good enough to generate a little of this quiet reaction business.

Depending on just how great the book is, this 24 hours is a mourning period of sorts, of variable intensity. In the most extreme cases, I'm homesick for the book. If the book makes it into my upper tier, I find myself later homesick for it periodically, regularly, and I have to dip back in, revisit my dog-ears, get a fix. (I do this, for example, with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, and a few others. Sometimes I also need a little hit of Ethan Frome in the winter. Those are just the novels. My desperate love for Alice Munro is ongoing, but short fiction you can slip in anytime; it's a separate concern.)

It's unusual to find a new book that reaches that level, and when it does, I want to shake everyone I see and shackle them to rocking chairs by the ankles and make them read it in one big gulp. I usually refrain, but if I have that wild look in my eye, watch your ankles. The latest book to qualify for this category was Penelope Lively's mid-'80s Booker-winning Moon Tiger, which I read a few months ago and miss like a serious friend. The book I just finished, Ann Cummins's recent Yellowcake, isn't at that level, but it's good. I'm reacting.

It's an ambling, slice-of-life Americana kind of read, but that's exactly the sort of novel I like. It took a while to get to the point of real reader momentum and investment--you know, that point where you read instead of doing what you're paid or socially obligated or physically impelled to do. On a spur-of-the-moment scale from 1 to 20, with 10 being your standard bestseller series fare and 20 being Alice Munro, I'd give the writing a 16. It could be tighter, the overall structure and flow could use some work, but there are some really fantastic passages, scenes, moments, and images. The language isn't showy. The dialogue is right. The depth and symbolism are there humbly, quietly. Very readable. Smart.

There are also some really good characters--good in the sense that they're realistically, compassionately drawn, flawed and round, predictable and unpredictable, known and unknowable and memorable the way that actual people are. It's spotty: some are much better developed than others, and where that succeeds, the reader feels the weight of these people's pasts and their problems and pains and joys. I want to know them better, am wondering about them, am missing them, even the ones I didn't particularly like. There were a few too many, unfortunately, though, to make that effect as powerful as it could have been.

Cummins also manages to establish a strong and consistent tone, a neat total package, which I really appreciate in a novel. (This goes back to the context and consistency theme: something I appreciate in general.) Sometimes when I think back on a book, my first memory is of its tone--often the impression of a specific set of colors. This book is dry, earthy pastels, brown and pink and gray. It's set in the southwest in the early '90s. The place and time are evoked with authority, are essential. It could get bogged down in mill-cancer-lawsuit drama, exploit that like a movie, or get too direct about culture clashes, but it doesn't--it just deals, pretty unflinchingly, with the complicated interplay of some characters, their loves and limits and lives and deaths, and their common land and home and social moment. It does this well, and I'm glad I read it. And now that 24 hours have passed since I closed it, and I've rambled about it a little, I can move on with my life. And pick my next book.

N.B. 1: Cummins has a story collection, Red Ant House, that's supposed to be fantastic.

N.B. 2: Typo count for this edition of Yellowcake: about 6.

Good place: Russo's

2008-07-13T19:16:00.003-04:00

A few years ago I had this curly-haired young foodie of a coworker. I was living on my own for the first time in a cartoonishly small studio apartment with no fire escape, eating mostly microwaved veggie burgers, and he'd roll up to his desk on, say, a Tuesday morning and describe the fiesty blood-orange risotto he'd whipped up the night before. He really made that.

Anyway, the kid introduced me to this place in Watertown, between work and home, called Russo's: it's an old family business that's grown to resemble Whole Foods but retains a little farmer's-market charm and has serious, inspired produce, much of it local. I rarely go, in large part because I get lost every time I try to find it, but this afternoon I was really missing the great fruit I'd had in San Francisco and actually had some spare time. So I went, and I got lost, and I got elbowed. But my ten-dollar bounty included messy fist-sized California nectarines and white peaches, red bell peppers so bright they look fake, a clump of fat asparagus, and some big canary-yellow summer squash. More canary than the canary melons in this picture.

As a throwback to my early bachelorette days, I just impulsively chopped and steamed all the squash and asparagus, threw it into big mixing bowls, and ate it sitting on the porch before the sun set, naked except for sea salt. The vegetables. Ah, antecedents.

Good call: WineSkins

2008-07-13T02:26:00.008-04:00

Someone clever bred bubble wrap with Ziploc freezer bags and came out with a product that makes leaving the San Francisco area a lot easier. What's a girl to do when she's burdened with several bottles of fresh-from-the-vineyard, uncork-this-for-a-real-cause wine that must be checked in a full suitcase that's likely to be hurled from plane to bin to belt? Shell out a few more bucks for a couple of these guys.

The wine they protected for me: that I'll describe later. But it's all intact in Massachusetts now, awaiting my gleeful consumption. Shared, special-occasion consumption, ideally, and not just after work on a Wednesday night. Gleeful regardless.

Good font: Mt. Feake

2008-07-12T21:21:00.004-04:00

So there's a rambling cemetery near my office--Mt. Feake, in Waltham, MA, along the Charles--that I have an occasional habit of wandering through. It's a good place to jog or escape from your cubicle or get menaced by mother geese. I only took a camera once, early last summer. Talk about interesting fonts: the signs throughout are spooky enough to warrant black and white. Taken 6.24.07.

Good font: private property

2008-07-12T21:10:00.005-04:00

How about a hand-drawn font, and in just the right place? Here's why I like fonts: they set tone and, at best, set up this cool bond between viewer and context. I think of good, well-used fonts as analogous to good eyebrows. It might be a poor analogy. I have to think about it more. I've probably already thought about it too much.

This picture's from last summer, and it always cheers me up. Popham Beach, Phippsburg, Maine, around 7.2.07. I think the bent nail is key, somehow.

Good font: antiques

2008-07-12T21:01:00.005-04:00

I found myself staring at this, the wall of an antique store on some side street in Savannah. Now those are some serifs, and aren't they fun against the splotchy plaster and points and rust? Taken around 3.23.08.

Good font: bus stop

2008-07-12T20:36:00.009-04:00

Wandering around Savannah, around 3.23.08. I like the background, too--an old ghosted ad on brick. (And might that be International Orange again?)

Good font: Lucas Theatre

2008-07-12T20:27:00.008-04:00

Entrance to the Lucas Theatre, revived by the Savannah College of Art and Design, like so many places in Savannah that sport good retro fonts. Taken around 3.23.08.

Good call: Colonial Park

2008-07-12T19:50:00.008-04:00

Back wall of Colonial Park Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia. Union troops encamped there during the Civil War went on something of a spree, changing the dates on some stones and breaking others, and the broken ones ended up cemented to this wall. Why not? It's Savannah. Taken around 3.23.08.

Good place: the Golden Gate

2008-07-12T00:18:00.012-04:00

So I stood here recently and decided why I like this bridge. There's something affirming about it. It's a neat, solid cooperation, man and nature both still showing plenty of muscle, managing to humble and enhance each other. And you have to like a bridge that associates itself with such good fonts.

It all has more than a little to do, I think, with the color, which is apparently International Orange. As someone smarter than me pointed out at the time, what if the bridge were just, you know, gray? It all works: the thing's got consistency, some old tough elegance, an understated but really memorable visual punch.

I also like its million-plus rivets. And even the way traffic makes it wobble unnervingly under your feet. Safe with a hint of risk.

It's flawed, like any solid character, of course--not all affirmation and good fonts. There's been an interesting push for more elaborate suicide-prevention measures lately, which I was reading about in the paper while I was there. I hadn't thought about the suicide volume, the feathers that any bridge-tampering seems to ruffle, really any of that. Made me notice the call-boxes along with the rivets; made me think. Taken 7.8.08.