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.

OK, I am officially quitting "Shiloh." I just don't see it getting any different than the 2/3 I have already read. It's one of those books that, if you dug it, you could read it forever, but if you're not invested from the first page, you're not going to become invested by an interesting change in tone or plot 10 pages in because there won't be any changes. I would not go so far as to say it made the Civil War boring, but it wasn't an interesting book to me. I would pick it up and find where I had left off, and every page looked the same. Still, I'm crabby I can't add it to my year's list. I did complete my reading of "We Have Always Lived in the Castle," by Shirley Jackson, which was pretty creepy.

Also, yesterday I watched the film "Dig!" It was wonderful. It's about the Brian Jonestown Massacre; I saw them at the Peacock Lounge in the Lower Haight, maybe in 1992 or 1993? And I just remember a wave of sound coming off the stage, and about 50 people onstage, smoke, and the people I was with were all talking about how notorious they were. Anyway, the movie is completely fascinating. Right up there personality-wise with "The Last Waltz."

And then we went to see "Tristram Shandy," which was a total slam-dunk. Just loved it, the Paris Bennett of 2006 movies so far. I guess this means I have to see all the movies Michael Winterbottom has made since "24 Hour Party People," including the science-fiction one and the porno. I actually remembered enough of Tristram Shandy the book from 20 years ago to catch a few jokes. Other people in the audience were also conspicuously laughing at these places. Yay! It was a big-time bridge-and-tunnel crowd, older ladies in wool ponchos.

The one thing we are missing here, besides everything, is a good used bookstore to browse in after the movies.

In San Francisco I bought a whole bunch of books. At City Lights, I walked around with a stack of four books I needed. Because we had a long walk ahead of us, practical N said, "Now let's try to get that down to one book," which enraged me so that I bought all four or maybe five. Then I bought another five or so at the SFPL bookstore at Main. And I am reading them all. Completed:

Solo Faces, by James Salter
Rituals, by Cees Nooteboom, which is GREAT

I had started Days Between Stations, by Steve Erickson, on the plane and finished it in SF, so I bought another book by him. People I like like Steve Erickson. I started reading Arc d'X a long time ago and put it down, but then kept thinking about it. DBS was his first novel and a little bit goth for me. A lot of, like, the man crawling inside the woman and feeling her insides. That's love man.

Reading:
Shiloh, by Shelby Foote

I know this book is greater than it seems on its face. On its face it looks like one of the Jeff Shaar potboilers of history, with the actual thoughts of General Washington as well as the lowly infantryman.

OK, I am glad I didn't bet anyone or any money that I read 50 books. There might be 30 overall, including the ones I left on the train or in Spain. I am a dope.