Idle Notions and Unexpected Realities: Movie Tie-Ins at the Institute Library

In November, 2012, someone who knows me very, very well suggested that Best Video out in Hamden should merge somehow with the Institute Library in New Haven. "You could do some great stuff together," I was told. "Think of the programming potential." "You're right," I said. "That's a really interesting idea, especially because the sort of people who love the Library are basically likely to be the same sort of people who love Best Video." I know this demographic, having served on the board of the Institute Library for the last seven, nearly eight, years, and as a person who worked for Hank, when Best Video had a store in the old Yale Co-op on Broadway.

And now: http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/a_gala_for_the_film_reels/

Back in 2012, encouraged by the idle conversation described above, I sent an email to a few people saying, "Hey, what if?" and heard crickets. One person said, basically, "Cute idea, but..." and nothing else. But now here it has come to pass that the Best Video Film and Cultural Center exists, with the assistance of the Institute Library, which is acting as a kind of fiscal sponsor for the enterprise.  Basically, the function that the Library now serves for the New Haven Review, it's now serving for the BVFCC -- ok, there are probably some differences, but that's my sloppy shorthand for it. I leave the details to the lawyers; what I'm thinking about, and celebrating, is my sense that the dreams of 2012 can come true.

The things that the Institute Library is, physically -- a time capsule, a museum of cultural oddities, a little tiny piece of history -- Best Video has always had in its movie collection. Best Video's stock is all over the place in terms of genre and time period, but to me, Best Video was the place where I could find all the old movies I'd heard of but never had a chance to see. When I worked for Hank, which was a thousand years ago, there were a lot of hours when I was, frankly, alone in the store with no customers, and I could play whatever movie I wanted as long as it wasn't obviously going to offend anyone who came by. So I watched a lot of movies from the 1930s and '40s and '50s (in addition to the new releases of the 1980s, which were a mixed bag, frankly). Hank had VHS tapes of just about everything in the world, or at least it felt that way; and if I was reading a book that made passing reference to some old Barbara Stanwyck flick, which in those days I often was -- well, all I had to do was pull it from the cabinet. Decades later, when I first walked up into the Institute Library, I swear to God I thought it was the set of a movie I'd watched on one of those days when I was just monitoring paperwork and waiting for the late afternoon rush.

The Institute Library is in color (mostly this kind of odd shade of green), but it goes with those old black and white movies I associate so strongly with Best Video. I am ardently hoping that movie and music lovers will rally around the BVFCC and keep Hank's establishment alive. But what I really want is a movie series at the Institute Library. I mean, for years I have been dreaming about this. I want a screening of "Auntie Mame" at the Institute Library. "The Thin Man." "The Maltese Falcon." "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit." It feels like, after years of talking about it idly, this may come to pass. There is no popcorn machine at the Institute Library, and there probably will never be, but as God is my witness, this engagement is wonderful news for Best Video, for the Library, and for everyone around here.

The Anchor.

You can make a lot of observations, none very happy, about the abrupt closing of the Anchor, the best dive bar that I ever knew in New Haven. You can complain about how abruptly it closed, how the landlords are jerks for making this happen. You can mourn the dead. You can also hope that it isn't really over. The space is still the Anchor, as I type this: the sign is not lit, but it is still hanging. The blue banquettes are still there. The jukebox, oh, the jukebox, is still there. But it doesn't look good.

Last night, Sunday, January 4th, almost everyone I knew in New Haven was in a sharply pained state as the news got around that the 4th would be the Anchor's last night of operation. I myself changed my plans for  the night so that I could get there for one last drink. I'd planned to feed my daughter dinner and put her to bed in her flannel owl pajamas, read her a bedtime story, maybe watch a movie with my husband. But I said to him, "I will read the bedtime story and then I'm going downtown." He  said, "I'll do bedtime. Just go." So I went downtown. It was raining. I left the house at 8.24 and arrived at 8.57 to find the Anchor's doors locked. I stood there confused. Locked? It wasn't even nine o'clock. The bells were ringing on the Green just then. A reporter stood at the door, talking to some girls in their twenties who smiled and told him how much they loved the place. "I led Bible study groups here," one of them said.

I remembered a lot of nights at the Anchor, and quite a few afternoons. I wondered if I should just turn around and go home. I said to my friend M., who was standing there almost teary-eyed, "I don't know what to do," and I listened to the others standing around: "Should we go to Rudy's? Three Sheets?" It was morbid to talk about going to another bar, under the circumstances, but at the same time, turning around and going home seemed unthinkable.

M. and I went to Cafe 9, where a band was playing and the saxophone was too loud. We could barely hear each other when we spoke. One of the things I loved about the Anchor was that you could have a real conversation there. Personally, I used to go and bring a book with me and read while I drank. The Anchor was a gross place, and it was a beautiful place, and it was, for a lot of people, an essential third place.

When Mark Oppenheimer -- the founder of the New Haven Review -- came back to New Haven to take over the job of editing the New Haven Advocate, he and I crossed paths his first week on the job. We were, you could say, acquainted with one another, tenuously. It seemed clear (to me; I can't speak for him) that we were going to be in each other's lives, at least for a while, and that we should get to know each other a little better. I suggested we have a drink. The obvious place to go was the Anchor.

I hope it can be resuscitated, because if it cannot be, I'm really not sure I can find a replacement. There is no other obvious choice, not for me.

On Reading, Again, and Again, to a Child

It's obvious to me that very small children -- babies, toddlers -- want to be read the same book over and over again. That's how they're absorbing the book, and the letters, and learning how to read, and how to understand that there's this thing called "the written word." Of course I wearied of reading The Little Fur Family and I am a Bunny and Corduroy (yes, even Corduroy) to my daughter. But I did it anyway, because it was important in a larger sense, and because, in a more immediate sense, it was what she wanted at bedtime. She's now six and a half years old, and there is no greater punishment I can threaten than "No bedtime story!" She will snap to attention, exhibit good behavior, brush teeth with military precision, if I even hint that she'll not be read to at bedtime otherwise. I've been observing her reading patterns: she's now old enough to read to herself, and she does read to herself all the time, often going back to favorite picture books, but also frequently just pulling some random thing off the shelf that it happens we've never looked at before. So she's shuttling back and forth between "things I know are in my wheelhouse" and "things that I don't know what's in there, but let's find out." Which I think is dandy. It makes sense to me.

What surprises me, though -- and I'm not sure why, but it does -- is that now and then she will ask for us to read to her, a second, third, or fourth time, a really long book that we have to read in installments. We don't do this frequently, but once in a while, I will decide that bedtime will be a chapter of a much larger work. We've read The Cricket in Times Square this way, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, and some of the All-of-a-Kind-Family books. We've read James and the Giant Peach and we've read Betsy-Tacy books. These aren't merely bedtime stories: they're reading projects. You can only read so much aloud in one night. Some books take weeks to get through, not because the chapters are necessarily so long, but because the effort of reading them is so great: it is, for reasons I don't really understand, harder to read Roald Dahl aloud than Betty MacDonald.

While all of these books have illustrations, the draw is not the pictures, it's the story, pure and simple; the illustrations are really just cherries on top of the sundae. What my daughter does when I read these books to her is different from what she does when I read her a picture book. A picture book, she wants to sit up in bed and snuggle against me and be able to see the pictures. With the longer books, even though there are pictures, and I can show them to her, she tends to not care very much, and burrows into her blankets and just listens to my voice as I read. Occasionally, I'll get to a picture I particularly like, and I'll say, "hey, look at this, doesn't her hair look so pretty here?" and she often won't even make the effort to look where I'm pointing.

We'll finish the book, eventually, and months will go by, and then -- as happened two nights ago -- she'll say, "Can we hear that again?" And I will inevitably -- why? -- be surprised, and pull down James or Cricket or whatever it is, and start at Chapter One all over again.

My husband is not someone who re-reads many books: he seems to feel (as many, many people do) that re-reading is usually not a good use of time, because there's so much out there to absorb. I, as I've written about before, am a compulsive re-reader of books. Is our daughter taking after both of us? Is she exhibiting both traits, in the way she picks out books to hear at bedtime? She almost never wants a "new" book at bedtime. Which I get: she wants something comforting and familiar. But everything starts out as something new, once upon a time, right? How does something make the leap from new and novel to comfortably worn-in? I wonder what other parents experience in this arena. I know that I have friends who began reading the Narnia books to their children when they were very young -- three, four years old -- and I rolled my eyes, because, well, ok: you probably couldn't pay me to read the Narnia books now, and as a child, I certainly wouldn't have sat through them. And can a three year old really understand it, anyhow? I'm not even talking about the Symbolism Of It All -- I just mean, can a toddler follow the plot? I don't know, I don't really care, to be honest. What I'm wondering is: Have those kids asked to hear the Narnia books again? And again? And again? Because I've gone through Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle about three times now (the entire series), and I've done Pippi Longstocking twice (and it's weird, because my girl asked for them again the other night, and it's the damnedest thing, but I cannot find them: they are here, someplace, but I cannot find them)...

And, at what point will these books become something she no longer wants me to read to her, but books that she wants to curl up with herself, for the eighteenth time?

It's an interesting thing, building a reader.

The Imponderables and The Institute Library

The Institute Library, which is now serving as a home for the New Haven Review, is about to see a big shift. It's an exciting change, but one I cannot help, personally, but be a little sad about. After three years, Will Baker is leaving his post as Executive Director of the Library, and moving to Pittsburgh. Now, I'm sure he'll have a grand old time there, as he is known for his love of Rust Belt cities. But this small New England city will not be the same without him. The Board of Directors of the Library spent a few months working on selecting a new Executive Director, and it was, I can tell you, a strange process filled with unexpected turns. I was, myself, on the search committee, and we read resumes from people living all over the United States. There were a lot of folks who were very hot to trot to come to the Library and take over where Will would be leaving off. I entered this process with a very open mind, thinking, "It is entirely possible that the next ED will be someone from Tennessee who hasn't ever been here but just somehow Gets It." Because, of course, this is a position where diplomas and straight-arrow resumes don't necessarily make someone the right candidate. This is a position where it really boils down to what Jeeves might refer to as "imponderables."  Having an MLS is nice, but not the point. What matters is having, oh, I don't know -- a kind of spirit and energy and gung-ho-ness; and having a real grasp of what the library has been about, and, what it can be about in the future. Those are really hard to quantify qualities.

It surprised me very much when at the end of the day, the library's new Executive Director turned out to be none other than a neighbor of mine, someone who I met last year when I found her lost mitten on Orange Street, someone who I see several times a week, in passing. Her name's Natalie Elicker, and she's someone who has been doing tremendous work around New Haven the last few years, working in various capacities. She's been working as a lawyer, but she's actually better known to me for doing all kinds of volunteer work and being one of those people that everyone seems to know. (At the time I met Natalie, returning her lost mitten to her, I was actually a little sheepish because I realized I'd probably walked past her house a million times, passed her on the street eight million times, and never once said hello. We ought to've known each other already.) So: Will Baker, who also has made his home on Orange Street the last few years, will be passing the baton to Natalie, resident of Orange Street. He's very happy about it, he tells me -- it turns out he has known Natalie since he moved to New Haven, years and years ago, and thinks very highly of her. (Will is clearly a better neighbor than I am.)

On Saturday, May 24th, the Library will be hosting an open house from 4 to 6 in the afternoon, so that any and all members of the New Haven community can come and celebrate Will's tenure at the Institute Library. When they come up the stairs, they will see a library that has changed so much from the place the Library was in 2011, when Will was hired.

When Will came on board, the Library was, granted, a pleasantly sleepy place -- it was a heavy mug of hot milk with honey in it: comfortable, eminently enjoyable, something that made you feel you were living in a novel of another era. But it was floundering in many ways, and it needed help. The Board had put a lot of energy into organizing that help, and was doing the best it could, but the fact was, someone was needed to be at the Library full-time, every day, and help wake the place up. We needed to change the Institute Library in some ways, yet find a way to maintain the old elements that made the Library the sanctuary it was. Somehow, Will Baker grasped this. He said, basically, "Hi, I'm Will, I think I can help you out." And he did. He took ideas we had and ran with them; he added his own ideas to the mix, and implemented them. People began to come into the library and then they added their ideas, and the day-to-day of the Library got very wondrously complex. The third floor was renovated, and a gallery was formed. It had been an utterly neglected space for decades -- decades! -- and it was, within a year, I think, of Will's hiring, a place where huge, crazy art pieces were installed, pieces that wouldn't have been displayed anywhere else in New Haven. (Thanks for this are, for sure, to be directed to Stephen Kobasa, who guided the gallery into existence and then made sure all was well for three years -- but it wouldn't have happened at all, I suspect, were it not for Will being there in the first place.)

With Will at the helm, the library was able to expand its hours. This is no small thing. This is a huge thing. There was a time when the library was only open about 10 hours a week, or something dismal like that, because financial worries made it impossible to do more. But the library made the investment in Will, who made the investment in the Library, in turn, and he changed the way things worked. Suddenly the library was open Monday through Friday, 10-6; and on Saturday, a corps of volunteers kept the place open mid-day. This was, at least to me, a huge sign. Being open -- almost nothing was as important as that, to me. The way the library had been so dormant all those years before -- the short hours were, to me, a symbol of all the sleepiness. It was quaint to read about but so hard to love ... because you simply couldn't get inside. But that changed.

The Library became a little daytime writer's colony. It became a place where alter kockers came to read magazines and peruse old books of essays and talk socialist politics. It became a place where teenagers came and helped out because they thought it was fun and because they felt like this was their place. Everyone's been at home at the library. This is an astounding level of change for some of the board members to contemplate. It seemed so improbable.

But we had to admit this: Library could not continue as it was. It had to adapt. The miracle here isn't really merely that Will changed the Library. A lot of people could have changed the Library and led it to a more stable place -- and while it's not sustainable, currently, it is closer to a sustainable financial footing than it has been in years -- because there are a lot of people who have fancy degrees in management and arts administration and such. And they could have come in and said, "OK, so, what we're going to do is this." And maybe the place would have thrived. But it would almost certainly have become an entirely different sort of place. And it could easily have lost its grounding in history, local history, because a lot of people aren't sensitive to that kind of thing. It's easy to talk about preservation, and have good intentions, but it is damned hard to achieve the preservation of a place like the Library. I've talked with a lot of people about it, over the years, and it's one of those things where either you Get It or you Don't. So I can tell you:

Few people would have allowed the Library to change and thrive with the style and manner that Will did. Will married Change with Preservation; he got the old and the new to talk with one another, civilly, and with laughter, and over cups of hot coffee. The Library may not be a double mocha cappuccino, but it is no longer the mug of hot milk and honey. It is something new, at the same time that it is something old. The Institute Library is a better place thanks to Will Baker, and we are indebted to him. I am indebted to him.

All are welcome Saturday afternoon. Four to six. Thanks, Will.

I was wrong in 1988. Bob Dylan Matters. OK?

So, in 1988, I was sitting in Broadway Pizza eating pizza and talking with some friends of mine who both happened to be named Dave. We were all people who cared a lot about music. I mean, a lot. We were the sort of people who went to record conventions to buy bootleg recordings of stuff, we spent hundreds of dollars collecting Japanese imports of, you know, whatever we were into. We were whack jobs. I worked at Cutler's Records, in those days. The subject of Bob Dylan came up. He had a new album out, and the Daves weren't drooling to get their hands on it, but they were saying things like, "yeah, I gotta get the new Dylan, I'll pick it up this weekend." And I snorted, "Bob Dylan is irrelevant."

This led to one of the biggest arguments about music I think I've ever had, and the Daves and I still talk about it today, when I run into them. Which isn't often, but this is New Haven, so, you know, it happens, now and then.

We laugh about it.

Dylan has proven to be important to a lot of people for longer than I could possibly have imagined, back then in June of 1988. Now, I personally still don't care much. I had a phase when I really enjoyed The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and thanks to a college roommate who was obsessed with Blood on the Tracks, I came to really love that album too. But otherwise? I have to admit I don't really give a hoot.

Here's what I give a hoot about: Donald Brown's book about Bob Dylan. The Institute Library is hosting a book release party this week. Come on down. Maybe get the book. Here's why you should do this: because you know -- if you're a reader of the NHR's site -- Don is a smart guy. He's got a good sense of humor (something I find many Dylan types sorely lack). He's a really good writer. And... it's coming toward the end of May, and you need to get out more.

I'll see you there. I'll be the woman standing around arguing heatedly with whoever will listen, insisting that for my money, Lou Reed is more interesting than Dylan...

Here's the NHR / Institute Library site for reserving a spot.

And here's the amazon listing for the book, which already has some good review! (The book will be on sale at the party, slightly cheaper than on amazon.)

A Review of These! Paper! Bullets! by a very reluctant theater-goer.

For two or three years now, my husband has been dragging me out of the house every few weeks to go to whatever’s going on at the Yale Rep. I am (to put it nicely) not someone who likes going to the theater, but I do appreciate a night away from the house, so I’m not complaining, really; but I will say, I’d be just as happy going to the movies. And with the Yale Rep -- you know, they like to do experimental stuff, it’s often brainier than I need, and over time I have arrived at this method of summing up my Yale Rep experiences: Is it a one-nap play or a two-nap play? We saw Paul Giamatti (who I love) in Hamlet last year. That, as I recall, was a three-nap play. I slept through the big fight scene.

The funny thing is, my husband (who never naps through any of the productions, and is far more charitably disposed, and loves live theater) often mocks Rep productions for the same reasons I do. What we often think is, The Rep productions are stunningly produced; they are technically amazing to watch, the performances are great. But man, the scripts are uneven. I’d say that each season gives us one or two shows we actually enjoy; but I’ve never gone napless through a Rep production. Until last night.

Friday night we went to see These! Paper! Bullets! and my own prediction was a) that I’d take a nap and b) I’d like it well enough anyway, and c) my husband would find it vaguely amusing without actually enjoying it. I turned out to be so, so wrong. So wrong, that I knew halfway through the evening I was going to have to write about this for the New Haven Review, because, frankly, if I enjoy something this much, I feel morally obligated to do something about it. A review here is pretty much the only thing I can do about it. Anyone who’s reading this and has a chance to see this production: Get yourself down to the Yale Rep. Sell some used books to Book Trader to come up with the money to buy tickets; borrow money; I don’t care. Go see These! Paper! Bullets!

Here’s the thing, folks. This is a situation where, for me as an audience member, there’s a lot going against a night out seeing this show. We have a tired mother, for starters. We have a format I don’t like (live theater). We’ve got a play based on a work I don’t care about at all (Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing). We’ve got a musician I don’t care about (Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day, a band I never liked). And we’ve got some theater people who -- I’ll be honest -- I just don’t know anything about, but people who know far better than I do think highly of them, so, fine (I glance in the directions of Donald Brown and Chris Arnott; I defer, always, to Chris in matters like these). We have the knowledge that it’s gonna be a Rep show, which usually means, “Jesus, seriously, you’re making me sit through this?” The only thing the play had going for it, in my case, is that I am a serious Beatles fan, and as such was likely to find at least the Beatles references in the show amusing. (In reality: they are more than amusing, they are really good.)

But what this very unlikely combinations of circumstances has led to is a very, very rare beast: a play that I would actually want to see again. Everyone in the cast is amazing; the dialogue is great; the costumes and sets are a pleasure, and there just isn’t enough time in the show to really take it all in. I cannot say enough good things about These! Paper! Bullets! and trust me: this kind of thing may never happen again.

Right Author, Wrong Book

Doris Lessing died last year. It got me thinking again about another one of my ongoing small problems as a reader, which I can explain very nicely with two writers as examples. The problem is: You love a writer, but for the wrong book. Another way to put it: The weird situation where you love a writer, but exclusively for the "lesser" works. When a writer gets famous, or develops a reputation for being particularly good at some thing or other, you’re supposed to gush over That Thing. Let me take as examples Doris Lessing (famous for her novel The Golden Notebook, embraced by feminists around the world; her political novel The Good Terrorist, and her sci-fi/fantasy novels) and Shirley Jackson, about whom I’ve written elsewhere for the New Haven Review. Shirley Jackson is known today mostly for her creepy fiction, novels such as We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Hangsaman, among many others.

Here is my problem: I have spent most of my life really admiring both of these writers, and regarding them with awe and wonder, and counting myself, really, truly, as an ardent fan, without having read any of these landmark titles.

Instead, I base my adoration of these writers on books that I think most critics would view as fluffy side projects. In the case of Doris Lessing, my love is based entirely -- entirely -- on a really skinny, scary-as-hell novel called The Fifth Child, which came out in 1988. (It’s actually a very Shirley Jacksonesque work, about a happy family that has four children, and then a fifth baby arrives, and Everything Changes and Not For the Better.) In the case of Shirley Jackson, my love is based on Life Among the Savages, which is just a collection of fictionalized essays about domestic life. (The connections here are fun to think about, aren’t they?)

And I have no plans to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, or Hangsaman, or whatever else.

Now, in the case of Doris Lessing, I’ve long felt bad that this book, The Fifth Child, was the one that made such a big impression on me. I suppose it was bound to; I was never someone who liked small children, and always found them scary. The idea of ever being a mother was completely abhorrent to me: Never! Never! (Never mind that I am, in fact, a mother now.) It was a short novel (my favorite kind) that was taut and made me feel that my sense about children was not unfounded. And it was, you know, well-written, had a literary pedigree, was published by a fancy house, etc. etc. I think I read that book once a year for ages. I remember that it was one of the books I took with me when I went away to college. I wasn’t at all ashamed of my love for The Fifth Child, but I definitely felt guilty that none of Lessing’s other books held any interest for me. I thought it didn’t speak well of me that The Fifth Child was the Lessing book I knew and loved so well, and more to the point, I always felt like I was the only person who felt this way, who’d had this experience. (I acknowledge this, though: Perhaps I just wasn’t the right age for most of her books. There are definitely some writers where if you don’t read them at just the right phase of your life, there’s no point. My mother gave me copies of numerous Lessing books when I was a teenager, which I glanced at and then set aside, because I thought, “oh, who cares.” At the same time, though, I’ve never gotten rid of them. Maybe the time is now, and in 2014 I should put them on my list. I’ve actually begun to read Anna Karenina, recently, for the first time; this, if nothing else, proves that anything is possible, because I’ve been avoiding reading that for decades, now, in spite of the fact that I own two copies of it.)

I thought that The Fifth Child as the only Lessing book I knew and loved so well showed me to be a weak reader, somehow. More to the point, I always felt like I was the only person who felt this way, who’d had this experience. And then a couple days ago I finally got around to reading the issue of the New York Times Magazine that they do every December, the Lives They Lived issue, where writers and photographers do little pieces about the noteworthy and interesting people who died during the year. Of all people, of all books, Steve Almond wrote about Doris Lessing, and god bless him for making me see so clearly that I am not alone. His essay, which is a pleasure to read by the way, begins with this:

“My interest in Doris Lessing -- Nobel Prize winner and one of the most celebrated writers on earth -- derives from a single book, the 1988 novel The Fifth Child, which has haunted me for more than 20 years.”

I always knew I liked that Steve Almond. I don’t care about his fiction at all, by the way, but boy do I love that book Candy Freak.

A choice tidbit that was recently brought to my attention, or: Where is my cocktail hat when I need it?

About three years ago, I learned something new about myself: I cannot hold my liquor at all anymore. The story isn’t a pretty one, but it was a moment in my personal history that I will never forget, and one which leaves me an odd choice to review the book at hand: Under the Table: A Dorothy Parker Cocktail Guide. And yet: I cannot resist. Compiled by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick (who’s The Man to Talk To if you need an expert on Parker these days), with some help from Allen Katz, this book is a charmingly assembled, lovely little package that many people will find an essential addition to their shelves. Now, I own more than a few bartender’s guides. I have logged serious quality time with The Savoy Cocktail Book and in my younger days I often assembled drinks while checking a Mr. Boston guide -- is that still the standard beginner’s guide to booze? Under the Table is not the kind of encyclopedic book that belongs in every household with a bottle of gin. It’s a specialty item. But it’s both informative and useful: it gives nice little histories of each drink, and is well organized, and very handsomely designed. Even so, it will leave many people shrugging. If you’re not enchanted by the world of the Algonquin Round Table, or by early 20th century American history more broadly, then you’d best leave this one on the shelf of the bookstore. It’s not for you. If your idea of a drink is, say, a Long Island Iced Tea, a wine spritzer, or shooters with names like Cement Mixer, this is not for you. In researching current trends in bartending, for the purpose of writing this review in an informed manner, I discovered that there is something called a Chocolate Martini. If you are someone who gets that, either conceptually or in actual life, when out in a bar: this book is not for you.

But if you’re someone who takes your booze at all seriously -- not in the sense of being a snob, necessarily, but in the sense of, When you want a drink, you want it to be a good, solid, season-appropriate drink; if you are someone who believes (as I do) that a gin and tonic cannot be respectably consumed in the wintertime, and that bourbon is a year-round item, as long as the accessories are seasonal -- then this is a book you will enjoy tremendously.  This is a book for people who don’t need their booze hidden under frills or umbrellas or tricks to make it so you don’t know you’re drinking alcohol. And if you’re a sucker for John Held drawings, so much the better. Yes: the book contains the requisite Yale reference (Yale Cocktail, p. 121), but even if it didn’t, I would be fond of this book, and happy with Kevin Fitzpatrick’s  work. Here is the highest praise I can offer to Under the Table: from it, I learned of a drink called the Jean Harlow, and now I want one very, very badly. How had I never been aware of this before? I intend to acquire a bottle of white rum immediately (I’ve already got the Cinzano) to make this at home; and when I am next out at night, a renegade matron on the loose -- 116 Crown, are you ready for me? -- I expect to order a Jean Harlow and enjoy it all the more, because I will not have mixed it myself.

Under the Table: A Dorothy Parker Cocktail Guide will be published in November by Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot.

A Great Failing on My Part: One Reader's Confession

I don’t think about this very often but every now and then it occurs to me that I must be the only woman in the reading population of the U.S. who did not devour the Little House books when she was a little girl. The subject came up again tonight. It comes up maybe once every two years.

A number of women were gushing over their love of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s oeuvre, and they turned to me expectantly and all I could do was say, “I read a chapter of one once in Cricket when I was little; I liked that story.” But beyond that, nothing.

When I was a little girl I owned no Little House books. I owned hundreds of books; my mother never refused to buy me a book I wanted to read, at least not that I can recall. I had a thousand stupid young adult novels and the complete Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and I had every single Trixie Belden book. But I never wanted to read Little House on the Prairie, I think mostly because it was set in the country, and my reaction to the country, even as a child (and -- notably -- even as a child who spent her summers down a dirt road in New Hampshire), was, “Eh, who cares?” And my mother never suggested them to me. She never presented me with a lovely boxed set -- you know the set I mean, in the checked box -- I think probably because she had never read them either.

What's more, I grew up when Little House on the Prairie was a crazily popular TV show, and the few times I watched it, it bored the daylights out of me. Even as a kid, I preferred Barney Miller and Taxi. So I went on with my life, totally ok with my ignorance of the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The thing that made me wonder if I’d missed out was reading Laurie Colwin, who in one of her essays cites Farmer Boy as being some of the best food writing out there. She quotes a passage in which a young boy (Almanzo?) goes to some country fair and eats an absolutely ridiculous amount of food and then he draws a long breath and eats pie.

Some time around 2002 I decided to finally have a gander at Farmer Boy; I remember finding a copy at Book Trader Cafe and thinking, “Well, ok, for two bucks, why the hell not.” It sat on my shelf for a few years before I finally read it. But I did read it. And now all I can remember of it is the bit that Laurie Colwin quoted. And have I read any of the other Little House books?

No, I have not. And I feel kind of bad about this. I feel sufficiently bad about it that I am seriously considering taking the first book out from the library and having it be a book I read aloud, slowly, chapter by chapter, to my little girl, who’s now old enough to enjoy something like that. Something long and sustained. We did James and the Giant Peach over the course of a week, and she loved it. We’ve done all the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggles, except (tellingly!) Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Farm, my copy of which I cannot find for the life of me -- and I have looked.

It’s August, but this will be my New Year’s Resolution. I will try again with Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Of Thee I Sing: Laurie Colwin, Geraldine Coleshares, and 20 Feet from Stardom

Forgive me, dear readers, for returning once again to Laurie Colwin. But it's unavoidable right now. A couple of weeks ago I became aware of a movie, a documentary, about rock and roll backup singers. It's titled "20 Feet from Stardom," and there was a review of it in the New York Times that knocked my socks off. I read the review almost without breathing and kept waiting for the article to refer to Laurie Colwin's Goodbye Without Leaving, which is probably the best novel ever written about rock and roll backup singers (not that I can name another one). But no such reference ever appeared. I thought, "Well, that is an oversight."

The movie focuses on singers like Merry Clayton and Darlene Love -- voices you know, even if you don't know that you know them -- and it does seem to be the case, as Colwin's character Geraldine says, that not everybody in rock and roll wants to be a star. One of the stars of the movie, Lisa Fischer, was interviewed and the Times quotes her as saying:

“I reject the notion that the job you excel at is somehow not enough to aspire to, that there has to be something more,” Ms. Fischer explained, speaking with her eyes closed, as she tends to do. “I love supporting other artists.”

She continued: “I guess it came down to not letting other people decide what was right for me. Everyone’s needs are unique. My happy is different from your happy.”

The upshot: Ms. Fischer has paradoxically emerged as a star partly because of her decision not to seek stardom." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/movies/the-voice-behind-mick-and-others.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Colwin's reluctant heroine, Geraldine Coleshares, seems to be cut from the same cloth. In a scene where an old rock and roll scenester, Spider Joe, interviews Geraldine, seeking awesome stories about the good old days, and how climbing the ladder to stardom was the best thing ever, Geraldine disappoints Spider Joe:

"...The fact was, I loved to sing, but it was my heart's desire to be a backup, not a singer. I said this to Spider Joe.

"You lie, babe. Everybody wanted to be a star." "Actually, everybody did not want to be a star." " (Goodbye Without Leaving, p. 137.)

Spider Joe tells Geraldine she's a drag and leaves, off to find someone more fun to interview.

20 Feet from Stardom is playing at the Criterion downtown right now. I know it's unlikely that there will be an act of God to allow me to go see it in a theater, but I wish I could. I will settle for watching it at home some day, some day soon. I wish that Laurie Colwin were around to see it, though; I bet she'd've gotten a real kick out of it. I know I will, when I finally get to watch... and listen....

UPDATED, June 30: Having written this piece I decided it would be a huge mistake to wait to watch the movie at home, because I'd never be able to hear the voices properly. So I did some juggling and made it to a Saturday matinee screening. This movie is WAY worth seeing. It will be at the Criterion at least through this coming Thursday, and I urge anyone who has even a fleeting interest in seeing the flick to go see it in a theatre and not wait to watch it at home, no matter how good your "home theater" is, I don't want to hear about it. If I could, I would arrange for a private screening for all former staffers at Cutler's Records.

I'm Taking My Sharpie and I'm Drawing a Line: Tessa Hadley and Deborah Eisenberg

Yesterday I had a tiny epiphany when I finally got around to looking at a recent issue of The New Yorker: that after years and years of basically ignoring the fiction in this fine magazine -- to which I have have subscribed religiously since I was 18 years old -- there is, finally, a writer of short stories whose work I actively look for in the table of contents. I can remember the first writer whose work made me pay attention to The New Yorker at all: Deborah Eisenberg. My mother was the person who brought her to my attention. It was the story, “What It Was Like, Seeing Chris.” My mother handed me the magazine one day, after school, and said, “I bet you’d like this.” She was right. The story about Laurel losing her sight, and her weird interactions with this older guy, Chris, who was sort of awful yet kind at the same time, was the most amazing thing I’d read since, I don’t know, the novels of Norma Klein. It was like reading Norma Klein, actually, but more subtle, and compressed, and more realistic, to me. Grittier. I became a huge fan of Deborah Eisenberg’s and when her first collection of stories came out I bought it immediately; I read it so many times the edges of the pages have grown soft.

While I fell in love with other writers after that, and to be honest, fell sort of out of love with Eisenberg’s work (I should just revisit it, though -- I am positive that the fault lies not with her but with me), the fiction in The New Yorker, over time, became something I just had no feeling for. I wish I could put my finger on exactly why. It’s true that my tastes in fiction are extremely limited -- I am the most provincial of readers, only interested in a certain type of writing, set in a certain kind of place -- but it’s also true that the magazine seemed to deliberately become a haven for the exact opposite of what I was looking for. So it was easy for me to glance at the author’s name and dismiss it: Not my kind of thing. I’m not looking to be depressed, or enlightened, or educated, when I read fiction (that’s what non-fiction is for, I guess, is my feeling). The multiculturalism that The New Yorker embraced left me cold -- though I think that, in a larger sense, it was a beneficial shift for the magazine and for readers in general. That it didn’t appeal to me personally wasn’t a problem for me; much of the rest of the magazine still did, after all.

So: All well and good: I was still someone who’d read The New Yorker every week and inevitably think some essay or other was great but completely zip past the fiction.

Until Tessa Hadley.

I remember reading “An Abduction” while sitting at the playground, keeping one eye on my daughter, praying I wouldn’t have to get up and help her so I could finish the story. I finished it and immediately re-read it. I cannot remember the last time I did that.

And yesterday, as I was reading “Valentine,”  it hit me forcefully that what Deborah Eisenberg was doing in the mid-1980s, Tessa Hadley is doing now. And I want to say -- forcefully -- that I do not mean that to sound insulting, or to pooh-pooh what Hadley’s work is about or how it’s done. What I mean is the best possible thing: which is that where Eisenberg left off, or left me off, anyhow, Hadley has picked up, and continued to write about these people with the same kind of eye. There’s a precision about it, capturing the sense of emotional wandering, the “I’m trying to figure this shit out, leave me alone while I figure this shit out, ok?” that every young person has. (Maybe not every young person, but a lot of them, certainly. The ones I liked, anyhow, when I was one of them myself.) Hadley, like Eisenberg, isn’t patronizing toward her young protagonists. She’s not writing pat little stories about teenagers to capture a lost innocence; she’s capturing those precise moments when things are teetering one way or another, and she’s doing it without moralizing -- almost wryly -- and she has a certain economy in her sentences that does so much with so little. The stories about older people, too, have this same quality of precision. To make a fast sloppy comparison: Where T.C. Boyle -- who also often has stories in the magazine -- is an entertaining if pedantic guest at the cocktail party (bombastic and full of pyrotechnics -- the showmanship is completely unavoidable, and it can be fun but it can also be overwhelming), Eisenberg and Hadley are shyer guests. They share this quality, this sense of smart people who’re maybe more shy than is good for them, sitting quietly in the corner, taking notes in shorthand that they expand ever so slightly to build the stories later, after they’ve gotten home from the dreaded cocktail party. And the stories are just as crafted and tight as Boyle’s, but without the baroque flourishes -- more Russel Wright, perhaps, in tone. And it’s easy to overlook Wright, because he’s not gaudy, but the stuff is beautiful nonetheless.

A tiny bit of internet research indicates that both Eisenberg and Hadley are felt to be “unfairly neglected” or underrated writers, and that may be true, but I, for one, esteem them very highly, and the way I once drew lines in my head between the works of one writer to another -- in college, I drew lines from Jane Austen to Edith Wharton to Dorothy Parker, which was very tedious, but that’s college for you -- I am now drawing a big, fat, black line, with a Sharpie, between Deborah Eisenberg and Tessa Hadley. Hadley’s “Valentine” is apparently a portion of a novel she’s planning to publish soon, and let me tell you, I will probably buy that one the moment I see it, in hardcover, just as I did Eisenberg’s Transactions in a Foreign Currency. I cannot wait.

What Vegetable Are You? or, I Have No Idea Who Killed Sister George.

Last night I had a hot date. My friend M, who I don't get to hang out with very often, asked me if I'd like to accompany her to see The Killing of Sister George, now opened at the newly-renovated Long Wharf Theatre. I am not a theater person, but, on the other hand, I am not one to turn down the offer of a night away from my four year old, so I said, "Sure!"

I wasn't fully aware of it at the time I accepted her offer, but this show is a big deal for Long Wharf for many reasons, the most glitzy being, the play is directed by, and stars, world-famous hot tomato Kathleen Turner.

M and I got to Long Wharf and it turned out that the comp tickets we thought would be awaiting us were not awaiting us. It's a long story, and not that interesting. But we were not alone: many others in the same boat also didn't get in. So, the theatre staff, clearly feeling like schmucks, and feeling bad for everyone, offered us all tickets for another performance. The staff was actually really nice, and very apologetic to us. We got our consolation prize tickets and then, of course ,the question was: Well, if we're not seeing the play, what the hell do we do now?

This question was settled by our running into Steve Scarpa. I know Steve a little: we've wasted quite a few hours chatting about nothing in particular, either standing on the street, or at the Institute Library. I think he was rather surprised to see me at the theatre: he knows I'm not that kind of girl, generally speaking. I explained that I was really M's date, just along for the ride. He said he was really sorry we hadn't been able to see the show, and urged us to have a drink and stay for the after-party. M and I considered our options (many and varied, of course -- there is no shortage of places where we could have gone to have a drink; or, we could have just called it a night and gone home, but that'd be dull). The consensus was: What the hell, we'll stick around. So, she (with her complimentary wine) and I (with my complimentary bourbon) sat down in the lobby and had a good old-fashioned chinwag, of the type we only get to have two or three times a year. It was, really, so nice to sit and talk. And in a pretty glitzy setting, without loud music blaring: not bad at all.

At the after-party, where there were tables of food awaiting us, M and I wound up in conversation with my fellow New Haven Review contributor Donald Brown (who is, of course, a real theater buff; his presence at the play was not at all surprising). Among the topics we discussed was vegetables, because we were trying to assure someone near us that the thing she was about to eat was, yes, a piece of fried eggplant -- she seemed concerned that it might be... something else. (No idea what.) The practical aspects  of vegetables taken care of, we moved on to more important questions -- specifically, one, which was: If you were a vegetable, what vegetable would you be? This is an awesome parlor game, by the way. M swears that years ago, she and my husband and I played this game together and that he said I was, no question, an artichoke. I don't remember this at all but I accept it easily. We decided that being an eggplant probably would be a mixed bag, since they absorb so much grease (a bad thing), but that, on the upside, they adapt to so many flavors so well.

We were wondering whether or not Donald was an ear of corn -- concluding, in the end, that he might well be  -- when Kathleen Turner arrived in the room.

It bears repeating that Ms. Turner is a hot tomato, but in light of our conversation of the moment, M reconsidered and said that she was maybe more of a red pepper. I concede that this is possible. A red pepper is one thing raw, but another thing entirely -- smokier, sexier -- when roasted. We watched Ms. Turner charm her fried-mushroom-eating and spinach-stuffed-bread-eating audience, and finally worked up our nerve to go over to her and shake her hand. We considered asking her What vegetable are you? but decided not to: Too Barbara Walters, we agreed. In the end we simply said it was nice to meet her. She was gracious and spoke to us briefly in her strange raspy voice.

But then: what else was left for us to do? Not much. What do you do once you've shaken hands with Kathleen Turner?

We said goodnight to Donald and headed out. As luck would have it, Ms. Turner did the same thing, and so we had the pleasure of watching her make her way to her car. We didn't follow them closely enough that I could tell you "and we tailed them all the way to Turner's hotel, and then we went upstairs and killed a bottle of whiskey with her -- good times. We picked up a Veggie Bomb pizza from Modern, too, because, you know, when in New Haven..." No, we're not that interesting. M drove me home, and then she drove herself home, and that was that.

A night at the theater when you don't get to see the play should be a frustrating night. Anyone would guess that. But M and I, we had a hell of a good time.

Richard Dorsett

New Haven used to have a pretty tight-knit community of booksellers. Of course, as bookstores have closed, that aspect of cultural life in New Haven has all but vanished as well, to be replaced by other kinds of literary communities (like the one fostered here at the New Haven Review). But most of us still talk to people who were part of that community. We know Henry Berliner (the Foundry Bookstore) and Charlie Negaro (Atticus) and Chris Evans (Elm City Books). John Gearty, my former boss at Arethusa, is someone I run into at Romeo's from time to time, and we inevitably stand there for forty-five minutes, chatting as aimlessly as we ever did. I have no idea what Henry Schwab from Book Haven is up to these days, I admit, but probably half the people reading this know and will be happy to tell me.

Another bookman in New Haven, William Reese, is not so much a man about town as a bookseller, because he never had an open shop, but he is about as well-known as a bookman can be in this town, by virtue of his field (high-end Americana and literature). His staff are mostly mysteriously perched behind the scenes, but I've known a few of them over the years, and counted them as friends. One of them was particularly dear to me, and it always bothered me that he was not embraced by the city of New Haven, and that he left, in the end, to go back to his hometown in Texas. He was a treasure, the sort of person who should have been adored here. He was sort of person who would talk to anyone, have a good time arguing with you, and call you up three weeks later to tell you that he'd found a book for you -- something you needed that you didn't know existed. Richard Dorsett had a way of seeming to know about everything under the sun, and if he didn't know about the thing you were thinking about, he knew someone who did, and he'd tell you to get in touch with him. Richard was amazing. I want to write that he is amazing, but he died, I learned a few days ago, on October 26th, at the age of 57.

Richard lived in New Haven for only a few years, and he was never part of the "scene" in New Haven the way he obviously was in his hometown of Austin. He wasn't a pillar of any community here. He spent a huge amount of time going to clubs to see shows, and he knew every bookstore in town. But he lacked the web of friends and associates here that he deserved, perhaps because he was blustery and could be arrogant. I think he was disappointed in New Haven very quickly and, as is common to people who move here, he never quite felt at home here because the city didn't greet him with open arms, the way he was greeted everywhere, I gather, in Austin. But he was a dear friend of mine, one of my favorite people in New Haven in the years he was here. It saddens me so much that he is gone, and that I'll never get to talk to him again. I want New Haven to know: you missed out. If you never spent an evening hanging out with Richard Dorsett, you really missed out.

I met Richard when he was working for Reese and I was working at Arethusa. I have to admit, I don't remember our first meeting, but I remember enjoying chatting with him immensely. I remember going over to his apartment for the first time: it was filled with the most fascinating crap, plus about a million books, and it was hazy with cigarette smoke. Richard had a skeleton standing up in his living room, and he had barrister's cases for the books he really didn't want anyone to mess with. Shortly after we became friends, my then-beau and I decided to shack up together, and started looking for a cheap apartment. Richard suggested we rent the place upstairs from him, which had just become available. I remember emailing the beau in Boston, writing, "It's 600 a month -- I think it's a sign from God." Every place we'd looked at downtown was twice that much -- and this apartment was twice as big as anything we'd seen downtown. In May 1999 I moved to 150 Willow Street, and my other half moved in a month later. Richard was on the first floor; the upstairs neighbors, Dave and Laurie, were wonderful people too, it turned out; and for a few years, we lived in what has to've been the happiest multi-family house in New Haven.

Richard would come padding up the back stairs to our kitchen door in his slippers and bathrobe, holding a cup of coffee and a copy of some obscure magazine, and ask me if I had any interest in a box of wigs he'd just acquired. He was always going to estate sales and picking up the damndest things. I mean, he was always hunting for interesting books -- he liked the weird, the erotic, and the obscure, but he knew about the classics, the things there would always be a market for -- but he would buy all kinds of stuff. I remember him buying a huge box of old penknives. And shoes: he liked shoes. Richard had style, and he appreciated it in others.

I think his contrariness bothered a lot of people but that it was their mistake to write him off after one trivial argument. I know he argued with people who I'd've thought it was impossible to argue with, and I guess he had a hard time getting people to "get" him, if you know what I mean. New Haven can be a really unfriendly place to newcomers. If you're not part of the Yale community, or automatically plugged into some other social system (by virtue of family or friends you already have here or whathaveyou), New Haven is a difficult place to land. I know from experience and I am always being told, we don't make it easy for people to call New Haven home. It always mystified and saddened me that so few people here appreciated Richard Dorsett.

Richard had a loud laugh. He liked to sing to himself, and one of our favorite memories of living upstairs from him is of the morning he was pootling around his apartment make arrangements for a relative's memorial service. He'd spent months and months tending an ailing cousin in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in the end, Richard was the one in charge of everything, I guess. All I know is, we could hear him making coffee and singing to himself, as if he were Gene Autry, "Funeral hooooo-ommmmmmmmme...." Sort of almost yodeling to himself.

Richard Dorsett left New Haven in 2002 or 2003, I can't remember -- it was a few months after we moved out of 150 Willow Street to a house around the corner. He gave us some of his furniture -- nice stuff -- and moved back to Austin to take care of his aging father. I only heard from Richard now and then after that -- we usually talked on the phone around New Year's, and occasionally we'd chat on Facebook. I spoke to him a couple of months ago, and, in fact, was thinking just yesterday that I needed to call him again to tell him how a project I'm working on was progressing -- I knew he'd think it was cool to hear about. You cannot imagine my shock when I got the message -- from a stranger, via Facebook --  that he'd died, alone in his house. I wish it hadn't been that way. I hope it was fast for him. I hope he wasn't in pain. Richard was someone who had a lot of anger in him -- anger toward people who he felt weren't paying attention, who were ignorant, who were mean, who had no sense of humor -- but he was always a sweetheart to me. I loved Richard, and I have a hard time imagining life without him in it. Richard was a finder-outer, he was a digger-into, he was an elegant weirdo. We loved him so much. I'm so sorry he's gone. And New Haven, you should be ashamed for not having fought to keep him here so that you could have learned to love him too. But you like your assholes pedigreed, with papers to prove you're smart and know the right people. Richard was not pedigreed, but he was one of the best bookmen I've ever known and one of the best neighbors I have ever had. My husband and I will miss you, and we will miss you even on behalf of all the people here who didn't have the patience or sense to love you while you were here.

The Institute Library Gets Haimish.

Just in time for the High Holidays. Here we are, at the Jewish New Year -- Rosh Hashana to you and me, or, at least, to me, and here's what I've realized, very suddenly, in the last hour. The Institute Library (which regular readers will recognize is a place toward which I direct a lot of my energy) is a long-lived if low-profiled literary institution in downtown New Haven, and it's going through a weird transformation. It seems to be morphing from a place with an extraordinarily WASPy vibe to a place that looks WASPy but is thinking of converting. For all I know, in fact, it has converted, and it's just that nobody told me.

I mean, I know the place was founded to be a working man's library. I know that, and I get it. But I also feel like somewhere along the way it got kind of Edith Whartony. Or maybe that's not right. John Cheevery. Maybe I'm wrong -- I haven't done real research into this -- but I feel like it ceased to be a middle-class hangout -- or, a working-class/middle- class hangout -- and became more of a private club, more the kind of place where you'd've seen the guys who worked at New Haven's white shoe law firms hanging out after having a long lunch at, I don't know, George & Harry's, or something. Certainly by the time I became a member of the library, it seemed like a kind of elitist joint that, ok, had maybe fallen into obscurity, but still retained a certain grandeur; and it also retained a sense of exclusivity even though on paper anyone could join. There was a closed feeling, a sense of it being a private club, and not always in a warm, welcoming way. The place was fascinating, certainly, and I never felt unwelcome there myself, but I could imagine people being wigged out by the library, and taking one look, and just... never coming back.

Something's changed. The Institute Library's gotten haimish while I wasn't really paying attention.

Is it because three out of the three events I've paid attention to at the library recently featured Jewish speakers? I don't know -- but I know it to be true. And I find it funny -- I imagine the Cheevery types of the 1940s and 50s raising their eyebrows every so slightly. But listen: this is good stuff. Josh Foer has twice now hosted these fabulous evenings where we in the audience got to hear people speak of their weird passions -- the series is called Amateur Hour at the Institute Library, and it is wicked fun. The first time Foer did this, he interviewed Jack Hitt, who of course is fun to listen to -- but it was, actually, Foer's questions that tickled me the most. Unfortunately, I cannot remember why now. I just remember that while I enjoyed Hitt's answers to the questions, I actually liked Foer's delivery. The third degree, but, you know, friendly.

Then, a few nights ago, Foer hosted Alan Abel, the world's greatest hoaxster, for the second Amateur Hour. Let me tell you: if you can't spend an evening listening to Josh Foer interview Milton Berle -- and you cannot -- you could spend an evening listening to him question Abel, and it would not be so different. The material is different, granted, and there were slightly fewer jokes about schlongs or mothers-in-law, but the mode was distinctly Jewish. Even if the guy spent twenty minutes talking to us with a tampon up his nose, something my mother would not recommend you do in polite company. You have to take my word for it. The refreshments that Atticus brought -- they shouldn't have brought brownies, they should have brought rugelach. Not that I'm complaining. I love brownies.

And now, tomorrow night, to close out Rosh Hashanah, we've got Davy Rothbart -- a Jew of younger vintage, but still. A guy with remarkable comic timing, Davy Rothbart: even written on the page, it makes me laugh aloud. (You've probably heard him on This American Life and thought he was hilarious, but I never have; I don't listen to it.) He's coming with his brother Peter, to talk about Davy's new book of essays, My Heart is an Idiot, and to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the remarkable magazine they publish, FOUND, which is, if you don't know it, something to behold. Between the book and the magazine and the New Year, there's a lot to celebrate at the Institute Library tomorrow. I suddenly wish I'd organized my weekend differently; if I'd planned ahead, I could have made a babka to bring to the Library tomorrow night. I'd've cut you a slice to have with your coffee. I would definitely serve some to the people from the New York Times who're going to be there. (Yes, the New York Times is paying attention to Davy and Peter Rothbart and the Institute Library: maybe you should, too.) I'm sorry; I wasn't thinking ahead. But you should come anyhow. Monday night, September 17, at 8: Davy and Peter Rothbart. A night to remember. The Institute Library, 847 Chapel Street. For information on buying tickets, please visit the library's website, www.institutelibrary.org.

A book I forgot to read a few years ago

I find that summertime is when I remember titles I meant to read years ago but forgot about for no good reason. The other day, for example, a copy of Nicholas Dawidoff's The Crowd Sounds Happy fell into my hands, and I sounded pretty happy about it myself, because I really wanted to read that when it came out. And then forgot about it entirely. I cannot remember the last time I read a book so quickly. I got it home and had finished reading it within, I think, 36 hours. Somewhere around page 40, I sent an email to a friend and said to her, "I don't know if you have time for recreational reading, but if you do, you should really take a look at this." When my husband came home from work, I said to him, "I've started reading a book and I think you need to read it."

It's not that I think Dawidoff's book has universal appeal; far from it. I think it will appeal to people who grew up as sort of sad lonely baseball fans -- which, okay, is probably a large group -- and people who grew up in Dawidoff's version of New Haven (a relatively small demographic). His descriptions of listening to games on the radio are lovely. The descriptions of his family life range from sweet to  harrowing. But what slayed me, personally, was his writing about the city I live in. I live, now, just a few blocks away from where Dawidoff grew up, and as someone who's there and raising a child, I could not help but find it fascinating. I was so interested in his memories of New Haven, in fact, that I found myself speculating about how no one who hadn't lived in New Haven in the 1970s would ever want to read this book. Now, that's probably not literally true, but it might not be far from the truth.

No one needs me to tell them that Dawidoff's a good writer. No one needs me to review this book at all, really. But if you are like me -- someone who has all good intentions of reading something which you then forget about until prodded, years after the reviews -- you need someone to remind you. Yes, this is a book you want to pick up. It's not a heartwarming book; Dawidoff isn't a guy you'd describe as happy-go-lucky. But it's a wonderful depiction of one kind of life in one specific version of New Haven, and I'm very glad to've read it.

The Lights on Broadway. Specifically, the neon sign we all wanted to put in our apartments, back when we were young and cool.

I speak, of course, of the massive Cutler's Records sign. The Cutler's sign was not only literally huge, but it was metaphorically huge in the mind of anyone who lived in New Haven. It was the most important physical marker on Broadway. Seeing the Cutler's sign -- which was neon, and in my childhood, I could swear, had a record moving on the turntable, though maybe I'm making that up -- you knew you were here. You couldn't possibly be anywhere else. Cutler's wasn't a chain. It was of New Haven and for New Haven. You could buy recordings of every Yale singing group you never wanted to hear, and all the local bands who maybe you wanted to hear, or maybe you didn't, because the bass player never called you even though he said he would, that asshole. People who knew Cutler's as the small storefront it's been in recent years have absolutely no way of understanding how phenomenal it once was. It's not merely that it used to be bigger. It's that it used to be bigger and what they had was music. Just music. There was a huge classical side, where your longhair types could find whatever it was they wanted (don't ask me, I don't know a thing about it), and there was a room full of 45s, where you could find every pop hit you'd ever hummed to yourself absent-mindedly and then couldn't get out of your head even though you couldn't remember the title. I know this because I used to be the girl in the 45s room and a large part of my job was to deal with customers who came in and asked me to sell them the song they couldn't remember. "It went like this: 'ooooh, baby, I said, yeah, yeah, yeah....'" these people would sing. If I didn't know the song, I'd go get someone else to help. Sam, there was a guy named Sam who knew every disco tune ever (this was not the same man who ran the classical side, Sam Carmack). There was Bob, who knew pretty much everything in every genre, probably because he'd been working at Cutler's since I was around four years old. The staff was incredible. It shifted a lot -- people tend to come and go in record stores, though there's always a core staff that stays forever -- but you knew that if someone was working there, they knew their shit in at least one category. And we had reference works to help us out if we were stumped, though I can't remember us using them more than once or twice in the few months I worked at Cutler's. The staff just knew the material. And we were good at helping people find that song, and we'd sell them the 45, and they'd leave the store with their little paper bags and head home, happy as clams.

My tenure at Cutler's was very short. It was the first job from which I got fired. I never knew why. After practically begging for a job -- Al Lotto hired me, finally, and I don't really know why -- I spent maybe four months working for Phil Cutler. It was 1988. I don't think I'd graduated from high school yet when I started, though perhaps I had, just barely. I was living in a mouse-infested apartment on Elm Street which I was subletting from three Yale students, and had the shortest walk to work imaginable. I was paid very little money, but it was all right: my rent was $250 a month and I basically had no substantial expenses beyond that. Then one day I went to clock in and there was no time card for me. I went to Al to ask where my card was. He said, "It's not there? Hang on, let me see if it's still in the desk." And when he came back to me, he looked unhappy. "Phil says you can go home," he told me. Ever cool, I said, "What?" and burst into tears. Poor Al. He gave me a hug and said, "Don't worry, you'll be fine." He didn't seem to understand what had happened any more than I did. I walked back to my disgusting apartment, cried a little more, and then hit the streets to find another job. Around lunchtime, Atticus offered me a job, and I became a bookman.

But Cutler's remained the best record store around, even if I was angry at the owner for canning me. Other new record stores came and went. I remember Amperes, and Strawberries, and Sam Goody's. I remember the used record stores downtown, which often seemed to be staffed by refugees from Cutler's -- you saw the same people flitting in and out all the time.

It is because of the time I spent in the record stores on Broadway -- Cutler's and Rhymes -- that when Nick Hornby's High Fidelity came out, I was able to smack myself on the head over and over again and say, "oh my god, this is the best book I've ever read." It's because of the time I spent in those stores that, when I first read Laurie Colwin's Goodbye Without Leaving, I was able to see so, so clearly, Fred's Out of Print Records, the store where Geraldine hangs out.

In a few days, Cutler's will close. I've gone and finally done something I never thought I would do: I bought Cutler's t-shirts. I now ardently wish I had one of the shirts that had the classic drawing of Cutler's*. But I was too proud to buy one when they were still making them. I gave a t-shirt to my brother this past weekend. He was visiting us -- an unusual occurrence -- and when I told him Cutler's was closing his jaw dropped and he said, "Ok, I gotta go tomorrow and buy --" "Don't worry, I've got it. I already got you one." If I could have, I'd've bought the neon sign, too.

*The drawing can be seen in the Hendricks/Goetzmann book About Town, and don't even get me started on that right now. But if you want to buy a copy you can:  contact the William Reese Company http://www.williamreesecompany.com/shop/reeseco/contact.html

Davy Jones on Crown Street

We cannot all be artists and writers. Though I'm writing this right now, I'm not really a writer. And though I know how to strum a few chords, I am hardly a musician. What I am is a really intense appreciator of writing and music in a few select categories. My tastes are not catholic or even particularly flexible, but within my genres, I know what's good. I am enchanted by rock and pop music, obsessing on single tracks, playing them over and over again: songs that serious musicians would call silly, music that my longhair parents wouldn't even describe as music. Of all the three-chord wonders I've spent hours listening to, though, the Monkees were the band I remember appreciating first. Watching re-runs of their show on one of the two TV sets in my bedroom, I fell in love. I don't really know why my parents couldn't have forseen that I was not going to grow up to be a classical pianist. Basically, my entire life, I now see, could have been predicted on the basis of this single fact: when I was not much more than a toddler, I bought a handful of Monkees albums, already rather worn, at the Salvation Army on Crown Street, and every night I fell asleep listening to them on my little orange plastic record player, gazing at the pictures of Mike Nesmith.

Davy Jones has died, and on hearing the news I was overwhelmed with memories of being so small and listening to those Monkees records. I was also a huge fan of the TV show, but I loved the records just as much. As I now find my daughter is enraptured by the unlikeliest songs (tracks by the Bobby Fuller Four? by the Pixies?) I had some kind of spell cast on me by Monkees tracks, most of all "Valleri." I even had a Monkees book, with some cartoon story about the Monkees in the Wild West or something like that; I am positive I still have it somewhere because there is no way I would ever have thrown out that book. (Actually, I know exactly where it is. It's packed in a box, the same box with my three copies of the book of Yellow Submarine.) The Monkees were central to my development as a cultural appreciator. And while it's true that I wasn't a Davy Jones fan -- I was a Mike Nesmith girl through and through, which will surprise no one who knows me -- the fact is, it was Davy's sunny charisma that allowed the rest of the Monkees to be famous, to shine too. You couldn't have Mike Dolenz, the dopey one, or Peter Tork, the spacey/arty one, or Mike Nesmith, the "intellectual" Monkee, without Davy, the cute one, who was a little silly but also basically normal, as their foil. And so I acknowledge my debt to Davy Jones. Without Davy Jones, we wouldn't have the Monkees. But the way I see it, there are other important things we wouldn't have. Repo Man, for example. How could Mike Nesmith have gone on to produce that movie if he hadn't had those years as a Monkee behind him? Impossible.

I remember that my babysitter, Laurie, took me to the Salvation Army on Crown Street now and then; it was just down the street from our apartment. I don't know if she was shopping for herself or for us or if she just used the store as a space where we could kill time in bad weather. But we went there, and I remember that I was able to buy my Monkees albums there for for 25 cents each; I saved my allowances to do so. I think Laurie thought it was funny that I wanted those records so badly. I am sure my parents had no idea what the stuff was, but I know that they knew about the records, because I still have them and one of them has been annotated on its sleeve by my father in his remarkable handwriting. If they'd had any idea that a tiny little degenerate was being created at the time, I'm sure they'd have tried to stop it. But they didn't know. It's sort of funny, actually. The Salvation Army fostered my love of pop music trash; it costumed me when I was in my cranky-with-no-cash wee rock and roll girl phase; and even now it costumes me and my daughter. I no longer buy records there, I admit, but I never walk into the Salvation Army without remembering that my long history with pop music -- my life in record collecting -- began there. With a bunch of guys singing someone else's songs, on Colgems, of all labels...

Thanks, Davy Jones. Thanks, Salvation Army. Thanks, Laurie.

"How's East Haven?" "Sucks."

The movie Ocean's Twelve, which came out in 2004, is one of my favorite movies of the last ten years. (Make of that what you will.) I don't know how many times I've watched it -- certainly a dozen, which seems right and just. Part of my affection for the movie stems from a little detail at the beginning of the movie. We see Danny Ocean (George Clooney) talking to a bank employee, talking about safe deposit boxes and retirement funds, and a caption flits onto the screen: East Haven, Connecticut. The moment I saw this, my first thought was: Why would a guy like Danny Ocean be in East Haven, Connecticut? And why does the shot of him leaving the bank and strolling through the center of town, then dumping his flowers into the trash so he can rush back to his wife, Tess, show a quaint, charming, subtly-decorated New England town which bears no resemblance to East Haven, Connecticut? He’s not in any East Haven I’ve ever seen; he’s in Guilford. He’s in Litchfield. He’s somewhere in Connecticut, sure -- but it sure as hell isn’t East Haven. I've discussed this with people who are more capable of nuanced thought than I. My original theory was, "Whoever wrote the movie (George Nolfi) thinks that all of Connecticut is like Westport, and has no idea that East Haven is just this blue collar town where rich people do not go to retire, where art curators are not going to redecorate their beach house and quibble with the housepainters about how much brown to add to the white paint." That it was a mistake borne out of ignorance of the true cultural geography of Connecticut.

But a cooler head suggests that perhaps the explanation is more complicated but also more mundane: that the screenwriter knew what he was doing when he wrote "East Haven, Connecticut," but that the director (Steven Soderbergh) didn't know what was envisioned by Nolfi when he went to film, and so, that segment of the movie wound up being the stereotypical "Connecticut" that people are used to in Hollywood product (with the exception of Mystic Pizza, which does a pretty good job of depicting working class life in Mystic -- at least, it LOOKS like Mystic, and not Westport. Or Guilford). The cooler head suggests that perhaps a town like East Haven would actually be an excellent place for Danny Ocean to hide out: claiming he’s a retired high school basketball coach, he’d have a chance to just blend into the community.

But here's what I'm having fun thinking about now: how lots of people who watch that movie from now on will see that little line of text -- East Haven, Connecticut -- and it's gonna mean something different now because of this hullabaloo with the mayor and tacos and the cops who've been harassing the Latinos who've been making East Haven their homes for the last 20 odd years.

When you factor in Ocean’s pseudonym, which he takes on to blend in to the charming little community of East Haven, is Diaz, the whole thing just becomes more comical. Wrong ethnic group to pick, it seems, if you're trying to sketch a character who's just trying to blend in. But maybe someone knew this would be a problem. When Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) asks Ocean, “How’s East Haven?” Ocean doesn’t skip a beat. “Sucks,” he says. So perhaps the screenwriter knew something about the real East Haven after all?

I am a sucker for bloopers -- you know, the gag reels they tack onto DVDs as “extras” off the main menu -- and it seems to me that more than ever, those opening scenes of “Ocean’s Twelve” are just one giant blooper. Mr. and Mrs. Diaz, you really picked the wrong place to go if you were trying to escape the attention of local police. Fortunately, in your cases, though, it was just a movie.

Russell Hoban.

I’m writing this on the morning of Friday, the 16th of December.  

Yesterday’s New York Times featured two big obituaries that were of note to people in the world of books and letters. George Whitman, the owner of (as people kept saying) the fabled, the legendary, Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Co., died at the age of 98. I never went to Shakespeare & Co. and I really don’t have much to say about the place, though obviously it was a landmark and hugely important. Godspeed to you, Mr. Whitman. But I am bitter and sad about the attention Whitman’s death attracted because the other big obituary I read yesterday affected me much more deeply, and I was surprised that I didn’t read the sad responses to it on Facebook that I had genuinely expected.

Russell Hoban died.

Were you ever a child? When you were little, did you read those books about the little badger named Frances who made up songs about how she didn’t like eggs? Who had a little sister named Gloria who loved Chompo bars? Whose best friend, Albert, was obviously going to grow up to be the only confirmed bachelor badger in town? Who had an awful friend named Thelma who was such a bitch that I cannot imagine ever naming a child of mine Thelma?

Russell Hoban wrote a short but hugely important series of stories about Frances. Bread and Jam for Frances; Bedtime for Frances; A Bargain for Frances; A Birthday for Frances; Best Friends for Frances; A Baby Sister for Frances. They are all absolutely wonderful. The illustrations were by Hoban’s wife, Lillian, except for the one done by the master Garth Williams (I feel bad about this, but have to admit that the one with the Williams illustrations is actually the one where I like the pictures the least -- this is not unlike how the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle book that I like the least, even though it’s wonderful, is illustrated by Maurice Sendak -- I prefer the Hilary Knight illustrations in the other three titles). Hoban wrote many, many other books, including acclaimed works for grownups. But I know nothing about them. I tell you this not in a boastful way, but just to make it clear I am no authority on Russell Hoban.

But I can tell you this: Hoban is a guy whose work was essential to the formation of thousands and thousands and thousands of readers around the world. Maybe not all highbrow readers -- maybe not the sort of people who shopped at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. But they were readers. And they loved those books.

When I was small, I spent a lot of time in the tiny town of Enfield, New Hampshire. There isn’t much happening in Enfield and there was even less happening then, when I was little. But they had a charming public library, which was a Victorian house that had been converted into a library. Every summer I would borrow the same books from that library. These were books I would never have touched the rest of the year, when I was in New Haven -- they were special summertime only books. The Frances books were summertime books. So was Eloise in Paris. Sacred titles, these.

When the Foundry Bookstore was still around, one day, about ten years ago, I very coolly went in and bought all of the Frances books they had -- I think there were four titles in stock. I didn’t need them, strictly speaking, but I thought, “I need to take these home and keep them safe.” I read them once and tucked them away on my shelf, with no intention of doing anything with them except enjoying them now and then.

Now, I have a three year old who adores the Frances books, which I have been reading to her since she was an infant. She loves to eat bread and jam because of Frances. We will always have copies of the Frances books in our house. Because not enough people seem to be taking this seriously, I will be loud when I say Rest in peace, Mr. Hoban. I know I didn’t know all your work, but what I knew, I loved.

847 Chapel Street, New Haven, Conn.

Many who know me know that I've been involved for some years with the Young Men's Institute Library, which has been located at 847 Chapel Street for the last hundred-and-some years. Growing up on York Street in the 1970s I had no idea the Library was there; living downtown in the 1980s and 1990s, I still didn't know it was there until (and I write this with chagrin) a Yale undergrad asked me one day if I knew anything about the place. I knew nothing. And I was too chicken to go up there and find out what it was. But the Yalie -- a sweet-and-fearless type -- went, and came back to me a day later saying, "You Need To Go There." In 2002 I was given a membership as a gift, and it changed my life. A few years after that, I joined the board of the Library, and my life changed again -- I gained a mission. I am an evangelist for the Institute Library.

At a dinner party in the fall of 2008 I met Will Baker, a local bookman. Our casual conversation about bookselling led me to ask him if he ever went to the Institute Library. He hadn't heard of it. I said, "Oh, you need go -- let me take you some day on your lunch break."

I took Will to see the Library the following week, as I recall, and it was, I gather, love at first sight. Shortly after that, Will left his position at the William Reese Company and enrolled in a library science program, a move that I found slightly confounding, but also understood: he had a mission, too. For various school assignments, Will threw himself into projects relating to or benefitting the Library. He built its first website -- a lovely, elegant little thing -- and conducted a survey of its members which was full of information that was interesting, surprising, and valuable -- and which would never have been undertaken by anyone on the Library's staff or board. The scale of effort Will put into these projects was simply beyond any one of us: these were labors of love, not merely assignments done to fulfill a degree requirement.

In January of 2011, the Board voted to install William C. Baker as the first Executive Director of the Young Men's Institute Library. A superior bookman -- by which I mean widely read, knowledgeable, and seemingly a Hoover for all information book-related -- Will moved to New Haven a few years ago and has thrown himself into becoming one of those social-lightning-rod types you read about in Malcolm Gladwell essays. I had heard of Will, myself, for years before I actually met him. On becoming acquainted with him, I learned that we knew at least a dozen of the same people. He's done volunteer work for New Haven Reads and at Christ Church New Haven; he has talked at length with at least 75% of the people he's ever laid eyes on, as far as I can tell; if he were interested in political office, he'd be a force to watch, but as it is, he's a bookman, and so he's just.... amazing.

Some folks are whip smart, and some folks are genuinely nice, and some folks are energetic and full of interesting ideas, but very few people combine all of these qualities. Will combines all of these qualities and adds a lot more to the mix; fortunately for the Institute Library, he's directing his love and energy toward the Library now, officially and full-time. The Library's hours have expanded: it is now open not just ten hours a week, but six days a week (M-F, 10-6; Saturday, with volunteer staff, 10-3). With Will at the helm, the Library will be developing new programming; re-working acquisitions policies; and, frankly, God knows what else. The guy's got a list of plans longer than my arm.

I know it's been hard for people to appreciate the Library in recent years because its hours were so choppy and difficult to work with. But now, the hours are longer. The place is open and right in the middle of a very buzz-y neighborhood (Chapel Street near Church -- there's a lot happening there); and there's wireless internet. You can go up and browse the shelves of books and borrow a stack of obscure 1930s thrillers or you can just sit and read for a bit and then amble off on your way. Either way, you are welcome to come by. Membership to the Library is still a humble $25 per year (and can be purchased with plastic for the first time if you go to www.institutelibrary.org).

I fell in love with the Institute Library when I saw they had almost every old book by Patrick Dennis on the shelf. Just sitting there. Waiting for me. I imagine that people who read the New Haven Review would have some similar experience on first browsing the stacks. On first walking in. The Institute Library is a beautiful time machine; a librarian walked in, one recent Saturday, and said to me in wonder, "It's a museum of what a library used to be." And it is.... except it's not a museum. It's the real deal. An old-fashioned membership library.

I predict you can fall in love with it too, and then, knocked silly with joy, you can leave the library and go have freshly made square doughnuts at the Orangeside Luncheonette around the corner. Really, a near-perfect morning.