My Alibris passion now is for buying a certain kind of home-decorating book of the 1970s. I found three books from Quick Fox press at a local used bookstore, and the next morning bought every other decorating work in the Quick Fox oeuvre, because:
* these are real people's houses from the 1970s
* they are not styled

Before I worked in this job I had no idea about stylists. I figured the art director went to the photo shoot, she and the photographer put everything how they liked it, and then they took the picture. No! There's a third party, almost always a freelancer, who is on the shoot, who probably brought most of the stuff to the shoot, and who totally determines the look of the shot. On house shoots nowadays, stylists bring kitchen goods, shelves of fake books, bed linens.

These 1970s houses are conspicuously not styled. They've been cleaned, usually, but no one went in and added new products that didn't belong to the homeowners, in order to make the house look hipper. The photos are also not retouched in any way. So it's eye-opening to me after looking at so many superperfect images in modern magazines.

I know if I showed these books to other people who work with m, it would be a huge effort for them to get past the ugliness of a lot of the rooms in the books. You can't argue that they're not ugly. They are.

Something that's funny in "Deus Lo Volt!" is that one of the armaments that the Crusaders carried by ship to the Holy Land was snakes. On a ship! And when the ship was sunk, all the snakes got loose, but then they drowned. I am on page 250 and may finish it. In between putting this book down and picking it up again I finished another book by Stanislaw Lem, for whom my affection is cooling, and picked up again the essays of Montaigne. I am also carrying around "Getting Things Done" again. I listened to Merlin Mann's speech at Xerox PARC, which further impressed upon me that Merlin Mann is the exact same age as me, maybe to the month. Although I knew about email before 1995, thank you very much. But all the same verbal tics.

Another person who is a similar age to me is the writer Allegra Goodman. My mother interviewed her last week for a piece, and said she reminded her of me. Except of course much more succesful, famous and a mother of four, I added silently to myself. I haven't read anything by her but I'll probably have to before my next visit to my parents.

In unsurprising news, I have laid down "Deus Lo Volt!" by Evan S. Connell to read something more amusing for 10 minutes. But I swear I will finish it. What frightens me is that I'm not retaining any of it. I'm on to the second crusade and I couldn't tell you a single name aside from kings Richard and Philip. Maybe I have BSE.

In more interesting but still unsurprising news, it is spring! It was more spring last weekend than this weekend, but it's still going on. First plant to make a strong showing: chives. I overwintered all my plants outside because I don't like having plants in the house. So if they died, they died. Now I have a zillion plans for the garden this year that will, as usual, depend on how early I get up each Saturday and whether I feel like doing anything but watching TCM. And whether I can scam a car to take me to Home Depot sometime this season to get the hardcore supplies such as mulch. One fun fact, and it is a fact, about Philly is that there are no van cabs.

Now reading "Deus Lo Volt!" by Evan S. Connell. One interesting side fact is that the author's initials are written in gold on the book cover underneath the jacket. I wonder at what point in their careers authors get their initials on the book cover.

This book is about the Crusades, and I know almost nothing about the Crusades, so as I read it I'm referring to the map in our hallway to look up where the Crusaders are now. One a side note to that, I love having a map in the hallway. But so the crusaders walked from France to Jerusalem. They had to divide into three bands so they didn't destroy everything in their path on their way.