I bought $80 worth of magazines last night. $40 were work magazines, and $40 were a bunch of literary journals I bought so I can hold a conversation with my sister. And because I went out to dinner on Thursday night with a bunch of girls and the only book we had in common was "And I Don't Want to Live This Life," by Debra Spungeon. So I need to catch up. I was a little bit conflicted about buying "The Believer" because it's such a typical play on my part, but I saw the actual pages, with that beautiful typography, I couldn't help myself. It's just a handsome, welcoming page. And it reminded me of when Pat Walsh gave me the first issue of McSweeney's. A genuinely exciting moment! So I'll catch up. But I'm also reading "The Longest Journey" by E.M. Forster as part of my Forster kick. Which gives me no dinner-table currency at all. I was in a car for four hours on Wednesday with three co-workers with whom I had nothing in common, and I was kind of kicking myself for reading all this obscure crapola that I can only really talk about with our renaissance-mailroom-guy.

In book news I read "Black Hole" by Charles Burns yesterday, along with Yoshihiro Tatsumi's "The Push Man." Figured I would read them on a rainy day. "Black Hole" was one of those books where I was almost sorry that it contained a traditional plot point (spoiler: murder). It didn't need a murder. It was trying to get at something pretty heavy and interesting. One of the books it reminded me of in that vein was "Super-Cannes" by J.G. Ballard. It was trying to talk about a true mystery, the mystery among other things of how we form groups and decide who's in and who's out, and then it sorts of turns into a sex-murder mystery. It may be that the heart of everything is sex and murder, and that in order to touch on really mysterious parts of life some books just have to tie them to exciting plot points. But plot points aside, "Black Hole" was pretty neat, and "The Push Man" was fascinating, a bunch of graphic stories about working-class life in late-60s Japan. All the women work at those geisha bars.

I finished "Deus Lo Volt!" It was a shaggy-dog story. I ended up liking it a lot. Then rewarded myself by reading a dumb mystery and a chapter of the Arcades Project. Now I have a pile of books to read. And I also read some of the short-story collection "San Francisco Noir." A couple things about this: first and as usual, it made me miss San Francisco, the way the end of "Lady From Shanghai" does. Second, the only Asian writer, at least judging by photos and names, was Alvin Lu. The book seems to have been edited by a New Yorker. But the stories were well reported, and they gave me the feeling of being in some of the situations I remember myself.

It might be that San Francisco has an easier narrative to enter, in reality, than Philly, and thus is an easier city to construct an easy-to-get narrative around. Someone like Michelle Tea sees herself as part of a continuum of a character -- the lovestruck lesbian prostitute -- who is more or less celebrated in SF along with the hated yuppie couple, the smart Latino/a in the wilderness, some other sex-worker characters, the geek and the Rainbow shopper. Where, aside from the Onion's dead-on item this week about the girl who never runs out of quirky things to do, I'm not sure there's an accessible Philly character. We have the cop, the grumpy South Philadelphian, the earnest North Philly church person. A Philly noir story wouldn't involve nice, relatable people who were drawn to drugs, crime and sex work because of personal quirks and flaws.