The Bookstore in the Basement

The Upper West Side has a hidden second-hand bookstore that appears and disappears like Howl’s Moving Castle and holds a continually replenishing trove of treasures beyond counting. Twice a month, usually on a Wednesday and a Saturday, although on no fixed schedule, its doors open to the public for a few glorious hours of bargain-price bibliomania.

Pick a category–you’ll find a shelf or a section of titles: fiction, science fiction, fantasy, science, sociology, philosophy, psychology, gender studies, travel, technology, medicine, mysteries, space, poetry, foreign languages, art, photography, self-help, religion. There are CDs and DVDs, even a custom oak bookcase and viewing pedestal for a complete Oxford English Dictionary.  And the children’s books range from classics to current favorites with plenty of I Can Read books for beginner book addicts.

Children’s books, classics to contemporary

The secret stash of books totals about 40,000 volumes each sale, although you probably won’t find multiple copies of any title at one time. Regulars know to bring a sturdy canvas satchel and cash–temptation always overwhelms good sense and an armload of books is heavy to haul home. So, if you are dedicated to the acquisition of delicious books and happen to be in the vicinity of the St. Agnes Library on Amsterdam between 81-82nd, check out the flyer on the door to find the next shop-op in the basement (Wednesday, May 30 from 1:00 – 5:00). There are no overstuffed chairs and bookstore cats to add atmosphere but you could always repair to a nearby pub to peruse your intemperate purchases and use some of the money you saved for a pint or two. Literary New York, paradise for savvy book junkies.

 

The Calder Game – Blue Balliett

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The Calder Game is the third in Blue Balliett’s series about some eccentric Chicago middle school kids who solve mysteries using an idiosyncratic belief in coincidence and their own curiosity. Chasing Vermeer was the first book to introduce Petra who has a magical relationship with language and Calder who keeps a pocketful of pentominoes and is a mathier kid. Together they made a formidable, if sometimes perplexing team. A great fascination of book one was the puzzle around the Vermeer paintings and it led to perusal of the Vermeers in our own museum across the park—a delightful follow-up to an engaging book.

In The Calder Game, the third member of the trio, Calder’s friend Tommy who was introduced in book two (haven’t read it) gets his ink. I don’t find him a very compelling character—in fact, he is anything but appealing. Picks his nose, for one thing, and is too easily ruffled. But his presence does take some of the action away from Petra to her detriment. She seems a less strong character in this episode and that is a loss.

The story begins as Calder takes a trip to Oxford with his father, after a disastrous class excursion to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art to see an ambitious Calder retrospective. Calder, who was named after the artist, lugs his pocketful of pentominoes with him and is stunned to find a giant Calder sculpture installed in the medieval town square in the small village outside of Oxford where he and his dad are staying. Dad takes off for a conference at the university, leaving Calder to sightsee on his own and things pretty much go downhill from there.

A village full of suspicious characters resents the sudden appearance of a sculpture no one wants, ominous looks and coincidences shadow Calder’s tourism, nearby Blenheim Palace has a legendary maze that hides ugly secrets and ancient landscaping that might be deadly, a fat cat shows up rather often at auspicious moments. Then the Calder sculpture and Calder himself disappear. You need a powerful willing suspension of disbelief to puzzle through the rest of the story. Petra, Tommy and a neighbor are flown over from Chicago to help in the search for Calder. The neighbor has thoughtfully procured some sort of Chicago official police detective IDs for them so they can ignore police lines and sleuth at will. They come and go day and night without much supervision. Calder’s father and the neighbor believe the children will solve the mystery of the disappearances.

There’s a lot of adventure and the kids do act independently. The resolution of the various riddles—and crimes—is tricky to guess at because it doesn’t/can’t make sense until the explanations at the end. A bright boy like Calder doesn’t know that a cave with an entrance and cracks in the rocks isn’t a sealed oxygen-free chamber. Americans are boors and bad guys before they are heroes and okay after all. It’s very puzzly—a hallmark of these books—and it was entertaining. But the illogical bits were very distracting and I wish they were more seamlessly incorporated. Nice to learn about an artist, a math tool that looks like a toy, a few museums and botanical gardens. But Chasing Vermeer was a better book—Calder and Petra were a tough team together. Add the nose-picking Tommy and, not so much.

The Calder Game   Blue Balliett  | Scholastic   2008

The Expanded Quotable Einstein – Alice Calaprice

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Albert Einstein was a prolific writer and commentator and eminently quotable. So a collection of his quotes is extensive enough to describe a life. The Expanded Quotable Einstein, compiled and edited by Alice Calaprice, is like a multilayered box of chocolates, tempting to dip into again and again. I picked it up while killing a day trying to clean all the crud out of my computer so it would operate at something swifter than near-death speed. The book was perfect for those long stretches of malware and spyware searches that served to overheat the laptop and not do too much else.

One of the first treats you encounter is a black-and-white photograph of Einstein sitting on a porch in Princeton wearing a huge pair of fluffy slippers. Meant to balance the hair, I suppose. There are portraits of him with his second wife, with Rabindranath Tagore and Charlie Chaplin, at the helm of his sailboat, with family and a pet dog. His violin gets a page as does E=mc² in his own handwriting. But the words are the stars of the volume and he had something to say about almost everything.

On life: “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.” That one seems to hint at Einstein’s troubled personal relationships—he was not always as benevolent to his family as he appeared to outsiders.

On his habit of playing the violin to unwind in his kitchen in Berlin—a room he credited with excellent acoustics: “First I improvise and, if that doesn’t help, I seek solace in Mozart. But when I am improvising and it appears that something may come of it, I require the clear constructions of Bach in order to follow through.” Einstein once told an interviewer for The Saturday Evening Post that he would be a musician if he were not a physicist. But, included in his remarks about music, are a casual rhyme about not inflicting your playing on your neighbors and a lament to Queen Elizabeth of Belgium that his technique had deteriorated with age.

He had a less than egalitarian view of women, in his own words, believing them to be obsessively concerned with domestic affairs and not much competition for men in matters of science. (Paradoxically, in 1918, Einstein spoke out in favor of mathematician Emmy Noether’s appointment to a university faculty, a position she was denied because of her gender. This was a departure from his usual championing of the superior brains of men.) Some things seem to have escaped his enormous intelligence entirely. His dismissive attitude toward women mirrored his aversion to marriage, which didn’t keep him from trying it twice: “Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident.” Even a genius can’t get everything right.

With age, Einstein’s “wisdom” took on its own life. He was quoted and misquoted everywhere, much to his dismay. He refused, as he had his whole life, to romanticize himself and delighted in the pithy comment, humorous or serious.

“I have reached an age when, if someone tells me to wear socks, I don’t have to,” he remarked to a friend. To his biographer he declared in 1952, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

Curiosity about Einstein the man can be satisfied by a careful read of Einstein, the writer and speaker. From love letters to his first wife to vexation about the puzzles of quantum theory and the frustrating search for a unified field theory that would answer all the questions, Einstein revealed himself in words. The ones collected here are fewer than an infinity, but they will do for a start.

The Expanded Quotable Einstein    Alice Calaprice | Princeton University Press   2000

Urban Texting

New York architect John Locke designs a "phone booth library" for seldom used street fixtures. City as library--YES!

A Visit from the Goon Squad — Jennifer Egan

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I didn’t read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad when it hit the big PR fan and exploded all over the place. Didn’t read it when it won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Didn’t read it when it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Wish I hadn’t read it now. Didn’t like it for a whole bunch of reasons and all the hype and prizes just exacerbated my disappointment.

The characters are cliché, tawdry and forgettable. Did not care about a single one. Sasha, the klepto, is supposed to be simpatico and funny, I guess. She wasn’t. There was nothing original about her sticky fingers and the discussion of it was boring. Bennie, the washed up music producer, is cheesy, sort of repulsive and completely unappealing. A revolving cast of cameos is hard to keep track of, indistinguishable, and resembles caricatures more than characters. The book attempts to sum up an era from about the 1970s to some time in the not-too-distant future–about 2020 or so. There doesn’t seem to be anything redeeming about the souls Egan creates to people this history. Her take on all of us is decidedly unflattering–bunch of self-absorbed, not especially bright losers–people you wouldn’t want to share a cup of coffee with.

The text is a miscellany of authorial styles pasted together with school glue that doesn’t hold. There are copious footnotes in some chapters, truncated texting in others. A 75-page (hard copy edition) graphic section that is supposed to be a PowerPoint composed by a 12-year-old girl to capture the dynamics of her family got lots of critical attention. It doesn’t work as a diary or a PowerPoint. No 12-year-old girl would ever produce anything like it—not even on Facebook, a venue a kid would be far more likely to use in any case.

The bits—more like not-quite-connected short stories—were a grab bag of events, from a jungle encounter with a genocidal general to a legendary outdoor concert that was pure marketing job start-to-finish. There was a tenement apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen, a young girl giving a blowjob to a music producer in the middle of a rock club concert turned rowdy, cocaine snorting, pot smoking, Xanax popping, ad infinitum. In a story, things should be there for a reason–the development of the characters or the plot maybe? Hey, I live in New York City where there are still a few misplaced clawfoot tubs in tenement apartments. The demise of the music business and ubiquitous marketing–sizzle instead of steak–are not news. Neither are aging washed-up teen celebrities, genocidal generals, drug abuse or environmental fail. I was not wonderstruck at all these shiny discoveries.  Readers are not rubes and I didn’t find the inclusion of tech-speak or the stereotypes clever or compelling.

Aaarrgh. Why did this book make me so mad? Egan can string words together but the narrative seemed glib and superficial–I kept waiting to be entertained or enlightened. Telling stories should be about giving gifts in exchange for time and attention. That is the point of art—to offer something important, not to show-off.  A Visit from the Goon Squad isn’t positioned as a piece of assembly-line fiction designed solely to sell boatloads of copies in airports and big box stores and it isn’t a book-like object notable only for the celebrity name on the cover. It arrived with certain expectations–a good read maybe? Something novel and thought-provoking? I’d like to think the literary establishment cared more about readers when it conferred its accolades and prizes. In this case, I guess you really can’t judge a book by the awards and blurbs on its cover.

A Visit from the Goon Squad   Jennifer Egan | Alfred A. Knopf  2010

The Night Circus — Erin Morgenstern

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Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus is really weird. The book is a series of linked vignettes, strung like a one-of-a-kind necklace from odd beginning to jarring end. The real name of the circus, which opens at dusk and closes at dawn, appears unannounced in an empty field and is colored entirely black and white,  is Le Cirque de Rêves—the circus of dreams. The entire story might be a dream—it certainly makes the point that the reality we apprehend is a construct of mind and that we can alter the dream at will or be captive of the nightmare that plays across our closed eyes when we sleep.

Near the end of the story, Morgenstern quotes Shakespeare’s Prospero; the passage would have been too instructive to include earlier in the book:

Our revels are now ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

How to re-cap this tale? Celia is the child of a magician who masquerades his skills as an illusionist. He trains her from age six to wage a challenge against the protégé of another magician, binding her to the wager with a silver ring that burns a permanent brand into her hand. The other magician plucks a boy, Marco, from an orphanage—apparently in late 19^th-century England orphans can be selected like groceries—and trains him in the ancient ways of magic from books. Celia is an intuitive and can manipulate matter. Marco creates fabulous structures out of formulae and spells.

The circus is the brainchild of a wealthy entrepreneur who specializes in the highly iconoclastic and throws midnight dinner parties for a select group of collaborators. None of these characters is as straightforward as they might seem. The circus arrives without warning. It seduces, delights and subverts lives. It contains the most amazing and unimaginable acts. It is unlike anything anyone has ever seen—as improbable and fascinating as the richest of dreams. Within it, lives unfold, performances astonish, magical children are born, wonders never cease. Outside the black and white striped tents and the iron perimeter fence, lives unravel, people grow old, some die, fans exchange stories and travel the world to find the circus and bask in its glow for a few nights. Celia is the illusionist of the circus, performing nightly; Marco is the assistant of the circus owner, living in London. Both are essential to keep the fantasy of the tents and performers alive.

Meanwhile Celia and Marco discover that each is the other’s competitor. They also fall in love. This is a complication that was not in the script. It will wreak havoc with the careful plans of their puppet-masters. And the contortionist and the fortuneteller have their own agendas; magicians perform acts that go horribly wrong and leave them evanescent—not gone but not quite there; a boy who climbs apple trees takes a dare to break into the circus in the daylight and changes his life. No spoilers here—it is impossible to summarize this story without telling the whole thing.

The language is mesmerizing, the premise is hypnotic; the conceits are captivating. I liked the book but I did resist the forecast forced combat that promised to end badly and I am really unfamiliar with this brand of fantasy—it’s something like an extended drug-induced hallucination from the 60s.  I would read it again to puzzle it through more diligently. The Night Circus may be the most unusual book you read any time soon. Despite, or maybe because of, its episodic construction, it has the power to hold your attention.

The Night Circus   Erin Morgenstern | Doubleday  2011

The Winter Solstice – John Matthews

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The Winter Solstice is a big book stuffed with glossy color plates and an encyclopedia’s worth of information about the origins of the solstice celebrations, Yule traditions and instructions for Yule logs, wishing trees and ceremonies, solstice animals and birds, and classic recipes for eggnog and wassail bowls.

John Matthews has written numerous books on Celtic subjects but this one is subtitled “The Sacred Traditions of Christmas” and there is a lot about the holiday we know and how influences from Druid mistletoe to Coca Cola have shaped it. Santa, with his red coat, big belly, rosy cheeks and white beard, is fairly modern image from an illustration publicized by the Coca Cola Company in its late nineteenth century advertising. The pagan Green Man is said to have challenged Gawain in Arthur’s court when Camelot traded its Druid spiritual customs for a Christian celebration. The first mention of Christmas trees comes from 1605 in Germany but the ancient Romans decorated their houses with evergreen boughs every year in early January.

You may infuse a solstice observance with symbolism from many cultures and Matthews tells you how. Mithras, a Persian deity with a life story remarkably like Christ’s, can be invoked with a golden circle or disc. Dionysus, god of wine and merriment, gets a pine cone. Holly branches and strands of ivy hark back to the folk tradition of a ritual battle between the Holly King and the Ivy Queen. The two plants, which remain green, produce bright red berries and are decorative in winter, were also part of Greek legend and represented for Christians the crown of thorns and the purity of Mary.

Matthews details the Twelve Days of Christmas with history for each day and suggested activities. But he lists as well the unique architecture of the pre-christian people who built New Grange and Stonehenge and other sacred sites aligned with the winter and summer solstice sun. An interesting tidbit is that Bronze Age and Neolithic shamans climbed down ladders into the fires and smoke of the underworld to retrieve soul bits or to discover wisdom. They were precursors of the reindeer-driven gift-giver who climbs down the chimney to reward good boys and girls with their heart’s desires.

The Winter Solstice is a better reference book than a straight-through read. I would add an index to make it easier to recover specific information without having to flip through pages. And I did find the content much more Christmas-centric than solstice-focused. But the book does link some of the older celebrations with the feast days and festivals that were layered over them. The Romans tried to remake a pagan world that revered the life-giving return of the light each year as the season turned. They may have co-opted solstice but evidence of it is still everywhere, if you know how to look.

The Winter Solstice: The Sacred Traditions of Christmas   John Matthews | Quest Books   2003

On Books and Barbarians

Books destroyed in the raid on Zuccotti Park. Photo courtesy of the Occupy Wall Street People’s Library

I was planning to muse about what it feels like to read a book a day but events derailed that idea. It seems that a free public library in a park needs to be dismantled in the dead of night by riot police and carted off by the Sanitation Department. And then, after more books are donated and some few damaged volumes are salvaged, the free library should be trashed again. Very nice. Not exactly my utopian idea about a whole city that becomes a library. Not really defensible unless we are the barbarians after all. Once upon a time I thought that marching and protesting—and even voting–could change the world. These days I read obsessively to change myself.

OWS new mobile People's Library--police won't let the books back into the park so they've taken to the streets with the protestors. Photo Courtesy of Occupy Wall Street.

As I keep on opening books and turning pages, I have discovered that I’m still tempted to abandon a book midway if it isn’t a pure joy to read. By finishing books, I find a few treasures and some memorable ideas or characters or plot twists. I still feel guilty about reading as there is so much work to do and not enough work for pay and I always think I should be marketing more, hunting for jobs to apply for (exercise in futility but guilt assuaging), doing the laundry at the dismal, overcrowded Laundromat. (Glamorous Gotham is full of romantic prewar brownstones with no laundry facilities whatsoever and none allowed in individual apartments.) Everything, it seems, could take precedence over reading a book, which must be an act of pure self-indulgence. How can reading a book be essential?

The OWS People's Library - Mid-October 2011

My answer to myself is that, in a society of barbarians, how could anything be more essential? Books capture the past, the present and the future. Books tell stories. Books create worlds. This one is slightly insupportable at the moment. So I can search for a better world, or ideas about how to make this broken world better, in every book I open. Reading is an exercise in hope. 

Reading a book a day takes time. So does blogging about the book. I spend more time than I mean to writing posts and more time than I want to loading the posts into the blog template and adding all the bits. I like the whole process, though. Immersing myself in a sea of printed words is a good feeling. I pay more attention to book news. I read more tweets from literary types. Occasionally I get the chance to interact with an actual reader about booklolly. No one ever says, How can you possibly do this? They know it’s doable. What they say is, I could never do that. And I silently substitute “would.”

Haul away all the books you like in dumpsters. Scatter the pages of books like leaves in autumn. Convince yourself, as I did, that you don’t have time to read and dash on madly in your busy lives. Or let the laundry pile up now and then, serve cereal for supper, and feed your starving soul with the rich repast of a good book. It will give you something worthwhile to talk about over the cereal. A book might be your best weapon for keeping the barbarians at bay. It might change your life. It might give you hope.

My library--part of the China section

Falling Man — Don DeLillo

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Before I started booklolly in earnest, I experimented with a few days of reading and blogging to see if I could read a book a day. It was tough but definitely doable and, being the sort of person who heads right into the thick of a guerrilla war to discover the truth about it, I created a blog and sat down to read. This book is one of the early experiments–saved it because the book is interesting and the read was relevant to its location and the day I read it. 

I grabbed Don DeLillo’s Falling Man from a display shelf at the library, thinking it would be the perfect novel to read on September 11^th. I confess to my own hardcover copy of Underworld, spine cracked but never really started due to single-parent-small-child-around-house-who-has-time-to-read-huge-books-? syndrome. It isn’t getting read for this challenge either because there aren’t enough hours in one day and DeLillo is worth reading slowly enough to savor. That said, Falling Man was probably not the best choice for 9-11.

Everyone has their story about where they were and what they were doing on that day, at that moment, and most particularly when the towers came down. I have mine. I have the futile attempt to protect a four-year-old from too much knowledge, too burning a memory of that day. I have the images—the man in a suit, clutching a briefcase and covered in white ash, trudging up Central Park West hours after, not looking, not seeing, just walking. He might have been DeLillo’s Keith, minus the glass shards and the blood.

What was ripped apart on that day was the fabric of the world we imagined we lived in. Just ripped like the old canvas of a circus tent, ripped right across your heart. The grief was sharp, personal and inexplicable—meaning I could never explain it and still can’t. Meaning certain sights will always bring tears to my eyes and shadows hover not far out of sight, ready to cast a pall. Sadness and loss are tangible things; they drain all the energy from the day and from your body. September 11^th, ten years later, spun the wheel backwards and it was as if the planes veered out of the blue into black smoke, flames and everything falling  just yesterday.

So, Falling Man. Very very beautiful and true in its detail and a potent reminder. Keith walks down the stairs, away from the buildings, out of the mushroom cloud of debris and dust, to the apartment of his estranged wife who is sure he died in the towers where he worked. In some way, he did. In the same way, Lianne stops feeling safe, moves in a dream through the streets to the emergency room, accepts the husband who reappears in her life by accident and then cannot leave. Lianne is haunted by her father’s Alzheimer’s and his refusal to watch his memory fade. Lianne’s mother is deliberately fading before her eyes. Lianne’s child, and Keith’s, Justin, is self-composed beyond his years and has his own stories about what happened on 9-11. He takes binoculars on playdates to search the skies out the window for planes.

Even those who escaped the inferno and the collapse never escaped from that moment and that day. DeLillo’s people replay their memories like an endless tape loop, revisit their own minds for what they can’t remember, don’t bother to reinvent themselves, seem incapable of moving on. There is healing from events so huge and so terrible that they stop time but this nation did not choose healing and these characters can’t find it. There is loss that saturates everything it touches and lingers in the air. Falling Man slowly collects the fragments of that day and holds them up to the light. Bits and pieces surface and fade back into the rubble of memory. Lives bob, float and swirl in the eddies. Desolation seeps into the soul and stains it forever.

9-11 was a game-changer. From that day forward we began to live in a different world. There are many ways of falling. DeLillo captures the brief angels spilled from a hundred stories up, the performance artist dangling in his suit from hotel balconies and railroad trestles, the tower survivors who walked away but did not really survive, the witness in thrall to an altered landscape, half understood. Falling Man is a beautifully wrought book and very sad. I wish I’d chosen to read it on some other day when the ghosts of loss hovered farther back and the consolation of small, normal things was not so overshadowed.    

Falling Man: A Novel   Don DeLillo | Scribner  2007

Tales of the City — Armistead Maupin

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All I can say about how I missed Tales of the City in the 1970s is that I was living in the South at the time and trying to get out. So little filtered down there—even reading Bruce Chatwin was extremely cutting edge for Florida. I would have been a solid groupie of Armistead Maupin’s book then, though, because that’s who I wanted to be—adrift and aloft in the bubble of San Francisco, up to my neck in free classes at Berkeley, discovering the world outside my sheltered niche and trying everything. I wouldn’t have lasted a week.

Maupin’s characters fare somewhat better. They mess up their messy lives chapter by chapter but they—most of them—manage to survive and evolve, inch by painful inch. And they are witty. My favorite thing about this book is the dialogue. I would be supremely happy to deliver sharp, funny repartee like Maupin’s that rattles the page like an automatic weapon. It’s part of what keeps Tales moving, although it’s part of what keeps Tales the tiniest bit tough to follow as well.

The chat is so smart and whip-like funny that I concluded it was Maupin’s own voice. Characters I wouldn’t have credited with that much wit have it in spades—more credit to them but not enough differentiation for each to have a singular voice. Every time I picked up the book again I had to rethread the needle with Mona, Connie, Candi, Michael, Mouse, Brian, Beauchamp (well, maybe not Beauchamp), Mary Ann, Prue, Oona, et al. Moral of story: read it straight through.

The book is a compilation of a newspaper series of tales, Dickensian in serialization if not in content. It deals with Mary Ann Singleton from Cleveland who escapes to San Francisco on vacation and never goes home. She ends up renting an apartment at 28 Barbary Lane, in a funky house on Russian Hill populated by a clutch of tenants from central casting.

Anna Madrigal runs the house and delivers a welcome note taped to a joint to new tenants. She has a deep dark secret that isn’t revealed in this first book in the series but it’s possible to guess at it and come fairly close. I found her the most interesting, humane and delightful character but Edgar Halcyon, wealthy businessman with caricatured society wife is very very good, too. Michael “Mouse” Tolliver lacks a truckload of self-confidence but is an extremely attentive listener and a considerate, if unemployed, roommate. A few marquee names like Liz Taylor get anonymous but unmistakable cameos.

The gay scene in San Francisco, before AIDS decimated a population and leached all the joy out of uninhibited shacking up and swanning around, is well-chronicled. The in-love-out-of-love sagas are believable, if a little exhausting finally. It’s hard work to be free-spirited, pharmaceutically-enhanced and constantly on the prowl. And Maupin’s world is a small one—these people are all connected and woven in and around each other’s lives in improbable but deliciously compelling ways.

Tales of the City spawned equally popular sequels, a musical, a TV series and a few more iterations. It was fun and a little nostalgic to read. People had so much hope then, such options for reinvention. It was a real era captured by an entertaining writer, an evanescent time that seems more like a novel someone dreamed up now that it’s gone.

Tales of the City: A Novel (P.S.)  Armistead Maupin  Harper Perennial 1994