My Caitlin Flanagan Problem: or, Shouldn't I Be Reading Something Else, Really?

My daughter was napping, so the house was quiet, and I was eating lunch and staring at my computer. On a whim, I went to the website for The Atlantic, which I always forget about and then remember with a huge sense of relief -- there I know I'll find something I'll want to read. I scrolled through the list of current articles and noticed a piece by Caitlin Flanagan, and clicked on it eagerly. As I settled in to read it, fork in hand, I shook my head and asked "Why am I doing this to myself? It's just going to make me crazy." But I had to read it.

Caitlin Flanagan is on a mental list I have of writers who I read whenever I can, even though they make me crazy. I've got a little list of such writers. Half the time -- more than half the time -- what they write turns me into a raving loony, pissed about their lack of critical thinking, their shitty writing skills, or some other massive flaw in their work; and yet I read every word I can find by these people. Why is this? Why is this? Why do I do this to myself? It's a form of masochism, right? But why?

And am I the only person who does this?

Flanagan is a writer who seems to inspire this reaction in lots of people, so I can't be alone. I mean, she makes people crazy, but she's still earning a living as a writer. I don't think anyone disputes that she's entertaining; she's got lots of clever sentences, and she seldom sounds simply moronic. But nuanced thinking may not be her strong suit, shall we say. I read her and while I'm laughing at some zinger she's come up with, I often think, "Well, no, that's not really true." And I wind up frustrated with the piece as a whole, even as I agree with several points, or even the thrust of the article overall. Even if I think she's got a good idea, I inevitably feel it's not well argued (which is comical, coming from me, because I am probably the least lucid or organized thinker in my zip code). When someone like me thinks a piece isn't well thought out, you've got problems.

But this phenomenon of "I hate you/I love you/When's your next book coming out" happens to me with fiction writers as well. Over the years, based on my affection for one writer, I've been led to the works of other authors who I've been told, or who I suspect, will quench my never-to-be satisfied thirst for another book by my beloved (ok, it's Laurie Colwin, I admit it). So over time I have read numerous novels that I opened hopefully, but have left me just angry that I wasted my time. Books by Maemeve Medwed -- who are the people who really think these are great? Because I just can't get into them; novels by Cathleen Schine, who I ought to love, but who I just.... don't; Meghan Daum. Oh, Meghan Daum. Her first book of essays made me insane: it was so good, so good, and she was so likeable in so many ways, but I just wanted to smack her on the head and tell her to shape up. I approached her novel The Quality of Life Report with apprehension, knowing on the one hand that it would almost certainly suck, but positive that I would devour it in maybe one and a half sittings. I was right on the money. Why did I do this to myself? I could have been reading something I actually enjoyed; instead, I forced myself to read this novel that held no surprises, no phrase that stuck in my head forever after (not true with My Misspent Youth, a collection of pieces that rings in my head all the time). I received her book about house hunting for my birthday last year and was so excited to read it, even as I knew it would disappoint -- and my suspicions were fulfilled. I opened it immediately and couldn't stop reading but in the end I was left feeling like I hadn't read anything at all.

It's very frustrating.

There's a test I have, though, which is, Do you keep your copies of the books by these people, or do you get rid of them (or never even buy them in the first place, but just borrow them from the library).

Cathleen Schine, I've kept one novel (last year's The Three Weissmans of Westport). There are no Medwed books on my shelves.

I'm keeping all my Meghan Daum.

Why do I read writers whose works I know I won't like? It's not like I'm getting paid to read these things (usually). I keep hoping for the next Veronica Geng, Laurie Colwin, James Thurber, or Patrick Dennis. I'm not looking for cosmic enlightenment, folks; just some solid light entertainment. I guess I'll just have to let you know when I find it, and in the meantime, re-read some Betty MacDonald. She's good on a cold winter day.

Enjoying New Haven: A Guide to the Area by Betsy Sledge and Eugenia Fayen

The closing of Clark's Dairy, and the news that Rudy's will be relocating to a location that bears absolutely no resemblance to the place it's been since it opened in 1934, have bummed me out significantly, but I think I can handle it. What made me realize I had to snap out of it (particularly in regard to Clark's) was the act of stumbling on a copy of Enjoying New Haven: A Guide to the Area, by Betsy Sledge and Eugenia Fayen. This is a little paperback that I remember my parents having a copy of in the late 1980s. I don't think I ever looked at it then but I do remember throwing it out when they moved out of their apartment downtown. The edition I remember -- and which is now sitting on the desk next to me -- is from 1989 and was published by Sledge and Fayen as East Rock Press, Ltd., and it is a fine little guide to the city with some really lovely prints. I found a copy of it a couple of Saturdays ago. I had spent the day at the Institute Library, a wonderful quiet place to go when you need a place that's wonderful and quiet, and on leaving, I went into the English Building Market, which is a couple of doors down. I cruise the place fairly regularly but hardly ever do I look at the books; however, this book caught my eye: I thought, "Oh, what the hell," and bought it.

So let me tell you: reading a guide to New Haven from 1989 is a trip. It's really a strange experience. I found myself remembering shops that I had really and truly forgotten about, though they were once landmarks of downtown New Haven. Scribbles, a shop on Chapel Street, beneath the Yale Center for British Art: you went there for stupid doodads, stickers, obscene greeting cards, and other things no sane person would spend money on. I'd forgotten all about that place. And what makes that awful is, I actually worked there briefly. For about two days. The job was so deplorable that, at the age of 16, I phoned them and said, "Yeah, hi, I won't be coming in. No, I don't need to pick up the paycheck. Keep it." I never wanted to set foot in there again.

How could I have forgotten about Scribbles? And yet I did.

The guide mentions Gentree's, a fairly dignified restaurant that used to be on York Street, in a building that no longer exists because Yale tore it down. It was on York near Chapel, a site now housing the new part of the Art and Architecture school. Gentree's was originally a men's clothing store; I own an overcoat from there, which I acquired at a tag sale on Orange Street simply because I wanted an article of clothing with the Gentree's label. The men's shop closed, and somehow Gentree's was re-conceived as a restaurant, the kind of place where you could get decent burgers and serious drinks. Plants; dark wood; 80s yuppie heaven. Gentree's closed, and I was sad; it wasn't that it was such a great restaurant, but it was reliable. Fitzwilly's, which was on the corner of Park and Elm Streets, was a similar establishment, but much larger, and I was very sorry when they closed, too.

And the Old Heidelberg! Which is now a Thai restaurant! How can it be that the Old Heidelberg is a Thai restaurant? Well, it is the case, my friends. Been that way since 1991. Which means that the Old Heidelberg has been gone for almost twenty years. Which means that there's at least one generation of people to whom that space has "always" been a Thai restaurant.

A sobering thought.

New Haven is, I suspect, no different from any other small city, or even town, in this regard: any business establishment that opens and then lasts longer than three to five years becomes, simply out of its survival, an institution. Some institutions are more entrenched than others: Rudy's may thrive in its new spot, but it won't be Rudy's, really; it'll be something else -- but even so, you know that for the next ten years, there will be people sitting around bars around town going, "Man, remember Rudy's, that night when...." I know that's how it is with the Grotto, a club on lower Crown Street that closed in I think 1988 or maybe it was 1989. New Haven is filled with sentimental chumps like me who remember every club, every restaurant they ever ate at, every store where they ever bought shoes, and lament their closings. If you don't believe me, there is proof on Facebook, even about the shoe store: Cheryl Andresen's shop Solemate, which started on State Street and moved to York Street, is much missed by many. I still wear shoes I bought from Cheryl and her shop closed in 2000. Are people more sentimental in New Haven than in other places? I have no idea. But when I meet someone who has been here a long time, inevitably our first conversation includes a litany of "do you remembers": the Daily Caffe; the Willoughby's on Chapel Street; The Moon on Whalley; the Third World International Cafe... it's always sort of romantic, actually, these conversations. We woo each other with our memory banks of the Nine Squares and the streets that radiate from it. Tight friendships are born out of these shared memories of places long gone.

Mamoun's is still here. Mysteriously, Clarie's Corner Copia is still here. Ashley's is here. All true.

But I miss Thomas Sweet. I miss the pancake restaurant that used to be on York Street. (Not the crepe place; I mean the pancake place; it was where Bangkok Gardens is.) And don't even get me started on the bookstores.

My Baby just wrote me a letter.

Continuing a theme: on letter writing: I’ve written and mailed two handwritten cards in the last few days, and I’ve been a magnet, recently, for books about letters. One is a book that came out a couple of years ago, Other People’s Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant to See, edited by Bill Shapiro. The other was Ben Greenman’s forthcoming collection of short stories, What He’s Poised to Do.

Bill Shapiro’s book appeared before me, in perfect condition, at a tag sale. I’m not sure it had ever been read. It had almost certainly been given as a romantic gift to someone (the book lacked an inscription, so I can’t prove that; but experience as a bookseller tells me the odds are good). The book looked unread. Clearly the owner had decided, “All right: enough’s enough, I don’t need this anymore.” And the book was banished to the church tag sale donation pile, along with old children’s books, dogeared and chewed up, and bad cookbooks, bought with good intentions but never used.

I bought it because its appearance was, I felt, a Sign. A few days previous to this, an old friend of mine -- someone with whom I engaged in extensive written correspondence for years and years (we now communicate, sporadically, via email) sent me a copy of Ben Greenman’s forthcoming collection of short stories. My friend clearly thought, “Hm, stories about letters. Who would want to read this? Oh: Eva.” I’m not sure what this says about me, but I’ll take it. The book was sent, received, and read pretty much in the same little windows of time in which I acquired and read the Bill Shapiro book, and it’s been an interesting little experiment, continuing what seems to be an ongoing concern of mine: what it means to write letters to anyone these days.

I don’t have any hard and fast proclamations on the subject but one thing is clear to me: people can say all they want that letter writing is dead, but it clearly is not.

Shapiro’s book is fascinating in that voyeuristic way you’d expect. It’s fun to leaf through -- some of the letters are just beautiful to behold, some of them are really works of comic genius, and some of them are gut-wrenchingly sad; you remember every stage of your own roller-coaster ride through romantic life as you go through the book -- but it’s not a book I lingered over.

Greenman’s book, on the other hand, is more of a challenge. The book isn’t a collection of letters; it’s a book wherein letters are central characters in their own right. The fourteen stories in What He’s Poised to Do are set in different places and different times. Each story starts with its title and a postmark serving as a dateline (“Seventeen Different Ways to Get a Load of That,” Lunar City, 1989; “Against Samantha,” New York City, 1928), which is a nice touch.

I’m afraid that, the older I get, the less good I am with fiction. I read it less and less, and I have a harder time just enjoying it. So I balked, a little, but I found Greenman’s collection houses really delicately good pieces. This will not surprise Greenman’s fans. He is a nimble and clever writer. His essays are always a pleasure to read; I now would actually like to go take a look at the novel he recently published, Please Step Back.

In What He’s Poised to Do, there were several stories that left me uninterested, unintrigued, completely, in what the characters had to say. But then, others crawled into my head and wouldn’t leave. Greenman’s collection is noteworthy. To elaborate on that much would, I feel, crush the stories -- they’re kind of like butterflies that way -- but the last story in the book, “Her Hand,” really struck me particularly. I read it once and immediately read it again, though it was hardly heartwarming. It’s a four page long quiet sigh of resignation.

The personally-directed written word -- letter, postcard, email -- written to be read by one person and one person only, is alive and well. Even if reading it doesn’t always make you happy. I’m going to go listen to the Bay City Rollers’ “Rock and Roll Love Letter,” followed by the Box Top’s “The Letter,” and see if I can cheer myself up.

A short consideration of romance in New Haven

Fellow New Haven Review contributor Nora Nahid Khan recently wrote an article for the New Haven Advocate about the futility of attempting to find romance in New Haven. (Link here: sorry, I can't seem to get the link function to work right now: http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/commentary/love-new-haven )

I know what she's talking about. I really and truly do. Romantic life in New Haven when you're in your twenties can be beyond frustrating. I assume it doesn't get any better or more fun when you're in your thirties or forties. But the fact that I am writing this from the perspective of a married person -- and, I might add, a pretty happily married person -- indicates that romance in New Haven is possible, does happen, and can even end in happy marriage. Don't despair, Nora.

That said, even with all my memories of romantic frustration (experienced primarily between 1993 and 1998), my own personal experience has left me littered with so many romantic memories of New Haven -- especially downtown New Haven -- that I can't help but say, "It's not that New Haven isn't romantic. It's that somehow people have lost their ability to notice romantic things when they're happening; because what matters isn't where you are, exactly, it's what's in your head, and what you are willing to do or say." The New Haven Nora finds so unromantic is the same New Haven where I had my first kiss (which was, I feel, a very romantic moment). Naples Pizza is where I had my (sort of) first date, which, okay, was not such a success (the guy showed up stoned, not exactly the way to win my heart). But matters did improve. Through my teens and twenties, romance was about walking around downtown aimlessly, looking into shop windows, stopping to sit and do nothing useful or noble on Beinecke Plaza or on the steps of a nearby secret society; going to Mamoun's at a ridiculous hour; sitting on the front stoop of my apartment on a sweltering August night, looking across the street to Rudy's, drinking a black cherry soda; sitting on the front porch of the apartment in East Rock reading and watching a massive rainstorm pass over us. And there were many public displays of affection. Many. I don't know where Nora's looking, but I see public displays of affection and romance all over the place. And I could tell you stories.

I will say that trying to find a viable mate in New Haven is difficult; this is a subject I've discussed ad nauseam with several people over the years. It is sometimes assumed that, since I am a local, I met my husband here in New Haven. My standard line on this is, "No, I had to import a husband." Though New Haven is filled with single people looking for mates, I apparently did not meet the elusive standards of the single men I chatted with, day in and day out, while working in a bookstore downtown. I suppose grad students are looking for more ambitious types than the type of girl who'd while away her time working at a bookstore the way I did. But it still stung, to be passed over, over and over again. I wonder if the people in their twenties looking for mates who Nora's looking at are people who are looking for mate, sure, but not (sorry) wholeheartedly, because they're putting more effort into looking for professional success.

It wasn't that long ago that I was, like Nora, bemoaning my singleness and wondering if I'd have to move across the country to find a boyfriend (I didn't). And I have lots of friends, male and female, who talk to me all the time about how it sucks to be dating in New Haven. I always say, "I know. I know." Because I do know. But I also think that things change; we change; and, New Haven being what it is, the available pool changes. Romantic life in New Haven is very, very possible, and can be more wonderful than you'd imagine. Give it time, and in the meantime, be grateful you're not paying New York rent while you suffer through your romantically-challenged years.

Slow Mail, the Letter Writers Alliance, and My Cousin Down the Street

One of my favorite people in New Haven is my second cousin Andy, who happens to live two blocks away from us, down the street, with his wife, Karen. Lest you think this is all about how wonderfully tight-knit my family is, and how great it is we live so near to one another, blah blah blah, let me jump right in and say that it sounds that way, but in fact, it's not true, and the reality is weirder. Andy grew up in Chicago and I never even met him until I was 25 years old. He moved to New Haven about four years ago because of Karen, who, it turns out, grew up just outside of New Haven. But they met in Ann Arbor and courted there, and as for their winding up living two blocks away, that was a total fluke. Karen landed a job in Westport, and rents there were so high that they chose to live in New Haven instead. And the nicest apartment they saw, when they were looking around, was on my street. So heigh-ho, here's my cousin Andy and his wife Karen, and we see them all the time, and believe you me, our parents are all thrilled. It's very cozy. Andy and Karen are completely brilliant and wonderful people and they prove it to me on a fairly frequent basis, the most recent of which was when Andy suggested that there be created a Slow Mail movement, akin to the Slow Food movement. As someone who has pontificated at some length about the glory of letter writing, and how sad it is we don't do it more, I glommed onto this right away, of course. (I'm sure Mark Oppenheimer would too -- I seem to recall hearing his NPR-friendly voice over NPR airwaves recently talking about this very subject.) Andy posted a status line on Facebook saying something along the lines of "Hey: Slow Mail. Anyone else think this is a great idea?" And he generated more than a few comments, among them someone's suggesting that he do a Google search for something called the Letter Writers Alliance.

Well, I don't know if Andy ever did that Google search, but I sure as hell did, and within an hour I'd convinced myself to join the organization. If you go to http://www.16sparrows.com/shop/Letter-Writers-Alliance.html then you too can join the LWA. It doesn't cost a lot of money, which is good, because it's kind of a silly thing to do, but boy, when I got my packet in the mail from them, I thought, "This is worth every penny."

The LWA was founded by some stationers who make what they describe as "greetings cards for sarcastic, quirky folks." (That phrase along made me desperately wish that I was still the buyer for Atticus; how I would have loved to put these cards on display.) So they've got a lot of snarky cards, which are way fun (if, all right, not for everybody), and clever stationery designs, and then they've got the LWA, which has a mission statement as follows:

"In this era of instantaneous communication, a handwritten letter is a rare and wondrous item. The Letter Writers Alliance is dedicated to preserving this art form; neither long lines, nor late deliveries, nor increasing postal rates will keep us from our mission.

As a member of the Letter Writers Alliance, you will carry on the glorious cultural tradition of letter writing. You will take advantage of every opportunity to send tangible correspondence. Prepare your pen and paper, moisten your tongue, and get ready to write more letters!"

I have several friends who gave up Facebook for Lent. One of them, a guy who lives in Idaho, sent me a Facebook message about two weeks before Lent began, asking if I would write to him, on paper, during Lent. I said, "Of course!" I did, using LWA stationery. I admit that I didn't use a fountain pen, but even so, it was a pleasure.

John Thorne Doesn't Live in California

If you're not interested in food skip this piece. No, I take that back. You don't have to be interested in food as in Food. What I want is people who like to eat. Do you like to eat? Good, then keep reading.

Everyone talks about Alice Waters. Alice Waters this, Alice Waters that. Berkeley is Heaven (unless you're Caitlin Flanagan, in which case it seems to be a special circle of hell, and I don't know why she doesn't move to the East Coast, but there it is). Fa la la la la la. I'm tired of it, and I am really damned tired of reading proclamations on food and eating from someone who just can't seem to get it that most of the country does not live in Berkeley, California. I know I'm not the only person who's got serious Alice Waters Fatigue. So for those of you who like to eat, and to Eat, and who like food and Food, and who like reading about it, let me make a recommendation. I promise I'm not about to tell you to read Michael Pollan.

Please go read any book by John Thorne.

I know he gets reviewed sometimes Big Places and I'm always so thrilled for him. The food magazines have always sung his praises. But at the same time, not once in my life have I ever talked to someone who knew who he was. I've never had someone idly look at my bookshelves and see all the John Thorne and go, "Oh, you like him too?"

I had no idea who John Thorne was until I read Laurie Colwin (sorry to bring up her name again, but it's true); in one of her cookbooks she mentions a pumpkin tian that he wrote about. I have no interest in eating pumpkin so I didn't really think about John Thorne again until several years later when I was browsing in a bookstore (why do I remember this? it was Atticus) while coming down with a cold. On a whim I bought Thorne's Simple Cooking, and while nursing my cold at home I read the book from cover to cover and could not believe how incredibly good it was.

I mean not that it was an incredibly useful and informative cookbook -- which it is -- but that it was just so well written. John Thorne is, hands down, in my top five American writers writing today. But nobody reads him except diehard foodies (as far as I can tell). Even though he's smart and opinionated and reasonable and funny and wonderful. Even though the books are beautifully designed, about as appealing as books can be (all published, I think, by Farrar, Straus, Giroux, and designed by Jonathan Lippincott, who's from New Haven by the way; Lippincott has designed some of the most handsome books in my recent memory, and Thorne's are right up there)...

One of the great things -- the noble things -- about John Thorne is that he writes about food that is born out of and meant to be eaten in climates harsher than the Bay Area. Thorne currently lives in Maine, I believe (or maybe the Berkshires, I can't remember now); he's writing always about food for cold climates. Food in places that really do have four very distinct seasons, maybe even plus mud season. Which is a totally different thing from what Alice Waters is always pontificating about, which is food in what would be for most of us a seriously alternate reality. John Thorne's reality is much more like mine. It's sloppy. It's not really very virtuous. It's not about having truffles on hand at all times, or mincing about talking about the divine walnut oil I found in the South of France. It's about buying a bag of beans because it's cheap and then figuring out the best way to make the best damn meal out of it (his chapter on baked beans -- oh, how I love it, almost as much as I love baked beans). Foodies who are in New Haven ought to read John Thorne, for sure, but foodies everywhere who want an antidote for Alice Waters Fatigue (not recognized by the DSM-V, but maybe in future editions) should please go find his books.

Simple Cooking Outlaw Cook Serious Pig Pot on the Fire Mouth Wide Open

The Yale Murder. Not that one. The other one.

I noticed in the New York Times an obituary for Jack Litman, an attorney who defended a lot of people who weren't such nice people. He handled a few notorious murder trials, and the Times named two in particular: one, the Robert Chambers/Jennifer Levin trial, "the Preppy Murder," which I actually remember, dimly (I was a teenager when it happened), and also a murder trial that was called "the Yale Murder." It was interesting to me that the Times made a point of referring to the Yale Murder, because, what with the latest big Yale murder, the Annie Le case, in all the coverage of that case I kept looking in the media for a reference to the earlier murder, and never saw it. I would have thought that someone would have brought it up, but, no, it never happened.

The only reason I know about the Yale Murder is that someone once asked me to locate a copy of the true crime book that it inspired. I located a copy for the customer, and then, because I like reading true crime, I got another copy for myself (finding it by chance at a junk shop, ironically, after putting actual effort into finding the customer his copy). I still have it. It's a bright magenta mass market paperback. Presumably for legal reasons the publisher was prevented from using Yale blue...

Now out of print, the book tells the story of the people involved in the case -- Richard Herrin and Bonnie Garland, two Yale undergrads who were involved in a relationship that had a bad ending (when Herrin killed Garland in her parents' Westchester house). This happened in the 1970s, and while I was here at the time, I was too young to have been aware of it.

I find it sort of weird that the "original" Yale Murder has become such an obscure historical fact, even here in New Haven, where I feel like we all have such long memories for things like this. People talk about Penny Serra like it happened yesterday. But the "Yale Murder"? Nope.

Maybe it's because Bonnie Garland wasn't actually murdered in New Haven. But even so. Even so. It's a Yale crime. Where did it go in our collective memories? Bonnie Garland is now, it seems, just a little note in Jack Litman's obituary.

I don't read poetry.

For someone who's made a living for a long time talking about books and being looked at as a wide, eager reader, an odd reality is the fact that no one has ever believed me when I've tried patiently to explain that there are entire categories of writing I truly never think about. Whole genres are of basically no interest to me. I might know a little about them, be able to recognize some big names, might even be able to steer people who're into a particular genre toward something that they might like -- while I myself never go near the stuff. In general, I do not read mysteries or science fiction or fantasy; I don't read military or political history or self-help books; the only travel writer I've ever read willingly is Bill Bryson, who hardly counts, in my view, since I think he's really a humorist; and I don't read poetry. I don't even think of poetry as being important most of the time. It's an indulgence. Usually a whiny indulgence, I feel. It's navel-gazing, I think to myself in my nastier moments. And usually so humorless, and undisciplined. Who needs it? (Don't try to argue with me; just chalk it up to personal taste and move on; the point of this is really not to debate the value of poetry or poetry reading, just to make it clear that, ok, I've got this bias, it's ugly, and I admit it.)

There are some poems I am attached to, though, and there are a handful of mystery novels I love and read over and over again. I've yet to find a science fiction novel that interested me, though. And military history? Um.... no. Hasn't happened for me yet. But you never know; I was thinking I might read Charlie Wilson's War some day, and even thinking that thought was a major step.

That said: I am a huge, huge, huge fan of Nicholson Baker, and have been since his first book came out in the late 1980s. I was a clerk at Atticus when The Mezzanine came out, and I read it (god knows what brought it to my attention, but I bought it, and I read it over and over again). Since then I have devoured almost all of his books. Some of them are on my yearly re-read list. I admit I couldn't get through Checkpoint, and I was never able to spring for his book on newspapers, and I haven't read Human Smoke (the subject matter didn't really appeal to me, but maybe I'll get it to it someday). Otherwise, though, my rule of thumb is, If Nicholson Baker's left his fingerprints on something, I want to get my hands on it as soon as possible.

So my perfect husband gave me The Anthologist recently -- Baker's new novel. I had planned to save it to read while on vacation next week. However, I was unable to wait and I'm now closing in on the end of the book, reading it in snips when not traveling or preparing for a New Year's Eve shindig or cleaning up and recovering from said shindig. And here's what blows my mind about this -- I am tearing through this book even though it's about poetry. It's about poetry, for god's sake. I don't give a crap about poetry. And I really don't give a crap about poets who write about nature, possibly my least-favorite subject in the world - yet Nicholson Baker has managed the impossible, which is to get me to utter the following sentence: "I think I might read some Mary Oliver one of these days."

I'm now packing for my vacation and selecting the books that will come with me -- only a few, as the place where we're going has bookstores I plan to peruse at length. But we'll be taking The Anthologist with us on the trip -- my husband (another Baker fan) is going to read it as soon as I'm done.

Nicholas Rombes, again. But it's relevant, I promise.

I learned recently about an interesting little plot regarding literature (or, at least, literary writing) and getting real mail, which is, as you can tell, kind of a thing with me. (Previously in this forum I've talked about letter writing and how no one does it anymore. Only, and happily, to be proven wrong by a reader of this very website.) It seems that Nicholas Rombes, who wrote the Cultural Dictionary of Punk I wrote about here a few months ago, is writing a novel called Nightmare Trails at Knifepoint, and he plans to publish and distribute it via the U.S. Postal Service. In other words, it's a serial that will reach its readers via snail mail. He's publicizing his work via the web, and signing up subscribers that way, but the readers will receive their chapters in the mail, along with their bills and L.L. Bean catalogues and flyers about political candidates. (I don't know about you but that's mostly what's in our mailbox.)

I think Rombes is a little crazy to do this, but you know what? Good for him. It's a weird little experiment but I can't think of any good reason why he shouldn't do it. I wonder how many subscribers he'll get. I bet some people will sign up simply for the pleasure of receiving mail that isn't a bill or something sent at bulk rate. I'm tempted, myself.

Loose Ends, Now Tied

In previous essays here at the New Haven Review, I've written about the death of letter writing and about my misty memories of flyers around downtown that proclaimed "New Haven is the Paris of the 80s." I wondered who it was that put up those flyers, and thanked them for their efforts, and expected nothing to follow. Yesterday I got quite shock when I received in the mail -- via the U.S. Postal Service -- an actual, real, hand-addressed letter from a man who tells me that he did it. He's the "New Haven is the Paris of the 80s" guy. Somehow he found my entry here from months ago, and he wrote me a letter to thank me for it.

Made my day. Hell: made my week.

The mystery is solved, my friends. I'm not going to reveal his identity, but I want you all to know, all is well, and the world is now, in my view, a slightly better place than it was twenty-four hours ago.

Shirley Jackson Gets Hers

Some months ago, I wrote a little thing for the New Haven Review about my love for Shirley Jackson's book Life Among the Savages. I've just gone back and looked at the date on the piece (which can be found here on the website) and my word, it was almost a year ago I wrote that tribute. Goodness. I've lost track of time in precisely the same way that Shirley Jackson lost track of her blankets. Well, in a recent Wall Street Journal, John J. Miller wrote an article about Jackson which will get a lot more attention than anything I'd ever write about Shirley Jackson, and I wanted to thank him for writing the piece because from it I learned some really good news. The Library of America is going to publish a collection of Shirley Jackson's work. Though I see no mention of the book on the Library of America website or on Amazon.com, the book is apparently scheduled for a June 2010 release. I for one am looking forward to it.

I miss my clotheslines.

When we moved to this house in 2002 one of the things I liked about it was that it came with two clotheslines attached to it, stretching from the back porches (first and second floors) to a very tall maple tree in the backyard. I'm not someone who uses a clothesline because I think it's environmentally correct, though I'm sure it is. I'm someone who likes a clothesline because of two things: one, sometimes I am seized by fits of cheapness and don't want to pay for the electricity to run the dryer; and two (much more important to me, really), I own things that get laundered regularly that cannot be put in the dryer. Namely, I own a lot of old linens and tablecloths and these things would suffer horrible indignities if tumble-dried. What they need is a clothesline. A drying rack will do for smaller things like tea towels or handkerchiefs or pillowcases, but when we're talking hand-embroidered sheets and and tablecloths, what you want is a long, long clothesline you can spread the fabric across just so, so that you can then hear the fabric snapping neatly in the breeze. No wrinkles. Nice. Ideally, all of these articles are spread artfully down the line, a little of this, a little of that.

Some weeks ago we realized that the maple tree behind our house was rotting and a hazard -- not in an immediate sense, probably, but we were alarmed sufficiently that we called an arborist and arranged to have the thing hacked down. I am now without a clothesline. My husband claims to feel bad for me, but I know he doesn't; he hated my clotheslines. (I hadn't installed them, mind you, but of all the residents in this house, I was the only one who used the lines, so they're "mine.") I am told that some day, when we get a new fence, we'll have a post installed that's tall enough that I'll be able to have my clotheslines again.

I'm not holding my breath.

In the meantime, I'm looking out the window and thinking about how I need to do laundry, and how, if I had my clotheslines, it would be a perfect day for it: it's sunny, the air is crisp, and there's a nice breeze going -- just enough to make my pretty tea towels and tablecloths flap around, but not so much to knock them off the lines.

I know some people are offended by the sight of clotheslines, and I suppose I could understand it if I were hanging out the family's unmentionables, but -- is anyone offended by the sight of tea towels and tablecloths waving in the breeze? The occasional handkerchief that's embroidered with violets or "Edna"? I just can't imagine it. The linens are so pretty to look at on the clothesline. Walking around the neighborhood this morning I saw other people's things on their clotheslines -- not vintage linens, either, just t-shirts and jeans and towels. It made me jealous. I miss my clotheslines.

A post-holiday musing on Jewish literature: Paul Rudnick is my Isaac Bashevis Singer

Come the High Holidays, as previously mentioned, I re-read certain books; the cycle is repeated around Passover. This year's High Holiday season gave me more time than usual to contemplate my personal canon of Jewish literature. My thinking was further prodded by reading in the New York Times of the death of Paul Rudnick's mother. Rudnick wrote one of the books high on my list, a novel called I'll Take It, which is about a young man traveling through New England one October with his mother and her two sisters. They're ostensibly leaf-peepers, but Joe and his mother have an agenda, which is to rob L.L. Bean so that she can get the money to redecorate the living room. I love this book but feel like no one's ever read it except me and my mother. The voracious reader's canon of Jewish literature apparently always has on it Serious Major Works by Serious Writers. I did a casual survey via Facebook (that tells you a lot right there) asking "What Jewish writers or books make up your personal Jewish canon?" Oddly, more Gentiles than Jews responded. But overwhelmingly the names were just what you'd expect to see on a college syllabus for a course entitled "Survey of 20th Century Jewish Literature." Potok; Singer; Roth; Bellow. I was bored thinking about this. One young woman, the brilliant Bekah Dickstein, posted a response immediately that warmed my heart, though: S.J. Perelman. Oh, yes.

To Bekah's eminently sensible suggestion, let me tack on my own list, a short list that came to me with shocking speed once I started thinking about it.

Sydney Taylor's All of a Kind Family books, which are the best way I know to introduce anyone to the Jewish calendar, to Jewish rites and rituals, and to the world of immigrant Jewish life in the early 20th century. The books are written with humor and love and the illustrations (in three of the books by Mary Stevens, in one by Beth and Joe Krush) are imprinted in my head. The Stevens illustrations have a delicacy that I particularly love.

Paul Rudnick's I'll Take It. There will, I'm sure, be someone out there's who's read this and who will be offended by my putting this on my list, saying, "It perpetuates negative Jewish stereotypes" or something like that. Well, it does. On the other hand, it's incredibly funny. Rudnick wrote this before he got big as a screenwriter and the number of genius throwaway lines in here is just astounding.

E.L. Konigsburg's About the B'nai Bagels: a Young Adult novel about little league, being bar mitzvah'd, and stuffed cabbage. Illustrated by Konigsburg, this is one of her earlier titles, and one which I feel gets short shrift, possibly because most people feel its appeal is too specific. That may be. But I don't give a crap about baseball and I read this book all the time.

Rebecca Goldstein's The Mind-Body Problem. I admit I haven't read this in quite a few years but I've always really liked this book. I enjoyed it a lot more than her other novels, which got a little too brainy for me, and I freely admit I've never read any of her non-fiction (what, like I'm going to read a book about Spinoza?).

A recent addition to the Eva Geertz canon of Jewish literature is Elinor Lipman's The Inn at Lake Devine, another light comic novel, about anti-Semitism in America in the 1960s and 1970s. Somehow that sentence strikes me as sounding absurd and heavy-handed, but really, that's what it is.

The essays of Fran Lebowitz are on my list. Judy Blume's Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself would make the cut.

Someone pointed out to me that my list is essentially bigoted, that I've got a bad attitude about people like Roth and Bellow, etc. etc. "Just because they're on everyone else's list doesn't mean they're not worth reading," he said, more or less accusing me of being a snot and a whiner. I'm not saying they're not worth reading though; what I'm saying is that I don't personally want to curl up with a little Saul Bellow when I'm looking for a comforting read. This is not material I'd read for fun, entertainment, relaxation, or escapism. I don't want books that try to ask or answer Big Questions. If anything, clearly, I'm interested in books that will say, "Ok, so, there are Big Questions. Very nice, all well and good but -- do you want another slide of babka? A cup of coffee? I can heat up the milk for you if you want."

Browsing the Shop Windows on Memory Lane

A number of threads in my life wove themselves together in recent days and it was all about shopping downtown. The New Yorker ran an article by Patricia Marx that name-checked the old punk boutique Bonnie and Clyde—it was on Chapel Street, I think in the space where Wave Gallery is now. The article was talking about a boutique in Chicago that's named after the store (which they said was in Stamford, but really I think they meant New Haven, unless there was a sister store in Stamford I'm not remembering) and I thought, "Man, Bonnie and Clyde. I've got stuff from there." And I do—I have a dress I still wear, and a military-issue shoulder bag that I last used two weeks ago. Bonnie and Clyde was, I think the first place I bought Manic Panic at—hair dye—a habit I found very hard to break.

Then the other weekend I was at Fashionista. If you don't know about Fashionista—well, maybe you don't care, if you're someone who isn't interested in buying other people's old clothes, shoes, jewelry, or cigarette cases—well, ok, but: Fashionista is just something to behold. It's a vintage clothing store run by Nancy Shea and Todd Lyon and it's a more spacious and better lit version of the Ritz, which was a vintage clothing store on Broadway once upon a time. Need an old tuxedo? They're there for you. Ball gown? Not a problem. Kicky little sheath dress? Purple suede elbow-length gloves to go with the sheath dress (or the tuxedo, for that matter)?

You simply never know.

I bought a dress at Fashionista few years ago. I get compliments on it all the time. But it's the damnedest article of clothing I own: it is made out of an old leopard print bathrobe. I love it. It's frumpy and amazing at the same time. When it falls apart—which it will, one of these days; how long can a bathrobe really last?—I will be heartbroken.

So I was at Fashionista a few days ago talking with Nancy and Todd about Bonnie and Clyde, which they remembered, and suddenly Todd said, "Wait, I've gotta show you something." She ran to a rack of men's overcoats and pulled out a coat that had an interesting label on it. I wish I could remember now exactly what it said, but it said that it was made for the Edward Malley Company, a department store that used to be right across the street from where Fashionista is now located (on lower Church). The line of clothing was something like "The Churchstreeter." I guess it was a particular line of men's outerwear or something. Todd cradled the coat and said, "Look: it came home."

For some years I've been acquiring clothes at second hand shops in part because I liked the clothes but also because I liked the labels, which told their own version of the history of retail in downtown New Haven. I have a dress (I wore it to a prom in 1985 I think) from Kramer's—I bought it at a second hand shop State Street. If you ask nicely maybe I'll show you a picture of me wearing it—high necked, but slit to here, head to toe paisley and head to toe sequins. It's a nightmare. I'm never going to sell it. I'd like to be buried in it, if possible. It's a great dress made all the more dear by the Kramer's label.

I've got a shirt from the Arthur Rosenberg company; they used to give J. Press a run for their money. I've got an overcoat from Gentree's, from before Gentree's was a restaurant—it was a men's clothing store. (Now, of course, it is nothing; Yale tore down the building and it's, I don't know, part of the new art building or something.) I have a hatbox from the Edward Malley company, as well as a very lovely cotton button down shirt from them.

Small shops no longer have products with their own labels in them. You don't buy a dress from Hello Boutique that has a label sewn in saying "Hello Boutique - New Haven." But it used to be clothes were marked that way. You can find very fine quality jackets with labels that seem improbable now: "Manufactured for ... in Derby, Connecticut." Derby, Connecticut?

I hope someone in Derby is collecting clothing labels, too.

The Cultural Dictionary of Punk

You wouldn't say that I was a punk rocker, but my record collection (yes, record collection) seems to have an awful lot of Ramones albums in it. For decades I wore a locket every day with a picture of Joey Ramone in it. I seem to have a weakness for some of the old CBGB's bands. When I need a little pick me up, I play "Atomic" (Blondie, I probably should explain). Really loudly. I feel it is good for my so-called soul. My close friends, and even some casual associates, know this about me, which is why I was surprised -- and then not surprised at all -- when a bookseller friend of mine, Kate H., appeared at my house recently with a book for me. "We got this in," she said, "and -- well -- Here!" Then she stood, waiting, waiting to see the expression on my face when I unwrapped the book (which she had, in excellent style, wrapped in old newsprint).

When I saw The Cultural Dictionary of Punk (recently published by Continuum, the folks who did those completely awesome 33 1/3 books), I think I smiled so big and so hard my cheeks hurt. Kate is a doll. I immediately began flipping through it and knew right away that this was gonna be one FUN book to read.

I read it from cover to cover. Every chance I had, I was sitting down with it: with my morning coffee; with a drink at the end of the day. I had my quibbles with it -- this is a highly subjective little book -- but in general I had to admire Rombes' book, which is passionate and filled with interesting details I didn't know.

I had two real issues with Rombes' work, both of which I had the opportunity to discuss in emails with the author. One is that several entries are really these personal discourses on some obviously serious problems that have arisen in Rombes' life. His family suffered horribly from a traumatic event beyond their control, and I wouldn't dream of trying to dismiss them or anything like that. But the sections relating to them did read sort of weirdly next to entries on the glories of the Ramones first three albums. The juxtaposition was jarring, and it detracted from the force of the book as a whole. I often thought, as I read, that Rombes should have just written The Cultural Dictionary of Punk and then done a shorter, tighter memoir about his family's tragedy, which Rombes admitted to me was probably true. So we'll see what his next project is like.

My second issue (which Rombes is trying to address as I type this) is that the book does not come with a CD (or a list of links to recordings online) of many of the songs Rombes discusses. Over and over again he has long discussions of songs that he describes as, you know, bloodcurdlingly perfect examples of this, that, or the other, and I said, "OH MAN I GOTTA HEAR THAT NOW!" and ran to the computer, only to discover that there was pretty much no way I was gonna hear those songs; they're not available on iTunes, and frankly, with stuff like this, it'd be easy to spend waaay too much time and money hunting down obscure 45s. When I expressed my wish for a CD (impossible) or streaming audio or something like that (more possible, though a lot of work), Rombes took it to heart (others had made the same remark to him), and at his website he has begun to post links to key songs. This is really useful, but it's also, just, you know, really fun.

I want to explain that I don't believe that every song he mentions should be included in this compilation; I mean, anyone can find the first Ramones album, or Marquee Moon (that's Television, people: Television). The average reader of this book doesn't need someone to provide a link to "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" or "Chinese Rocks" or "Venus de Milo"; we've got those internalized pretty well by now, thanks. But there must have been at least a dozen really out there songs by, you know, punk bands from Cleveland or Tulsa -- bands that existed for about three minutes -- that Rombes talked about so tantalizingly that I basically wanted to shoot myself when I wasn't able to listen to them RIGHT THEN.

Well, listen: don't let my griping deter you. If you've got any interest whatsoever in punk rock, punk culture, punk whatever, then this book deserves a half inch of space on your shelf. http://culturaldictionaryofpunk.blogspot.com/

Gitlitz's Bakery on Whalley Avenue

A conversation I was having with someone recently got me to thinking again about Gitlitz's Bakery, which used to be up on Whalley Avenue. It was the opening of Manjares, a new cafe in Westville, that started it again. I think about Gitlitz's all the time, at least once every three weeks, I estimate, but Manjares got me thinking about it again because I suspect it'll be one of those neighborhood bakeries people get all territorial about (if it succeeds, which I ardently hope it will). There's an article in the Independent about it, if you want to read about Ana and her bakery; better yet, go, because Ana is one of the nicest people I've met in recent years....

But anyhow. Gitlitz's. I remember it was on Whalley Avenue in a building that got torn down a few years ago, a sort of art-deco era strip mall. I could be wrong, but I remember a grocery store/produce shop called Paramount one or two doors down from it. The stores all had neon signs that must have been really glitzy when they were first put up. By the time I was a kid, it was kind of seedy looking over there. But my family adored Gitlitz's. My parents still wax rhapsodic over the chocolate birthday cakes they bought there for my older brother. They remember ordering one cake that was decorated to look like a football field. (This is hilarious in retrospect; my brother is not exactly what you'd call a jock, and I don't think my father could name a football team if you asked him, but I guess that's what it's like if you have a little boy -- you get birthday cakes that look like football fields.) There were little football player figurines on the cake and everything. A few years back I vowed to try to replicate this cake for my father's birthday, which we always celebrate at Thanksgiving, and at the (now defunct) Goatville Trading Company I found vintage football player cake decorations. They were all different sizes, so my cake looked a little weird. And I don't know how to draw a football field anyhow (I'm my father's daughter). But, you know, the point was made; everyone understood this cake was a tribute to Gitlitz's, and it was pretty good, too.

So just now I Googled Gitlitz's Bakery and found that someone on Chowhound.com laments the passing of their coconut layer cake, of which I have no memory (I hated coconut when I was a kid), and that Emily Bazelon has an article on Slate.com where she talks about the babka at Edge of the Woods, which she misses now that she lives in DC, and which apparently is made using the old Gitlitz recipe.

Now, the Gitlitz babka was legendary to me growing up. It was perfect. Chocolatey with no annoying distractions like fruit or nuts. Why have I never gotten a babka at Edge of the Woods? Possibly because I only go there twice a year or something (it's not convenient for me; I have recurring dreams about them opening a branch on Willow Street or State Street); however, I have now determined that I will get my ass up there and buy a chocolate babka soon.

But this was it, for online referenes to Gitlitz's. I felt this was a shame -- a shanda, really -- and determined to put my own voice out there in praise of Gitlitz's. Because if I'm doing a Google search for them, there must be thousands of others doing the same thing. (Ok, maybe not thousands. Maybe six people a year do a search for Gitlitz's Bakery. But they're a demographic, too, and I am catering to them, my fellow Gitlitz devotees.)

The other thing that was so important to me at Gitlitz's was something that we always called a pull-apart cake. I have no idea what the bakery itself called this cake. And I've baked cakes that are similar to it. But I've yet to make one that was as perfect as theirs. It was, I suppose, a Jewish variant of what Midwesterners call Monkey Bread. This was an eggy yeast dough, I'm sure, somewhat dry, that was placed in a tube pan in slabs that had been thoroughly coated with some kind of shortening (butter? maybe, but maybe not) and lots of cinnamon sugar. The cake rose in the pan again before baking, and what resulted when you removed the cake from the pan was a cake that didn't require slicing. Each section of cake came away neatly by hand. Grownups ate this with a cup of hot coffee; I remember eating piece after piece while downing glasses of very cold milk. We had this on weekend mornings. (My mother hated to cook but believed that all meals, should come with dessert, not just dinner. I'm not sure how many parenting magazines would advocate this but my brother and I thought it was just fine.) Pull-apart cake was excellent stuff, and you could eat a lot of it because it wasn't cloying and didn't have frosting to distract you from how good the cake was.

I didn't hear about Monkey Bread until I was in college, and when I tasted it I realized that it was a cousin of my lost Pull-apart cake. I started comparing recipes, and making them when I was home, and while they were all pretty good, none of them were quite what I was looking for. Most importantly, the method of piling all the butter-and-sugar-coated dough balls in the pan was so time consuming, and it meant that the shape of the finished cake was never the same as what I had in mind. And the dough wasn't ever quite the same.

I now wonder if maybe it wasn't just challah dough they used in the Pull-apart cake. I will have to investigate this. If anyone has insight or, even better, recipes....

I Had Post

I was reading somewhere (was it in the New Haven Independent? cannot for the life of me remember) that the U.S. Postal Service is suffering financial woes and considering dropping Saturday mail delivery as a cost-cutting measure. Some tiny percentage of the local populace is up in arms about this. I would be one of them, but I frankly don't see that losing Saturday mail delivery would really be the end of the world. Slightly inconvenient, yes; but on the other hand, it would reinforce the idea of a weekend for most people, which might be a good thing, in a small way. I found myself lamenting my own letter-writing habits, or lack thereof in recent years. Ask anyone who knew me from, say, 1983 to 2000 and they will tell you that I wrote more letters than anyone in their right mind would ever wright. Anyone with a life would not have written so many letters. But I wrote letters. Boy howdy did I write letters. Long letters, handwritten, often with fountain pens; long letters, single-spaced, on a typewriter (and later on a computer). I typed on postcards, I typed on onion skin to friends overseas, I typed on anything I could wrap around the cartridge thingy on my typewriter (which I still own). I remember writing a letter on a barf bag, once, when I was on an airplane, though I have no recollection now of to whom I was writing.

And I saved all the letters I received back. I have boxes of these things, and while I can imagine throwing out some memorabilia from my life I cannot imagine throwing out those letters.

So I'm an incurable romantic on the subject of written correspondence. But at the same time -- when was the last time I wrote a letter? Well, actually (and I write this a little sheepishly, because it takes away from my argument a little), it was in the last ten days; I wrote a letter to a woman in Vermont. I had fun picking out a card that had an illustration on it I knew she'd like, and when I filled up all the space in the card I got out some loose notepaper and continued on that. And I am confident that she was happy to unlock her PO box and find that handwritten letter waiting for her.

We're all made so happy by real letters and postcards. We were twenty years ago, when they were pretty much normal; now we're made even more so because they're so unusual. So how come we're all so lazy and can't be bothered to write real letters? If a diehard like me is too lazy to write a letter, what hope is there for anyone else?

I am reminded of a phenomenon from my bookseller days when I would mail books to customers; I always made a point of including a handwritten note with the book, just to acknowledge the customer, to be friendly. I was always surprised by how happy this made people -- who knew that a little three sentence note could make someone so happy? One shop I worked at mailed catalogues periodically, and I was in the habit of writing out all the addresses on the envelopes, and people even commented to us on the handwritten mailing addresses. It was something we'd done because we were too cheap or too disorganized to set up for computer-printed mailing labels, but it turned out to be a piece of really good marketing.

I could try to make a vow to start writing one letter a week to someone from now on, but let's not fool ourselves: I wouldn't be able to keep that vow. Still, I feel bad that I'm not the letter writer I once was.

George Selden vs. Roland Barthes

One of the weird things, I've found, about becoming a parent is that people keep saying to me -- this started when I was pregnant -- "Oh, now you'll have the fun of re-reading all your favorite books from when you were little! Won't that be great?" Well, sure. But the thing is, I never stopped re-reading all my favorite books from when I was little. At my bedside table are at least thirty books, but one of them -- it actually lives in the table's drawer -- is a copy of Corduroy by Don Freeman. It's a newer copy I bought at the Foundry Bookstore; my original childhood copy fell apart aeons ago. This is a book that I have taken out every few months to read to myself at bedtime. My husband has gotten used to my showing him some of my favorite pictures to him: "Doesn't he look just so sad??? Poor Corduroy..."

It is true that one of the best parts of being mother to my daughter is reading to her and watching her learn to appreciate books, though at this point she's most interested in tearing them or standing on them, only once or twice a day actually sitting down and pretending to really read them. (She's good at mimicking the sound of me reading to her, though.) But the idea that I left my children's books behind when I reached the age of 13 or something is just moronic. I can't imagine doing that. I know most people do, but I think it's a real shame. Most people also think re-reading in general is a waste of time, but I don't. Most books are a waste of time; usually my feeling is, You might as well focus on the ones you love, and read them until they fall apart, like my beloved copy of Corduroy.

I did not keep all of my books from my childhood and youth; my family moved a couple of times, and that meant deaccessioning. But I have easily three shelves' worth of books from my own childhood and I do re-read them, some of them very regularly. The All-of-a-Kind-Family books get read usually twice a year (once at Passover, once at the High Holidays; sometimes, okay, at Chanukkah, too). Ronnie and Rosey by Judie Angell (a YA novel) gets read usually once a year; I actually picked up a second copy of it a couple of years ago because my original was just beat. Pippi Longstocking, the oeuvre of E.L. Konigsburg (Father's Arcane Daughter, (George), A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, and About the B'nai Bagelsin particular), and all of the novels by Louise Fitzhugh are re-read at least yearly. Ditto The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill, which has to be read in multiple editions because the text changes. Also, the George and Martha stories by James Marshall, the four Mary Poppins books, and a YA novel by Alice Bach entitled They'll Never Make a Movie Starring Me.

All of these are in regular rotation, and I'd take any one of them, any day, over a novel by Philip Roth.

There are children's books which have joined these ranks more recently, such as Beegu and Slow Loris by Alexis Deacon, and the Provensens' Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm, which I somehow missed when I was a kid. (My parents didn't believe in farms, I guess.) I am in love with it and have one copy for me and one for my daughter.

I don't understand why people pack up and toss their books from childhood if they don't have to. Why would you want to forget the stories that made you what you are? In college, when better minds (or at least more grade-grubbing minds, I guess) were happily reading moronic texts on literary theory assigned by Paul Fry (I took a class at Yale one summer; boy, was that a bummer), I was re-reading stories that were actually stories, not just pretentious trickery. The Genie of Sutton Place by George Selden is more important to me than anything Gadamer or de Man ever came up with. Let alone Roland freaking Barthes. Between The Genie of Sutton Place and S/Z? No contest.

New Haven's Union Station's Lavish Display

New Haven's a wonderful place but it is pretty rinky-dink in a lot of ways. If it took itself more seriously, for example, matters relating to public transportation would be taken more seriously. Don't get me started on bus service here, for one thing. (I use the buses all the time, and I'm the first to try to defend them, but my point is, I shouldn't have to think about defending them. I should be able to just... use them, and boast about them.) One sign that New Haven used to be a bigger, more impressive place than it is now -- or a place that cared more about the public's view of public transportation -- is the train station, which is lovely, designed on a grand scale. When I was a kid, the New Haven train station wasn't the building it is now; that building, the original train station, was closed, first awaiting demolition and, then, eventually, renovation. In the meantime, we used this underground, scary, damp-feeling space which has somehow completely disappeared. If you took me there now I wouldn't know how to explain where it was. This is the trouble with memories from childhood; they get hazy. I'm sure many readers of this will be happy to tell me what happened to that piece of crap train station. (Please do.)

You walked in at street level and the whole entrance was this massive ramp down to the waiting area, where there were sad little benches, and then you went up to the tracks, as I recall. I may be mistaken but I remember the ramp having dreary, ill-advised industrial carpeting on it (after a while, the flooring was some kind of equally depressing linoleum). The best part of the whole place was the vending machines, which isn't saying much. Kids always like vending machines anyhow.

The old Union Station (which, Wikipedia tells me, was designed by Cass Gilbert -- woo woo) is a huge improvement over that disgusting place I remember from the 1970s. It's airy, sunny; when you walk on the floors, your snappy shoes make a wonderful, adult "click-click-click" sound. (If you're wearing Birkenstocks or sneakers or shoes that aren't snappy, you just trudge along and miss out on the joy of the clicking.) There's a shoeshine station, which I've always wanted to patronize but have never had a chance to; there's a newsstand. There are a few little sandwich stores, which aren't remarkable but do their jobs perfectly well. My main point is, you come into the train station from the street or from the tracks, and either way, you think, "Huh. New Haven. This is a real place." It's a miniaturized Grand Central Station, and that sounds like I'm being slighting, but I'm not trying to be. It's a marvelous space.

One of the things that continues to make the station so appealing is its arrivals/departures board, which is something of an anomaly in today's LED display world (so my husband, who pays attention to these things, tells me). The board is a huge black and white thing with little panels that flip, like the numbers on the alarm clock my brother had in 1978, changing the displayed information. The panels turn incredibly fast, and the sound they make -- kind of "whp-whp-whp-whp-whp" -- is just awesome. When you're waiting for a train that's running late -- as the Amtrak trains often are -- you can get absorbed in your reading and not worry about missing anything because you know you'll look up when you hear the whp-whp-whp sound: it digs into your head, signifiying "new information on the board, pay attention." Sometimes the information is useful to you, and sometimes not, but either way it's fun to watch the text change. You can see all the names of the cities on the Northeast Corridor whip by, which is cool. You can think, "Well, maybe I'll skip going to Boston and just hop onto the Montrealer instead." (You won't, though, because your girlfriend in Boston would be pissed, and, what's more, you wouldn't have a place to stay in Montreal anyhow.) There's something about that board that keeps one's sense of travel intact in a way that the LED displays of Grand Central Station -- a shame they installed that -- just.... don't.

People who know me will snort at this; I am a homebody and am known for not liking to travel And it is true, I like being at home. But every now and then I also like going somewhere, particularly if there is a snazzy hotel involved (I'm big on snazzy hotels), and so I have had some experience with train stations and, yes, even airports. I'm one of maybe three people you'll ever meet who's actually been at the Los Angeles train station, for example. And I can tell you: New Haven's train station is nicer.

But, of course, I am biased.

Thank you, Fearless Critic. An eater in New Haven loves you.

For years, working in bookstores here, I wished there was a decent guide to the restaurants in New Haven. I knew I wasn't really qualified to put one together myself, but it was so obvious to me that New Haven deserved better than the Zagat guide to Connecticut, which in my opinion is totally worthless. Then Robin Goldstein and Clare Murumba came to the rescue and published The Menu, which was about 95% dead on. I was an instant fan and bought many copies to give as gifts; when I worked at Atticus I sold literally hundreds of copies to grateful eaters.

The authors moved away, and I felt bad that the odds of a third edition seemed slim. It was, I suspected, just one of those things: person comes to Yale, does something really cool in New Haven, and then leaves. We've all seen it happen.

So imagine my joy when a few days ago I was poking around online looking for reviews of a downtown restaurant and I came across a website that was called Fearless Critic. One look and I knew it was Robin Goldstein at work. Further investigation indicated that a new guide to New Haven restaurants was out there -- how had I not known about this? (Well: this is what I get for leaving the bookstore game.) Completely thrilled, I sent Robin a message telling him how excited I was to discover this, and I now have my paws on a copy of the Fearless Critic guide.

And let me tell you it is a blast.

Please: if you're someone who likes to eat, and you spend any amount of time in New Haven, get a copy of this thing. It's in bookstores downtown, it can be (ahem) ordered online. I'm not going to get all uppity about where you buy it; just buy it.