I've been such a busy reader lately. I think all the books I drunk-ordered are in now, from both Amazon and Alibris, and after I gave away some of them (such as "Rex Barks," a modern guide to sentence diagramming) and filed away some books I bought in order to have duplicates to give away (such as F.V. Irish's 1883 book on sentence diagramming), I have been reading the ones I'm keeping. The first one I read and finished was "Locas," of course, and it was all I could do not to leave work early the day it arrived. I'm almost ready to read it again. Then I found a replacement copy of the monograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard from Aperture, with the hot-pink cover. It is a completely engrossing book, which is odd since it's mainly photographs and that's not usually something I get engrossed in. There's an appreciation by Guy Davenport and some other text by another writer I don't know, and an arrangement of photos that is different from the museum-related anthologies of his work. I had this book when I was 12 and read it to bits, then lent it to Paul Kimura, whose house and I assume the book were both destroyed in the Oakland fire.

I also got an anthology of war stories by science fiction writers. This is because of how much the book "Starship Troopers" blew my mind, and my general fascination with war stories. This was a neat idea for a book, and I would honestly read an anthology of war stories by almost any genre of writers, including romance. The highlight of this anthology, which I am not reading straight through and have not finished, is a tossup between "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card and "The Nuptial Flight of the Warbirds" by Algis Budrys, who write the very great HR novel "Rogue Moon." I would also read an anthology of HR stories by science fiction writers, and what "Ender's Game" shares with "Warbirds" is that they are both mainly parables of HR.

Then what else am I reading? I just looked into my Amazon account for the past six months, and realized I have given away every single other thing I ordered, including An Illustrated Guide to Lace, the soundtrack to Sabrina the Teenage Witch (on which Matthew Sweet sings "Magnet & Steel"; it was a penny), and many other things. So what, exactly, in my busy life, am I reading?

I was on Amazon, drunk-shopping as I do, and I clicked on and bought "Locas," a giant hardcover book with all the Maggie and Hopey stories from Love & Rockets. It's been about the best thing I've read in a long time. I can't even express what a wonderful book this is. I remember getting some of these same comics in the mail, back in 1985. Then I stopped following it for a while, and then the series ended. I was a little nervous to read the old stories again because they were such a part of my late teens. But it was as good as I remember and then it got better as the characters got older and did things I wasn't familiar with. I stayed up last night to finish it because it's too heavy to take on our trip this weekend. The physical experience of reading it is so transfixing. You have to not touch the black parts of the images, because your hand leaves a blue mark. I'm so happy to have this book.

Reading it also unearthed memories of when I first read these, in 1984 or 1985, and I had one of those dreams where someone who is dead now comes to you so vividly, with details you wouldn't remember if you tried consciously to remember them. You wake up with a nice feeling of having really spent time with them.

Next time you're in Philadelphia, come with me to the Edgar Allan Poe Historical Site. It is past the highway at the edge of downtown. There are a couple of rangers who work there. One of them answers the door enthusiastically. She is six feet tall and her name is Helen. Dick the ranger sits behind the desk and clicks a clicker. Helen ushers you back to a screening room where there is an eight-minute film on the life of Poe in progress, followed by an 18-minute film of "The Black Cat." You walk in the screening room imagining that Helen the ranger will follow you and continue to talk to you because you are the only people she has seen all day. There are actually other people in the screening room. They are four German girls and a man in a Turkish cap. You watch the last three minutes of the film and then tell Helen you won't be watching the 18-minute film. Instead you tour Poe's house using a laminated self-guided-tour sheet. The house is exactly as it was left in 1930. It is in terrible shape and no trace of Poe's residency remains. Still, it is a $279,000 house in this market. It has six rooms on three floors, plus a basement. The basement has a partly walled-up chimney which some say figures in the plot of "The Black Cat." It is known for certain that Poe wrote "The Raven" while living here. When you are done with your tour another ranger has turned up. He is talking with Dick the ranger about the underground Benjamin Franklin Museum. On Monday and Tuesday they will be replacing the carpets at this museum. Having been there you know it is high time. The other ranger says, "So that means on Monday and Tuesday a whole bus full of people is going to come in from who knows where just to see -- " and Dick says, "Yup." You, being me, will think that anyone who comes in from out of town expressly to see the underground Benjamin Franklin Museum is going to be happier at another museum. No one who came to town on a bus to see this museum has ever been there.

Yesterday I bought the CD set of the New Yorker as a present for somebody. Lucky them! Then I sat and read Bookslut for a while so I could think of some other damn thing to read. I don't want to read anything, though. I didn't go to any more meetings of that book club back in the summertime.

Back when I was freelancing, I worked on this one Canadian book and removed all Canadian content from it. Turns out the writer hated it. http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2005_08.php#006511

I hate those authors that you grow to hate because they're on the bookshelves right next to where the book you're looking for is not. There's some crappy sci-fi writer who's always got about three feet of space next to where Stanislaw Lem would be shelved. LeMak? This seems to happen most in genre fiction sections, but that's where some good writers end up getting shelved. I've been going into the local Borders every day this week, waiting for the September issue of a certain competitor's magazine to come out. I have to go up two escalators, look at the shelf, turn around and ride back down. Still no magazine and I happen to know the subscribers have had it for a week now.

In other book news I just finished reading "The Razor's Edge" in the Bill Murray movie tie-in edition. I can't for the life of me imagine Bill Murray playing this character as written. The character he's playing in the movie, judging by the way he's dressed on the cover, is written as a lighthearted, sincere, God-seeking homegrown mystic with a magnetic smile and a sexy body. Usually when I even vaguely know there's a movie tie-in I can't help thinking of the book character with the face and style of the actor portraying him. But this book even though there's a picture on the cover of Bill Murray I didn't picture him one time. I just can't see him playing someone with an open heart.

When I was a copy editor it used to make me nuts when my editor would swoop in at the last minute, reread some story and rip it apart. I guess my choice of words here makes that apparent. But this would be after five or six people had looked at the copy, it was laid out, captioned and proofed. Then the editor would find a moment to concentrate on the story, find a flaw and go to town. When this happened, I'd try to go with the flow myself, but especially when I managed other copy editors I got to see the size of the rage that flares up. Not only is their own work denigrated, negated, but they also have to deal with running their whole process on it again. And they'd ask me to put a stop to these changes. It wasn't that there physically was no time to do this stuff, though it was a huge inconvenience. It was more that it was off-system.

Now that I am a big cheese I do the exact same thing that used to drive me and my staff up the wall. Now, the editors under me offer reasoned arguments to persuade me not to make changes at late stages. There's a system, there's a time to do this stuff. We have built in this time here, here and here for exactly that. But it's my job, now, not to be locked into the system. There's a time in your publishing career when you must be a believer in the system and know it and enforce it and defend your patch against the forces of anarchy. And be humorless and uncool about any kind of effort, no matter how creative, to get past the system.

Education of the doomed is a theme of "Never Let Me Go." In two senses: educating people who aren't necessarily going to use a good grade-school education in the traditional way, by going on to college and a professional career; and the doomed-ness of any brand-new kind of school, how hard it is to keep it going and how it feels when it's eventually destroyed. I'm not sure if I'm reading into this because of my own experiences, or whether there is a nontraditional school in the author's background that helped him understand how it felt. I wonder what a charter student today would make of this book. It must be a somewhat similar experience to my own late-70s experimental school. The process of running the school is so much more apparent; the students are aware that they are taking part in a school built expressly for them; and the physical plant is in bad shape and the supplies are crappy.

My own nontraditional school, where half the student body was not college-bound, was closed after I went there two years, when I was in 6th grade. Our 7th and 8th grade teachers used to comment that the students who had attended this school were noticeably brighter than the other students. Then at 9th grade, we half that had college and career in our futures split off from the half that probably didn't. I realized a couple years ago that I assume all those other students are dead. My sister called me on this once; she sees people from school around town, and they're just regular people, not doomed geniuses.

Dear Sirs,
I'd appreciate more clarification on the May Q&A re Section 8.167 (3). This answer (pasted below) leaves two copyeditors with different ears no clear way to resolve a disagreement. For instance, the examples given below may seem correct to your ear, but to mine they are both off. Were we working on the same busy copy desk, you and I would have no other rule to help us resolve this -- and our co-workers would watch with growing amusement as we muttered "ALL About EVE!" "No, All ABOUT Eve!" for hours at one another. Can you give us a few tips for resolving "ear" conflicts by rule?


Q. Section 8.167 (3) of the 15th Manual of Style says that, when applying headline style, a preposition should be capitalized if it is stressed (A River Runs Through It). Please clarify what is meant by “stressed.” Furthermore, how would you capitalize “One Nation under God”? Thank you.

A. We are talking about how it sounds to the ear—admittedly, a somewhat murky rule. A river runs through it? A river runs through it? No—a river runs through it. Your “under” is likewise a good candidate for capping, for the same reason. Other examples:

A Man about the House vs. All About Eve

Desire under the Elms vs. One Nation Under God

Once again the June Q&As on the Chicago Manual of Style web site are just wrong and weird. The editors have directed this poor person (below) to lowercase a proper name in a title, just because the proper name is composed of common nouns. It's a glib response that hinges on a stupid comment one of the editors wanted to make ("lowercase the livestock"). I've been in this position where people are asking you all kinds of dumb questions and you just want to answer them any way you can and get on with your life. But this could have taken a bit more consideration.

On a related note, my next public art project will be to stand at the ticket counter of AirTran airlines the next time they cancel a flight out of Philadelphia and listen to people try to reason their way onto a plane that doesn't even exist anymore. We were on such a flight last weekend and accepted our fate, but the guy next to us, who'd read the ticket counter man's name off his badge, wouldn't let up. He kept saying, "Hey, Chris Brophy! What about if the plane is delayed until tomorrow, is that still the same flight? Chris Brophy, what about if I take another plane there and want to take this flight back?"

Q. I understand the general rules about titles (academic, civic, etc.), but I am working on a project that has quite a few instances of the following: “We are pleased to have the Minister of Food, Agriculture, and Livestock here with us today. . . . We appreciate the support of the Prime Minister of India.” I would lowercase “prime minister of India,” but what to do about the minister of food, agriculture, and livestock? Should it be the minister of Food, Agriculture, and Livestock, all lowercase, or title case? Thanks for your help.

A. It wouldn’t seem right to lowercase the prime minister and uppercase the livestock. Chicago style would lowercase everything in your titles (except India).

Also just finished reading Joe Pernice's novelette about the Smiths' "Meat Is Murder." It was like something one of my classmates would have written and pretty amateur-ly published. But it had a lot of heart and charm. It was interesting as a work by one of my favorite musicians about being in your late teens in 1985. So it goes in the same category as "Grosse Pointe Blank" and "Romy & Michele." If I had to rank these three works in terms of fealty to my version of events it would be JP's "Meat Is Murder" first, then Romy, then GPB. One interesting motif here was the development of a high school musician and how high school bands get together. Which I knew a little bit about from overheard conversations, but it did always seem miraculous that three or four teenage boys could get together and not only do a directed activity such as sports but, on their own, find mutual free time, rehearsal space, money for equipment and the guts to play in public and even to write music and lyrics and share their likes and dislikes. It still seems amazing to me that kids do this.

I ordered a bunch of books and they're all coming! One shipment I got already. It includes "Never Let Me Go," as well as "The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living." But the one I was most excited about was one I had bought to give to N. He was equally excited to see it but he is finishing another book so I get to read this one first.

It is "Trawler" by Redmond O'Hanlon. I have been reading Redmond O'Hanlon since those Vintage Departures editions of his books about Borneo and the Amazon back in the late 80s. And I am proud to say his last two books I bought in hardback as soon as I could get them. The Borneo and Amazon books were funny and learned and really wonderful. His next book, about the Congo, got very weird. He did the same thing in that book that he always does: goes on a massive expedition into the jungle with some odd companion. But there were points in the Congo book where I got the feeling he was losing his mind. It was a very dark book and not a romp like his other two.

So "Trawler" -- I really wasn't sure what it was going to be. I hadn't even heard it existed, and then I saw it on the shelf someplace where I didn't want to buy it. But the very next opportunity, I got it, and between ordering it and getting it I anticipated it. And now I am reading it. It is art. I am moved by it and feel privileged to read it. It's his Moby-Dick, down to the messed-up punctuation and overuse of italics.

OK, the thing with the Chicago Manual of Style FAQs is this:

The CMS attempts to answer every question that could come up in copy editing, and it is resorted to in arguments between copy editors, of which there are many (arguments). But the latest edition, 15, which came out a year or so ago, deviated from the prescriptive approach of previous editions and got into this touchy-feely crap about how you're supposed to use your ear to decide. An example will help. This is from the Q&As on the CMS site:

_____________
Q. Section 8.167 (3) of the 15th Manual of Style says that, when applying headline style, a preposition should be capitalized if it is stressed (A River Runs Through It). Please clarify what is meant by “stressed.” Furthermore, how would you capitalize “One Nation under God”? Thank you.

A. We are talking about how it sounds to the ear—admittedly, a somewhat murky rule. A river runs through it? A river runs through it? No—a river runs through it. Your “under” is likewise a good candidate for capping, for the same reason. Other examples:
A Man about the House vs. All About Eve
Desire under the Elms vs. One Nation Under God
_____________

First of all, imagine the discussion that must have led to this question being asked. Second, imagine having your question picked to answer in this prestigious forum, and then getting this answer. There's nothing here you could take back to the person you were arguing with to say definitively that you're right or wrong. Picture the "discussion" that would lead from this: one copy editor saying "ALL about EVE" through clenched teeth while the other editor says "All ABOUT Eve" with equal feeling. There's no defensible logic, just conviction.

Non-editorial people follow this capitalization rule and other folk grammar notions when they write their own headlines and slogans. Verbs, for instance, should always be capitalized, but "is" almost never is, because it is rarely stressed: Shaeffer is the One Beer to Have When You're Having More Than One.

One of the kids in my office is reading Moby-Dick for the first time. He comes in and wants to talk about it but he's only in the early chapters. The other day he wanted to talk about the chapter where Melville compares the sizes of whales to the sizes of books -- the "folio" chapter. I think it confused him; he's a smart guy so I am taking it seriously that this chapter gives him pause. He was concerned that the book size terms would come up later in the book and be some kind of key to understanding the point of the book. Like the end of the book will hinge on a pun on "duodecimo."

But also, he's still at the point of deciding whether to skip the technical digressions and just read the adventure story. I feel that the digressions are important, and that if you're reading this as an "important" book or one that holds some key to America, the digressions are the book. I have stated this to him but also made some vague reference to guides on "the internet" that will tell him which chapters to skip if he just wants the straight adventure story. I have my Moby-Dick comic also but I think this would insult him. To me, the story itself is fun and all but the book is more interesting. Does that make sense?

This weekend in Toledo I also read "H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life." I had not read any other Michel Houellebecq, though I know how to spell his last name. People find his other books cold and weird. I just loved, L-U-V-ed, this Lovecraft book. I feel a little shame at liking Lovecraft as much as I do, which isn't a huge whole lot but is enough. To compound my shame, I think he's one of the writers that I started to read because Harlan Ellison told me to when I was 14. Borges, Lovecraft, Lem. I genuinely like these writers and I'm happy I picked them up before I had too much to worry about pridewise. I think anyone who finishes and enjoys The K*** R***er has a lot more to be embarrassed about.

This book's explanation of Lovecraft's racism made a lot of sense to me. Lovecraft was a genteel racist, the upper-middle-class New England type that I know, until he moved to New York and lived in poverty. His dealings there with immigrants and lower-class people inspired him to create his stories' creepy races of half-human half-monsters. And, says Houellebecq, all he and his protagonists could do was wait to be inevitably beaten by this stronger race. It definitely is an old-New-England type of feeling. Fear of the vigorous Italian, who is destined to overrun your old town. I'm sure my nat. fath. looks at his daughters married to Poles and Irishmen and sees his great legacy laid to waste in a similar manner.

The other day I was talking to an interior designer and he shared his theory with me: that interior designers are the modern equivalent of the hermit. Because they're in society but not of it. They step into people's lives and then leave them and go back and live alone. So I started reading about Thomas Merton, in Guy Davenport and Ralph Eugene Meatyard's "Father Louie," which is the only book about hermits I had around the house. Thomas Merton sounds like a complicated guy and I guess now I have to read "The Seven Story Mountain." And make an effort once again to understand the Black Mountain school. But one thing Thomas Merton did is, he wrote the coolest book title ever. "Cables to the Ace."

When I'm loitering around on the Web all bored, it's nice to know there are huge archives at exile.ru. This morning I read a Mark Ames review of an underground club in Moscow that contained an accurate description of what it felt like after seeing the Butthole Surfers in what I assume was 1988. I remember walking down an empty street in Pontiac, Michigan, in a haze after seeing them for the first time, in euphoria, feeling like I had seen something no one ever had before. (This also was the first time I had seen a g-string on a live woman, and actually, come to think of it, probably the last time.) Or seeing an exhibit of Joseph Beuys at the museum in Darmstadt, Germany. All the American kids were talking about this weird part of the museum with felt and lard and dishes of bees. I remember wandering through the galleries, room after room, knowing nothing about the artist, and all the labels were in German, and being so intensely, mystically moved. I really couldn't tell you why. The more I read about Beuys later on, the happier I am that the first time I saw his work I had no clue what it was about, because evidently I felt what he'd intended his viewers to feel. Usually when I'm given hints on what to feel about art I go ahead and feel it. As long as I like the art, I'll go along with what's asked of me. But I'd have had a hard time going along with an order to feel the oneness or whatever I felt at this show.

That said, we saw "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" yesterday. All the actors in it were charming, like heart-eyes charming if you know your old Monkees shows. I didn't walk out of the theater feeling like a new person; I felt like I had spent the exact amount of time in the theater as I actually had.

Dispatch 3 from Hell Is Other People's Opinions: Went to a book club last week. We discussed "The Kite Runner," which I thought was not very good. Completely and instantly clear when I walked in that everyone else loved it. LOVED it. One girl said it was her favorite book ever. We went around the room and said our favorite books, so I know these are not dumb or unread women. I just can't figure out what about that book has made such an impression on readers. I found it amateurish in writing and plot. Implausibilities involving topics I do know about (life in publishing) made me doubt the facts relating to topics I don't know about (the Taliban). I guess it's another Da Vinci Code. Oh lord, though. I said my favorite book was "Howard's End." Why not.

Here are some words I have banned in copy at my office:
decorative
special
various
-type as a suffix

I am crazy about the BBC show "Look Around You" but it's on at the worst time in the world: 10:40 on Thursday night. I really did try to stay up for it yesterday but fell dead asleep on the couch. I woke up at 1 am, which is right in the middle of the unfocused worry portion of my night. Usually I am up at about 3 having unfocused worries in a semiconscious state. But last night I had to get up from the couch, clear my dinner dishes, set up the coffemaker, go up three flights of stairs, and get ready for bed, all while in this state of unfocused worry. Everything I did seemed to have horrible consequences I could not begin to comprehend. Then I couldn't get to sleep so I played computer solitaire on N's old iPaq. Which was the exact worst thing to do, as it allowed my mind to race freely. I spent a little time working on the graduation address I will someday deliver to the students of my old high school, wherein I will share all the carefully worked-out theories that enabled me to get the hell out of Toledo. I was working through the definition of "adulthood" ("There's no principal of adults!") when my rational mind told me it was time to read a fucking book. I am reading "Low Life" by Luc Sante, which is more or less a rehashing of some other, older books such as Asbury's book about the gangs of New York, as well as "The Big Con," the greatest book ever written. In "Low Life" you get the feeling the writer is working a lot with secondary sources and simply presenting all the facts out of those sources. It's actually a lot like an article out of "Murder Can Be Fun." One of his other books is called "The Factory of Facts" and the phrase rings in my head as I read this book. It's fact after fact. I know the facts all came from places but I don't know whether I trust those places -- there are a few fun asides presented as fact that I believe are urban myth. But a book like this does fill the mind wonderfully.

From Will Christopher Baer's "Penny Dreadful":


...they were patiently waiting for me to stop freaking out and get my shit together and flow.


This line occurs to me a lot.

Guy Davenport died this week. I think I lent his book "The Geography of the Imagination" to some of my friends. I know I have lent or given "7 Greeks." I go back to his essays when I am feeling too tired to read anything new, or feeling stupid or complacent. Yesterday morning I saw his publisher's announcement of his death in the New York Times and felt a shock. His name has held a totemic significance for me ever since I was a teenager and read an essay of his on the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard. This was in an Aperture monograph of Meatyard's work that I must have read to pieces. Then I lent it to someone whose photography reminded me of Meatyard's but who had never heard of him. Next thing I knew the book was lost in the Oakland fire, along with whatever other great treasures. But there was an essay about Meatyard by his friend Davenport that moved me. It's the source of a thought I apply to many of the people I love -- Davenport, who was extremely educated, was remarking that Meatyard had never read the Odyssey or the Iliad or something. But, Davenport said, when Meatyard does get around to reading it, what a reading it will have. I may be getting the attributions messed up but that's the idea. Most of his nonfiction writing involved making connections among writers and books and ideas, about half of which I've read. And every time I go back to reading his essays, I've read a few more books he mentions. I'm excited to go back now having finally read Howard's End. He jumps around among topics and ideas in a way that gets me excited to pick something new up. It is as exciting to me as my freshman-year honors conference, when there was a similar interplay of ideas. It was just assumed you wouldn't make cheap pop-culture references that would end the discussion. I don't know if kids can even have this kind of discussion now. Some smartass would jump in with a sitcom refernce and shut down the higher brain function of the class. If I was a professor I would ban references to any kind of modern work produced for profit. "Madonna Studies" can blow me.



One thing I remember doing on search engines in, like, 1996 was searching for the terms "Guy Davenport" and "Ralph Eugene Meatyard." I'd come up with nothing. The two groups, early Web users and modernists, were absolutely separate. It was akin to Fran Lebowitz translating the letters of Alfred Lord Douglas into CB slang. (There was no CB term for "pearl gray.") Is it declassé to know the works of Fran Lebowitz almost by heart? Guy Davenport knew lots of Greek lyrics and stuff.