Book Heaven

No Fat Please, We're New Yorkers

2007-01-03T21:04:00.000-08:00

As a certified health nut and medical info junkie, I had long ago banished trans-fats from my diet. This of course did not prevent me from gleefully watching the battle going on in New York as they sought to protect the willpower-less from the dreaded artery clogging goo. Believing as I do in absolute freedom, it was a bit hard for me to fall in with those who would seek to impose their dietary beliefs on others. On the other side of the coin though, don’t we have an obligation to try to minimize unnecessary procedures in this age of insanely skyrocketing medical costs? If you forsook trans-fats, wouldn’t there be a great health care savings as the need for angioplasties and coronary bypass operations was greatly reduced?

Well, maybe not. According to something I read in Medicine By Design by Fen Montaigne (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), the cost of health care is related to the length of your life – the longer you live, the more health care cost you’re going to ring up. Banning trans-fats may actually increase health care costs in the long run.

Just as I was pondering this new line of thinking, I ran across a couple of interesting books. In Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market by Susan Strasser (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), an entire chapter is devoted to the development of the "wonder product" Crisco. In a 1915 ad for the product, we learn that many physicians are "personally recommending it to their patients" and that it has "great nutritive value." No sooner had I read this than I came across a book entitled Twinkie Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger (Hudson Street Press, pub date March 2007). There is a chapter in the book entitled "Consider the Twinkie" but I really don’t have to read it. I have a friend that used to be involved in the manufacture of Twinkies and I learned all I ever needed to know about Twinkies from him.
Maybe I’ll feel a little bit better after I read Brian Frazer’s Hyper-Chondriac (Atria Books, pub date March 2007). This really sounds like my kind of book:

I’m a hyper-chondriac. My prescription? Whatever you’ve got. And quickly, please. I’m in a hurry." With those words, Brian Frazer strikes the keynote for his quixotic quest for total wellness – a seemingly paradoxical goal for a young man who doesn’t smoke, rarely drinks and never misses an opportunity to floss.

Kind of sounds like somebody I know quite well. Except for that young man part.

The Burglar Who Stole Medical Journals

2006-09-28T09:55:00.005-07:00

(with apologies to Lawrence Block)

In my wild and reckless youth (a Freyian fantasy, to be sure), I was asked by a girl (who I had a crush on) to steal a band-aid for her. She could have afforded to buy the band-aid and I certainly would have bought it but nooooo it had to be stolen. We were in New York at the time and even in my youthful innocence I knew it wasn’t an especially good idea. In an instant I had the aftermath storyboarded in my mind and it would have made Will Eisner proud. I was being carted off to the Tombs. As they dragged me away, there was a frame that was just filled with her lovely hand (with band-aid prominent of course) as she waved goodbye. As her hand fell out of frame, the screen was now filled with the leering faces of my future cellmates. Not too surprisingly, I passed on stealing the band-aid.

Later that day we were on the Staten Island ferry and this same girl dared me to take off my shirt. Not being a crime, I only had to endure the embarrassment of doing it in front of a rush hour crowd, and this being many years before chest-bareing became cinematically popular it was still something I mentally wrestled with. As a reader of Strength and Health magazine and a disciple of Bob Hoffman though, I possessed a bare chest that was pretty good in those days but evidently it was not enough to overcome my failure at the real test that day -- stealing the band-aid. I wasn’t too surprised when I didn’t get any further with this girl.

My larcenous nature was not tested again for many years until one day when I found myself in Macy’s looking at bookcases. I didn’t see any that I liked but I did notice a copy of Frank Gruber’s Brass Knuckles tucked in among all the other worthless books displayed on the floor model bookcases. I really wanted that book and even though I knew there would be no consequences in spiriting it away, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I did however come back the next day with another book which I “traded” for the Gruber. I still hadn’t really passed the larceny test.

Fast forward to the present. I am in a doctor’s waiting room pawing through the magazines when I come across a copy of The Journal of the American College of Cardiology. This magazine is just jam packed with articles I’d like to read -- articles about statins and stents, bypass surgery, and lipid levels. I immediately decide that not only am I probably the only patient that would want to read this stuff, I also decide that I would actually be doing a good deed if I “spirited” this issue out of there. What could the doctor have been thinking when he left a magazine out there that would undoubtedly scare the daylights out of any skittish patient who dared to crack it open?

After reading the journal I am still curious about this stuff and discover a website where I can learn everything there is to know about stents. I hope I’ll never need one but at least I’ll be prepared if that day ever comes. (P.S. I’m a minor expert on stents now if anyone needs a consultation). Again, I can’t believe this information is available for anyone to look at. I can access every issue of a journal that’s basically intended for cardiologists who place the stents. There are stories here about stents gone amuck as they were being placed and lots of other installation mishaps that would send any prospective patient fleeing. One article’s title was especially chilling -- “Don’t Cause a Stroke While Trying To Prevent One.”

I have quickly become a medical journal junkie. I have hundreds of journal articles on my desk and now whenever I go into a meeting I always take a stack of them with me. As soon as the meeting turns boring (usually almost immediately), I start reading journal articles. It’s better than sitting there with a bored expression on your face for a couple of hours and my coworkers have even gotten used to my behavior.

In my medical journal surfing I have finally found one that has obsessed me. There is an issue of The Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology that has eighty some pages devoted to the effects of chocolate and cocoa flavanols on cardiovascular health (one of my favorite research topics). The problem is that this is not available online and a twelve issue subscription to this august journal costs nearly nine hundred dollars. Ouch!

I tried to find a medical school library nearby that had this but no luck. I’m not positive but I’m pretty close to the point where I might try to “liberate” this issue even if they had a guard watching it. Of course I’d bring it back after I had a chance to read it. I guess I’m still light years away from truly larcenous behavior. Stealing valuable knowledge like this can’t really be a crime anyway, can it?

By Jeeves!

2006-09-07T12:32:00.000-07:00

One of the great advantages of working in Newark (as opposed to New York) is that I only have a rather painless twenty-six minute rail commute. Another advantage is having access to the Newark Public Library, a library that’s actually older than the New York Public Library (though it has far fewer books to be sure).

Still, there are a lot of dusty old treasures in the Newark library since they don’t seem to get rid of their older books. One interesting book that I came across recently is Author! Author! (Simon and Schuster, 1962) which is a book of letters that P.G. Wodehouse (who will always be remembered for giving us that unforgettable servant, Jeeves) sent to his friend W. (Bill) Townend, a fellow writer The book is a veritable writing manual and there are no shortage of great passages one could quote. Here’s one I especially liked about the genesis of ideas for stories:

Listen, Bill. Is this a crazy idea? I suddenly thought the other day that, as there are always a lot of rats on a tramp ship, why shouldn’t one rat, starting by being a good bit bigger than the other rats and so able to eat them daily, gradually grow and grow till he became the size of a bloodhound? This accomplished, he begins to throw his weight about. Mysterious things happen on the ship. The bosun is found dead with his face chewed off, two cabins boys disappear entirely. And so on. Is this any good to you? It certainly isn’t to me.

There really ought to be some sort of central bureau, an Ideas Exchange, where authors could send plots they couldn’t use themselves and other authors could buy anything that suited their style. The bureau would charge ten per cent for its services and clean up.

Wodehouse proposed this idea in 1920!

I didn't know that much about Wodehouse before reading this book. His early years make for great reading. On his second trip to New York (in 1909) Wodehouse had a great stroke of luck, selling two stories in one morning, to Cosmopolitan and Collier's for $200 and $300 respectively. He immediately decided not to return to England, instead renting an apartment in Greenwich Village. He thought he could "live there practically forever on $500, especially as there were always the Cosmopolitan and Collier's standing by with their cornucopias, all ready to start pouring." Of course, as usually happens, he was not able to sell either of them another story and he eventually gravitated to the pulps before being discovered by Vanity Fair (he wrote about half of each issue under a number of names) and then going on to success in the world of theatre, and then of course his great creation, Jeeves.

This from the front cover flap copy of Author! Author!: Our advice to all writers -- would-be writers, stalled writers, good-style-no-plot writers, good-plot-no-style writers, rejected writers, and writers who want to be better, happier writers -- can be summed up in three words: GRAB THIS BOOK.

It is our hunch -- only a hunch, but a powerful one -- that you will be seized with a burst of inspiration and resolve that will propel you to your own typewriter the minute you have finished the last page of AUTHOR! AUTHOR!

Propel yourself to a library to look for this -- you won't be disappointed!

A Motto To Live By

2006-07-28T13:26:00.000-07:00

I was on yet another of my all too frequent search and recover missions. The object was not a missing comrade though but only a book. As always happens when I venture into the archives, the mission proved to be a failure. Instead of finding the book I’m looking for, I always seem to turn up the title I was looking for about three months ago. This time though something unusual surfaced.

I found a letter (circa mid-80s) from my favorite writer, Stirling Silliphant. Always a gracious man, he had written to thank me for something I had sent him. At the end of the letter he casually mentioned that he would be out of touch for a while because he was in the process of moving. He promised to send me his new address when he finally settled into his new location -- Thailand! I must admit that I stared at that letter for quite some time. How could one of the greatest screenwriters (In the Heat of the Night, The Towering Inferno, and many other classics) leave Hollywood for Bangkok? Well, the answer was right there. Silliphant was moving to Thailand to immerse himself in the Buddhist world.

That innocent comment had little effect at first but soon like all of Silliphant’s subtle messages it began to work on me. It eventually led to today’s several bookcases filled with books on Zen and Buddhism and while I consider myself far from enlightened I’m still silently thanking Silliphant (sadly no longer with us) for putting me on the right path. He seemed to have a great way of imparting an important message to you with little effort. Some of the seventy one episodes of ROUTE 66 that he wrote (quite possibly the greatest achievement in TV writing) are noteworthy purely on an entertainment level, but many of them had a message and it could range from drug addiction (Birdcage on My Foot) to the tragedy of unwanted children (Somehow It Gets To Be Tomorrow). Harlan Ellison was noted for his ability to write stories in bookstore windows, but you had the impression that you could lock Silliphant in a closet with a book of matches and when you opened the door he’d have a completed screenplay in hand.

I can no longer remember the context or the episode (time for a search and recover viewing) but in an episode of ROUTE 66, Buzz (George Maharis) says to Tod (Martin Milner), “Now there’s a motto a man can live by.” Well I really wish Silliphant were around to hear the motto I found in a book recently. I believe I already mentioned this in DAPA-EM, but this one is so good it bears reading every day. The quote is by Goethe and it appears in Robert D. Richardson's Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (University of California Press, 1986):

To live within limits, to want one thing, or a very few things, very much and love them dearly, cling to them, survey them from every angle, become one with them --that is what makes the poet, the artist, the human being.

While we're in this spiritual mood, I stumbled onto a really interesting website the other day. I was reading one of the most enlightened of all magazines, Utne, and discovered a website for those among us who are searching for themselves (and who among us isn't?). If you go to zaadz.com, you'll find about a zillion people who are stumbling towards enlightenment (a great title for a book, and of course I've got a copy of it). I'll admit that the first couple of profiles I previewed didn't exactly inspire me but then I hit this one for Kate (she appears on the first page of profiles for good reason). Here's a taste of her story:

In the fall of 2003, I either sold or gave away all of my possessions except for about thirty boxes that I stored with a friend and what I could fit in my car. I left behind my friends, my work, my apartment, and the life I'd lived there for six years and headed out for a cabin on top of a mountain in Pulaski, Virginia with just me, my three cats, some clothes, several boxes of books, thirty different kinds of tea, and a newly acquired laptop and cell phone. I stayed on the mountain for six months.

Okay, we'll cut her a little slack for that laptop and cell phone. This is the twenty-first century after all. Time permitting, I think I'll follow Kate's exploits. I'm also in the process of following the adventures of another searcher who left it all behind. Elizabeth Gilbert had the house with the white picket fence but with the requisite 2.4 children staring her in the face, she decided it was time to head into the great unknown. "To find out who she really was and what she really wanted she got rid of her belongings, quit her job, left her loved ones behind and undertook a yearlong journey around the world, all alone." Her tale is chronicled in the highly recommended eat pray love: One Woman's Search For Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia (Viking, 2006). Right after Gilbert's wonderful book I moved on to Steve Kotler's West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief (Bloomsbury, 2006). "After suffering from lyme disease for two years, Kotler loses the perfect job, the perfect girl and much of what had been the perfect life. With nothing of any meaning left to him, Kotler sets out to surf around the world." (another silly dream of mine lived vicariously).

And coming up next time, a search of another kind altogether:

THE BURGLAR WHO STOLE MEDICAL JOURNALS (with apologies to Lawrence Block)

Eat This Book

2006-06-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

When I first spotted Eat This Book (yes, that really is the title) in my local library, I didn't even bother to pick it up. As someone who eats with a glacial slowness, I really didn't think I'd be interested in a book about competitive eating. The book, a trade paperback, is rather eye-catching though, owing principally to its plasticized cover, a marketing move that more publishers should probably consider. Design-wise, the cover is effective but hardly inspiring -- three hot dogs in buns stretch across the cover with the title written in mustard. Since the subtitle is "a year of gorging and glory on the competitive eating circuit," I think there should definitely be at least one exclamation point after the title.

On my next visit to the library the book was still there and I took it out figuring I'd probably only read a chapter or two. Author Ryan Nerz had me hooked after a few pages though and I found the book pretty easy to breeze through. After reading the first chapter which details Nerz' introduction to the "sport", you can pretty much turn to any chapter and find something interesting.

At the back of the book is a list of the 83 foods for which IFOCE (the International Federation of Competitive Eating) is keeping records. Amazingly, two people hold 35 of the individual records. Even more amazing is that the number one record holder, Sonya Thomas, is a diminuitive waif-like woman who can't weigh much more than 100 pounds. Here's a list of a few of the records she holds:

Baked Beans 8.4 pounds in 2 minutes and 48 seconds
Cheesecake 11 pounds in 9 minutes
Chicken Wings 167 in 32 minutes
Oysters 46 dozen in 10 minutes

For me the most amazing achievement is Oleg Zhornitskiy's downing of 8 pounds of mayonnaise in eight minutes! You'll be sad to find out though that Cool Hand Luke really isn't so cool anymore since Sonya only took 6 minutes and 40 seconds to down 65 hard-boiled eggs while ol' Luke took the better part of a couple reels of film to do a measly fifty.

In the best tradition of modern reportage, the author dives into the world of competitive eating himself with quite painful results. Yes, this book is a gut-wrenching literary feast and while you may be able to put it down, you won't soon forget some of the characters and their oddball achievements. The book even sports a great blurb on the back cover by Takeru Kobayashi, who at only 131 pounds seemed to singlehandedly ignite this sport when he shattered the hot dog eating record at Nathan's annual 4th of July contest (53.5 dogs and buns in 12 minutes):

Using my own patented dunking technique, I ate this book in two minutes and thirteen seconds. It should have been faster, but the cover did not masticate easily.

Lest you think the actual eating of the book impossible, at one point Nerz recounts the story of a man who started out eating glass and worked up to some other truly strange items -- bicycles, TV sets, supermarket carts, a coffin, and (get this) a Cessna airplane (a two year long labor of love which evidently got him in the Guiness Book of World Records).

Oh yeah, I forgot one great achievement (kind of forgettable after that Cessna though) was Kobayashi's performance after eating Japanese buffet food for 45 minutes -- the 131 pound man gained a whopping 26 and a half pounds. After reading this book you may never feel nauseous again.

Ellroy Reads!

2006-06-19T20:59:00.000-07:00

As a devoted fan of James Ellroy I've attended a couple of his book signings. I believe that it was at a signing at Tower Books in 1992 (for White Jazz) that Ellroy was asked (no doubt by an aspiring writer) who were the authors that he read. I'm pretty sure that Ellroy answered that he didn't read but I think he meant that he didn't read crime fiction while he was in the process of working on a book.

Of course we've seen blurbs from Ellroy on other writers' books so we know that Ellroy is, as you would expect, a reader. What really surprised me though is a blurb of his that I found on a rather unlikely book. The book is Sleeping With Schubert ("a novel about genius, passion and hair") by Bonnie Marson: a lawyer's life gets thrown into an upheaval when her body and mind become inhabited by the restless spirit of the Romantic composer Franz Schubert. Here's what Ellroy had to say of this most unlikely object of his reading: "A startling first novel, daringly original and richly evocative in its theme of creative redemption. A must-read, pure and simple. Bonnie Marson brilliantly soars."

My favorite blurb at the moment is Alice Sebold's front cover plug for Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club:

If I could eat this novel, I would.

Second place goes to the Daily Mail's blurb for Andrew Eames' The 8:55 to Baghdad, a novel about Agatha Christie's little known journeys to Iraq, circa 1928:

This is one of those lucky books which is based on a cracking idea, an idea so cracking that it almost qualifies as a brainwave."

Nobody says it quite like the British.

They Shoot Book Collectors, Don't They?

2006-05-19T22:08:00.000-07:00

At the conclusion of this past Friday's dollar book free-for-all at the Strand, I remarked to an employee that several of the usual suspects were conspicuously missing. It was my impression that, like the mob, once you were in this select group, there was no getting out, that we were in a marathon of sorts, not unlike the marathon dancers of yesteryear, and that graceful retreat was not possible. Nothing short of dropping in your book hunting tracks right on the Strand floor was acceptable. The lesser number of participants (four were missing) meant that we all scored a few more choice books (well, at least choice in our eyes).

My best find that day was Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage (Coffee House Press, 2006). "A tale of exile, unrequited love, and the redemptive power of literature", Fermin is the story of a most unusual hero: Firmin, a rat, resides in the basement of a bookstore in Boston's Scollay Square during that area's bygone bookstore/burlesque era. No ordinary rat he, Firmin can read and he soon becomes friends with the owner of the bookstore and a down-on-his-luck science fiction writer.

Another interesting find was Haiku Guy (possibly the first novel whose subject is the writing of haiku) by David G. Lanoue (Red Moon Press, 2000), but hands down the most bizarre title was By the Time You Finish This Book You Might Be Dead by Aaron Zimmerman (Spuyten Duyvil, 2003): "Eliot Greebee, a lonely, overweight, middle age Certified Public Accountant is the creator of CUTLAS, a mathematically based system designed to justify a purely hedonistic lifestyle. Practioners can do whatever they want whenever they want." Oh, and let me not forget Wheeler Dealer: The Rip Roaring Adventures of My Uncle Gordon, a Quadriplegic in Hollywood by Chip Jacobs (First Person Press, 2006)which (I think) is the true story of the author's grandfather, Lee Zahler. It probably sounds like I'm making these books up, but they're all REAL! I wish I could figure out how to post pictures here because if I wasn't such an idler, I'd have pictures of these books accompanying this entry just to convince the doubters among you.

JUST FINISHED
Once upon a time I had the brilliant idea that I would read all of the Dan Turner pulp stories of Robert Leslie Bellem. A silly idea to be sure which didn't get very far before I abandoned it. A far better idea was my recent thought to start reading the Nebula award winning stories. The first story I read was not even the winner but was one of the nominated stories which you can find in Nebula Awards Showcase 2006: The Year's Best SF and Fantasy edited by Gardner Dozois (ROC, 2006). The story is Travels With My Cats by Mike Resnick, a story that Resnick feels is one of his best. Instead of a Tarzan or a Mickey Spillane novel, an eleven year old boy is resigned to buy the only book he can afford at a garage sale -- Travels With My Cats by Miss Priscilla Wallace. After initially fascinating him,the book sits unwanted and unloved until the young boy, now forty years old and leading a life of quiet desperation, returns to it and finds his life totally transformed by this obscure little book. Look for this one -- you'll love this story!

A Million and One Little Lies

2006-05-08T12:25:00.000-07:00

Although it has evidently been out since March, I just noticed the James Frey parody A Million Little Lies by James Pinocchio in my local drug den, er .... bookstore. I'm pleased to report that I'm immune to the charms of this little book and have no intention of reading (or acquiring) it. I do however have another little lie to report.

In the area of creative nonfiction, this is a real beaut. In the April 3, 2006 New Yorker there's a letter from Allen and Wallace Shawn, sons of the legendary New Yorker editor, William Shawn. It seems that they wrote in to shed light on a few inconsistencies in the movie version of Capote. Well, maybe more than a few.

Their dispensing of the real truth about their father's role in the Capote saga is skillfully and subtly delivered.

Here's the film version contrasted with the real unvarnished Shawn version:

Film: Shawn speaks of "building interest" in Capote's piece (In Cold Blood)
Real Shawn: he didn't believe that articles or their authors should be publicized

Film: Shawn organizes a book reading at which he personally introduces Capote
Real Shawn: he never organized a reading and he never addressed one -- not just for Capote but for any writer. Moreover, they add, he never spoke in public on any occasion

Film: Shawn arranges to have Richard Avedon go to Kansas to photograph Capote and the two killers
Real Shawn: he never published any photographs by Richard Avedon in the magazine and he didn't think the New Yorker should run photographs

Film: Shawn flies out to Kansas to visit Capote
Real Shawn: this is the best one of all -- Shawn never went to Kansas to visit Capote -- the sons end the letter with this indisputable piece of truth -- "in fact he
never had the experience of flying on an airplane."

Who's the real legend here? I only hope that in some future age when the do the movie version of Shawn they get at least some of this stuff right!

One True Pure Thing

2006-05-01T12:59:00.000-07:00

I’m not exactly sure at what point I began to hate Richard Bach. Bach, you might remember, is the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and several other soul searching books. It’s probably pretty hard for Bach to get a fair shake these days owing primarily to the bad feelings that little bird still seems to be engendering. Although he claims to rarely walk out of movies, Roger Ebert reportedly walked out of Jonathan Livinston Seagull and came up with this classic quote: “The Little Engine That Could, is, by comparison, a work of some depth and ambition.” I doubt that even after thirty five years, few people have changed their assessment.

My latter day encounter with Bach occurred when I chanced upon a copy of another of his books, The Bridge Across Forever (William Morrow, 1984) in the Newark Public Library. The book has a pretty wretched looking cover and would by itself be enough to scare off a current potential reader in the event their local library hasn’t already discarded this title.

When I read the jacket copy though, I was hooked. Bridge is Bach’s recounting of his search for his soulmate. It quickly became evident that Bach is a pretty nice guy. Bach obviously didn’t write Seagull as a “get rich quick” scheme; he was evidently as surprised as everybody else that the book was so successful.

One of the most curious things about The Bridge Across Forever is that it describes the success (monetary and otherwise) that Jonathan Livingston Seagull created for Bach, but although he alludes to the book in numerous places, he never mentions the book by title. Quote the Seagull, nevermore seems to be the operating plan here (and a good plan it probably is).

Bach's search for his soulmate makes fascinating reading, and, likeable guy that he seems to be, you can’t help but cheer him on. Just when it seems that he’s probably never going to find her, he meets the actress Leslie Parrish. The reader pretty quickly senses that she’s the one, even if Bach himself isn’t quite so sure. It was at this point that I had to skip ahead and consult the internet to see how it all worked out. As it turned out, Bach did marry her but they were later divorced.

I was pretty much on neutral ground at this point but as the pages flew by, it was pretty easy to start to hate Bach. This man of many metaphysical musings seems to be positively lost in comparison to Ms Parrish, who if even half of the portrait he paints of her is true, is certainly as enlightened a human being as is possible. When Bach has to declare bankruptcy after his investments sour, it is Parrish who comes up with her own money to buy the copyrights on his backlist. You can’t help but feel that although Parrish might be his soulmate, she somehow deserves better.

Sadly, they are no longer together and Bach has evidently remarried again. I get the impression that she preferred a life of quiet and he a more active life. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have created anything since then that is as interesting as The Bridge Across Tomorrow which I can certainly recommend. I think I'm going to have to ransack the tv archives to find some of Ms Parrish's guest appearances to see if any of that enlightenment is visible onscreen.

He's a Gass, Man!

2006-04-14T21:56:00.000-07:00

The arrival of a new book of essays by William H. Gass is as welcome as the arrival of spring. Like that most looked forward to of seasons, Gass delivers all manner of things fresh and new -- in this case, A Temple of Texts (Knopf, 2006) "speaks to the nature and value of writing and to the books that result from a deep commitment to the word."

As I usually do, I scan the table of contents to see which essay I will sample first. Although "William Gaddis and His Goddamn Books" sounds the most intriguing, I opt instead for "A Defense of the Book," an essay that would probably prompt nine out of ten spouses to ban this book.

At the beginning of the essay, Gass tells of how Ben Johnson's tutor advised him to keep a book "where an ardent reader might copy down passages that especialy pleased him, preserving sentences that seemed particularly apt or wise or rightly formed ...."

Jonson takes the advice. "Ben Johnson collected thoughts he thought right or wise about poetry, about good writing, and, above all, about the management of life." Unfortunately I don't have access to the book, Discoveries (1641) that was created from his pages of observations, but I soon find myself copying some of Gass' thoughts in my own notebook, a few of which I'll share with you :

In the ideal logotopia, every person would possess their own library, and add at least weekly, if not daily, to it. The walls of each home would seem made of books -- wherever one looked, one would see only spines; because every real book is a mind, an imagination, a conciousness. Together, they comprise a civilization, or even several.
I have rarely paged through one of my dictionaries (a decent household will have a dozen) without my eye lighting, along the way, on words more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
In a library, we are in a mind made of minds -- imagine -- all man has managed to think, to contrive, to suppose, to scheme, to insinuate, to lie about, to dream ... here ... within reach of our hand.

My Kingdom (and Ethics) For A Donut

2006-03-26T19:44:00.000-08:00

Another memorable day has passed in the history of the three-ring literary circus known as dollar book day at the Strand. This past Friday's performance was, as usual, not without incident. A newcomer to the fray got a bit too close to the starting line when the gun sounded and while he apparently escaped serious physical injury, the psychic trauma he suffered will no doubt last for quite awhile. At the Strand, you are not allowed to go near the table when they are setting out the new dollar books. The most hopeless of the participants (I number myself among this group) loiter as close as possible, trying to memorize where the choice books are being laid down for what will certainly be a very short rest. When the Strand employees step away from the table, all hell breaks loose as about a dozen obviously deranged book dealers and collectors attack the table like a flotilla of famished pirahnas. Well, this poor unsuspecting soul got caught in the onslaught and spent the better part of a half hour just staring in amazement at the books flying off the table, muttering over and over again to an onlooking Strand employee, "I've never seen such agression before." He later appended his statement, "They're not even great books." So mesmerized was he by this spectacle that he only tentatively picked at the edges of the battlefield. He later made a generous $2 offer for a copy of a book of Lord Nelson that somebody had snatched up before he could get to it. The crowd ignored him. Feeling sorry for him, I later let him go through my basket, offering him anything he wanted. I have since noticed that he possesses a much more refined taste than I do, and I would do well to cultivate a bit of that discernment myself. In truth, they're really not great books -- they're just too cheap to resist!

I found a rather interesting book this time out. From Voodoo to Viagra: The Magic of Medicine is a collection of "37 Uplifting Essays From a Doctor's Bag of Tricks." Oscar London, M.D. is a guy I'd love to have for my doctor. The pseudonym of an internist in Berkeley, California, London is the author of three previous books of humorous medical essays, including one titled Kill As Few Patients As Possible. I was won over by reading only one essay in Voodoo -- Krispy Kremes: New Arthritis Wonder Drug? Written in an age before Krispy Kremes were easy to obtain, the good doctor recounts his two year obsession with his desire to taste a Krispy Kreme doughnut, confessing his willingness to do anything to obtain a box of "warm" Krispy Kremes, including making a pill peddling pharmaceutical salesman's dream come true when he offers to prescribe the salesman's arthritis pill to his next 100 patients in return for the delivery of said doughnuts. His justification for this apparent ethical transgression -- "the drug has practically no side effects and, more likely than not, the next hundred people to walk through my door will have arthritic symptoms out the wazoo, so to speak."

It brought to mind a doughnut story of my own. About ten years ago I was in that bastion of gourmet delight, Dean & DeLuca, when I noticed a display case filled with $2 doughnuts. These were no ordinary overpriced doughnuts though. They were veritable works of art -- exotically flavored beauties no doubt handmade with loving care. I didn't try one that day but later found out that they were indeed handmade and delivered by a guy on a bike. Some years later I saw them featured on a show on The Food Network and it was at this point that I mentioned them to my best friend Tim. Uncharactistically, he didn't suggest that we jump in his car and go over to New York at that very moment to sample them. Before we could act on this doughnut quest, he moved to Florida and once again I forgot about the doughnuts. That is, until another couple of years had passed and one day he confessed that on a business trip to New York, he had paid a trip to this doughnut den while neglecting to call me to accompany him. He recounted in excruciating detail how he had stood in line with the other doughnut devotees, some of whom had no doubt traversed entire continents to share the experience. He bought a half dozen of the beauties and stood off to the side taking a bite of each before tossing the rest in the trash, while the whole line of stunned people watched this spectacle, wondering if the doughnuts weren't really all they were cracked up to be. My friend assured me they were heavenly little creations and that he couldn't trust himself to eat more than a bite of each.

I just went to the website of this doughnut pusher and if you are so inclined you can visit it as well. The address is www.doughnutplant.com. I also found a review on another website:

I tried the white peach donut and nearly fell over with bliss.

Okay, here's a list of some of the flavors that they've unleashed so far:

Our flavors are always fresh and seasonal. We make new flavors when inspired by seasons, holidays, people and just about everything else! Here is a list of just some of the flavors we've been making throughout the years:

Vanilla-Bean
Valrhona-Chocolate
Chocolate-Mocha
Orange
Apple-Cinnamon
Pecan
Blueberry
Apricot
Pistachio
Ginger
Poppy Seed
Malted-Milk
Blueberry
Vanilla-Bean
Pumpkin
Lime
Strawberry
Toasted-Almond
Raspberry
Rosewater (with fresh rose petals)
Walnuts
Powdered Maple Sugar
Banana with Pecan
Cherry
Coconut
Yankee Donut with blueberry pin stripes

As for me I still don't think I could bring myself to eat a doughnut -- at least as long as they're still fried. Maybe if somebody finds a way to bake them like Guiltless Gourmet chips. Until then I'll have to be content to look at my copy of The Donut Book. Actually maybe this is a book that I can now get rid of. If I could find it that is.

A Glass A Day

2006-03-10T21:04:00.000-08:00

Dedicated as I am to maintaining my arterial health, I've taken to drink the requisite glass of wine a day, though I am not especially fond of the stuff. Of more interest to me is the literature on the subject. Possessed as I am of a tin palate (a blessing actually) I am easily amused by most of the wine reviews I read. Though there is a 100% certainty I'll never try any of the wines mentioned in Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide 6th Edition (Simon & Schuster, 2002), I couldn't resist purchasing this book when it turned up at a discount price at Costco. Originally published at $60, it's unlikely to sell well at Costco even at a $11.99 remainder price since most of the wines discussed are from 2000 or earlier and no doubt quite pricey.

One can turn to most any page and find interesting flavors that Parker can detect in these no doubt very complex wines. There is little doubt that Parker has the most sensitive taste of any living being, but I'm not sure of some of these flavors -- quartz, stones, asphalt, gravel, tar, chalk, and buttered popcorn (to name just a few of the odder variants).

In my own case, I decided that in the interest of enhancing the elasticity of my arteries (what wine will supposedly do for you) I'd at least make an effort to find something I liked even if I couldn't detect all these fabulous tasting features. And so I started buying up various wines and pitted them against each other, eliminating the loser while letting the winner go on to fight another worthy candidate. I set $20 as the upper limit for a bottle and was only a little surprised that price had almost nothing to do with likeability. After almost a year of this I was truly shocked (but happy) to find that my favorite wine sold for the pauperly sum of $6.49 a bottle. The wine is Rosemount Estate Shiraz Cabernet and it vanquished everything in sight including a couple of higher priced Rosemount wines.

I may have to finish reading Elin Mc Coy's The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker Jr. and the Reign of American Taste (Harper Collins, 2005) to see if there is any hope of training my seemingly simple taste buds. I read a few chapters of the book and found it rather interesting but as usual got sidetracked by another book.

An Essay a Day

2006-02-22T08:21:00.000-08:00

My idea of a perfect day would start, not at the crack of dawn, but at some gentler hour, where I would repair to the porch and begin the day by reading an essay. Set against a backdrop of hapless commuters making their way to work, I hope by then I would be enlightened enough to feel sorry for them not smug about my good fortune in being able to mine the pages of literature rather than having to scuffle for pesos in the workaday world.

Of course I'd be torn about whether to read a "new" essay or one of the many classics that have stood the test of time and are deserving of a rereading. To be sure it'd be hard to tear oneself away from a good Christopher Morley collection until you'd read them all. Maybe, to be fair, the diet would have to be two essays a day -- one new and one classic.

Today I decide to reread E. B. White's "Here Is New York", an essay so popular that it was actually reprinted as a little book a couple of years back. I'm reading it though in a 1977 Harper & Row collection entitled Essays of E. B. White. This is a great little essay (vintage late 40s, I believe), hopelessly cheerful in its optimism and the colorful picture it paints of the city. Cheerful that is until the very end when it turns serious and leaves you with an ending that rings so true today that it's positively startling in its timeliness and timelessness:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

from "Here Is New York" by E.B. White

100,000 CDs!!!

2006-01-18T19:32:00.000-08:00

Music has always been a big part of my life but I'm sure I'll never amass anywhere near 100,000 CDs. One person who did though was legendary Radio One DJ John Peel who is shown in the January 2006 issue of Uncut, standing in front of a wall of music, a "small part of his 100,000 + record collection."

Here's how the magazine describes his annual ritual of picking the year's best music: "Each November, as the nation's thoughts turn to unrepeatable Christmas discounts, and the office-party death squads ready themselves for another season of drinking and driving, I commit myself to three or four weeks of serious tedium by inviting listeners to my Radio One programmes to write listing their favourite tracks of the year. About 5,000 of the scoundrels oblige, thereby condemning me to nights in an ill-lit corner of the scullery entering their votes in a ledger. At the end of this proto-Dickensian routine, we have what we call, I fear, the Festive 50."

In honor of Peel's untimely death a year ago, Uncut magazine presents in the January issue's free CD JOHN PEEL'S FESTIVE 15, fifteen tracks from previous Peel selections. My favorite is 1986's The Trumpton Riots by Half Man Half Biscuit. With a name like that, does the music really matter?

In the same issue of the magazine is a review of Peel's autobiography (his wife actually wrote 230 pages to Peel's 160 -- when he died he had only reached the early 60s). The title is Margrave of the Marshes and I have no clue as to where that comes from. One thing though is eminently clear -- Peel truly loved music and was one-of-a-kind.

Though I'll never amass a collection that could compare with Peel's I wonder if he were still alive what he would think of all the live music that is being made available. I just found out that I can download enough live music that if the discs were stretched end to end they'd run from New Jersey to a point somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Thankfully my technical ineptitude and impatience have kept me from figuring out the arcane downloading procedure, so for the moment at least I'm safe and there's no need yet to add another shift at the blank CD factory.

The Disappearing Village

2006-01-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

A Birthday and a Requiem

Well, it's that time of year again -- the start of a new year and the coming of another birthday. This year I do what I've been doing for the past several years -- I take the day off and head for New York. Although I'm in New York at least once a week, today there will be no shopping. The day will be spent exploring my favorite place -- Greenwich Village. Though I may have missed the golden age of the Fifties, I've been wandering around the Village since the mid 60s and my love for it has not diminished a bit.

I start the day by walking the length of Bleecker Street. It seems there's a few more upscale shops every year but thankfully most of them are pretty tastefully presented. The most disturbing change in the recent past was a CVS pharmacy occupying the site of the former Village Gate. There's still a Village Gate sign sitting atop the sign for the CVS which only makes it look even more out of place. This affront has been eclipsed this year by the demise of a legendary beat generation hangout -- Carpo's Cafe -- on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal (one of the most famous addresses in the city) -- which has now been replaced by the Butterfly Grill, a Vietnamese restaurant! One can only imagine what Beat poet Gregory Corso (who lived in an apartment above it) would think if he saw it. When this site was the San Remo it was the hangout of the beat crowd-- Kerouac, Ginsberg, et al. In my forthcoming memoir, I'll recount how, although very young at the time, I helped Kerouac with On The Road. Since I'm sure you're all breathless with anticipation, I'll just toss out one little tidbit: it was on a roll of toilet paper that I provided that he wrote part of it. I'm currently looking for a publisher for my memoir. If any of you know of one that also needs a fact checker, please let me know.

It'll be pretty hard to top this indignity but I have no doubt that rising real estate prices will make more unpalatable changes a reality. I'm glad to see that some places like Cafe Wha (where I spent quite a bit of time) are still here if not quite the same (sadly I arrived there a bit too late to see Hendrix play there but if I were writing my memoir, I'd try to work it in). On the internet I find a cool site (songlines.com) which shows me the name of every business on Bleecker Street with a little history mixed in.

Early in my exploring I spot legendary chef Mario Batali on his motor scooter. Batali was wearing his trademark shorts and looked like he could have been tooling around Rome instead of a frigid New York. Wish I had his thermostat!

Next I spot a guy reading a book while he's walking. Wish I had noticed what it was that was so hard to put down (hope it wasn't A Thousand Little Pieces). I have enough willpower to resist the siren call of the cupcakes at both The Magnolia Bakery and the Polka dot Cake Studio. I have to go into the Porto Rico Importing Company though to treat myself to the overpoweringly wonderful smell of all their coffee.

Another change is that Joe's Pizza has moved a few doors down and has been replaced by (can it be possible?) yet another pizza place. Abitino's seems to be doing a helluva lot better than the other new pizza place (how can there be so many?) half a block away on Carmine Street. This forgettable place seems to have little style and less customers. Bleecker Street Pizza is still holding on but I have yet to try it.

I end up where I always do -- at John's Pizza. I had my first pizza at John's in 1961 and I've been going back ever since. I've tried them all and John's is still my favorite. For me, only one thing has changed about John's in 45 years -- I might as well be trying to pass Confederate money there since I can no longer pay for a pizza. When I moved three years ago I found that I had hit the pizza jackpot when the owner of John's (a more gracious and generous guy there never was) turned out to be my new neighbor.

Today I am truly honored to have as my lunchmate an 84 year old former NYPD detective who had his first pizza at John's in 1951. For the second time in as many months I meet someone who seems to be much younger than their real age (though he's not nearly as attractive as the first one).

One thing has not changed about John's though -- the decor remains stuck in the fifties. In what seemed to be some previous epoch, the enlightened management let kids carve their initials and messages of love into the wooden booths. There has been a moratorium on that only because there is no longer any room left (just as well in these terror stricken times not to see knife wielding youts as Joe Pesci would say) . The two murals on the walls have been there as long as I can remember and as god awful as they are I would probably start a picket line if they were ever replaced. The work of a truly bad artist on a really bad day they lend a comfy feel to the place that no high priced art could improve upon.

As the day ends I make a resolution to pull out the books I have on Greenwich Village and actually read them. That should keep me occupied at least until next week when I get a chance to visit again.

P.S. As I write this I am listening to Tracy Chapman's debut album on my iPOD. I never got to see Tracy Chapman perform in Harvard Square but if I were writing my memoir you can bet I'd work her in somehow. Maybe I'd even do a duet with her. And since it's my memoir I'd even sound good.

The Patient From Hell

2006-01-04T21:15:00.000-08:00

I promise that this is the last medical book I will read for at least three months. It'll be pretty hard to top this one anyway. The full title is The Patient From Hell: How I Worked With My Doctors To Get the Best of Modern Medicine and How You Can Too by Stephen H. Schneider, Ph.D with Janica Lane (DaCapo Press, 2005). As a climate scientist, Schneider is concerned with the effects of global warming and all those other nasty things that are happening to the planet as we continue to despoil it. He's also concerned with something particularly nasty that's affected him a little more personally -- mantle cell lymphoma which is right up there near the top of the list of the things you don't want to experience. As a scientist Schneider has a great advantage over the typically afflicted patient but none of that really helps him in his battle with the medical establishment. Starting with the premise that "no doctor has all the answers" (there are often no answers, only odds), Schneider sets out to obtain the best possible treatment for his cancer.

With the exception of one rather slow chapter in which Schneider discusses his work as a climate scientist (he can be forgiven for this), this book is pretty hard to put aside. All the gruesome details of his struggle with a bone marrow transplant are here and they provide a valuable resource for anyone who finds themself in his situation. Even though Schneider as a scientist has a definite advantage in his knowledge and his affinity with doctors, his struggle to get the best treatment is by no means an easy one. Scientist or not, doctors view any patient who expects individualized treatment to truly be "the patient from hell." If you follow his trailblazing efforts, you can learn the following:

how to obtain and interpret odds
how to seek better treatments that may not fit the usual "standard of care"
how to get treated as a unique individual and not the mythical average patient
how to recognize the decisions that you, rather than the doctor, must make
how, most important of all, to build a partnership with sometimes reluctant doctors

The most fascinating part of the book is the information about cancer and remission. I have never read anything that lays out the situation so clearly or so compellingly. Before he began his treatment, Schneider had 800,000 cancer cells per microgram of DNA in his tumor and 200,000 cells per microgram in his bone marrow fluid. As incredible as that sounds, later in the book Schneider contrasts two possible treatment options. The starting point for the patient is 100 billion cancer cells. Now that's a lot of cancer!

One course of treatment reduces the amount to 100,000 cancer cells, the second treatment reduces it to 1,000 cancer cells. It's pretty obvious in looking at those numbers that no course of treatment is going to completely kill all those cancer cells. Remission is a relative thing. You can only hope that your treatment gets the remaining cancer cells to a level low enough for your immune system to keep them in check. And here Schneider throws out an interesting idea -- "it is possible that everybody has a very low number of cancer cells all the time; the key is to make sure your body's natural defenses continue fighting them."

Knowing that by the time a CT scan can detect a return of your cancer, when it may already be too late to beat the recurrence, Schneider relies on PCR (polymerase chain reaction) -- a test on the blood using PCR can detect very low cancer cell counts and by monitoring your PCR level you can see how the cancer is progressing or being held in check. PCR is obviously the best way to monitor this but my impression is that its use is not as widespread as it deserves to be. This bears a lot of further research.

A highly recommended book that I simply cannot praise enough.

Who Are These People?

2005-12-09T22:28:00.000-08:00

A wee bit of yearbook archaelogy ....

The chance sighting of someone from college at a location approximately 750 miles from the scene of the alleged crime, er ... education sent me hurtling thirty five years into the past, where, my ears filled with a couple of weeks of nonstop sixties music, I began to remember my one regret from that time period -- that I didn't see more concerts at the Fillmore East. That regret led me to program CDs of recordings made at the Fillmore, a place that still haunts me (and anyone else who has ever been there) to this day. I did see lots of Grateful Dead appearances there but looking through Amalie R. Rothschild's Live at the Fillmore East made me wish I had spent a lot more time there. Listening to the music and paging through the book healed that wound. A little.

When I moved three years ago my college yearbooks surfaced again. I was now looking through them for the first time in thirty five years. The recognition rate was so low I could have been looking at mugshots. Who were these people?

The shifting sands of time have obscured most of my college memories and it was probably only natural that it would take a little time to reclaim them. By the time I had worked my way through all four yearbooks the mists began to clear a little and some of the people began to look vaguely familiar.

Ironically, the one person I remember most vividly was not to be found anywhere. He was singlehandedly responsible for searing that first day of college into my memory and I can visualize it as if it were yesterday. The dorm was empty as I began hauling my stuff from the car to my room. Filling the quiet was the unmistakable sound of the Temptations, a sound that grew louder as I neared my room. The music was coming from the room next to mine and the sound was so vivid and insistent that the Temptations could have actually been in there. When I finally finished unloading I went next door to meet my new neighbor. Even when I entered the room he didn't acknowledge me as he was busy dancing around and lip-synching to "My Girl." This was a scene that would be repeated over and over again virtually all day every day. If Eddie Kendricks ever took sick, this guy could fill in for him. Well, maybe with a little stretching of the imagination since "Bo" was a white guy from Pittsburgh, quite a bit shorter in stature than his idol. Sadly I no longer can recall Bo's last name because he was too cool to get his yearbook picture taken (I skipped my freshman photo too at his urging). He was also too cool to go to class or to say goodbye when he disappeared suddenly one night, never to return. It was a loss felt by everybody but especially by me. I had attained a coveted spot in his inner circle by virtue of my pilgrimages to the Apollo Theatre on trips home. I'm now thinking I'll contact all the other people I know from freshman year to see if any of them remember Bo. This was my only course in Idol Worship and surprisingly after forty years I'm still enrolled.

Thanks to the internet, finding people these days (even after thirty-five years) is easy (maybe too easy). Finding me is a snap since there isn't anybody else in the country with my last name. How hard can it be to find a guy named Warren Kooi? In ZabaSearch I find that there is still a Kooi in Pitman, N.J. and I figure it's Warren's father. Warren though is not listed so I assume he's no longer in New Jersey. I put his name into Dogpile and a few minutes later I'm on a Pittsburgh area high school website and there he is. Warren is a biology teacher and from his picture he doesn't appear to have changed much, except his hair looks as white as the driven snow. After four daughters and thousands of students it's probably a miracle he still has hair.

Next I want to find another interesting guy -- Paul Spector. Paul's residence changed from Boston to Hawaii between sophomore and junior year and then back to Boston again for senior year. We never exactly figured that out. I'm not sure where he'll turn up today. His name is a little too common though and I get too many hits on it. Paul is best remembered for opening letters from home, extracting the checks, and discarding the letters unread. Sometimes out the window. Naturally we really thought that was cool at the time.

Next I want to find Herbie Hancock (not the jazz musician) who still reminds me somehow of Arlo Guthrie. Maybe if I put on some Arlo Guthrie it'll help me in my search which is fruitless so far because his name is a little too common as well.

After spending about eight hours going through my four yearbooks my memory is starting to improve a bit and I've got a list of about 100 or so names and there's no telling how much time I'll expend trying to run these people to ground. It's a lot of fun though and highly recommended. Maybe I'll even go to visit Guido Boggio (real easy to find) from Hasbrouck Heights, who, like myself, is still pretty much within walking distance of home. Somehow I've got a feeling I'm going to be spending quite a bit of time on this and maybe I'll have more to report at a later date.

Brain Scan Sunday Afternoon

2005-11-22T09:58:00.000-08:00

(with apologies to Dog Day Afternoon)

Our story begins on a windswept autumn afternoon with yours truly racking his brain (an organ that will be featured prominently herein) for a way to get out of raking leaves. Fortunately I notice a neighbor in the cul-de-sac teaching her grandchildren how to ride a bike. Since conversing with neighbors is one of the few spousally approved excuses for abandoning one’s chores, I felt safe in knowing I could put down my rake and engage in a little friendly tete-a-tete (also the title of a wonderful new book about Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir).

The conversation goes swimmingly enough until the very end when my neighbor drops the news that causes a chill to run through me -- she has just been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Bad news indeed but coming on the heels of two other acquaintances being diagnosed with brain tumors, it is positively frightening news. Neither of the other two turned out well either -- one is blind with the end apparently near, and the other is faring badly too, never having left the hospital since her surgery.

As someone who regularly reads both The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) and any other obscure medical publication I can get my hands on, I have reached the point where there is little that truly frightens me anymore. After a moment’s reflection though, I realize that most of my expertise (such as it is) is in heart disease (my most feared enemy) and the more common and less terrifying cancers.

What in fact do I know about brain tumors? Let’s see, I’ve read Jimmy Breslin’s I Want To Thank My Brain For Remembering Me and The Healing Blade (about noted neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Spetzler), and most recently illustrator Suzy Becker’s humorously told tale of her brain surgery misadventures (I Had Brain Surgery, What’s Your Excuse?). Oh sure, I’ve got some two dozen books about preserving and enhancing brain function, but that’s about it. The bottom line: I don’t know squat about brain tumors.

My neighbor tells me she wants to go to an upcoming brain tumor seminar at NYU Medical Center but unfortunately she’ll be in Florida at the time. I file that information away in my real short term memory and then a funny thing happens -- I notice an ad in The New York Times for Brain Tumor Awareness Day. As if a full day’s program of brain tumor related topics is not enough inducement, they are also offering a free brain MRI! This folks is an offer I simply cannot refuse. Give me a bargain (it doesn’t have to be free) and you can poke, prod or scan me most anywhere.

Brain Tumor Awareness Day (this is the fourth one) is sponsored by the Brain Tumor Foundation (www.braintumorfoundation.org) an organization founded by Dr. Patrick J. Kelly, chairman of neurosurgery at NYU Medical Center and a man who has 6,500 brain surgeries under his belt. After sixty seconds with Dr. Kelly I would sign on to let him do surgery on me with silverware if necessary. Such is the confidence that Dr. Kelly exudes that I cannot image having anyone else perform brain surgery on me. Dr. Kelly is obviously a man for whom time is precious yet he has dedicated himself to the early detection of brain tumors and founded this lifesaving organization. God bless you, Dr. K.

Believing as I do that patients should shower their surgeons with gifts every year on their new “birthday” I make a note to send Dr. Kelly a copy of a wonderful new book that I found impossible to put down -- Wendy Moore’s The Knife Man, about noted anatomist Dr. Robert Hunter. It’s never too early to start charming the good doctor just in case, and anyway I’m already feeling guilty that I’m getting all this for only a $45 donation.

A couple of speakers into the day and I’m already treading water. This is pretty complex stuff! Most refreshing of all is that everyone seems to agree that they don’t have all the answers. And no wonder. I now realize all too well the meaning of the phrase “it ain’t brain surgery.” Nothing is evidently quite like brain surgery. Brain tumor treatment makes NASA and spaceflight seem like paint-by-numbers. Lest you think I’m exaggerating here, please check out the forums at www.braintumorfoundation.org. Have your aspirins handy or prepare to bail out early. This stuff is quite intense.

All of the speakers were uniformly wonderful. The single most memorable line during the day was “we cannot live with our mortality twenty-four hours a day,” a comment obviously intended for brain tumor patients but applicable to everyone else as well.

At lunch I have a rather unusual experience that may yet turn out to be life changing. As I eat my lunch I am listening to the people next to me recount their tales of courage and hardship. Three of the five people next to me have had brain surgery and I am mesmerized by their stories. Not so mesmerized though that I fail to notice a very attractive woman at the end of the table. She immediately looks familiar but I cannot figure out where I know her from. As someone who once lost sleep over trying to recall the name of the alcoholic St. Bernard in the tv show Topper, I know this is going to bother me.

I am thinking brain don’t fail me now but am still drawing a blank. It isn’t until I am in the solitude of the MRI that it comes to me. The woman in question was in a couple of my classes in college, thirty-five years ago! I no longer remember the classes or the teacher. Let’s be honest I don’t remember too much about college any more after thirty-five years have elapsed. Someone once said they never forgot a pretty face but let’s face it I’ve forgotten plenty of them. How then could it be possible that I would remember her after almost forty years?

The answer though is the reason why I am having a hard time believing it’s really her. I’m happy when people tell me I don’t look my age but I’m only cheating Father Time out of about ten years. This woman however is cheating him out of at least twenty. In fact, she looks so much like she did in college that she almost looks frozen in time. She doesn’t look to have gained an ounce and it looks like thirty-five days have slipped through her hourglass not thirty-five years. It’s positively scary but she could probably slip into a college classroom today and no one would think she was appreciably older than they were.

I can never seem to remember what I ate even a few days ago, yet I seem to remember that she was only eating an apple and some water. The food was surprisingly good and she wasn’t really eating any of it. I didn’t notice anybody else with similar restraint. As someone who is toying with the idea of caloric restriction as a way to enhance longevity, I'm wondering if that could possibly be her anti-aging secret. As a student of longevity I'm dying to know but please don't let me know you can escape aging and look like that without spending endless hours in the gym. Life isn't fair but that would simply be too much to bear.

After I leave the MRI I go back to look for the only person I’ve seen from college since I graduated. She’s gone though and with her the secret of her youth.

My brain has gotten a good workout though and as I leave I think this is a day well spent. I make a mental note to mark my calendar for Brain Tumor Awareness Day 2006 (November 12th, 2006). These people are so organized that they already have it scheduled. Hope to see you there!

P.S. One never wants to hear that their brain is unremarkable but when you’re waiting for the results of an MRI of your brain those are just about the sweetest words you can hear (even if you weren’t previously concerned about the results). I had my MRI on Sunday and on Thursday they confirmed that my brain was indeed unremarkable. Thank you Brain Tumor Foundation!

If you’re in the New York area (or Massachusetts or Houston), you can get a brain MRI for only $169 at brainscans.com. Everybody else might be well advised to investigate the opportunities in your area. Brain tumor rates have apparently doubled and there may be as many as 500,000 people walking around with undiagnosed tumors. If you're still not convinced about the value of early detection (before symptoms appear), I'll leave you with a rather sobering statistic: the 5 year survival rate after diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor is only about 30%. Not nearly as terrifying as pancreatic cancer but pretty scary nonetheless.

Coming Next: The recognition level was so low I could have been looking at mugshots. This was my college yearbook though. Who Are These People? A Wee Bit of Yearbook Archaelogy

Zzzzzzz ......

2005-11-17T21:14:00.000-08:00

There is another new book out about sleep. Of course I've already got three books about sleep that I haven't read yet -- The Promise of Sleep, Power Sleep, and Losing Sleep. The truth is although I spend quite a bit of time trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle, I never really give much thought to sleep. I average six hours a night -- five hours in bed and an hour on the bus. It might be good to get a little more but there's just so much to do. Of course there are those who will tell you that sleep isn't really all it's cracked up to be. Martha Stewart says she averages 3.7 hours a night, and at a Barnes & Noble appearance I quizzed health guru Gary Null about his claim of only getting two hours a night. And now I see in a New York Times Science piece that sleep times range from 22 hours a day for the lemur to -0- (yes that's zero) for the bullfrog. Hmmm ....

Nevermore!

2005-11-13T20:46:00.000-08:00

By the time I finally decided to break down and buy a copy of the first issue of Sylvester Stallone's fitness magazine, Sly, I couldn't find a copy anywhere. The reason for my change of heart was Stallone's first editorial which reached one really simple yet profound conclusion. Stallone came to the rather startling realization that based upon his remaining life expectancy he had only 800 odd weekends left. A sobering thought for all of us and a message to spend our time wisely. In Stallone's case it was readily apparent that he wouldn't be spending much of that time writing more editorials.

Now comes word of a Stallone movie project even more unlikely than the prospect of another Rocky (can the news of a new Rocky really be true?). The new project in question is reported in the September/October 2005 issue of creative screenwriting. Get a load of this:

"Nu Image/Millenium Films has made a deal to produce Sylvester Stallone's Poe, based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe. Stallone will also direct. Stallone has always been fascinated by Poe and finished the script several years ago."

We can only hope that he doesn't decide to play Poe himself. Nevermore!

How Could I Have Missed This Book?

2005-11-08T20:42:00.000-08:00

Since I was eighteen in 1966 when this book was first published I can probably be excused from missing it as I no doubt had more important things to do than read mysteries. It would probably have slipped by me again if not for the front cover blurb from Anthony Boucher: "A Wild Novel of Black Humor ... Wonderful." Boucher heaped even more praise on the novel on the back cover: "A mad fantasia of the Freeway Age which happens in a kind of Southern California-cubed and begins (at least) as a mystery ... Wonderful (I admire a man who can conceive a murder suspect who goes around disguised as a giant tree sloth)."

The book in question is Gascoyne by Stanley Crawford (The Overlook Press, 2005 tp $14). If you're still not convinced to seek this out, get a load of the description of what the book is about:

Meet Gascoyne, a new breed of hero, a man who spends whole weeks in his car, eats there, sleeps there, and conducts his business -- wielding power, pinching pennies, and fostering corruption -- by mobile phone as he somehow manages to drive through bumper-to-bumper traffic at fifty miles an hour. But he's found a new preoccupation, hunting down the killer -- last seen slithering away from the crime scene in a tree-sloth costume -- of his business associate and finding out how the southern California megalopolis has suddenly slipped out of his grasp.

Whoever wrote the copy for this book certainly deserves an award. How can you resist a book described like this: "A tour de force blending of genres -- Alfred Hitchcock, jungle-war novels, science fiction, mad doctor movies, Westerns, James Bond, 18th-century mock epics, Greek tragedy and hardboiled detective stories -- first published in 1966, Gascoyne is a hilarious look into a future that looks remarkably like the present."

No alligators but you can't have everything.

Move Over, Lovecraft!!!

2005-10-28T12:52:00.000-07:00

They don't make too many mistakes at the Strand but a recent purchase might have been one of them. Or maybe it's really me that made the mistake.

I was just about finished with another dollar book hunting expedition when I spied two books sitting on a box, having evidently been rejected by someone who first thought about buying them. I rejected the first one instantly but the second one held my attention a lot longer. The cover design was sort of eye catching but derivative -- I've seen a similar design on several recent books, but still ....

In any event, the book in question is Robert Rankin's The Brightonomicon (Gollancz, 2005). The 2005 publication date tells me that this book doesn't belong in the dollar pile ... at least not yet. I can't even begin to describe what this one's about so I'll just reprint the jacket copy:

When our teenage hero takes his beloved one, Enid Earles, away for a dirty weekend in Brighton, things do not go as he might have wished. Instead of a night of passion -- his first -- our young hero is thrown from the pier by the leader of the Canvey Island Mod Squad. He narrowly escapes death by drowning when he is brought ashore by the Perfect Master, Cosmic Dick and self-styled Logos of the Aeon (not to mention the reinventer of the ocarina), Hugo Rune Himself.

But our hero has lost his memory and, in desperation, agrees to join the Lad himself in the solving of twelve cases, or conundrums, based upon the Brightonomicon, the new zodiac signs formed by the alignment of Brighton streets and discovered by Rune: carriageway constellations. Together they must find the Chronovision, invented in the 1950s by a Benedectine monk, which affords the viewer scenes of past events ... and, should it fall into the wrong hands, afford ultimate power to the would-be World Dictator.

And this being an adventure most exciting, they must find it before the sinister Otto Black, would-be World Dictator and all-around bad guy.

Or the whole world will all go to pot.

Which it will to a certain extent anyway: these are the 1960s after all.

In this, a stand-alone novel in its own right (in case this is the only Rankin novel on the bookshelves and you're wondering whether to fork over your precious pounds to buy it), Rankin's extraordinary imagination rises to new heights of madness. How he continues to get published is anyone's guess -- but let's all thank the Lord that he does. Because he saves mankind once more and still has time for a pint.

How's that for some snappy promo copy? In case you've just come in from the wilderness and don't know who the Rankin chap is, rest assured that he is a highly published author. Across from the title page is a list of his books, several of which are trilogies. My favorite is the Brentford Trilogy which consists of seven (?) volumes:

The Antipope
The Brentford Triangle
East of Ealing
The Sprouts of Wrath
The Brentford Chainstore Massacre
Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls
Knees Up Mother Earth

Lest you think this is some struggling author, at the back of the book you are entreated to join the Official Robert Rankin Fan Club which promises "Details of Major Sproutlore events and tours." There is even an accolade from the author himself: They are quite mad, yet brilliant. Amazing Stuff!"

Methinks I might just let this one age a bit longer before tackling it.

The Man Who Collected Lightbulbs

2005-10-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

What kind of excuse can a man offer when asked why he was possessed to collect 75,000 lightbulbs? When psychiatrists came to interview Baltimore dentist Hugh Francis Hicks about his collecting, he pointed to someone even more obsessive -- William J. Hammer, an engineer who worked for Edison, who had collected 130,000 different bulbs. While that might have made his collection seem almost second rate, Hicks probably conveniently forgot to mention though one area in which the engineer probably wasn't as obsessive -- the times Hicks abandoned patients in the middle of dental procedures to give tours of his Museum of Incandescent Lighting.

I found this wonderful story in Michael Kimmelman's absorbing The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa (The Penguin Press, 2005 hc $24.95), a book that is not so much about collecting as it is about the relationship of art to our lives. From the front flap copy comes this explanation about the books' premise: "The idea behind The Accidental Masterpiece is that art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully ... about how creating, collecting, and even just appreciating art can make living a daily masterpiece."

This is simply a wonderful book that can make you more concious of art and the world around you. I'll just leave you with the chapter headings which hopefully will intrigue you enough to make you look for this book:

The Art of Making a World
The Art of Being Artless
The Art of Having a Lofty Perspective
The Art of Making Art Without Lifting a Finger
The Art of Collecting Lightbulbs
The Art of Maximizing Your Time
The Art of Finding Yourself When You're Lost
The Art of Staring Productively at Naked Bodies
The Art of the Pilgrimage
The Art of Gum-Ball Machines, and Other Simple Pleasures

Mr. Know-It-All, Part the Last

2005-10-11T09:29:00.000-07:00

Oh, the outrage of it all! You get a great idea for a book, you work hard at writing it, and then you get savaged by a review from a writer who is essentially tilling the same field that you are. My outrage at this situation has been smouldering for a little over a year now and I have finally reached the point where I have to get it out of my system.

When I first picked up A.J. Jacobs' THE KNOW-IT-ALL: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (Simon & Schuster, 2004), the story of one (apparently slightly deranged) man's attempt to read The Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover (reportedly 33,000 pages and some 44 million words give or take a couple) I wasn't sufficiently impressed to even read a word of it. My first feeling was that a book like this should have a denser design -- it should have more heft and the words should be shoehorned in so tightly that you'd be curious enough to investigate further. At first glance, it looked shockingly lightweight. A couple of weeks later I picked the book up again and actually started skimming it and reading random entries (the book is comprised of entries arranged alphabetically as the encyclopedia is). I quickly became addicted to reading the book and read perhaps seventy pages or so without being sidetracked by another book (an all too rare occurence as any book addict knows and the highest compliment you can pay to a book). I only stopped at that point because I wanted to save the rest of the book to savor in a few more installments.

One thing was immediately clear -- this A.J. Jacobs was one witty guy. Jacobs, an editor at Esquire, had achieved something remarkable. He took an idea anybody could have thought of (and no doubt almost every writer wished they had) and he created a book that had you smiling on every page. I kept waiting for this book to disappoint me but it never did. Jacobs' interweaving of his personal life and his family into the entries made the book even more compelling (at great expense to Jacobs no doubt as I'm sure the retribution was quick to follow).

It has now been more than a year since Joe Queenan wrote his unfavorable review -- 'The Know-It-All': A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing (published October 3, 2004 in The New York Times). He called Jacobs' book interminable: corny, juvenile, smug, tired. Worse, he called Jacobs "a poor man's Dave Barry; no, a bag person's Dave Barry." Queenan then went on to pick apart several entries as if he were vetting a real encyclopedia rather than a witty take on an encyclopedia. Here's some of the other unflattering comments in the review: mesmerizingly uninformative, this misguided endeavor, lack of sophistication, the pedigreed simpleton, his staggering lack of sophistication.

It seems though that Queenan is the one guilty of a lack of sophistication. There's nothing quite as illogical as a humorist trying to write a serious review of a humorous book. Queenan missed the point entirely -- it should have been obvious to anyone that Jacobs didn't read every word in The Encyclopedia Britannica (nor did he need to) or that he really thought he would become the smartest person for having done so. Queenan's attempts to discredit Jacobs by dissecting a few entries and parading some of the critic's obscure knowledge was nothing if not embarrassing. It's unfortunate that because he couldn't find a hook for his review, he had to stoop to trashing the book and insulting its author.

A.J. Jacobs, to his credit, didn't even fire a return volley until February 13th, 2005 when his essay "I Am Not A Jackass" appeared in The New York Times. Not surprisingly, it possessed the same sparkling wit that his book did and stood in contrast to Queenan's witless review. Calling Queenan's review "one of the most mean-spirited reviews in the 154 year history of The New York Times", Jacobs went on to say: "The writer --- a humorist named Joe Queenan -- seemed genuinely angry at me, as if I had transported his niece across state lines." Jacob's most satisfying blow was dealt at the end of his piece when he said : "Oh, and you can make sure your Amazon ranking for the bully's new book is much, much lower than yours. Which it is."

Queenan's negative review stands in stark contrast to the other reviews of the book which are uniformly positive. Both his review and Jacob's essay are available on The New York Times website and are certainly worth reading (at least Jacobs' is). After comparing Queenan's witless rant to Jacobs' measured and wit-filled response, I know why I'm still a subscriber to Esquire after thirty plus years and why I stopped buying Queenan's books a long time ago. In fact, if I can find the Queenan books I have I think I'll deposit them in the garbage. If it'll let me.

My only regret is that Jacobs didn't challenge Queenan to some sort of intellectual duel.

Next up: The Man Who Collected Lightbulbs

Mr. Know It All, Part the First

2005-10-05T20:46:00.000-07:00

If you were Mr. Know-It-All you'd already know the answer to the following two questions (I'm not embarrassed to admit that I didn't know either of them):

1) What was the origin of the TV Dinner?
2) What the hell is Spam made of?

The story behind the TV Dinner comes from a really cool book that I picked out of the Barnes & Noble clearance section: 50s: A Perfect View of the Past (Barnes & Noble Books, 2004). This is an attractive little hardcover with a $14.95 cover price. It comes with a DVD and was only $4.99. Anyway, here's what it says about the TV Dinner:

In 1953, C.A. Swanson & Sons had a problem -- 270 tons of left over Thanksgiving turkey! After Thanksgiving Swanson had ten refrigerated railroad cars -- each containing 520,000 pounds of unsold turkeys -- going back and forth across the USA because there was nowhere to store them.

A breakthrough idea came from the trays used to serve airline food -- and the TV Dinner was born. Swanson sold ten million of them that year.

And now for the grisly truth about SPAM courtesy of W.C Privy's Original Bathroom Companion Number 2 edited by Erin Barrett and Jack Mingo (St. Martin's Grifffin, 2003): Seeing pork shoulders piling up in the coolers of the George A. Hormel Company in 1937 gave one of its executives an idea. Why not chop the meat up, add some spices and ham from other parts of the pig and form it into small ham-like loaves? Put it in a can and fill the excess space with gelatin from the pig's leftover skin and bones -- you could probably keep the meat edible for months without refrigeration.

Coming up next: Who is actually Mr. Know-It-All and which writer/critic thinks he's really Mr. Know-It-All? (he isn't even close).

Gentlemen, Start Your Camels!

2005-10-04T05:44:00.000-07:00

Holy dromedary, Batman! Shouldn't we stop whining about our problems and think of some of the hardships people are enduring in other parts of the world?

Take the tiny country of Qatar. You'd think their only problem was worrying about sinking into the desert sands with the weight of all that American firepower that went through there. But nooooo ....... they have a much more serious problem -- a shortage of jockeys for the camel races. Dubbed "the sport of sheiks," camel racing in that part of the world is supposedly on par with the Kentucky Derby or the somewhat lesser well known Royal Ascot. Or so we are told in a fascinating article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal entitled Ride 'em Robot: Qatar Offers Solution To A Jockey Shortage by Yasmine El-Rashidi (no new York based scribe for this prestigious publication).

It seems that the camels (which run for as much as six miles) prefer jockeys that weigh less than sixty pounds. As enlightened as they are over there, this is after all a favored pasttime and underage children were pressed into duty raising a hue and cry from human rights groups. What's a sport minded Arab to do? Well, using that good old Arab ingenuity (and leaving American ingenuity in the dust, er .... sand) they looked into the use of robots. Now I'm not really doing them justice when I say that they looked into it. Unlike this country that gives out multi billions of dollars in no bid contracts, they did it the right way. They formed a Robotic Jockey Committee and pressed a Swiss robotics company into action. The company did 100 hours of testing with 20 prototypes.

I can't begin to do justice to the thought and deliberation that went into this breakthrough. You'd have to read the article to see how much care and effort went into a project like this. You'd also probably be surprised to learn that the government offers a two day course in robotic jockeying leading to a diploma. Why I bet if their State Department prepared a 14 volume work on going to war, the powers that be would probably actually read it. But of course that wouldn't happen because unlike some countries, these people are enlightened and have better things to do than go to war.

On a lighter note, there are many camel racing publications. I'm happy to report that I don't get any of them. See I do have some willpower.

That "Book Thing" Thing

2005-09-30T05:45:00.000-07:00

Damn you, Bill Crider. I'm usually pretty good at not falling for all those time-wasting links you put in your blog, but, sucker that I am, I made the fatal mistake of clicking on that BOOK THING link. I've already made several trips there and "wasted" half a dozen hours nosing around. I haven't ponied up my ten dollars yet to become a paid member, but how far away can that be? I've only listed twenty books so far (my user name is mrjazz) and I can still find myself under the new addicts section but that won't last long once everybody else discovers this site. Then, to get noticed, I'll have to be among those with the most books listed and some have over two thousand listed already.

I'm still not sure if this thing can list your books alphabetically but even that shortcoming might not prevent me from forging ahead. Letting you put on tags to sort your books might be enough. One thing that is cool is the ability to see other people who have the books that you have. I only listed twenty so far and there were no real common titles in there and one person actually had three of them. A kindred soul already.

Maybe the highlight so far was this comment from the username: LarsonLewisProject: "I knew we were meant for each other when, on our first meeting, he asked me if he could see my reference books." Now that's a booklover!!!

Bring On Those Leeches!

2005-08-26T05:38:00.000-07:00

It's a well known fact that I can't bear to part with any form of printed matter -- books, magazines, newspapers, -- once they come into my possession, their life is spared. The one exception is medical books of which I am very fond. I have been passing these along to my wife's heart surgeon who is also a lover of books and a sometimes frequenter of the Strand.

I am also always cutting medical articles out of The New York Times and there was a real beauty in yesterday's paper entitled "Age Old Cures Like the Maggot, Get U.S. Hearing" by Gardiner Harris. It seems that in these increasingly high tech times, one disease cure is decidedly low tech. Well known in medical lore, it was always presumed the leech went the way of the horse and wagon but leeches are being used today by high tech surgeons like microsurgeons. This is the part I really loved: Leeches are also extraordinarily sensitive to proper blood flow and so can offer immediate feedback on how well surgery went, said Dr. Bruce Minkin, a hand surgeon in Asheville, N.C. "It won't attach if there's not good arterial blood coming in, and sometimes that tells me that I need to go back in ," Dr. Minkin said.

The part about maggots was even more interesting. Maggots it seems can clean up wounds that will not heal with normal techniques. They give an example that would be hard to top:

And during World War I, a doctor described seeing two soldiers who had been left wounded on the battlefield for days. When their clothes were taken off, thousands of maggots were found in their wounds. Once the maggots were removed, the doctor was astonished to find clean, pink living flesh. That doctor, William Bayer of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, became maggots' modern medical champion.

Maybe if you missed out on raising ostriches you can get in on the ground floor of maggot farming. Now that the government has convened a two day panel of medical advisers to regulate the industry, can speculation be far behind. Maggot futures here we come!!!

The Melville Channel

2005-08-23T10:02:00.000-07:00

Until the Melville Channel launches (I do expect to see it in my lifetime) I will have to content myself with the already expanding universe of all things Melvillean. One of the reasons I can't retire is that the Newark Public Library has half a shelf full of inaccessible Melville stuff including one book I'm just dying to get to -- Melville's Reading by Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (University of South Carolina Press, 1988). This rather hard-to-find volume discusses books that Melville either owned (he was a real book fiend!) or had access to. Before I treat myself to that though I've got to get to Hershel Parker's two volume biography, surely the most definitive biography of any writer. A few books might possibly be longer, but at 940 pages for volume one, I wouldn't count on it. It's hard to imagine the kind of scholarship that went into creating this two volume biography.

In the preface to the first volume is this opening statement made by H.M. Tomlinson, in the London Athenaeum, 4 June 1921:

Now is the time to tackle that book about him. If this task is neglected a little longer, so that some priceless recollections of Melville, now available, are lost, and documents and other evidence of the man, which now exist, are buried still deeper beneath the litter of the years, then the book about him will be but tentative, and will leave the mystery darker than ever. And what a jolly task the writing of that biography would be! If only one lived near Nantucket.

One wonders what Tomlinson would think if he held Parker's work in his hands. Turning to any page in the book will fascinate you and I must admit that I cheated and skimmed some pages that mention Melville's acquisition of books. His life is even more interesting than his work and thanks to Parker no stone has been left unturned. Now if only I don't get sidetracked by some other book .......

With Breathless Excitement

2005-08-22T05:49:00.000-07:00

If only we could recapture how we read when we were children, burning with interest, with breathless excitement, unwilling to put down our book to eat or sleep. Often we can remember the actual circumstances of where we were sitting, the injunctions of our parents to come to the table or go to bed. My memory of my childhood literary enthusiasms is still vivid. I read The Three Musketeers on a visit to my beloved Aunt Henrietta, in Watseka, Illinois, the time I nearly died.
I can't begin to match Diane Johnson's remembrance of reading The Three Musketeers probably because I never finished the book when I was her age (nine or ten at the time). I bet I read the Classics Illustrated comic though but sadly I don't remember the circumstances of that either. I do remember where I was when I read the classic Mickey Mouse comic story, "Island in the Sky." I was waiting for a pizza with my parents and I remember being very upset with myself for getting a drop of oil from the pizza on the comic. The disparity in these remembrances probably accounts for the fact that I am pounding out these words for this blog while Diane Johnson is writing a timeless book like Into A Paris Quartier (National Geographic Directions, 2005). Mystery fans may remember Johnson as the author of Dashiell Hammett: A Life. The thing I find most mysterious is that on the copyright page it shows Johnson's year of birth as 1934 which would put her at 70 or 71 years of age. If that is a recent photo of her on the inside back cover maybe we should all depart for Paris posthaste.
Johnson's book is the latest entry in a wonderful series from National Geographic. In an age of $15 trade paperbacks, these books look to be a real bargain at $20 for a hardcover. They feature attractive cover design and even the endpapers are impressive enough to make you want to collect the whole series (there appears to be about 20 so far). A combination of travel narrative with a bit of history sprinkled in, I have found them to be quite addictive though I have yet to actually purchase one (I've taken them out of the library so far).
I recently read in another book about Paris that there are some 10,000 books about Paris and this is a great addition to that collection. Suddenly though I am feeling kind of poor because I only have a handful.

Wiping My Butt

2005-08-19T05:39:00.000-07:00

The other day I was wiping my butt (we're all friends here, right?) when I got the distinct feeling that I was mopping up a spill from the Exxon Valdez. If you're even a little bit observant you've probably noticed this unsettling phenomenon yourself. If not, you're even a more finicky eater than I am and that's not good. In my case I easily traced this occurrence to a piece of candy that was forced upon me the last time I got my hair cut. The barber has good intentions and though I never have a problem refusing something that is offered me, I do have a problem with this guy because he is so serious in taking care of his regular customers that I find it hard to refuse. The candy, purported to be European in nature, had a filling that made a Hostess Twinkie look wholesome. Needless to say I didn't enjoy it but considered downing it one of life's little concessions.

I've noticed this oil spill phenomenon on a few other occasions, most notably after eating at Chinese buffets which I no longer patronize -- most of them seem to have more unhealthy American food than Chinese anyway. This unsettling state of affairs is no doubt caused by some alien types of oils or food additives that would probably make Olestra look good. As I age I am getting much more concerned about what I put in my body although I was pretty much a nut case about this all along.

I have in fact decided to put on an all out blitz to get my cholesterol levels even lower and will soon begin logging everything I ingest. This latest project was born after a visit to the cardiologist when I observed him asking my wife how she got her cholesterol readings to improve so much. I was sorely tempted to pipe in that you have to start off the day with a pint of Ben & Jerry's (2 days worth of saturated fat) and then work in a good sized chocolate bar (actually brick sized) during the day, while making sure not to forget a hot dog or two on occasion. The sad fact is that the woman can eat virtually anything and not gain any appreciable amount of weight or even budge her cholesterol levels. I was pretty proud of myself for having finally gotten my HDL (the good cholesterol) out of the forties -- I hit 55 this time, attributable no doubt to my finally deciding to have a drink a day. My teetotaler wife on the other hand had HDL of 85 !

So I decided to pull out my copy of Cut Your Cholesterol by David Katz, M.D., and Debra L. Gordon (Reader's Digest, 2003), a book which you can probably still find in the bargain section at Barnes & Noble. I am still in the lowest risk group according to the way they rate you and obviously there's a lot more to it than your cholesterol level but it's something that you can tinker with. In my own case, a low fat diet did not give me good results at all. I actually have better results with higher fat levels but I'm very concious about where the fat comes from. Having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day for lunch and an ounce of dark chocolate at night hasn't adversely affected my readings at all. I'd probably even be better off if I upped the chocolate consumption but for me it's a mental thing and going higher would probably require hypnotism.

Also on the health front: although I haven't eaten any meat for years, I saw a new book in the library that claims that Alzheimer's may be linked to the consumption of meat. Avoid this one if you're a carnivore (sorry but I forgot the title).

More Bourdain!

2005-08-02T09:07:00.000-07:00

I have my copies of Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour. Why I even have a copy of his Bobby Gold Stories. They all pale however when compared to Anthony Bourdain's video ventures. You could watch the Food Network's A Cook's Tour over and over again without tiring of it, and how many things can you truly say that about? And so it is a real gift that Bourdain is back on tv again, this time in a one hour show (twice as good!) called No Reservations broadcast at 10 PM on Monday nights on the Travel Channel. The first two shows, on Paris and Iceland, were nothing short of spectacular and while I'm a little leery of how he's going to fare in next week's location (New Jersey Oy!) I'll certainly be glued to the set.

Changing Priorities

2005-07-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

In my recent book recovery efforts after the leak in my basement, I came across a collection of men's magazines that I forgot that I still had. Of course I was unable to bring myself to throw them out (I am working on this shortcoming) but a curious thing happened. I suddenly was wishing that the magazines had been ruined rather than the several years of xerox copies of The New England Journal of Medicine and The Journal of the American Medical Association that I had diligently assembled only to see them damaged bythe elements and subsequently tossed out by my wife -- I was still trying to "rehabilitate" them.

If you haven't read these august medical journals you're missing out on a lot. I admit that I'm kind of addicted to them. Sometimes you find out that stuff you thought was good and other times things kind of even out when supposedly bad stuff turns out to be beneficial. Some good news: the July 6th, 2005 JAMA seems to conclude that habitual coffee consumption is associated with a substantially lower risk of type 2 diabetes (doesn't help me since I rarely drink the stuff). Bad news: vitamin e doesn't seem to be as great as it seemed to be -- it either seemed to have no cardiovascular protective effects, or, worse yet, people with higher vitamin e levels seemed to have higher c-reactive protein levels, a marker for the dreaded inflammation now thought to be a culprit in heart disease. The NEJM also has nifty case studies where doctors try to troubleshoot ailing patients. Read one or two of these and you'll wonder how anything is ever diagnosed (and these guys at Mass General are the cream of the crop).

If you've ever wondered about that guy who goes for a checkup and is pronounced fit as a fiddle only to drop dead outside the doctor's office, wonder no longer. It ain't always a blood clot. You can read about it in the May 12th, 2005 NEJM in the article entitled "Heart Rate Profile during Exercise as a Predictor of Sudden Death." Now those are two really frightening words. The greatest risk of sudden death seems to be in people who exhibit three things -- resting heart rates above 75 bpm, people who can't increase their heart rate by 89 beats per minute during exercise, and people with recovery rates of less than 25 bpm after one minute of rest after exercise.

Still, even with all that bad stuff, I'm looking forward to the day when I can have online access to these two essential (at least for me) publications. Stay healthy and eat your salmon!!!

All Things KONG!

2005-07-21T09:44:00.000-07:00

A couple of months back I glanced at a copy of a new book on King Kong. The book in question, Kong: King of Skull Island is considered to be a prequel/sequel to the 1932 book King Kong. The work of author/illustrator Joe DeVito, it was a pretty impressive book and I think I decided to see if I could find a review copy at the Strand at 50% off. I then promptly forgot about the book, not having noticed a copy at the Strand. Then, the other night, I'm flipping through the high definition channels to see what's on and come across some previews of coming attractions on the Universal high definition channel. The first one, called (I think) The 40 Year Old Virgin, looks mildly interesting. Then, it is followed up by a trailer that has you riveted to your seat. It took a little while (no I didn't need to see the ape) before I realized it was for King Kong. My first impression as the trailer started was that this is a movie I've just got to see. Quite an endorsement indeed since I can't remember the last movie I've seen, preferring instead to wait until they appear on the dish, hopefully on one of the high definition channels. I have vowed to watch only movies in IMAX theatres but I'll gladly break that vow to see King Kong. It looks to be that spectacular.

Now, I'm warning you. Whatever you do, don't venture near the kongisking.net website. Unless of course you've got a lot of time to spare.

10,000 Books!!!

2005-07-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not just trying to get your attention. There's a great article in the real estate section of the Sunday New York Times (7/17/05). In a regular section called "The Hunt," this entry entitled "When It's Time To Turn the Page," is about a couple (he's 71, she's 62) who decided to close the Connecticut chapter of their life and begin the Manhattan one. Problem? Find a reasonably priced apartment that would house them and his 10,000 books. Well, it turns out he really had 15,000 of them but he somehow managed to sell or give away a third of them. Consider me impressed. A retired classics professor, Thomas Cole is currently writing a literary study of Ovid, so one might argue he still needs those books. At the end of the article, Mr. Cole answers the question all of us book accumulators are constantly asked -- whether we have read all those books. I have now added his wonderful answer to my other great answer to this question. I will now alternate between the two answers, both of which will give your questioner pause. If you want to know his answer you'll just have to check it out online at the New York Times website (which of course you should already be doing anyway). I'm not trying to hold out on you but his response won't be nearly as valuable if everybody is using it.

Trouble in Book Vault #67

2005-07-14T10:27:00.000-07:00

My tours of my book holdings have temporarily been suspended because my basement now looks like the lair of a madman (which of course it is). After emptying out book vault #67 (just a slight exaggeration) I now find virtually every foot of space (and there's quite a bit of territory there) covered with books and magazines. Since I still haven't been able to determine the source of the water (no visible leaks in pipes and it hadn't rained in two weeks before the event) I have held off moving the books back.

One thing came out of this adventure though. Although a lot of books were marginally affected, a few that I didn't want to throw away got pretty wet. If you put them outside in the sun, you can bring them back to life (they won't look pretty though) and they won't have any dreaded mold. You've just got to make sure they get plenty of air (a couple I had in a box did get moldy) and they'll be just fine. One last word of advice: don't drag this process on for more than a month or so. My wife finally got tired of looking at the books and magazines sitting under my porch (needing only another airing or two) and threw them out one day. The biggest loss was about five thousand pages of stuff I had xeroxed over the last couple of years. Actually the ones I'm gonna miss most are the articles from The New England Journal of Medicine. Yeah, I guess I am a madman.

Discounts Make the Heart Grow Fonder

2005-07-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

It would be easy to cure my "book problem." If only Barnes & Noble and Borders (to mention nothing of The Strand) would only cooperate. If only all books were sold at full list price. That is my dream but it doesn't look likely that we'll ever see that scenario again. The economy is in the toilet and isn't coming out anytime soon (if ever). The fact that the yield on the ten year treasury note is almost three-quarters of a point below what I can get on a five year CD is an ominous sign indeed.

I'm trying to remember the last book I bought at full retail and I can't. It's been a long long time. I can't even remember the last book I bought at 10% off with my Barnes & Noble Reader's Advantage card. I will buy a book though when they throw in an additional 10 % off (20% off total) but 25% off is better and when Borders sends out those 30% off coupons, well I've just got to help the cause if they're being that generous. I'm a sucker for 50% off at the Strand and don't even get me started about those dollar books at the Strand annex. I got a momentary good feeling there the other day when a rather normal looking young lady fairly zipped through the dollar tables pulling out five or six books to my every one. I kind of felt like the guys at the Indy 500 trying to figure out how an attractive young lady could leave them in the dust. For a moment I thought of questioning her about her purchases (she had 200 or so books put aside in mere minutes) but I was afraid she'd tell me she was buying them for resale. Better to delude myself that there was somebody worse off with dollar books. Far far worse off.

Borders had no sooner finished pumping up their second quarter revenue with a end of June 30% off a book offer when they came up with a way to give the third quarter an opening jolt. When you bought a book at 30% off, you got a coupon good in July for 25% off a DVD. How sick is that? And why am I even telling you this since everybody is probably falling victim to these consumer traps.

I Practice Wabi-Sabi

2005-06-21T10:34:00.000-07:00

Having long been a fan of Japanese thinking, I have wrestled mightily with the concept of Wabi-Sabi which is the idea that there is beauty in imperfection. Supposedly WabiSabi was first originated with Zen practioners who hold that there is no such thing as permanence or perfection. All things are impermanent and imperfect.

The concept has entered my mind on many occasions when I obsessively try to find the most perfect copy of a book to purchase. On more than one occasion I have rejected a book simply because it had some minor imperfection -- it doesn't take much more than a tiny tear or ding to cancel the purchase. In fact I am still looking for a copy of a particular book, having rejected all the copies I've seen so far for some flaw.

I now have a great opportunity to embrace Wabi-Sabi as a truly unfortunate event has befallen some of my books. A mysterious leak recently appeared in my basement and the small amount of water that soaked through my ceiling tiles (causing several of them to fall) fell on the floor of one room causing quite a bit of damage as it migrated under the carpet and under the boxes and piles of books that were stacked on the floor. Hundreds of books and magazines were affected, some pretty badly. Never one to throw out anything, I tried to save as many of them as I could by spreading them out to dry on my deck. A great percentage of them were in fact saved but I now have an awful lot of imperfect objects to practice Wabi-Sabi on. Now doubt I will be a Wabi-Sabi master before long (certainly if I don't find the elusive leak which has mysteriously cured itself for the moment).

Of course I will soon begin to consult my extensive Zen library to learn as much about Wabi-Sabi as I can, but in the meantime I've bought some of those nifty water alarms to make sure I don't have too many imperfect books to contemplate. Keep your powder and books dry!

On Bullshit

2005-06-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

Finally, a book I can do without. I'm paging through the August 7, 2005 issue of The New York Review of Books, and there it is on page 77 in a quarter page ad. The book is entitled On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt (Princeton University Press). Lest you think this is some joke, I might mention that Mr. Frankfurt is a philosophy professor emeritus at Princeton University. Amazed at how a book like this could only be $9.95 in cloth, I go to the internet and find several reviews of the book. Dana Milbank's review for The Washington Post highlights the contrast between the book's promotional package which screams out "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE" with the fact that the material was written nineteen years ago and has been previously published twice already. In case you missed it the first two times around or aren't exactly convinced yet, here's some help from the ad copy:

There is SO MUCH BULLSHIT in our culture. But why? What function does bullshit serve? According to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, we lack a clear theory of bullshit. With insight and humor, Frankfurt attempts to build such a theory.

Da Vinci Flinchy

2005-06-06T20:24:00.000-07:00

I usually avoid The Wall Street Journal like the plague. It isn't that I don't like the paper. Actually I think it has some fascinating articles but I just don't have the time to read another paper. Friday's Journal is always a temptation though because the Weekend Journal section is pretty hard to resist. What usually tips me over is a good article in the first section and this past Friday's paper did it again. Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg's article was simply must reading for any booklover. Entitled "Quest For Best Seller Creates a Pileup of Returned Books," it referred to the book biz as "an industry gone mad," and the details seem to prove it. In the last ten years, book returns have quadrupled from 200 million dollars to a whopping 800 million. The article told of a Time Warner warehouse with twenty million unsold books, two to four million of which will be deemed unsaleable even as remainders with their fate being recycling. And that's just one publisher!

One of the most fascinating parts of the article was the long journey a book takes until it is returned to the publisher. In an example cited, books were shipped from a Time Warner warehouse in Indiana to a Barnes and Noble store in Marina Del Rey, California. After they remained unsold, they began a 2,800 mile journey back to Barnes and Noble's national distribution center in New Jersey (about seven miles from where I live). Barnes and Noble then sent the books on another 700 mile journey back to the Time-Warner Indiana warehouse. From there, they will eventually be sold as remainders and go on yet another journey, some of which will obviously be going back to Barnes and Noble yet again.

The subtitle of the article was: Hoping For a Da Vinci Code, Publishers Flood Stores. One can only wonder where this business is heading. It's pretty doubtful it'll have a pretty ending.

In related matters, there is a great piece in the latest New York Times Book Review (Cash Up Front) which tells what publishers have to do and pay to get their books prominently displayed in a bookstore. I guess the little guy just doesn't have much of a chance today. Maybe we can adopt a cause and do a little of our own impromptu display work on a title. Might be fun.

Happy as a Sandboy

2005-05-31T09:01:00.000-07:00

Not content to limit my self improvement program to increasing my vocabulary by a single word a day, I decide to add a phrase to the mix. Today's enrichment comes from The Pirate Dictionary (Pelican Publishing, 2004). Now we're all familiar with those old favorites, "shiver yer timbers" and "walking the plank," so in search of something new I sticks me finger in this book and comes up with this beauty:

happy as a Sandboy The Ostrich Inn, on the site of the original harbour of Bristol, is next to the Redcliffe Caves which used to be a major source of sand. Landlords used to send little boys (sandboys) into the caves to collect sand to spread on the floor of the tavern to soak up the beer spillages. They were paid in beer.

How can you not love that one! Addicted as I am to arcane dictionaries and encyclopedias, I'm going to have to consider adding this one to the collection, matey.

P.S. Not content to let well enough alone, I decide to check out this pirate stuff on the internet. I can see I've really been asleep at the wheel on this one. Two guys tried to start a Talk Like a Pirate Day in 2002 and all that seems to have come of it is that Dave Barry got a great column out of it entitled "Talking the Plank." Strangest of all though is a guy who says "it has been my lifelong dream to start the first Pirate Rap band." Shiver me eardrums!

Carbs? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Carbs!

2005-05-26T21:21:00.000-07:00

Or do we? Well, actually even kindly old Dr. Atkins would have admitted that we do need carbs, that is unless we want our trusty old brains to revert to caveman functionality. The good doctor was probably too busy trading shots with his critics to refine the message he was trying to get across. Even though I'm not ready to sign on with the low-carb camp, I'm always willing to listen to the other side of the debate and so I went to a new book for help. The book is entitled Dr. Robert Atkins: The True Story of the Man Behind the War on Carbohydrates by Lisa Rogak (Chamberlain Brothers Penguin, 2005). It's a quick breezy look at the doctor and makes for painless reading. I can't say that I learned too much from the book but the once muddy waters are now starting to clear ... but it's still a pretty murky picture.

Dr. Atkins was not the person who discovered the effect of carbohydrates. That honor goes to a nineteeth century British undertaker -- William Banting. In his 1864 Letter on Corpulence (which sold more than 60,000 copies in England alone!), Banting became the first low-carb proponent when he wrote:

Of all the parasites that affect humanity I do not know of, nor can I imagine, any more distressing than that of Obesity, and, having emerged from a very long probation in this affliction, I am desirious of circulating my humble knowledge and experience for the benefit of other sufferers, with an earnest hope that it may lead to the same comfort and happiness I now feel under the extraordinary change -- which might almost be termed miraculous had it not been accomplished by the most simple common-sense means.

I don't think there's any question that a low-carb diet can help you lose weight. The science is pretty much indisputable. The problem is that the media played up the aspect of eating all that fatty food when the real message is to reduce your intake of carbohydrates, especially simple carbohydrates which is what most of our heavily processed food is. Of course you don't necessarily have to eat a high fat diet to do that. Even though I seem to need a lot of carbohydrates to maintain a stable body weight, I'm still not sure how much of an adverse effect eating them has on your pancreas which has to work overtime to process them.

The reason I've finally decided to trim the carbs a bit is that I learned that less carbohydrates results in a better lipid profile with lower cholesterol (at least triglycerides) being the main result. We'll see.

Mystery of the Review Copy

2005-05-24T10:35:00.000-07:00

ONE WAY TICKET TO PALOOKAVILLE

When I'm pawing through the dollar tables at the Strand Annex with all the other wild-eyed bibliots (yes, the second syllable of that word is short for idiots -- bibliophiles is not appropriate for us bottom feeders) I'm always wondering if they put out any new books lately and on which table they might reside (usually not the one I'm looking at). Today though I have not only hit the new books immediately but I find one that creates what shall now be known as The Case of the Strand Mystery (with my sincere apologies to Mr. Doyle). It involves a mystery trade paperback that normally wouldn't draw a second glance from me because it is neither hard boiled nor is the book itself especially attractive, sporting as it does one of those bland covers that is really all that a second or third tier publisher can realistically afford.

The mystery begins when I crack the book open to find a letter from the writer to a prospective reviewer, in this case an online publication. The letter is dated May 21st which is Saturday and it is Monday May 23rd as I discover the book. My best guess at this point is that the book was delivered to someone while the author was in New York for the Edgar Awards week.

Now the question is how the book could possibly get onto the Strand dollar table in so short a time. Of course, maybe the reviewer just devoured the book immediately, and, short of space as all but a few fabulously rich New Yorkers are, decided to dispose of it at the Strand where a book like this couldn't possibly have added more than a quarter (25 cents) to his review copy payout. Still, there are an awful lot of books streaming into the Strand on a daily basis and I am more than a little surprised that this one was pushed out into the marketplace so quickly (actually the scene on the dollar tables resembles nothing so much as the low end of the bazaar in Cairo (and some of the customers look like they've come from a galaxy far, far away). Workers struggle mightily with the boxes and boxes of books consigned to their dollar fate (and believe me there's no shortage of books -- as soon as spaces develop on the tables, they are immediately filled in from what seems to be an endless supply of boxes of still more dollar books), but it's never appeared to me that any books escape an aging process as they wait in line to be pawed at by the bargain hunters. There are signs up that anyone going through the unopened boxes will be summarily ejected and (one imagines) banned for life. No doubt the same fate will soon await the person who has been leaving dozens of books strewn on top of the dollar books as they buzz saw their way through the pack. Some days when you arrive you almost don't have the heart to look through the dollar books because it looks like a tornado has swept through only moments earlier. It's hard to believe that they haven't caught the perpetrator of this crime against the normally gentle booklover. The staff at the Strand is nothing if not vigilant and I'm sure it's only a matter of time. Being banned for life from the Strand is truly a sobering threat for any book lover but I often wonder if that would really help cure me or if I'd just resort to disguises. Hmmm, there may be a way out of this madness after all.

Knowing how the Strand works, the mystery deepens since they only buy books at the main store (at 12th street). The book would have had to come into the 12th street outpost on Friday (the 20th, the day before the reviewer ostensibly first got the book), then it would have to go through the intensive screening process where it obviously instantly failed and instead of going to the half price tables it was instead banished to the shipment that would go down to the Strand annex later that day. This would almost certainly have had to happen on Friday afternoon since I'm almost positive that they don't send books to the annex on Saturday. It also couldn't have happened on Monday since I found the book at lunchtime, long before any shipment might have arrived. It's pretty obvious to me at this point that the book was delivered to the prospective reviewer before the date on the letter but still it's a pretty quick turn around from potential review to Palookaville.

Once at the Strand the book had to have been almost immediately dumped onto the dollar table. So what we have here is an almost instant dashing (unbeknownst to them of course) of the writer's hopes as it goes from a hoped for review to the Siberia of the book world in less than forty eight hours. I too contribute to the rejection as I pass the book up, putting it back on the table. No doubt I will be seeing this book again as I check through the dollar books on future visits.

I have checked the author's website and it is cheery and hopeful, exuding a very optimistic and self assured air (which is of course a good thing). I can't bring myself to e-mailing the author to solving this mystery though. In case anyone wants to take a crack at figuring out who the author is, I'll give a few clues (and maybe a prize): the author in question is a woman, I believe it was a medical mystery, and she lives in the shadow (well, the general vicinity anyway) of that most noted of all Woolrich scholars.

A Collectible For the Common Man

2005-05-23T20:33:00.000-07:00

There's nothing quite as gratifying as anticipating the next hot trend and being way ahead of the curve. I was into (and unfortunately out of) both comic books and movie posters before they became hot. I'm not one to search out the latest and greatest, but if it happens to fall into my lap, well ......

Even if I had the money and wanted to spend it in a refined and socially accepted way (comics and movie posters fall short in this area), there's no way I would even dream of getting involved in collecting wine. Still, collector that I am, I love a good story and can't resist the annual issue of Wine Spectator that they devote to this most worthwhile of pursuits. Now, however, you can be one of the first to learn of something that may become far more popular than wine collecting.

Right about now, it would be appropriate to cue the music to Aaron Copland's Rodeo (that was the one that the Beef Council appropriated for its ads, wasn't it?). Copland's Fanfare For the Common Man might actually be more fitting though (if a bit over the top) considering that this is a collectible that will be well within reach of the common man.

Are you ready for this? The new hot thing to collect is going to be ..... vintage sardines! Just as I was staring at a three pack of King Oscar sardines that I had discovered in an annual cleaning of my desk at work, and wondering whether they might still be edible, I come across a life altering piece in the June Gourmet. According to the article, there are actually sardine aficionados (can you envision Sardine Aficionado on the newsstand?). Steven Jenkins, a partner in New York's Fairway markets had this to say about vintage sardines (I guess mine might qualify): "Once they age, the flavors meld and become more complex, almost a non-fish thing, very nutty, deep, and enthralling." The only real question at this early stage of the game seems to be what qualifies as vintage. The article uses two or three years as a conservative estimate but Chuck Prine, a Minnesota-based sardine salesman for more than 40 years, says many artisinally packed tins will last well into the next decade. "Realistically", he says, "after 25 years they'll be even better."

And, unlike wine which is only good for you in small doses, you can pretty much eat all the sardines you can tolerate. There's nothing quite like those omega3 oils to help reduce inflammation and help promote the regularity of your heartbeat (let's not even think about how that baby beats the first time and every time). So do something good for your ticker today and at least think about getting into sardines. Why you'll even help ward off osteoporosis by downing those teeny sardine bones that are included with the sardines at no additional charge and are actually the only fish bones that are truly good for you to eat. Really.

Guess it's time to convert that fallout shelter into a sardine cellar.

The Legend of Swamp Dogg

2005-05-20T05:49:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of Sherill Tippins' wonderful new book February House (more about which in a future post) she mentions a meeting between Carson McCullers and George Davis (the fiction editor of Harper's Bazaar) in which Davis used the phrase "a marvellous swamp in sinister frondescence." I find it impossible to get these words out of my head as I try to conjure up the image of that most mysterious of musicians, Swamp Dogg, imagining him as some half-mad character arising from the mist enshrouded primordial ooze with his guitar encrusted in plankton and a crawfish or two hanging on for dear life.

Sadly, none of my dozens of musical reference books is of much help in uncovering the real person behind the Swamp Dogg legend. When I first heard of Swamp Dogg (mentioned I believe by Richard Moore in DAPA-EM), I didn't have a clue as to who he was or why I might want to know more about him. Then I discovered that I actually owned an unlistened to (nothing new there) CD by the Dogg (maybe for a touch of class, it could be Swamp Doge and now we will envision him rising from the Grand Canal). Anyway, I finally listened to this no doubt critically undervalued CD, somewhat disarmingly entitled Best of 25 Years of Swamp Dogg ... Or F***k The Bomb, Stop the Drugs. Once you hear the Dogg, mere music just doesn't seem enough anymore.

I guess it really hasn't diminished the experience now that I know that Swamp Dogg is really Doo Wop legend, Jerry Williams. Williams explains his use of the Swamp Dogg name in the CD booklet: "I became Swamp Dogg in 1970 in order to have an alter-ego and someone to occupy the body while the search party was out looking for Jerry Williams, who was mentally missing in action due to certain pressures, mal-treatments and failure to get paid royalties on over fifty single records ...."

One hardly knows where to begin when discussing Swamp Dogg but maybe the best place is the genesis of his name. The "swamp" part comes from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the "mecca of funk" which inspired legendary Atlantic Records v.p. Jerry Wexler to coin the term "swamp music." Jerry Williams doesn't disappoint on the explanation of the Dogg part: "So I came up with the name Dogg because a dog can do anything, and anything a dog does never comes as a real surprise; if he sleeps on the sofa, shits on the rug, pisses on the drapes, chews up your slippers, humps your mother-in-law's leg, jumps on your new clothes and licks your face, he's never gotten out of character."

You might find it interesting to spend a few minutes at the Dogg's website: swampdogg.com. On the site is lots of interesting information (he was the first to convince Lionel Ritchie to sing!) and he's published an article entitled If I Can't Be Your Husband, Let Me Be Your Wife. He's also got a song entitled If I Ever Kiss It, He Can Kiss It Goodbye. Choosing my favorite Swamp Dogg song was easy -- how can you top (at least title-wise) The Love We Got Ain't Worth Two Dead Flies.

Swamp Dogg's most controversial song is probably his seven minute and sixteen second magnum opus, Call Me Nigger. The Dogg successfully takes the stigma out of the N word in a masterful performance and you can be sure that no one will ever attempt a cover version of this song!

A national treasure, Swamp Dogg is an experience best experienced in his 1995 Virgin Records compilation, Best of 25 Years of Swamp Dogg ... Or F***k the Bomb, Stop the Drugs (check out eBay for this one) .

Tomorrow this recording gem will be winging its way to the Crider compound and if the Texas authorities let it pass through, he will almost certainly weigh in on it himself. Long live the Dogg!!!

All The News That Fits (Part 2)

2005-05-16T09:02:00.000-07:00

Before I could finish Thursday's New York Times I was waylaid by an article on the front page of Saturday's paper (no I haven't even cracked Friday's paper yet). If you never read more than the first few paragraphs of this article (which seemed a bit out of place on the front page of the main section), you might rush right out to protest this latest outrage. In an article entitled College Libraries Set Aside Books In a Digital Age, Ralph Blumenthal goes on to tell of how the University of Texas at Austin is scattering their 90,000 volume library not to the wind but to other university collections. If you are a patient sort and continued on to page A10 before lighting your torch, you might have been a bit relieved to learn that the unwanted books were actually being placed in other divisions of the university's library system, "one of the nation's largest, home to some 8 million volumes and growing by 100,000 a year". Still, the idea of a library's books being replaced by a "24 hour electronic information commons" is a bit unsettling. Also a bit unsettling in a totally different way is the thought that they're adding 100, 000 books a year. Why that's 400 books a day (a business day anyway)! Now that's a hard one to grasp.

I'm not sure why I read the Elmore Leonard piece since I have avoided so many articles about him thinking they were just more of the same. There's not too much new ground broken here either except that we learn that there is only one person left locally who can repair Mr. Leonard's trusty old I.B.M. Selectric when he pounds it into submission. "He says he can live on $6,000 a year. He lives in a trailer park." One gets the impression that if pressed Mr. Leonard could also live on $6,000 a year, and repair typewriters in a trailer park. Certainly one of the least pretentious writers it is still a little unsettling to learn that a guy who writes his novels out on a pad before typing them, actually has a researcher. The highlight of this article was the disclosure that Mr. Leonard thought his latest work, The Hot Kid, came in a bit short at 280 pages. "I thought it should be longer than 280," he said, sitting in one of the chairs in front of his desk. "So I said reset it with one or two lines less per page and make it work. And it came out to 312." Now that's genius!

A marked contrast to the Leonard piece was a feature in the House and Home section about Caleb Carr. Entitled Rebuilding the Past In Words and Wood, it told of how Carr had purchased a 1,400 acre parcel of land adjoining his grandmother's property in a rural area 180 miles north of New York, and upon which he had constructed a house "so historically accurate, so in harmony with its surroundings, that it would seem to have been there for 200 years." Only slightly jarring is a satellite dish attached to the porch but Carr never intended the house to be a spare creation and the one interior view reveals it to be spectacular while still in keeping with its style. The article also features a nice little cover illustration of Carr's latest effort, The Italian Secretary, a Sherlock Holmes mystery that was commissioned by the Doyle estate and is of course a must read. It comes as little surprise that Mr. Carr considers himself "a dark person" (not that there's anything wrong with that), but I was surprised to learn that Mr. Carr's body keels to the right a bit because of a botched surgery.

Lots of good stuff in these Times pieces and well worth searching out on their website if you don't get the actual paper itself. I will refrain from commenting on the last interesting article though. Podcasting is obviously the devil's work (would the iPod be his spawn or his spoor?) and is best not discussed, at least not until I get hooked on it!

P.S. After checking my trusty Merriam-Webster, I note that one of the definitions of spoor is:
"droppings, especially of a wild animal." I guess that spoor might best describe some of these Podcasts themselves

All the News That Fits (in my garage)

2005-05-13T05:43:00.000-07:00

Their masthead proudly proclaims "all the news that's fit to print," and quite a bit of news it is if the mountains of unread papers in my garage are any indication. Every newspaper recycling day, my wife and I have a little discussion about the unofficial archive of The New York Times that is residing in my garage. Fearful that she might actually be spiriting some of these as yet unread papers past my ever vigilant guard, I took the desperate step of going through the main sections of the papers and pulling out the one or two articles that might interest me so that I could discard the rest.

The problem is that there's just not enough time for any working person with a modicum of curiosity to work his way through that august publication on a daily basis. Let's take yesterday (Thursday May 12th) for example. The main section of the paper yielded only two rather off beat pieces that caught my eye. One was about the discovery of a previously unknown rodent found in Laos. Amazingly, wildlife scientists had never seen this animal before despite the fact that they often show up in Laotian markets being sold as food (guess scientists have been dining elsewhere). The Southeast Asian scientists must truly be asleep since DNA revealed that the family this little critter belongs to took the fork in the road of the rodent family millions of years ago. Never one to rush to judgement with a claim, scientists have just announced this discovery despite the rodent having been "discovered" in the late 90s when a visiting scientist from Madison, Wisconsin discovered them on a market table. The scientist, Dr. Timmins, said he was not tempted to taste one of them, but that "in Laos, pretty much everything gets eaten." To my credit, my interest in this has been slaked and I truly have no interest in reading their findings just published in a report in the journal Systematics and Biodiversity.

Fortunately, my interest in current events has practically evaporated, and the only other main section story that interests me is entitled How Do Japanese Dump Trash? Let Us Count the Myriad Ways by Norimitsu Onishi. It appears that cleanliness is next to timeliness in the lives of the Japanese. For those of us who are challenged by the mysteries of recycling, consider this -- residents of Kamikatsu (population 2,200) must sort their garbage among 44 different categories. Even in locations where there are less categories (Yokahama has only ten) the instructions are rather inscrutable:

Socks? If only one, it is burnable; a pair goes into used cloth, though only if the socks "are not torn, and the left and right sox match."

In land scarce Japan, 80% of the non-recycled garbage is incinerated while in the US, the same 80% ends up in landfills. Obviously, the Japanese are always several steps ahead of us, and it's not hard to see why. The Times article had a quote from one of Japan's "garbage researchers," and told of people volunteering to be garbage guardians. Spotting mistakes and bringing the wrongdoers to justice is evidently easy since your garbage must be in clear bags and labelled with your ID number. The penalty for non-compliance? Well, the article did tell of one 77 year old volunteer who complained to the owner of an apartment building about one young non-compliant couple and they were evicted! Way to go, Japan!

It's Saturday night and I'm still going through Thursday's paper. Coming up -- interesting articles about Elmore Leonard and Caleb Carr, and something truly dangerous for ye of little willpower -- podcasting.

Another Myth Deconstructed

2005-05-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

Now that I've been exiled from eBay, I'm spending less time scuffling for pesos to support my book buying habit, and, (surprise of surprises!) more time actually reading. To fill some of this new found time, I turned to a subject that interested me almost as much as those mysterious Collyer brothers. The subject in question was Hetty Green, a woman often referred to as "the witch of Wall Street." A few things about Hetty are indisputable -- although she was not the richest person of all time, she amassed a remarkable fortune in a man's world and her achievement may actually be more impressive than any man's. As fortunes are measured, I seem to recall Hetty's was ranked in the mid 30s, half a dozen notches lower than that of Bill Gates. John D. Rockefeller's fortune in 1937 is #1 on the all time list and unlikely to be surpassed any time soon (fortunes are measured as a percentage of the gross national product). Hetty was a woman obsessed with accumulating wealth and the only thing that may have given her as much pleasure was going toe-to-toe with the robber barons of the Gilded Age and besting them at their own game. She's little more than a footnote in history today primarily because she didn't bother to soften her image through philanthropy. She was indisputably a titan of finance though and even bailed out a struggling New York City a couple of times

There is a pretty interesting web site devoted to Hetty. You can access it at: hettygreen.com. Called "A Frugal Women's Museum," it is a tribute to the often misunderstood entrepreneur. More importantly, there is an interesting book that is also worth a few hours of your time: Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon by Charles Slack (Harper Collins Ecco, 2004) was a book I had a hard time putting down. Although I generally hate the opening chapters of a book like this, Slack's recreation of Hetty growing up in the whaling era of New Bedford, Massachusetts was positively masterful. It made me want to run right out and check out a few of the books mentioned in his bibliography that detailed whaling era New Bedford.

I've always been fascinated by the story that Hetty let her son lose his leg because she was too cheap to pay a doctor to try to save it, instead relegating his care at the time to a free clinic. Slack debunks that tale but his stories about Hetty's schemes to avoid paying for medical care more than make up for that shattered myth. I just noticed that Slack teaches a class entitled Bringing History to Life at his hometown Trumbull, Connecticut library. Wish it were closer and I could attend!

Right after I had finished this book, a remarkable thing happened. As I was pawing through some old books at a book sale at the Newark Public Library (details to be provided in a later entry) I came across a copy of Hetty Green: A Woman Who Loved Money by Boyden Sparkes and Samuel Taylor Moore (Doubleday, Doran 1930). It was a pretty funky copy but Hetty would have loved the price -- it was free!

Kicked Off eBay!

2005-04-01T21:59:00.000-08:00

No Ho-Ho-Hos For Fan of SmoBros (with apologies to Variety)

I wasn't exactly laughing the day the complaint from the Smothers Brothers arrived. As a lifelong Smothers Brothers fan, there really isn't much I wouldn't do for these guys. Hell, if they asked me to come over and cut their grass, I'd be glad to do it. So I was truly hurt when I read the words: "your listing infringes the rights owners copyright, trademark, or other rights." The e-mail from eBay further went on to advise me that the rights owners had not made this charge lightly -- they had notified eBay, under penalty of perjury, that mine was an infringing listing.

At this point, I was pretty confused. I had advertised a 16mm film of an episode of THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS HOUR, circa the late 60s. It has been generally accepted for quite some time that commerce in 16mm tv shows is not an unlawful activity. In the 1970s, the FBI was known to show up on collectors' doorsteps investigating their possession of these supposedly contraband items. There have been no investigations since that time, and major motion picture studios have conceded that, because of the "first sale" doctrine, it is not unlawful to possess or sell these items. It is generally accepted that distributors "sold" tv series and motion pictures to tv stations rather than leasing them, and in so doing put them into the legal marketplace by virtue of the "first sale" doctrine.

I was convinced that their complaint didn't have any merit but what's a small time eBay seller to do when he runs up against somebody with the stature of the Smothers Brothers, who, incidentally, he has long admired? Of course, I did the logical thing which was nothing since these occasional complaints didn't really seem to have any significance and were mainly viewed as an attempt on eBay's part to pacify the intellectual rights holders who monitored their site. Of course, unbeknownst to me, these occasional complaints were starting to accrue on some demented abacus they evidentally keep in eBay headquarters and I was suddenly booted off of eBay. Actually, eBay makes it pretty easy to get reinstated -- all you've got to do is promise that you won't engage in any more of this offending behaviour. Since I believe I was within my rights in listing that film, I decided this was a matter of honor at this point and decided to follow eBay's instructions to contact the intellectual property rights owner directly at: smobro1@aol.com.

Now the wheels started spinning. Would I possibly have a better chance if I contacted smobro2 instead of smobro1? My guess was that Dick Smothers, who does corporate speaking engagements, would probably have laid claim to smobro1 (I can even visualize that on his license plate), and might be a lot tougher to deal with than Tom, who owns a winery, and is probably more mellow, and who is undoubtedly smobro2. Then, conspiracy theorist that I am, I began to wonder whether the brothers are even aware of these individual complaints or whether in fact they are the work of their minions. Surely comedians as successful as the Smothers Brothers must have a full complement of minions to tend to their empire (to say nothing of those vines at the winery). Maybe the minions were even acting on their own and got a little carried away here.

Actually, I really know that smobro1 belongs to Wendy Miller who takes care of their fan e-mail. Hey, I'm a big fan myself so I'm going to e-mail her about this matter but I sure hope she doesn't take offense about the minion designation. I've always been rather fond of people named Wendy (remember that Wendy and Me tv series?), so cross your fingers for me. Stay tuned for an update on this. Oh, and by the way, the brothers have a new CD entitled Curb Your Tongue, Knave. How can you not like these guys?

JULIE, JULIE, JULIE!!!
I have always liked Julie Newmar (no matter how innocent your intentions, one always hesitates to use the word love in connection with a celebrity) and my like for her did not diminish one whit after I received a complaint from her. In fact, as I read the e-mail, I kept picturing her as Catwoman, giving me forty lashes with her tail as punishment. Just kidding, Ms Newmar!

I have long been a fan of the talented and beautiful Ms Newmar and one look at her web site only confirms that she is obviously a very sensitive and caring person. One of my friends had been a big fan as well, and it was one of his prized collectibles that I was advertising that had evidently upset the Newmar camp. ADVENTURES IN PARADISE was a rather lackluster series and there's not much Michener in it (his book contributed the title to the series) but some episodes are redeemed by the glow of a star and this particular episode was singlehandedly saved by Ms. Newmar.

A recent check of eBay revealed more than sixty ADVENTURES IN PARADISE listings. One of them was being advertised by a seller with a feedback number of about four zillion. So I quickly eliminated the collectible as the problem. The only possible explanation was that they objected to my mentioning her name in the listing. Listing her name was done not so much to capitalize on it but rather to alert her fans who probably search eBay listings by her name.

I confess that I will still like Ms. Newmar even if this is not resolved in my favor, but unless it is, it is doubtful that my autographed Catwoman photo will ever regain the prominent spot it once had on my desk. That spot is now occupied by one of the few other autographed photos I own (I'm not a real autograph hound) -- that of Mel Torme, and Catwoman is now staring forlornly at a wall. I also plan on e-mailing Ms. Newmar and will report the results later.

I can no longer remember what I might have done to upset the people that run the Elizabeth Montgomery estate but there's no way I'm going to tangle with them anyway. Dead or alive, it's best not to risk invoking the spirit of Samantha. I didn't even need to confer with Dick York on this one. After five years on the show, he was replaced by Dick Sargent so what chance would I possibly have with this complaint?

Last, and most bizarre of all, I received a complaint from David Cassidy who objected to my listing of a 16mm film of an episode of Man Undercover, a short-lived series that he starred on. At first angry, I later came to realize that Cassidy was only trying to spare another human being from having to watch this series, and who am I to quibble with a humanitarian gesture like that?

Friends tell me I haven't been smiling as much lately. Cut off from eBay, the flow of money into my coffers has dwindled to a trickle. I've had to use the library instead of the bookstore. Pretty soon the world will experience a collecting cataclysm the likes of which have never been seen before. When I stop buying, mouths will not be fed, the delicate fabric of the collectibles ecosystem will be irreversibly rent, and whole economies will be in turmoil. Boo to you, eBay.

Feeding a Yen

2005-03-24T09:19:00.000-08:00

Who knew that people could be so passionate about food, or that they could write about it in a style that rivals that of the best literature. Ironically, most of this throwaway food writing will probably survive as long as much of the supposedly longer lasting fiction. Feeding a Yen by Calvin Trillin (Random House, 2003) certainly deserves such a long life.

Calvin Trillin is of course a national treasure and reading his musings on food is almost as satisfying as eating the food he is lusting for. Almost. Of course there are few people who get the enjoyment out of eating even their most treasured foods that Trillin does. He seems to experience food on a different level than you or I. He is truly a food Buddha and the rest of us are just wandering in the wilderness trying to find the temple.

I wanted to read this book as soon as I saw it and I'm still not sure why it took me so long to actually get to it. The level of anguish in Trillin's voice is so high that it may be safer to just read the essays individually. As one wanders through them, Trillin's pain is palpable as he recounts the treasures that are on his Register of Frustration and Deprivation, a list of foods that only seem to be available in a tiny geographical area many time zones distant from Trillin's Manhattan. Even when something is within his grasp though, like the gnarly pumpernickel bagels right in his own back yard, they seem to slip away from him, and his loss becomes our gain in the essay devoted to the search for them.

The list of foods that Trillin is desperately seeking is neither exotic nor expensive. I can't really get too exited by most of these -- pan bagnats, boudin, posole, caribbean fried fish, ceviche, and fish tacos -- but I could never tire of reading his musings about them. My favorite essay was entitled Pepper Chase in which Trillin recounts his love affair with pimientos de Padron and his consumption of more of them in a week than most people will consume in a lifetime. Highly recommended.

Living With A Writer

2005-03-02T13:15:00.000-08:00

On the back cover of Living With A Writer edited by Dale Salwak (Palgrave, 2004), the following question is posed: "what is the cost of a masterpiece or a caring relationship?" The first essay that I chose to read in this book answers that question all too well. In Damned By Dollars: Moby-Dick and the Price of Genius, Herman Melville biographer Hershel Parker tallies the huge cost that Melville paid in plying his craft in the face of a public and a publishing industry that was blind to his talent.

The opening of this wonderful essay sets the stage for this question:

In early May 1851, when he had finished almost all of Moby-Dick except the concluding chapters and late insertions, Melville wrote Hawthorne about 'the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose', a mood that could seldom be his: 'Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.'

Melville went on to say that because dollars damned him, because he was so rushed, 'the product is a final hash,' and all his books were botches. Certainly nothing could be further from the truth and one need not read very far into Moby-Dick to see it for the classic work that it is. Certainly one of the greatest tragedies in all of literature, it is still astounding to think that nearly fifty years after it was published, Moby-Dick had sold a scant four thousand copies. I am instantly reminded of the classic Gahan Wilson cartoon in the New Yorker in which a modern day Melville is adrift upon a city street and everywhere he looks are whale references, even on the slippers of a young child scuttling by him. The caption for the cartoon is something like, "I wonder if we've oversold Moby-Dick." One can only wonder what Melville might have produced had he not been so beaten down by his lack of recognition and his constant indebtedness, and achieved even a modest success. Certainly he escaped the worst, or maybe not -- one kept expecting his failure to rush him to an early grave but maybe having to work nineteen years as a lowly paid customs worker while stories swirled in your head may have been worse than death.

Reading Parker's fascinating essay on the toll that his masterpiece took on Melville and his family temporarily sends me scurrying for the countless books that I have with Melville references, especially Herman Melville A to Z by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock (Checkmark Books, 2001), which I hope to find the time to read soon. And from the "too bizarre to be true" department, this from HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature 2nd Edition:

Mocha-Dick J.N. Reynolds published an account of this white whale in The Knickerbocker Magazine in 1839, twelve years before Melville's Moby-Dick. It was the earliest account of a white whale legendary among seamen for its fierceness and the difficulty of killing it.

Lucky for Reynolds that he didn't expand his piece into an epic novel. No matter how good it might have turned out to be, I don't think the world is ready even today for Mocha- Dick. Those great white whales may not kill you, but they sure do a lot of damage.

Son of Maltese Falcon

2005-03-01T11:07:00.000-08:00

In a previous entry I bemoaned the lack of any supplemental material in the new Maltese Falcon reissue but I've been positively gorging myself on the articles and appreciations that are scattered about the internet. Right about now I'm kind of disappointed that I passed up that Hammett encyclopedia (Greenwood Press?) that I spotted in the Strand bookstore a couple of years back. It was only half the $80 list price but I guess I was in a miserly mood that day.

I was positively shocked to read in Richard Laymon's Library of Congress speech that there are some 2,000 variants between the Knopf text and the five part Black Mask version of The Maltese Falcon. Laymon mentions that there is only one complete set of Black Masks in private hands, and I'm pretty sure I know where they reside. The sad part though is that even if you owned them yourself, you'd have to think twice about subjecting those issues to all that page-turning to read them. Forget about trying to compare the Black Mask version to the Knopf version.

In this age of Director's Cuts and endless supplemental material of dubious merit on dubious DVDs, wouldn't it be nice to have that Black Mask version to read? The stuff that dreams are made of.

Run Do Not Walk!

2005-02-28T10:22:00.000-08:00

I'm sure most of you have already seen this, but if you haven't already been to this site (I learned about it from imponderables.com), run do not walk to http://everyonewhosanyone.com. This is one entertaining website! Expect to spend many hours there. Maybe longer.

Gerard Jones wrote a coming of age book set in 1960s San Francisco and in order to attract a major publisher, he sent it to "everone whos anyone" in the publishing industry. He lists all the people he's sent it too, and their responses. Amazingly, he got a lot of well known names to read it and respond and reading the responses and his responses to the responses is absolutely priceless. Jones has a lot of confidence in his book which is a good thing up to a point, but when you begin to believe that you've got the great unpublished novel in your hands, you're headed for the cliff, and it certainly shows in his comments. While most people would tread gingerly as if they are walking on glass, Jones goes back at the agents and publishers virtually full tilt and it makes for some fascinating exchanges. His style is not exactly good at winning friends and influencing people though. If every agent and publisher were courted in this manner, they'd be hunkering down in fallout proof bomb shelters.

Warning: you might have to spend a little time trying to figure out exactly what is going on at this website, but believe me it is time well spent. Before you try to figure out what is going on, I suggest you click on "United States Literary Agents." Scroll down to where the list starts with the agents for ICM and start enjoying this madness. You can go back later and read the introductory stuff. If you do it the other way, you may not stick with it long enough to get to the best part -- the responses from the agents and publishers. Note: not surprisingly, some of the respondents were none too happy that their comments were published, so beginning with his submissions to movie types, he is not publishing their responses on the website, but is publishing his responses to their responses. A wee bit disappointing, but fun nonetheless.

The author has also written something with the unlikely title of Ophra Wimsfree and the Mayonnaise Man which he is also trying to promote. I've already been to this site several times and can't believe it. I guarantee you're going to love it!!!

Pity the Bowler

2005-02-26T23:02:00.000-08:00

There is one professional athlete we should all feel sorry for. Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be professional bowlers! On the subsistence scale, professional bowlers rank only one little notch up from itinerant blues musicians and things don't exactly seem to be looking up for them. Although I always kind of enjoyed watching bowling on tv, my interest waned when ABC and Chris Schenkel disappeared from the telecasts. When one of the major tournaments was held in my backyard recently, I became interested again and was positively shocked that the bowlers' lot has not improved. These guys can't really even enjoy their sport because week in and week out, they're scuffling for pesos ... and very few pesos at that. They slog around the country in their mobile homes, entering upwards of thirty tournaments a year, and if they're really really lucky, they might crack $100,000 in earnings. Subtract out the cost of about $1,000 a tournament and if you're one of the lucky ones, you could net about $70,000. Of course, you could count on your fingers the bowlers that make over $100,000 a year while there were 217 golfers who passed the $100,000 mark last year. In the history of bowling, there have been very few bowlers who had $200,000 + years, and the most I ever saw one win was Walter Ray Williams who had a $400,000 plus year ($417,450 in 2002-2003). I think this may be the only year of this magnitude any bowler has ever had. If three bowlers crack the $200,000 barrier in any given year, it's nothing short of a miracle. This year alone, there were 141 golfers earning over $500,000, and I've never heard of most of them before.

On the Professional Bowlers Association website, one player I always liked, Buffalo's Tommy Baker was touted as the tour's eighteenth player to win over a million dollars. His earnings on tour totalled $1,268,882 but that was from 1976 to 2004. In fact, he had only one $100,000+ year, and this is from a guy that's in the PBA Hall of Fame! On the other hand, golf's leading moneywinner last year, Vijay Singh, pulled in almost 11 million dollars, far in excess of the PBA's purse total for the entire year.

I think I may have one book about bowling, and even that one was a publisher's proof that I bought for 97 cents. You can't even find a book about bowling in a bookstore. Of course, you could find a few on the internet (my favorite title was Bowl Better Using Self Hypnosis) but every single one of the books is about technique. There doesn't even seem to be a single book about the history of the sport and it's unlikely barring any unexpected resurgence there will ever be any lavishly illustrated history published. So, the next time the PBA tour is in your neck of the woods, adopt a bowler and take him to dinner. I'm sure he won't be expecting anything fancy.

Collyer Brothers

2005-02-25T09:06:00.000-08:00

In this age of bloated books, how nice it is to have a book that comes in at a fighting weight, with nary an ounce of fat on its spare frame. It's books like this that diehard book addicts truly live for -- they can literally be consumed in one large bite. In this case though, therein lies a tragedy. Ever since I first discovered the legend of the Collyer Brothers, I hunted for every meager scrap about them that I could find. What minor league hoarder wouldn't be curious about the hall of fame Collyers who hold every record in the rather neglected sport of accumulation.

There is of course a bit of information about the Collyers on the internet, but hardly enough to whet your appetite. As interested as I was, it's hard to believe that it took me this long to get to Franz Lidz' Ghosty Men: The Strange But True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders (Bloomsbury, 2003). This pint-sized (5.5 x 7.25 inches) book packs a real wallop but sadly the 161 pages go by all too fast. If time travel were possible and I had a lot of trips, I'd love to have been outside their Harlem brownstone when they began hauling out the 180 tons of "junk" that made them a legend. There were a lot of things in the book that I hadn't known -- that Homer and Langley's dad, Dr. Herman Collyer, a gynecologist at Bellevue, left his family in 1919 when his wife refused his request to make their townhouse into a sanitarium! The good doctor was reputed to be something of a booklover himself, with a medical library of some fifteen thousand books in the house. From little acorns, mighty oaks certainly grow.

Franz Lidz masterfully contrasts the story of the collecting Collyers with the equally heartbreaking story of his Uncle Arthur, first immortalized in Lidz' earlier classic Unstrung Heroes: My Improbable Life With Four Impossible Uncles (surely you remember the film based upon this book).

As always, there are references in the book that require further investigation. Lidz mentions Helen Worden, a reporter on the World-Telegram (one of NY's eight daily newspapers), who first broke the story of the "ghosty men" who lived in the mysterious mansion. There is a reference to Out of This World, a book she wrote in 1953 that chronicled the Collyer Brothers and other lesser New York hermits and recluses. There are ten copies of this book advertised on the internet with prices ranging from a mere $78.67 to $186.84, with five coming in at $159.95 to $160 (curious that tight grouping). The book is subtitled: A Collection of Hermits and Recluses Their Ways of Life and the Stories Behind Their Retreats. Although there are no copies of this book available in nearby libraries, I'm sure I'll stumble across it at some library (even if I have to sit there and read it right then). For now I'll content myself with planning a trip in the spring to Brooklyn's Cypress Hills Cemetery to see if I can find their gravesite.

Snot

2005-02-24T07:16:00.000-08:00

I apologize in advance for the messy and rather disturbing nature of today's thought. The other day I spent a pleasant hour with David Feldman's latest Imponderables book, Do Elephants Jump? (Harper Collins, 2004), a book that like all books of this nature is best savored in small very satisfying bites. Anyone who can find fault with a book like this is obviously jealous because this is the kind of idea we all wish we could come up with. Feldman, a pillar of the popular culture world, is now on his tenth book and for latercomers, there is an index to all ten books in the latest volume. After I finished the entry on one of my favorite foods, Why Is Peanut Butter Sticky?, I turned to the index to see if my latest burning question was there, but alas, it is not.

Having made it to mid-February without a cold, I was mistakenly gloating about it to some people at a funeral I attended. As luck would have it, I immediately got a beauty of a head cold for my efforts and an imponderable (albeit a very squeamish one) popped into my head. Where does all that snot come from? And how can your body seemingly manufacture its own body weight in snot on a daily basis? And why can you only manage to eject about 1% of it through your nose, with the other 99% sliding uncomfortably down your throat? I have a feeling I'll be waiting for quite a while before this topic is addressed. In the meantime, you might want to check out David's interesting website which is much more than just a promotion of his books: imponderables.com

P.S. I then made the fatal mistake of looking up "snot" on my favorite search engine http://dogpile.com. I learned that there is a snot.com (don't bother), and even found an excerpt from Snot by Verlie Hutchins (can there actually be a novel about snot?). The best new information came from the website haggis-on-whey.com where the evidently esteemed Dr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey's book is featured. The book is entitled Your Disgusting Head: The Darkest, Most Offensive, and Moist Secrets of Your Ears, Nose, and Mouth (Simon and Schuster, 2004). Seeing as this book, part of the Haggis-on-Whey World of Unbelievable Brillance, is aimed at ages 9-12, I don't think they would be pulling our leg about the origin of snot and rest assured that their explanation makes a lot of sense in a cosmic sort of way. Last but not least, is the very valuable information dispensed at kidshealth.org. Snot, or mucus if you'd prefer, helps keep all those undesirable airborne contaminants out of our lungs, and also helps prevent our stomach acid from eating our stomach. Long live snot!!!

Younger Next Year

2005-02-04T13:43:00.000-08:00

Although I don't share Bill Crider's literary ability, we do have one thing in common -- we both look quite a bit younger than we are. In my case, I can attribute this to my mother who had incredible skin and a flawless complexion even when she died at the age of 81. The woman didn't have a wrinkle or a line on her face. She did have heart disease though and had a bypass in her mid-60s. My father also had heart disease, dying at the age of 59. So, in my case, looking younger really doesn't count for too much.

With the family history in mind, I set out to learn as much as I could about heart disease because, quite frankly, I didn't want anyone sawing my chest open. Besides reading virtually every heart-related book that's published, I also read all the appropriate articles in The New England Journal of Medicine and The Journal of the American Medical Association. What I have become is a cardiologist's nightmare, knowing just enough to drive any doctor crazy.

The first time I picked up Younger Next Year: A Guide To Living Like 50 Until You're 80 and Beyond by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge, M.D. (Workman, 2004), I only glanced at the book before deciding that it didn't appear complex enough to justify a further look. The book though has a typical Workman cover which won't win any design awards but achieves its purpose quite well. I soon picked the book up again and took a little closer look at it. Even on a second look, it didn't seem like something I had to read. Soon however I did find myself reading it and I can report that it is quite remarkable and well worth your time. It has in fact made a remarkable life-altering change for me.

The book can pretty much be summed up in three words: exercise, EXERCISE,EXERCISE!! Now if you told me that, I admit I wouldn't be too eager to read it. Crowley and Lodge however have made the most compelling case imaginable for the need to exercise and the proof of their success is in the fact that a drag-your-feet exerciser like I was now finds himself in the gym every day!

The beauty of this book is that it is written by a doctor (Lodge) and his patient (Crowley) and they have beautifully laid out the science and wisdom of exercising to keep yourself young. They alternate their message, Crowley talking like somebody you've known all your life, and Lodge like the doctor who's truly interested in your well being, instead of just shuffling you in and out of his office.

If this book doesn't get you up and exercising, there's no hope for you. I can guarantee you that you'll never need to read another word to motivate you to exercise. There are of course a few other things they discuss but I'll leave them for you to discover by yourself. Although I'll never be able to bring myself to eat a donut (though sometimes I'd like to), I no longer feel the need to be as obsessive about my diet now that I'm exercising. I can eat my dark chocolate knowing that it's good for my heart and my mental well being. I am reminded though of a news story about Jack LaLaane celebrating his 90th birthday. Jack was having a great time at the party but he steadfastly refused to have a piece of his birthday cake. Now that's willpower!

Do yourself a favor and take a look at their website: youngernextyear.com and pick up this book and read it. You won't be disapponted!

Bizarre Coincidence

2005-01-31T11:33:00.000-08:00

Another truly bizarre coincidence to report. Although my house is extremely well constructed, there is one area where it is sadly lacking in quality. The pipes are not insulated for sound and when you release the water from the tub, it sounds for all the world like it is just cascading down the wall. It really doesn't sound like it's in a pipe at all and it still unsettles me to hear it. Although we've been in the house for about two and a half years, my wife just noticed this the other night. After explaining to her that this situation is very common, she went to sleep and I sat down to read which I almost never do that late at night (1 A.M.).

I decided to pick a story from Mark Helprin's new collection, The Pacific and Other Stories (The Penguin Press, 2004). I paged through the book and selected the most interesting story, Vandevere's House. It was short (12 pages) and it had an intriguing opening:

A year or two before Melissa left, Vandevere had fallen into the rhythm of making the house better, day by day.

Three pages into the story, I get to the following unbelievable passage:

Though you could not see them, the things you could not see were flawless. The plumbing supply lines, for example, were made of an alloy used in United States naval ships to coat areas subject to the greatest corrosion. When water ran to sinks and tubs, you could not hear it coursing within the walls even with a stethoscope, and when it drained it cascaded inaudibly down stainless-steel pipes with sides two inches thick, themselves encased within walls as heavy
with plaster as the White Cliffs of Dover.

When I recovered from this passage, I somehow managed to finish this wonderful story about a man who could not let disorder into his hopelessly ordered life. Like all of Helprin's books, this is a treasure to be savored one great story at a time.

Bookies Atwitter!

2005-01-31T09:48:00.000-08:00

Wow, I have really been lazy. Twenty eight days since my last entry. Wish I could say I've been reading madly but we all know that's not the truth. Anyway, in a really weird coincidence, I decided to use the seldom heard word "atwitter" in the title when I thought of this entry a couple of weeks back. I can't remember the last time I heard "atwitter" spoken nor would I want to guess when I'll next hear it, but the day after the word popped into my head, I heard it mentioned on the news. I'm sure if you gave me a dollar for every day that goes by without hearing it again, I'd be rather rich.

In any event, this entry is occasioned by a now misplaced article in The New York Times in which the stagnant fates of the book industry were bemoaned. Actually the article wasn't really that negative. The publishing industry seems to be treading water but in this economy that's not such a bad thing. Witness the music industry which is on a slippery slope to oblivion as sales keep heading south. Fortunately for the music industry, they're a lot more creative than the publishing industry, and keep trying to reinvent themselves. Their latest effort, the Dual Disc (video on one side, music on the other) seems to have run afoul of technical difficulties with more than a few hardware manufacturers warning consumers that they are to use the discs in their equipment at their own peril. Seems the thicker than normal discs are not reliable, to be charitable, and warranties will not be honored for damaged players.

The rather staid publishing industry should be glad that they're not beset with the technological advances that threaten the recording industry, and also that, with the exception of the advancing age of their customers, they don't really have any natural predators. You can copy a CD for about 15 cents, and blank DVDs are now only 40 cents each. Of course, you could probably copy a book at work for free if you were so inclined, but of course except in rare instances, nobody's going to go to the trouble.

The answer to the publishing industry's problems can be summed up in two words: added value. There is little incentive to buy a hardcover when you can just borrow the book from the library, or wait until the inevitable paperback comes out at half price or less. Now if there were a few extra added attractions to tantalize us. I'm betting though that you won't see any supplemental material until the industry is down for the count, which may not actually be too far off. People are now starting to realize that they've got way too many unopened DVDs laying around and you can see that business choking on product. As people embrace digital music on their iPods, CDs are suffering. Pity the old fashioned book. How long before it's on life support?

I just spotted the anniversary edition of William Gibson's Neuromancer in my local library. Now if ever a book cried out for supplemental material, that's the one. Except for a new introduction by Gibson, and a fairly substantial afterword by Jack Womack, there's really nothing here to make you want to buy the book. How much do you want to bet that the forthcoming 75th anniversary edition of The Maltese Falcon has nothing extra to offer either?

Now Reading

2004-12-30T22:00:00.000-08:00

Well, another two weeks have passed since my last entry, and I just don't know where the time has gone. As I survey the gazillion books that I own, there should be no shortage of candidates just crying out to be read. With a monthly budget approaching that of some small libraries, more books are flowing in here every day. So what am I reading? Well, I'm almost too embarrassed to tell you, but of course I will, in the hope that it may help me see the error of my ways.

After reading George Kelley's comment in DAPA-EM (the mystery amateur press association) that he was starting to reread the Nero Wolfe canon after learning that the estimable Art Scott had logged an unbelievable twenty trips through the Wolfe saga (!), I tried to decide if I had ever finished reading all the Wolfe books myself. Having decided that I hadn't, I decided to start with the first book, Fer De Lance, as George had done. I have a copy of it somewhere but since it is unlikely that I could wait until it turned up, I went to the local library and was shocked to find that they didn't have a copy. I then checked a Barnes and Noble and was even more shocked to find that there weren't any Stouts on the shelves. I finally managed to locate a well-worn omnibus collection in another library. As my wife looked at Royal Flush, she gave me a look reserved for the truly deranged, which, considering the circumstances, I probably am. I'm not sure how far I'll get with the Wolfes, but I am going to try.

Long before I read the article in today's New York Times (Case of the Lawyer With a Sherlock Holmes Bent by Marc Weingarten) I have been eyeing Leslie S. Klinger's The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (Norton), but have been saved from buying it because every single copy that I've seen so far has been sealed. Until today of course, when I came upon an opened set. A quick glance through the hefty two volume set confirmed what a monumental achievement it obviously is, and that of course I had to have it. Since half of my Baring-Gould Annotated Sherlock Holmes leaves something to be desired, having been all but ruined when my wife overwatered a plant that was resting atop one of the volumes, I could be excused if I perceived a pressing need for a replacement. I probably won't perceive a pressing need to start this anytime soon, but just knowing that I have a set will cerainly be reassuring.

R.I.P. Books

2004-12-14T06:52:00.000-08:00

I was literally close to tears a couple of years back when I read a prediction that books (and bookstores) as we know them would be all but extinct within twenty years. At that time, the culprit was seen to be e-books. Ironically, after a short while I came to view the possible extiction of books as a good thing. Of course, if there were no books, I wouldn't have to worry about my addiction to them. I would be involuntarily cured.

Of course e-books have seemingly gone next to nowhere and it is doubtful that they will play much of a major role in vanquishing books. Just my luck. Now, however, while the end of books may not be in sight, the need to possess them certainly might. The front page story in the December 14th New York Times, "Google to Add Top Research Libraries to Database" by John Markoff and Edward Wyatt told of a grand project that Google has to transfer as many as fifteen million (15,000,000) volumes into readily searchable digital files that could be freely searched over the internet. Although only books whose copyrights had lapsed would be available in their entirety, users would have limited access to copyrighted works and presumably could either purchase entire works in print or electronic form. Once everything is readily available, why would anyone ever need to possess a book?

The article states that Google hopes to eventually double the starting scanning rate of 50,000 pages a day. The project is estimated to take a decade or so but I assume that work done so far will be accessible as the project proceeds. Earthshaking news here. I can just imagine a day where every pulp story ever published is available. Now if only someone can manage to stretch time. Evelyn Wood, where are you -- I'm ready to listen!!!

Medical Stuff

2004-12-13T09:33:00.000-08:00

Wow, I can't believe it's been more than two weeks since I've written anything here. As usual, I've got lots of stuff swirling around in my head, but little time to make much sense of it. I had been deeply immersed in watching a bunch of DR.KILDARE tv shows when I started getting some intermittent stomach pains which is really unusual for me since my stomach has done its job quietly all these years with little notice that it is even there.

I probably would have pooh-poohed the doctor's recommendation that I get a CT scan except I was halfway through a book with the comical but equally terrifying title, I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse? by Suzy Becker (Workman, 2004), author of the classic All I Need To Know I Learned From My Cat. Now for all you authors out there, the brain book is a good one to know about if a publisher balks at your request to put something other than words in a book (a map, a doodle, etc). Becker's book is jammed with every conceivable manner of drawing, doodle, and odd thingamajig that you can conceive of. It takes most of the edge off the terror in her story, and still the book manages to come in at a righteous $19.95 sticker price (yes, this is a hardcover).

After I went to the doctor, I stopped off in Barnes & Noble and discovered another book to add to my must buy list. I don't think many of you will be adding this one to your list, but don't say I didn't alert you to this one. At 1800 pages, I was expecting the 2005 CURRENT Medical Diagnosis and Treatment to have a hefty pricetag even though it is a paperbound edition. Medical tomes such as this are never cheap but the $59.95 price tag seems like a bargain to me. My earlier thinking that I might have an irritated appendix led me to do some research which quickly reaches the conclusion that appendicitis is one of the more difficult ailments to diagnose, so of course I read the section on appendicitis in this book and learned a lot. Actually, if you could read this book from cover to cover and absorb even a fraction of the material in it (say maybe learning the clinical diagnosis and patient management advice for only 250 of the 1,000 common diseases and disorders covered here), I'd wager a guess you could pass yourself off as a doctor at any party. Why, I'd bet you'd even have people asking for your business card. At which point of course, you'd have to say that you're sorry, but you're not accepting any new patients at this time. I will be buying this book!

Writers on Comics

2004-11-26T07:56:00.000-08:00

Older (and presumably wiser), I no longer start a book of essays at the beginning. I now do the sensible thing -- take a little time to page through the book to find the best essay because quite likely that's the only one I'll read before I plow on to the next book.

Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers edited by Sean Howe (Pantheon Books, 2004) is a series of essays about comics by seventeen writers. The books itself has a few nice touches -- each essay is preceded by a panel from a comic that is being discussed in the essay. Another cool effect is that page numbers and page titles are in color.

A quick scan of the book revealed a fatal problem with it -- the mostly (relatively) younger writers spend way too much time on the silver age -- in fact it almost seems as if nobody knows about earlier comics. I looked in vain for anything about those beloved Disney comics and Carl Barks, but alas nothing. I turned to jazz critic Gary Giddins' contribution about the Classics Illustrated series and found it to be interesting but not engrossing.

The highlight of this book is Glen David Gold's Oui, Je Regrette Presuue Tout, an agonized confessional about the insanity and hopelessness of collecting. In the About Contributors section, I learned that Gold is the author of Carter Beats the Devil (a book I have but have not yet read). In his little bio section, Gold recommends that anyone who collects anything should read Werner Muensterberger's Collecting: An Unruly Passion (another book I have but have not yet read!).

Gold tells of how he was in therapy (shouldn't we all be?) and when his doctor had to cancel an appointment one day, he found himself with time on his hands and was drawn off the highway into a strip mall by a BOOKSTORE sign in the parking lot. The bookstore in question was closed but through the windows, Gold spotted a veritable treasure trove of original art -- comic book pages, book covers, paintings, etc. The entire store was filled with original art! The essay recounts the adventure Gold had in trying to track down the owner of the long closed store and his attempts to convince the owner to sell him some of the original art. His pain is palpable as this (mis)adventure progresses. This should be required reading for any would-be collector and is the ultimate cautionary tale about collecting. Don't miss this one!!!

Rescuing Books

2004-11-23T20:34:00.000-08:00

We all dream of being involved in great adventures and while this tale is not exactly on a par with Howard Carter's discovery of King Tut's tomb, it is no less exhilirating in its own understated way. When a twenty three year old student noticed that Yiddish books were being thrown away at an alarming rate by a younger generation that didn't have any interest in them, he set out on an improbable rescue mission that had no shortage of drama, resulting in a heartwarming book entitled Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books (Algonquin Books, 2004). It was actually a million and a half books, and when the dust and mold had settled, Aaron Lansky had not only rescued an entire species of literature -- he then proceeded to find a way to get the books into the hands of people like himself, people who had been searching for the books at the very time that they were being thrown away.

In this highly recommended wild ride, you'll find him rescuing books from dumpsters, matching wits with a bookstore owner who steadfastly refused to sell the mountain of Yiddish books that had been sitting in the middle of his floor for years, and trying unsuccessfully to convince a Catskills resort owner that he was really only looking for books not performing a bizarre stand up comedy routine. You'll meet the unforgettable Ostroff from Sea Gate, a plumber from Brooklyn by way of Russia who preceded George Plimpton by forty years in hosting an entirely different constellation of literary greats. You'll learn that the most dangerous job in rescuing books is not the backbreaking lifting or inhaling years of accumulated dust and mold but the position of "designated eater," a job fraught with its own unique brand of danger.

The book can be summed up best in one quote that echoed through many of Lansky's encounters with the owners of the books: "he was handing me not merely his books but his world." There is an entire world contained within the pages of this book and it will stay with you long after you've turned the final page.

A great book about books. File it next to Nicholson Baker's Double Fold.

The $3,000 Book

2004-11-17T21:10:00.000-08:00

For a minute I thought I had stumbled into a Neiman-Marcus catalog, but no it was really the Barnes & Noble Holiday Catalog. So what the hell is a $3,000 book doing in there?

On page 22, across from a B&N published book, Intimacy, is a page devoted to a book entitled GOAT: A Tribute To Muhammed Ali. First mistake: although GOAT stands for "greatest of all time," GOAT is truly a stupid name for a book. Why not simply call it The Greatest. Second mistake: they should have devoted a two page spread to GOAT. Putting it across from a book selling for $19.95 is like putting up a luxury high rise next to a tenement. Continuing with our list of mistakes, the cover of this book, with GOAT in bright red on a white background is way too garish, even if it might be the colors of his gloves and trunks.

Okay, now for the unit cost. At 75 pounds (!), the book costs $40 a pound. With 3,000 images, the cost comes down to a buck a photo, and the 600,000 words comes out to a mere half cent a word. Shades of the pulps! Sure it's bound in leather and it's cradled in a silk covered box, but $3,000? I thought their Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot book would be a tough sell at $150, but what were the folks at Taschen thinking when they hatched this one?

Most amazing of all, is that the book is "limited" to 10,000 copies (!), and signed by Muhammed Ali and artist Jeff Koons. I can't even conceive of how a perfectly healthy person could sign 10,000 copies. Having Ali sign 10,000 copies must surely be cruel and unusual punishment no matter how much he got for it. A fight that went the distance couldn't be as taxing.

I should have quit while I was ahead, but I just paid a visit to the Taschen website. The lettering isn't red on white but is actually pink on white (the color of Ali's first Cadillac), and you only get that cover if you buy one of the first 1,000 copies which actually retail for $10,000! They come with a sculpture by Jeff Koons which I can only describe as a dolphin hovering over a stool which looks like it's encircled by a tire! Maybe I'd better get my eyes checked. As it turns out, if you can only afford one of the $3,000 editions (limited to 9,000 copies), the cover is the word GOAT superimposed over Ali's chest! If my feeble memory serves me correct, I think this was also printed by the Vatican's printer. Wow, my head is reeling. I feel like I'm being jabbed to death and can't get my gloves up. Check out the Taschen website but don't say I didn't warn you.

If I didn't know better, I'd think this was a gag.

Freaks and Geeks

2004-11-06T22:40:00.000-08:00

Somehow we all managed to survive high school, and today even the bad experiences
seem a little less painful in the light of nostalgia. Strange as it might seem, it's probably not unnatural to want to relive those days, but at a distance, through the eyes of other educational combatants.

You could certainly be forgiven if you don't have a clue as to what Freaks and Geeks is. The truth is if you blinked in the fall of 1999, you probably missed this highly regarded but short lived tv series that ran for only a mere twelve episodes that fall and winter. Beset by preemptions, schedule changes, and competition from ABC's Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (who cares about that show anymore?), Freaks and Geeks didn't even get to air the other six episodes of the series that had been shot. Improbably, the show lives on due to dedicated fans and an impossibly devoted pair of creators.

Freaks and Geeks is a dramedy (part drama, part comedy) about life at a Michigan high school, circa 1980. This past April, a DVD box set of the series was released. The six disc set retails for a bit more ($69.98) than some box sets, but few DVD releases have been this generous with extras. There are twenty nine audio commentaries from virtually everybody involved in the series (surely that must be a record). And, if you're still not satisfied, there is a deluxe limited edition box set (available online only, $120) with an additional two discs (eight in all) plus more text material packaged inside a high school yearbook! The additional two discs include virtually everything that the creators could put in, and, knowing the show probably had a limited chance at surviving, they had been saving material right from the start. I'm not sure I've ever heard of a DVD release including "table reads" (the script is read by the cast around a table not a set) but there are actually three of them in the limited edition supplementary material. A true labor of love!

As if that weren't enough, now comes the publication of all eighteen scripts in two volumes by Newmarket Press, Freaks and Geeks The Complete Scripts Volumes 1 and 2 ($19.95 per volume). Each script is preceded by a short commentary from the writer. What is most amazing is that apart from the show's creators (Paul Feig and Judd Apatow), there are nine other writers who are credited, also quite possibly a record for such a short-lived series. Rather than dilute the power of the vision, the wealth of writers has just the opposite effect -- rich original visions touch on just about every conceivable topic -- liquor, bullies, starting a band, sex ed, fake IDs, pranks, drugs, and even disco (!). Check it out -- you won't be disappointed.

A Must Buy!

2004-11-05T22:39:00.000-08:00

Okay, don't laugh now but this book virtually jumped into my basket! If it's true that we are what we eat, one thing is clear -- you'd better either stop eating or avoid this book at all costs. Since this is the sixth edition of this work (first published in 1978), I don't know how it's possible that I don't already have an earlier edition of this book but I can tell you that I will definitely get my money's worth (a mere $16.95) out of this one.

A Consumer Dictionary of Food Additives (Three Rivers Press, 2004) by Ruth Winter is the kind of book I just love -- it's good for you and if you're at all interested in the subject matter, you'll definitely find yourself constantly referring to it. So, all right, let's take it out for a little test drive. Every morning I start the day with one of life's great foods -- Cheerios! Hey, they've gotta be better than Jimmy Dean's Pork Sausages, right? Either these General Mills people have got to be really bold or they've got the real thing here. The box of Cheerios has a bowl on it shaped like a heart which of course is a healthy red with a ribbon wrapped around it that proclaims: As Part of a Heart-Healthy Diet, the Soluble Fiber in Cheerios Can Reduce Your Cholesterol! Yes, they do have an exclamation point there and believe me that's not lost on me.

Okay, what's in Cheerios and what does Ruth has to say about it? Well, first of all, it's whole grain oats (nothing bad there), then modified corn starch, followed by corn starch (shouldn't that order be reversed?), then sugar, salt, calcium carbonate, oat fiber, tripotassium phosphate, wheat starch, and vitamin E bringing up the rear (to promote freshness).

Well, right away I like those General Mills folks because I just know that Vitamin E (to promote freshness) is definitely better than BHT, right? Oops, I see they're using that in Total to preserve freshness. And hey, what about all the cereals that aren't using anything to preserve freshness?

Okay, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the bad additive here must be tripotassium phosphate (sounds kinda ominous, doesn't it?). Well, I can't find it in the book, but I can find potassium phosphate and tripotassium phosphate's probably three times as good (or bad!). Anyway, here's what it says: "used as a yeast food in the brewing industry and in the production of champagne and other sparkling wines. Used in frozen eggs as a color preservative. Has been used medicinally as a urine acidifier." I gotta tell you, that last one freaks me out a little.

I also check out corn starch (shown as cornstarch in the book). It says: "may cause allergic reactions, including skin rashes and asthma." I also learn that chemicals used to modify starch are propylene oxide, succinic anhydride, 1-octenyl succinic anhydride, aluminum sulfate, and sodium hydroxide (see all). I think for now I'll pass on checking those modifiers. Breakfast may never be the same again.

On the bright side though, I don't have to worry about having to buy Ruth's other book, A Consumer's Dictionary of Cosmetic Ingredients (Fifth Edition). Sorry ladies.

Graham Greene

2004-11-04T22:18:00.000-08:00

I've been kind of proud of myself for having resisted Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene. Over the years I've picked up the three volumes that comprise this work (the first volume came out in 1989, the second in 1994, and the third was just published), and though I was somewhat tempted, I ultimately returned it to the shelf each time. Maybe it was the thought of how much time I'd have to invest in it, or maybe I was just waiting until it was finished. I'm afraid now that my resolve to avoid this work has weakened somewhat.

On November 4th, Dinitia Smith published an article in The New York Times -- Graham Greene Biography, Heavy on Sex, Draws Some Outrage. Now, in truth, it wasn't really the sex part that caught my attention, though admittedly it was kind of hard to avoid it. It seems that Graham's relatives are none too pleased about some of Sherry's disclosures regarding Greene's sex life, the most notorious of which is evidently a list of forty seven prostitutes that Greene had sex with. No, it wasn't the sex that captured my attention, but rather the thought that Sherry spent a virtual career (thirty years) on this 2,251 page biography, an obsessive quest that certainly took a heavy toll on Sherry's life. In researching the writing of Graham's books, Sherry followed in his footsteps, contracting exotic illnesses almost every step of the way. In the article , Sherry is quoted as saying, " I almost destroyed myself. By the time I had finished, my life had been taken from me."

Sufficiently intrigued, I went back and read Paul Theroux's favorable review in the October 17, 2004 The New York Times Book Review. In Damned Old Graham Greene, Theroux had this to say: "For anyone interested in Greene's life and work, this three-volume biography is incomparable; as an intellectual and political history of the 20th century it is invaluable; as a literary journey, as well as a journey across the world, it is masterly; as a source book and rogue's gallery it is fascinating." Theroux's review too is a masterpiece and now there is little doubt that this three volume work will soon end up on my bookshelf. I only hope I can avoid Leon Edel's five volume biography of Henry James which Theroux compares the Greene work to. Only time will tell.

Best Of The Best Of

2004-11-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

One of my friends had a life threatening illness and couldn't eat any solid food for six months. I asked him how he maintained his sanity and he told me rather matter-of-factly that he just sat at home and watched the Food Network all day just dreaming of when he'd be able to eat again. I guess I could understand it. It doesn't take much to get hooked on those shows.

My favorite is Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour. Now there's a guy who truly loves food! I also became a fan of a show called The Best Of. On this show, hosts Jill Cordes and Marc Silverstein travel around the country reporting on the best food and eating establishments they can find. I'm happy to report that there is now a book to go along with the TV series. Food Network The Best of the Best Of (HP Books, 2004) is a state by state offering of great food and the places that serve it. They describe it best: "part travelogue, part recipe collection, part scavenger hunt, part confessional .... this book showcases the breadth and variety of eating in America that is the hallmark of The Best Of. Every place has a story. And like any good story, we look for something unique that distinguishes each place, whether it's the setting, the characters, the history, or the lore."

Since I'm not much of a traveller and even worse -- I'm a very fussy eater -- it's unlikely I'll ever eat in many of these places. I've only actually eaten in two of them. A couple of times a year, I walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to eat in Grimaldi's Pizzeria. Not only is it a spectacular pizza, but it's one of the few I've found that tastes almost as good as a leftover (important since I usually only eat three of the eight slices when I'm by myself). The second place I can vouch for is Primanti Brothers in Pittsburgh. I'll never forget the Saturday when I had a tuna sandwich there. The novelty here is that french fries and cole slaw are piled on top of the tuna fish between the slices of bread. Words simply cannot describe how good these sandwiches are and though I've sworn off french fries, all that would be forgotten if you dropped me down into their dining room.

Along this line, I have two personal "best ofs" that I am always touting. For years, believing it was bad for you, I swore off peanut butter. It was only after a friend told me that he had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich each day for lunch that I did the research and found that peanut butter was actually good for you. The best choice is peanut butter that doesn't contain any hydrogenated oils. I've tried them all and nothing even comes close to Wild Oats Crunchy Chunk Peanut Butter which only contains two ingredients: peanuts and salt. Even natural grind-em-in-the-store peanut butters can't compare and at $2.49 it's a real steal. Unfortunately, the Wild Oats stores are only in 24 states.

The second of my "bests" is a bagel from the bakery cafe chain, Au Bon Pain. For years I ate nearly every variety of bagel they made with one exception -- I studiously avoided the jalapeno double cheddar model. Then one day I tasted it and now I won't touch any of the other bagels! I pop the jalapeno double cheddar into a toaster over to crisp it a little more and it goes great with any type of meal. I don't think it would be possible to find a better bagel and the proof is that I always have them on hand. After a while I got to wondering what was in the bagels and was kind of fearful about finding out because I didn't think I'd be able to kick the habit if I had to. I finally broke down and checked their very informative website and learned that the bagel doesn't contain any partially hydrogenated fat (you'd be surprised how many do) and in fact only clocked in at six grams of fat (3.5 saturated). This comes in under my fat radar but sadly their scones (and everyone else's) do not. Au Bon Pains are not everywhere but there are 230 of them, including quite a few in South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand.

Melons!

2004-10-30T23:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, I admit it. I've sunk to a new all time low. Now I know what some of you are probably thinking, but nooooo, you'd be wrong. Those are not the type of melons that I'm talking about. The kind of melons I'm going to discuss are far, far stranger. This story will prove what many others have known all along -- I have little or no will power when it comes to books.

I was in the Strand Bookstore the other day and while scanning the shelves, my eyes fixed on a rather thin but attractive spine that proclaimed MELONS. The full title is actually MELONS FOR THE PASSIONATE GROWER by Amy Goldman (Artisan, 2002). Page after seductive page is filled with beautifully photographed images of .... melons! Have you ever seen a Colorado Striped Tarahumara? Unfortunately there is no source to obtain seeds for this melon but if you've got the urge to try your hand, this book promises "practical advice on growing, pollinating, picking, and preparing an extraordinary harvest." There are 100 different melons listed here with seed sources for most of them.

In my defense, how could I resist a book that had this quote on the front cover : " I am a lover of melons. I eat watermelons, cantaloupes, Persians, honeydews, and hand melons in season. After perusing this fascinating book I want to grow and eat every melon on earth -- just to savor the flavors and see the diverse colors and textures...."
Martha Stewart

She might have a little wait but I'm going to try my hand at these next spring.

Spy-Fi

2004-10-22T21:27:00.000-07:00

Well, it's time once again for the Friends of Old Time Radio Convention, and as usual I haven't really been listening to any old time radio shows .... until now of course. The week before the convention had me searching for shows that I want to listen to, but of course can't find. This year I'm listening to one of my favorite shows, The Lives of Harry Lime (The Third Man). I'm not really a big spy series fan but I can never get tired of Orson Welles' portrayal of Harry Lime.

Similarly, I'm not a big fan of the espionage field, either fiction or nonfiction. You could count the spy books I own on one hand. Somewhere I have a copy of Herbert O. Yardley's The American Black Chamber (Bobbs-Merrill, 1931), a book about cryptography that my father had. I recently purchased Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage 2nd Edition (Random House Reference, 2004), by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen. Despite the fact that this is mostly real life spy stuff with very little attention paid to spies in books or movies, the encyclopedia sucker that I am couldn't resist it.

When I was seriously collecting films, I occasionally would get a call from Danny Biederman who was always looking for spy material. I knew he was a diehard fan but I was still surprised to come across a book he has just written: The Incredible World of Spi-Fi (Chronicle Books, 2004) is a very attractive (and at $19.95 attractively priced) book that is subtitled: Wild and Crazy Spy Gadgets, Props, and Artifacts From TV and the Movies.

I can't possibly describe this better than the flap copy: The ultimate in espionage eye candy, The Incredible World of Spi-Fi captures four decades of our favorite spies and their impressive cache of gadgets. Danny Biederman, creator of the legendary Spi-Fi Archives, has collected over 4,000 rare pieces -- salvaging them from the darkest, dustiest corners of old Hollywood soundstages and studio back lots. So thorough is his collection that the CIA visited the archive and invited Biederman to display a portion of his massive collection at CIA headquarters.

Incredible!

Duh SOX!

2004-10-20T21:57:00.000-07:00

It isn't until October (if at all) that my thoughts turn to baseball. This year though, with my beloved Red Sox in contention, I faithfully watched most of their clashes with the dreaded Yankees. With a payroll that bloated, the Yankees should be able to just stare you into submission, and when they defy all odds and stumble, well, there's just not many experiences in life that are quite that satisfying. At a fifteen million dollar salary, Kevin Brown delivered each of his winning games at a cost of $1,500,000. Contrast that with the Sox' Curt Schilling, who, notebook in hand, is the consummate professional, bringing a supernatural air to the position. It isn't too hard to imagine him in the off season in some fantastic laboratory huddled behind an array of bubbling beakers, test tubes and retorts, inventing something even more fantastic than Flubber. The Yankee pitchers in comparison would have a hard time with a three ingredient recipe!

Luckily, I haven't succumbed to the lure of sports books. I've got only a handful, and the only baseball one I could immediately lay my hands on is Red Sox vs Yankees: The Great Rivalry by Harvey and Frederic J. Frommer. Some of the books are tempting though and I just hope that whatever vulnerability I have to buy any of them disappears when the Series ends. Don't get me started!

Vanishing Books!

2004-10-19T22:03:00.000-07:00

If you read Nicholson Baker's wonderful Double Fold, you know that books are disappearing from libraries at an alarming rate. I had only thought that we were talking about large libraries, but noooooo, as it turns out they're disappearing from my little local town library as well. As I was leaving the library last week, I noticed a sign on the door: BOOK SALE. Unable to resist, I found my way back to the reference room where the sale books were located. I was shocked to find a copy of zen master Alan Watts' biography In My Own Way (Pantheon Books, 1972) in the discard pile. Almost as shocking was Robert Taylor's Fred Allen: His Life and Wit, a choice 1989 biography of the radio funnyman. Surely this was a mistake. These are not the type of books one normally finds in a library book sale. They really should be back on the shelves.

I also found a copy of Barry Eisler's Hard Rain (Putnam, 2003), the second book in the well received series about Japan based freelance hit man, John Rain. His first book, Rain Fall, was a Publisher's Weekly Best Novel of 2002, a book about which James Ellroy said: "a hypnotically hip resurrection of the hit-man thriller. It's got it all: dazzling plot, deft characterization, beaucoup originality." Surely somebody would be looking for this book and would be disappointed not to find it.

I also found Ellery Queen's Book of First Appearances (The Dial Press, 1982), a collection of the first story appearances by twenty-five famous names in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Why would you discard a book like this?

How about Louis L'Amour's Education of a Wandering Man (Bantam Books, 1989)?
At first I thought these books were probably being discarded because of lack of space. When I went to the place where the Zen and Buddhism books were shelved, I was sad to find that a zen book that I really wanted was GONE! (having evidently been discarded earlier when I wasn't looking). Since the shelf was only half full, and they weren't adding many books of this nature, the space consideration didn't seem to make sense. I finally concluded that maybe it was the fact that these books hadn't been checked out lately that doomed them. The last due date on the L'Amour bio was 2/1/99, the Watts book was 4/24/00, and the Fred Allen was 9/21/98.

Whatever the reason for their deaccessioning, I was glad to get them. The price: 25 cents each or 6 for a dollar. Good books for sixteen and two-thirds cents a pop. Unbelievable!!!

Google Whack, Anyone?

2004-10-18T21:43:00.000-07:00

If you already think you're wasting too much time on the computer, don't read any further. It could be dangerous to your sanity. If, however, you like to be on the cutting edge of everything, and consider yourself an adventurous soul, google whacking might be just the thing for you. Don't be afraid -- step in a little bit closer while I try to explain.

Forget about jigsaw puzzles, trivial pursuit, or any of those passe games that were once the way to while away your time and, maybe, just maybe, help you stave off the potential ravages of Alzheimers. Google Whacking has all of the positive attributes of gaming, but, admittedly, it does have one big negative -- it is hopelessly addictive and might just drive you crazy (to say nothing of getting you in trouble at work).

It all started for me when I noticed a book in the library that at first glance offended my sense of design. It was a garish blue and white color with some red and yellow letters that resembled neon graffiti spray. On a predominately blue background (like a blue screen) a ginger-bearded young man was riding a computer mouse as if it were a bucking bronco. The title of the book was Dave Gorman's Google Whack! Adventure (The Overlook Press, 2004) and it looked like some sort of novel shaped gaming manual. To tell you the truth it kind of repulsed me and I'm still not really sure why I picked it up. But pick it up I did, and, well, life hasn't been quite the same ever since.

You see Dave Gorman is some mad Brit, actually a stand-up comedian if he's telling the truth. This crazy adventure started for him when he got a seemingly innocent e-mail that said: "Did you know that you're a googlewhack?" Of course he didn't, but being the adventurous and daring soul that he obviously is, he got sucked into this dangerous diversion that has the potential to be just as addictive as heroin, cocaine, or, well, even book collecting.

After getting that cryptic e-mail, Gorman did the absolutely worst thing he could have -- he sent an e-mail asking, "What the hell is a googlewhack?" Obviously this is a question you are now asking so without further ado, I'll point you in the right direction. Googlewhacking is a brain teaser that is played on the Google search engine (www.google.com). The bare bones of this idea is to pick two "real words" (they must appear in www.dictionary.com). Your goal is to get a search that results in only one hit, that is, only one website that contains the two words you've chosen. An example given in the book is "coelacanth sharpener." Since I have two books (temporarily unavailable for research purposes) in my library about the coelacanth (a fish hitherto thought to be extinct), I responded to the coelacanth reference and began trying to find my own googlewhack using coelacanth as one of the words. The results were nothing like what I expected though.

Since the coelacanth is a fish, it's quite natural that you'd get quite a few hits using those two words and you do get a respectable 14,500. I tried coelacanth sushi and got 190 hits. I thought I had a good one with coelacanth phlegm but still found there are 30 websites where these two words appear. I got down to 20 with coelacanth malted, and thought I had a winner with coelacanth spitoon which returned only one hit. When I went to www.googlewhack.com to authenticate my googlewhack, I quickly found that something was wrong. There was only one website that mentioned those two words but that website made the same spelling error that I had. Spitoon should be spelled spittoon and coelacanth spittoon yields a frustratingly close seven hits. Now I was getting desperate and wracked my brain and finally came up with what I thought would be a sure winner, but coelacanth pierogi produced two hits. Many more frustrating tries ensued before out of sheer desperation, I used a word that should not be uttered in proper coelacanth circles. Sorry ladies but the word is tampon. I was pretty damn confident that coelacanth tampon would do the trick but unbelievably it yielded a perverse nine hits. I won't tell you how many more I went through before I found a combination with only one result, but I will tell you the words coelacanth stevedore only come up with one result. I am however by now so shellshocked that I don't want to "authenticate" it, preferring instead to think that I have won one small battle. In truth it wasn't quite as hard as I made it out to be, but it is a hell of a lot of fun, as is Gorman's book which I'll mention again later when I finish it.

So, without further ado, gentleman (and ladies), start your search engine! P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I don't own any Google stock.

The Man in Black

2004-10-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

I was never really a big fan of Johnny Cash but I'm more than making up for it now. When I bought a Super Audio CD player, one of the discs that I bought was Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. Now of course I've got to purchase Michael Streissguth's companion book, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece (Da Capo, 2004), a very thorough look at the making of this classic album. I could shelve it next to the other two Johnny Cash books that I bought recently -- Cash An American Man by Bill Miller, and Cash by the Editors of Rolling Stone -- but I'll probably park it next to two other volumes that it is similar to -- A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album by Ashley Kahn, and The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece by Eric Nisenson. All three books have very detailed text sections and extensive photos and set a very high standard for books of this type. Also on the Cash front is a lengthy article in the October 2004 Vanity Fair about Cash's unlikely relationship with Rick Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam records. David Camp's article called "American Communion," looks at their decade long collaboration which resulted in some memorable music at the end of a long and productive career. Oh and I even found yet another Cash book lurking in the stacks -- the Michael Streissguth edited Ring of Fire: The Johnny Cash Reader, a collection of thirty-two articles and essays about the man in black.

Kung Fu

2004-10-15T22:45:00.000-07:00

One of the selling points of DVDs is their ability to add a seemingly endless assortment of extras to the presentation of the original production. In truth, most of the highly touted extras don't bear an initial watching much less multiple viewings. Such is fortunately not the case with Kung Fu though. I bought the first season of KUNG FU on DVD as soon as it was released, and of course it's been sitting unopened ever since. It had a Made in Taiwan sticker on it, and I began to think that was the equivalent of disappearing ink, so I finally cracked it open today and watched the 90 minute pilot that started the series. Though I had seen it before I was immediately struck by how novel it was and the fact that it was really a wonderful piece of writing. In the documentary "From Grasshopper To Caine," the writers Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander told how they came up with the idea, and, against all odds, managed to sell the project. The best part is when producer Jerry Thorpe tells of a scene where David Carradine has to leap off a cliff. Before he asked Carradine to do the jump, Thorpe did the jump himself. In the documentary, Carradine remembers how he had this excited expression on his face when he fell but Thorpe had the most placid and serene expression on his, and this is documented in mid-fall still photos. Thorpe was also responsible for the brilliant photographic style of the series.

I've now spent an hour searching for my copy of Herbie J. Pilato's The Kung Fu Book of Caine: The Complete Guide to TV's First Mystical Eastern Western but so far have yet to turn it up in the archives. I did however manage to come across my copy of David Carradine's Introduction to Chi Kung, a book that will obviously help me if I can ever find the time and the interest to read them.

AndySez: Too BOLD!

2004-10-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

I can probably trace my collecting obsession back to the late 50s when I started collecting coins. At that idyllic time, coin collecting was considered a worthwhile pursuit for a young child and you could walk into a bank and get a $50 bag of pennies which you could go through and they wouldn't even flinch when you came back in a day or two and wanted to swap them for some silver dollars which you would breathlessly search in hopes of finding some with that impossibly exotic Carson City mint mark. Today, if you tried this, they'd look at you like you were some pint-sized terrorist.

I even enlisted the local grocer who even in the late 50s and early 60s would have some old timers come in with the occasional Liberty head nickel or Barber dime or quarter. There was still an occasional coin from the late 1800s floating around from time to time, and this was the great appeal of coin collecting over the more staid (read boring) world of stamp collecting. Coin collecting presented a sense of adventure and possibility that stamp collecting lacked. Of course, coin collecting's allure ended when the chance of finding something interesting in circulation ended, much like the longshot of finding collectible paperbacks at flea markets today.

And so with this history, it wasn't at all surprising when I hit page 47 in the October 4, 2004 New Yorker and immediately froze. On that page was an ad for a book, Illegal Tender: Gold, Greed and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle by David Tripp. This is the tale of the ultimate numismatic treasure hunt, a search for a coin that is so rare that only one was believed to be in circulation. In 1933, in the midst of the Depression with the economy near collapse, FDR recalled all the gold in circulation and banned private ownership of it. In the numismatic equivalent of Fahrenheit 451, untold millions of gold coins were ordered melted down and made into gold bars. To the slag heap of destruction also went nearly half a million 1933 double eagles ($20 gold pieces) that were minted but never put in circulation. As often happens with things of this nature, a few coins slipped out the back door into the world of collectors. Amazingly, the Secret Service devoted considerable time and resources to tracking down these escaped coins and were still on the job as late as 1996 when what is believed to be the last coin was tracked down. If indeed it really was the last coin. It is still a highly desirable item though because this particular coin was not melted down, but was instead sold at auction for 7.5 million dollars!

The New Yorker ad even contained a blurb from the estimable Simon Winchester and by now I needed no prompting. Even though I knew this book would probably turn up in one of the three libraries that I frequent, I still ran right out to buy a copy. My initial excitement turned to disappointment though when I cracked the book open to find it printed in that particularly irritating bold type which I consider the literary equivalent of the equally offensive orange instrument panel lights (which you can at least dim). Am I the only one who considers bold type difficult to read? I could possibly understand bold type in a book intended for a youthful market but that is not the audience for this book or for the new Bob Dylan bio, Chronicles Volume 1, which is also printed in bold type. By the way, you can read an excerpt from Illegal Tender at www.simonsays.com and it's not in bold type.

What's In A Name?

2004-10-12T21:03:00.000-07:00

It has occurred to me that Book Heaven might not be the best title for this blog. My first choice was Book Fiend but that was already taken, as was Book and Books. I think the title should use the word book and ideally it should come first. So far, the only variants I have come up with are:
books books books
books are my life
book nook
bookish
book blog
book life
It's pretty hard to get excited about any of them, but I've got to come up with something. If anybody has any suggestions, they would of course be appreciated.

Who Wants My Vote?

2004-10-11T21:06:00.000-07:00

It's highly unlikely you'll ever find much of a political (or religious) nature here, but just this one time I can't resist. I have a very selfish request and I'm willing to trade my vote for it. I'm looking for a candidate who is willing to ban books. Not specific books, mind you -- I'm looking for someone who will outlaw the ownership of all books. You see I've tried countless attempts to stop buying books and all of them have failed. I'm firmly convinced now that only in a modified Fahrenheit 451 society would I have any success in kicking the book habit. Don't get me wrong though -- I don't want to see books burned. I think the solution would be that if you couldn't own books, you'd have to rely on libraries and they would then have a larger selection of books to choose from. After all, this is the way it was in good old Ben Franklin's time, and he didn't seem to suffer for it. Actually, if I could get any book I wanted from the library, I wouldn't feel the need to buy them. I'd even be willing to pay a hefty membership fee for the privilege but I guess I'm in the minority.

Since neither of these guys would probably be willing to ban books, I guess I'm going to have to find some other method of disqualifying one of them. Right now, I'm leaning towards eliminating Bush. It's not that I don't believe in war. Hell, I think there are some people for whom the death penalty is too good. Yes, call me barbaric but I firmly believe there are a few select people who should be tortured before they're sent on their way to terrorist heaven.

No, the real reason I'm probably going to vote for Kerry is that I don't feel any sort of kinship with Bush -- I don't think he's a book person. It's unlikely he'll ever do anything that will reflect favorably on the world of literature. I'm not even sure he reads books. It doesn't seem like he's ever read his father's book, and if he did, he scares me even more because he doesn't seem to have learned anything from it.

I never thought I'd say this, but the only guy who would make me feel safe at night is Pat Buchanan. I think he would bring to the government something that is conspicuously missing -- accountability. But that's a whole nother story, and please don't get me started on it.

Make Mine Dark

2004-10-10T21:57:00.000-07:00

Chocolate, that is. Dark Chocolate. Although this information has been kicking around for a couple of years, it was only about two months ago when I discovered a newspaper article about the cardio-protective attributes of chocolate, more specifically dark chocolate. It seems that dark chocolate is especially rich in flavanols and is even more heart protective than red wine. Now if you told me two months ago that I would be eating chocolate every day for medicinal purposes, I would surely have laughed at you, but that's exactly what I'm now doing. Of course, before I do anything, I first do my research which in this case meant scouring the internet for more details. I found plenty of information and all of it seems to check out. One important point that can't be overlooked is that flavanols are destroyed to varying degrees in the processing of chocolate, and thus, all chocolates are not equal. It seems that the best chocolate is (surprise!) produced by an unlikely source -- the huge food conglomerate, Mars, Inc. Mars has spent years working on proprietary techniques to limit the reduction of the beneficial flavanols during the processing phase, resulting in their cocoapro trademark (see www.cocoapro for more information).

So I am now devoted to eating four-fifths of a Dove bar daily, which is about an ounce. I can't seem to bring myself to eat the whole 1.3 ounce bar yet, but I'm working on it (guilt is a tough thing to overcome). I hadn't experienced a Dove bar before and was immediately impressed with the product. It's a very narrow bar which is much thicker than a usual single serving bar, resulting in a very intense experience.

I was really surprised to discover an article in today's (10/10/04) The New York Times Magazine entitled "Eat Chocolate, Live Longer?" by Jon Gertner which told the story of the research that Mars is doing. After all that I've read, I'm sold on the idea of eating dark chocolate daily, but I still have two questions to resolve: how much should I really be eating (some study participants ate 3.5 ounces daily), and would it be better to space it out during the day? The flavanols in the chocolate apparently relax the linings in your arteries, making them more elastic and improving blood flow, but there is still a question in my mind as to how long this effect continues after the consumption of the chocolate. In any event, make it dark chocolate.

One of my favorite chocolate books is Alice Medrich's bittersweet: Recipes and Tales From a Life in Chocolate (Artisan, 2003). Though you won't find virtually any scientific information about the healthy aspects of chocolate in the book, you will find almost everything you wanted to know about chocolate, and then some. Medrich, who has also written four other books about chocolate, including Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts (which won the James Beard Cookbook of the Year award and which I am now searching for) shares her thirty years of experience with chocolate. If you only own one book about chocolate, bittersweet is the book for you.

Population 101

2004-10-09T21:48:00.000-07:00

Don't know much about geography? Well then, what about some basic population stats? In my own case, I was quite surprised by just how little I knew. It all started when I read Philip Shishkin's article "Afghans Are Free, Market Isn't" in the October 8th Wall Street Journal. The article was about Nizar Habibi, a man charged with one of life's more difficult tasks -- trying to set and enforce price controls in the Afghan capital. What really surprised me was that the population of Kabul was quoted as "nearly three million." So I pulled out my Merriam Webster's Geographical Dictionary (the hopelessly outdated Third Edition from 1997) in which the population of Kabul is quoted as 1,424,400 (1988 figure). It's obvious that until I can update my geographical dictionary, I would have to rely on the internet for more up to date statistics. What I found was positively shocking (from www.citypopulation.de).

At 290,342,600, the population of the US looks pretty healthy. But did you know that if you added the populations of Afghanistan (28,717,200 by itself) to the populations of Iraq, Iran, Korea and Pakistan, the total easily surpasses us. Of course, that is positively dwarfed by the populations of both India and China which are each over a billion! As a minority, maybe we should heed the pages of history (I've got quite a few of those books too!) which are littered with the tales of countries and leaders who o'erleaped their ambitions. Maybe that's the global test we've been hearing about lately. Oh yeah, can anybody tell me why there hasn't been a fourth edition of the Merriam Webster Geographical Dictionary yet? Oh, and those population statistics from www.citypopulation.de? It seems they come from something called CIA -- The World Factbook 2003. The graphic on my monitor isn't all that clear but it looks like the logo on that "factbook" is that of the (gasp!) Central Intelligence Agency.

All Things Irish

2004-10-08T21:28:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm just about two-thirds of the way through Matthew Hart's The Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art (Walker & Company, 2004), an interesting book about one of the world's greatest art heists pulled off by a most unlikely criminal mastermind, a Dublin gangster named Martin Cahill (nickname: The General) who drove the Irish police crazy as they tried in vain to recover the paintings. Of course there are a lot of Irish place names mentioned so I finally got to pull out my copy of The Encyclopedia of Ireland edited by Brian Lalor (Yale University Press, 2003), a 1218 page doorstop which sits on a shelf next to The Encyclopedia of New York which sits next to The Encyclopedia of Surfing (I'll quit while I'm ahead lest you think I'm crazy but I do have a penchant for specialized encyclopedias). One need look no further than some of the familar names of Ireland's counties to be put under a spell -- Limerick, Tipperary, Wicklow, Galway, Kerry (!), Londonderry, Kilkenny, Cork, and so on. Almost makes me want to hop on a plane bound for the Emerald Isle where a week would certainly result in a self renewal. That is, of course if I wasn't so afraid of flying. Paging through the Ireland book made me think of another reference book I purchased recently -- The Oxford Dictionary of British Place Names by A.D. Mills (Oxford University Press, 2003), where one can find enchanting places like Christmas Common and Port Sunlight. On a similar note, I almost bought a book of California place names but hesitated just long enough so that when I came back for it a couple days later it was blessedly gone and I didn't have to try to resist it. P.S. The Irish Game has its own web site -- www.theirishgame.com

Stop Me Before I Buy Another Book!

2004-10-07T10:29:00.000-07:00

Although my life is already hopelessly out of control, I've decided it's high time I jumped on the blog bandwagon and gave it a shot. I initially thought of calling this "A Day in the Life" since it'll probably include some of the minutae of my day, but decided that the main thrust will probably be about my adventures in collecting, or, more specifically, my failed attempts to stop collecting. At the present moment since my biggest problem seems to be my inability to stop buying books, I even seriously thought of calling this "Stop Me Before I Kill, er ... Buy Another Book", but decided that title, although accurate, might be just a tad too unwieldly. Future posts will probably include confessions about my book buying, my latest strategy to stop buying books, and, occasionally, when I'm not moving books around, I might actually get to a review or two. Stay tuned!