I have a Palm Pilot now!!! I love it. It has WiFi so I can go sit in Love Park and write teeny tiny emails from *inside my hand*. I wrote my first email on it this morning but it bounced.

In other news, I have a flickr buddy.

Just finished reading "Young Törless" by Robert Musil. Mainly because Milan Kundera wrote about him in a book of essays about the novel and classical music, and I just semi-finished reading that. The back of my Penguin edition of this book calls Musil the Proust of pre-war Central Europe.

Every so often I will complain about a book because I feel like the writer is trying to explore one of the great mysteries of life and the soul, but ends up resolving the mystery via sex or murder. If you ever have the feeling that something creepy is going on, I mean really, most of the time it's because you're living in an entirely different and separate world from everyone you know, even from those you love, and this world might not even be real, and you might not have a soul, and you'll never truly see or know yourself. Those are the fucking myteries. And then J.P. Ballard or whoever resolves this creepy feeling by saying it's from a sex cult. Well! This book just never went that way. I adored it and I felt like I was accomplishing something by reading it. It really was the same feeling I got from reading Proust.

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.

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.