Went to New York this weekend with no books at all. It was weird. I didn't meant to not have any books. But so I sat on the train and read the New Yorker's story on the New Orleans police force, and then the story on James Agee. I like James Agee's film criticism. I have tried to read some of his other work and wasn't in the right frame of mind -- which means that though I own a copy of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," I have never taken the wrapper off it. But because I'm also reading "Here Is Your War" by Ernie Pyle I'm interested again in reading this -- another writer who, however briefly, lived among his un-privileged subjects, clearly reporting on them (not undercover or anything) but in their lives in a sympathetic way.

None of my dad's people were involved in the West Virginia mine story. There were no Italian last names at all. As horrible as the miners' story is, there's also this twisted undercurrent of people from West Virginia wanting to be on TV. Can you imagine being the governor of that state. The last time you were on was during the Big East tournament or something.

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.