Mulling Over and Adjusting an Arrangement

I'm not intimidated nor pressured by the sheer number of books I have in my room, the 10 stacks across from the right side of my bed, the clustered stacks in front of my nightstand to the left of my bed. I'm always excited about the possibilities they present, and I like seeing the books I want to read soon. But I like some order in it, even though my organizational skills say otherwise since none of the stacks are really ramrod straight. Some are fierce competitors against gravity as they teeter at times. Some probably intend to tip over when I'm not looking, but they're just fearful of my glare.

The order that I seek is reading order. Before, I'd just pluck whatever book out of whatever stack that interested me. Finished with one, go back for another. Before that even, I'd have three or four books going which turned out not to be a good idea because even though I'd enjoy what I was reading, I'd never feel close to those books.

So I want to give equal attention to fiction and nonfiction, and I decided that I'll have one novel (or book of short stories) and one nonfiction book always at hand, and when I finish the novel, I'll move on to the nonfiction book, and back and forth. For example, yesterday I finished reading Bed Rest by Sarah Bilston, a novel about a British New Yorker ordered to bed rest for the final three months of her pregnancy and what transpires from it. Then I moved on to Like I Was Sayin'... by Mike Royko, a collection of his columns from 1966 to 1984, across The Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune. I replaced Bed Rest with O: A Presidential Novel by Anonymous (the author's identity was revealed not long after publication in January), about Obama's re-election campaign against Tom "Terrific" Morrison, a four-star general and one-term governor who is the Republican nominee for president, and though privately he does not like Obama, he vows to run a clean, civil campaign and sticks to it. In light of what the real-life Republicans are offering up as candidates, I'm going to read this and dream. After I finish Like I Was Sayin'..., I'll move on to this. And I'll replace Like I Was Sayin'... with Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books by Paul Collins, about he and his family moving from San Francisco to Hay-on-Wye, a small town in Wales, England which has 1,500 residents and forty bookstores. My kind of book, and though I'd be tempted to move to Hay-on-Wye just for the bookstores, I'm doing well enough on my own and I've got so much I want to accomplish in my own country anyway.

There are exceptions to this arrangement. Research for my presidential books and my 1930s Hollywood history book, and a few others, can go forth with as many nonfiction books as necessary. And today in the mail, I received, among other books, Oy Vey: More! - The Ultimate Book of Jewish Jokes Part 2 by David Minkoff, and Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR's All Things Considered, edited by Catherine Bowman. Joke books and books of poems don't take me long to read, so they can drift by as often as I want to read them.

Though I tend to read nonfiction much more than fiction, there are authors such as Ann Beattie, Anne Tyler, and others who I want to get to know more, and this is the best arrangement for it. And since last week, I've felt much closer to my reading.

Impatient for the End of October and Bits of November and December

I want the end of October to come already, October 27th precisely. That is when MTV will finally begin airing the return of Beavis & Butt-head. There will be both beloved dumbasses (My favorite is Beavis), there will be Cornholio, there will be my 10-year-old self next to me watching with glee (I remember Christmas Day 1996, I was 12, Dad was in New Jersey, and Mom took Meridith and I to the movies at GCC Coral Square Cinema 8. She went with Meridith to whatever they saw, and I fairly ran into the theater that was showing Beavis & Butt-Head Do America). The new thing for the show is that Beavis and Butt-head will not only be commenting on music videos. There will be clips of Jersey Shore for them to do proper justice to (One clip has one of the girls of Jersey Shore saying, "I'm a whore, hello!" and Butt-head remarks, "That's how she answers the phone."). And there will apparently also be clips from 16 and Pregnant and YouTube, the latter of which doesn't make sense to me because even though we're in a far more advanced technological age than when Beavis & Butt-head first aired, the two don't seem like the kind to use computers. Better that they keep on watching TV.

Why can't I have November 1st yet? I need it! James Garner's memoir, titled The Garner Files, is coming out. It being only 288 pages is a little disappointing at first, but I'm hoping that he spends a good number of pages talking about Maverick, The Rockford Files, and especially Victor/Victoria, one of my favorite comedies. It also has an introduction by Julie Andrews.

I'll trade you a few of my DVDs if I can have November 15th right away. Toward late September, I read in The New Yorker an excerpt by Ann Beattie of her forthcoming book, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life, and I went online right after and pre-ordered it on Amazon, since it squarely hit my passion for the history of the presidency and all those involved in it. Plus, it made me addicted to Beattie's writings, spurring me on to order her first short-story collection, Distortions, her first novel, Chilly Scenes in Winter, and The New Yorker Stories, a compilation of all the short stories Beattie wrote for The New Yorker.

Can someone please push November 22nd closer to me? Like pressed right up against me? 12 Angry Men is finally getting a proper DVD release as part of the Criterion Collection, which, in a two-disc set, includes Franklin J. Schaffner's 1955 TV production of Reginald Rose's play. There's also a TV production of Tragedy in a Temporary Town, which was written by Rose and directed by Sidney Lumet, who directed 12 Angry Men, and aired a year before 12 Angry Men was released in theaters. After this one, I'm hoping that Barfly, written by Charles Bukowski and starring Mickey Rourke, is released by the Criterion Collection.

And oh please oh please oh please oh please, someone just give me November 22nd right now, because scrolling through these pre-orders on Amazon, I just found out that Look I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany by STEPHEN SONDHEIM, one of my heroes, is coming out on the same day, the second volume of his vastly detailed books of lyrics, the first being Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes which came out in late October last year.

And I think I want to see Tower Heist when it comes out in November, chiefly because of Alan Alda, but also because it looks funny. Nice to see Eddie Murphy back as the way he once was.

Favorite Quindlen Passage

I couldn't squeeze this into my previous entry about reading Talking Out Loud this afternoon. This needed to be here, in its own space, a part of Quindlen's column from July 8, 1992 about the United States Olympic men's basketball team, especially because of her stated equivalent:

"Somewhere in the contract of the male columnist it is written that once a year he must wax poetic and philosophic about baseball, making it sound like a cross between the Kirov and Zen Buddhism. This covers the baseball profundity axis more than adequately, which is a good thing. The connection between a base hit and karma eludes me.

But basketball is something different, sweatier and swifter and not likely to be likened to haiku, thank God. And this Olympic basketball team is something different entirely. It is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: "O.K., Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He'll do the interior monologue. Hemingway will edit--no, don't make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He's young, but he's got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can't play--they're girls." On television they were running down the lineup: Larry Bird. Patrick Ewing. Michael Jordan. Magic Johnson. When they got to Christian Laettner, the student prince of college basketball, I almost felt sorry for the guy because he was so outclasses, a mere champion among giants. We don't see giants often, even one at a time, never mind en masse and in skivvies."

Amen, Reverend Quindlen!

An Ideal Afternoon Lived

For now, in Santa Clarita, I spend as much time as I can reading, which during the week means large stretches of the afternoon given over to it. And I read with no expectation of doing anything else, doing anything better, because this is better. This is best.

Throughout this afternoon, I read from page 33 to the end of Thinking Out Loud by Anna Quindlen, a collection of her columns. I love newspaper column writers because the great ones teach you about succinctness, of packaging all your thoughts about any topic into a short number of words. Blogs don't have the limit that newspaper space does, but I don't like to pontificate for 182 paragraphs when far fewer will do. 180. Maybe.

In fact, my favorite aspect of my writing is knowing when to stop, an instinct honed from beginning to write when I was 11, all the way through to working at The Signal for two years, and beyond that to today, just as a voracious reader. Whenever I write anything here, it starts from an idea that pops to mind during the day that I just have to put into a lot of words. Then I start, and eventually, I get to that point where I think I've done all I can for that certain topic. The 10 floors of the Fairmont Hotel in Newport Beach (http://scrapsofliteracy.blogspot.com/2011/01/ghosts-grow-larger.html) require more than recounting weekend errands.

In the case of reading Thinking Out Loud, many things were going through my mind, first that Quindlen has a huge heart and an innate understanding of people. Real people. Not politicos who claim to have solutions that turn out only to suit them. Not famous people who are as far removed from daily life as a polar bear is from outer space. You and me and the babies that have changed Quindlen's life and outlook, for example, as well as columns about politics and the human faces of abortion, not just conjecture, and sweet columns about her children.

I also thought about other books I have that I want to read, such as that which I received today, including Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court by Jan Crawford Greenburg, a biography of legendary film critic Pauline Kael by Brian Kellow, and Second Lives: A Journey Through Virtual Worlds by Tim Guest, about those who live in and for computer-generated environments. I will never run out of anything to read, and this makes me the happiest over anything else in my life, although the attempts to be published for a second time and hopefully so on always compete with that.

Most of all, I just sat there on the couch, deeply satisfied at where I was and what I was doing (It comes with feeling like you're floating a bit, even though you're just sitting). I was reading a book, a particularly good one. That's all I needed. These are my ideal afternoons.

John Le Carre, By Way of Tallahassee

Sara, a former 9th grade crush (my first serious crush at that), my most trusted friend, and well on her way to becoming a great human rights lawyer as a student at Florida State University College of Law in Tallahassee, sent me an e-mail last Wednesday, wondering if I'd read any of John Le Carre's novels. She heard of him through the film adaptations of his books, and 40 pages into The Honorable Schoolboy (her first Le Carre novel), she's a huge fan, describing each sentence as "taut and vivid," and the characters being lifelike.

I replied, telling her that during the years I had been a patron of the Valencia library when it was part of the County of Los Angeles library system, I picked up the first and second novels of the George Smiley series, A Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, in one book, but had only read the beginning of A Call for the Dead before other books got in the way, as they always did, since I always reached the 50-item limit of my library card, always all books.

When Sara recommends books, I look into them right away, because she has the same mindset as I do about books. She loves them just as fiercely. So I told her I'd read A Call for the Dead soon, ordering it from abebooks.com, as well as The Russia House, of which I had seen the first few minutes of the Sean Connery/Michelle Pfeiffer movie adaptation via Netflix, and had been interested in it then.

A Call for the Dead arrived yesterday, shortened to Call for the Dead, as this 2002 trade paperback printing indicates. I liked it right away because there was an introduction by Le Carre and there seems to be Le Carre introductions for each of the Smiley novels in these Pocket Books printings.

I told Sara by e-mail after I had come home from Walmart Supercenter today, where I finished reading Call for the Dead, that I'm at a great advantage right now because I don't have a local library, not until we move. Therefore, I've fashioned my own library of sorts, made up of books I really, really want to read, but not encumbered by any limit on a library card. I take time for every book, unless it gives me reason to give it up. Plus, there being no due date, there isn't that minor pressure either. So I was able to take the time for Le Carre, and I can truly say that Call for the Dead is some of the best writing I've ever read. Le Carre is so descriptive by being so minimal with his words. He chooses each one carefully. He doesn't seem like the kind of writer who would agonize over each word choice, but he's clearly taken time to figure out what he wants in each sentence, each paragraph. Sara's right about the vividness of his sentences, which extends into clearly-drawn characters. His descriptions are never overdone, including of physical appearances, which only serves to bring you deeper into this moral-gray spy world. This is my kind of spy novel, which I never really got from Ian Fleming. The movie James Bond is my Star Wars, but upon reaching Doctor No in my attempt to re-read the novels, it was disappointing, not containing any of the low-key excitement found in From Russia with Love. But Le Carre, that's where my spy love lives.

In the first chapter of Call for the Dead, there is this sentence:

"That night he stayed in London at somewhere rather good and took himself to the theatre."

Le Carre not only gets deep into the British Secret Service, but also in his sentences. You can't merely read that sentence and move on. You have to think about it for a moment. To me, "rather good" indicates that either he's stayed in London before and accomodations have never been reliable, or wherever he has stayed elsewhere has not been all that good. "Took himself to the theatre" is Le Carre's interesting way of saying that Smiley went alone, since theatergoing is usually in pairs or as a group. Only he went. He was his own date, but not much.

This next passage is from chapter 6, 'Tea and Sympathy':

"It was still raining as he arrived. Mendel was in his garden wearing the most extraordinary hat Smiley had ever seen. It had begun life as an Anzac hat but its enormous brim hung low all the way round, so that he resembled nothing so much as a very tall mushroom. He was brooding over a tree stump, a wicked looking pick-axe poised obediently in his sinewy right hand."

"Obediently" is what I love here, since the pick-axe was obviously aimed at the stump, sharply aimed.

This is the second-to-final paragraph in Call for the Dead. Maston is (or was) Smiley's boss, and Smiley is on a flight to Zurich:

"Soon the lights of the French coast came in sight. As he watched, he began to sense vicariously the static life beneath him; the rank smell of Gauloises Bleues, garlic and good food, the raised voices in the bistro. Maston was a million miles off, locked away with his arid paper and his shiny politicians."

Descriptive in such a short set of words, well-chosen ones at that. That's one of Le Carre's greatest talents.

Sara's recommendation led to Call for the Dead (I preferred to start at the beginning of the series), which led to me ordering A Murder of Quality and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the next books in the Smiley series. I intend to read all of Le Carre's novels, the non-Smiley ones not in any order. But so far, this is my favorite paragraph in a Le Carre novel, particularly because of the subtle humor at the end. This is the start of chapter 3, 'Elsa Fennan':

"Merridale Lane is one of those corners of Surrey where the inhabitants wage a relentless battle against the stigma of suburbia. Trees, fertilized and cajoled into being in every front garden, half obscure the poky "Character dwellings" which crouch behind them. The rusticity of the environment is enhanced by the wooden owls that keep guard over the names of houses, and by crumbling dwarfs indefatigably poised over goldfish ponds. The inhabitants of Merridale Lane do not paint their dwarfs, suspecting this to be a suburban vice, nor, for the same reason, do they varnish the owls; but wait patiently for the years to endow these treasures with an appearances of weathered antiquity, until one day even the beams on the garage may bost of beetle and woodworm."

There are books I blast through as a speed-reader, sometimes done in a day and on to the next. Some, like American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by Joan Biskupic, which I finished last night, I still speed-read through, but I slow down because the information is important to me. With Call for the Dead, I kept in mind at the beginning what Sara had said about the sentences of a Le Carre novel, and then after the first page, I was out on my own. She was right, and I slowed down to take in each sentence, to turn each wonderful phrase over in my mind, to admire the mystery in it. In his introduction from March 1992, Le Carre writes:

"When I had written the book, I feared that my troubles had just begun. I had talked to nobody about the proprieties of writing a spy story while I was still inside the spy business, and nowadays, I am told, new entrants have to sign away their literary lives before they are allowed to join. Certainly I knew enough about the subterranean connections of my service not to attempt to publish without official consent. So I sent the book to the Legal Adviser, Bernard Hill, who had always seemed to me to be the dullest old stick in the whole outfit, and he returned it a couple of days later with a note saying how much he had enjoyed it. He asked for one change and I made it. Not for security reasons: he thought it might be libellous. He also asked me to use a pseudonym. He thought it wiser and, sucking on his pipe, he wished me luck.

When Victor Gollanez accepted the book, I asked Victor what sort of pseudonym I should choose. He recommended two Anglo-Saxon monosyllables---something like Chuck Smith or Hank Brown. I chose le Carre. God alone knows why, or where I had it from, but I didn't like Victor's advice. When people press me, I say I saw the name on a shop front from the top of a London bus. I didn't. I just don't know. But never trust a novelist when he tells you the truth."

David Cornwell is his real name. Smart move, because Le Carre adds more mystery to what's in store, the dank spy world most of us can only know through books.

Moral of all this enthusiasm? Always trust book recommendations from your closest friends.

Victor Fleming, from Lisle, Illinois

Whenever I ordered books from abebooks.com, the first listings I'd usually see for any book, were "ex-library" copies. I avoided this because despite them being listed as "Good," I couldn't be certain of exactly what was contained within that condition. Was a page or two stained? Were there markings through and through to the detriment of trying to read the book? I don't mind a tear or two if it doesn't interrupt the book, but what kind of guarantee was I getting by "good"?

Now, having stopped buying books for a long while because I'd like to maintain some semblance of a savings account, upon reflection, I wonder why I didn't go for library books more often, especially in light of receiving today Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master by Michael Sragow. This particular hardcover edition, sold by Better World Books in Mishawka, Indiana (http://www.betterworldbooks.com/; though I always order from abebooks.com), comes from the Lisle Library District in Lisle, Illinois, with the book jacket tightly preserved in plastic, as is the standard with good libraries. And on the inside flap, under the plastic covering, there was a checkout receipt for this book, checked out on "March 03, 2009 8:38:15 PM," as indicated on the receipt, with a due date of "3/24/2009".

On the dedication page, written in pencil is the Dewey Decimal number for the book, and on the far left side of the page, written vertically in pencil as well is "1/16/09," likely when this book was entered into the Lisle Library District. So now it's October 2011. And on the very back blank page, there is a red stamp of "WITHDRAWN" on it. Perhaps this wasn't a book for the district. Maybe patrons were more inclined to check out books about actors than about 1930s directors like Victor Fleming, famous for The Wizard of Oz and for directing Gone with the Wind for a time until he left for The Wizard of Oz. That kind of directorial switch fascinates me.

Two things motivated me to buy this book, besides not having a steady library right now, which would save me money certainly, but I'm not going to wait to read: One, out of all personalities in Hollywood history, I'm most interested in directors. I wrote about actors in What If They Lived?, but I like knowing about the directorial power on the set, the quirks, the artistic beliefs, the drive. The same kind of thing stands with my equal passion for learning about the presidents and the Supreme Court. I've never thought about it at length, but perhaps it stems from being curious about how power affects a person, how they use it, whether executive power, judicial power, or power on a movie set.

The second reason is for my preliminary research for my 1930s Hollywood history book. I want to see how other authors cover the period, what they focus on in writing about their subjects, such as Sragow about Fleming, Scott Eyman about Louis B. Mayer, and other authors' books I have about the studio system itself. I seek tour guides to show me how they've covered the period so I can determine where I want to go, though undeterred by what's been covered before.

I love how this book jacket's been preserved in plastic, how clean this book looks and feels. That's of course because it's still relatively new, not having been touched or handled all that much, but it's still remarkable to me. What's even more amazing is that I looked at the inside jacket flap and the list price for this book is $40. I got it from Better World Books for $5.25, free shipping. 645 pages for $5.25. I always take pleasure in such bargains. Saves me a hell of a lot of money and there is potentially great value in the reading to come.

From a Bum Joke to Joe Pesci in "With Honors"

I subscribe to this e-mail service called Arcamax (http://www.arcamax.com/), which sends comic strips by e-mail the night before their publication in newspapers nationwide. I've rediscovered Curtis, my favorite comic strip when I was a kid, and I love getting Andy Capp, my favorite comic strip now, every evening.

They also provide columns such as Dear Abby, and political columns and cartoons, and also jokes, among so much else. I received the jokes e-mail just now and found this one at the top:

"The bum on the street

A bum asks a man for $2. The man asked, "Will you buy booze?"

The bum said, "No."

The man asked, "Will you gamble it away?"

The bum said, "No."

Then the man asked, "Will you come home with me so my wife can see what happens to a man who doesn't drink or gamble?"

It's funny, but right at the start, I wasn't thinking about the joke. I thought about Joe Pesci's role as the charismatic, homeless Simon Wilder in With Honors, which I've grown to like over time, mainly because Wilder, when he's introduced, is living in a boiler room under Widener Library on the Harvard campus, and clearly loves books.

Again, a boiler room. Under a library. Not my ideal living space, but Wilder is essentially living in a library. That is until Monty (Brendan Fraser), so worried about his Very Important Thesis that Wilder has gotten hold of, calls the campus police on Wilder and he's thrown out and arrested.

After Monty pays contempt-of-court fines leveled on Wilder during an appearance before a judge, Wilder hawks newspapers to passersby in a town square and then pointedly asks Monty what he sees. Monty replies, "A man," and Wilder fires back, "No, you see a piece of shit, Harvard." Monty answers, "I see a man who needs a home." Wilder replies, "I had a home. I had a warm place to sleep. 17 bathrooms and 8 miles of books. I had a goddamn palace."

Every time I hear the "8 miles of books" part, I get a little lightheaded (as if the shots of the inside of the library later aren't enough). I'm also reminded of the Strand Bookstore in New York City that I'd like to dive into one day, after visiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park. 18 miles of books at the Strand, as its reputation maintains. It's the kind of dream that makes me hope to win big in Vegas one day, somehow (even on penny slots), so I can charter a few jumbo jets to cart books home from the Strand.

And all this from one joke.