(comic from Remix Nancy Bushmiller)

I read the New York Times every Sunday. Do the whole “NYC” thing, though I’ve only spent a few weeks total in the city. Bagels and cream cheese, lots of yelling at the paper (yes, hard copy on Sundays). There’s good stuff in there, too, if you remember to remember that it’s all paid for by ads for gazillion dollar homes on Manhattan or Boca Raton, or cruises on Ritz Carlton ships. It’s always been an outlet for the moderate power elite, now out of power but still wealthy. Not as gilded (the gray lady) but not “stop the presses” activist either.

And yet…sometimes by design and often by accident some truth squibs out. There was a real jaw dropper in the magazine yesterday. Seems the DT manosphere is currently eating lots of steak. No surprise, but since these boys see themselves as godlike, their steak dinners (lunches, breakfasts…) have an ideology, a list of rules, a health guru, and unrepentant financial superiority.

The reporter, a story editor at the Times, joins in and tries a diet, as dictated by a Dr. Sean O’Mara (Irish! My people make the best con artists. The gift of gab). You eat beef, are allowed a little bison elk or venison, grass fed, and must pair it with various fermented foods, like kimchi, Roquefort, kefir. It helps to rub all that meat in fermented vegetables. Because, get this and turn on your crap detector: cows ferment what they eat in their many stomachs. When I read this I had to stop, look out the window, refocus. When I stopped laughing I thought, does that mean RFK Jr’s stomach is doing the work of a cow’s?

Dr.Sean O’Mara. Look him up! Search engines were invented for this. Part of running a good con is the obviousness of the con, so an outsider looking in will say I’d never fall for that! as the mark is transfixed. Really, do it now. Look this guy up and tell yourself that you’re smarter than the boys in the DT cabinet, who fell for this stuff : Dr. Sean O’Mara transforms influential individuals into highly optimized versions of themselves—biologically, cognitively, and visually. Duffy, Vance, RFKJR, Lutnick, and “the president has noticeably taken notice of Vance’s slimming figure.” Although the Prez doesn’t go for this con himself. Bring on the Diet Coke and fries!

Like a good reporter the Times guy goes to other sources. Another expert, from NYU, says it’s ok for quick weight loss but probably boring. Reporter points out that without carbs his energy flags. OK, end of deeply researched journalism.

Of course he interviews Dr. Sean, who has been eating nothing but cow and kimchi for ten years. It has “turned his life around.” Maybe, but how isn’t explained. Was he a no good dirty eater of ice cream and potatoes? The doctor “pulled up a Bristol Stool Chart”. And here I need to try and resist a cavalcade (shit storm) of feces jokes, lest my prose hit the fan. Ok, can’t resist. Did he pull Bristol out of his ass? The Bristol grades turds, from type one (hard pellets) to type seven (watery, no solid pieces). Type four is the creme de la creme, “smooth and soft like a snake”. Oderless! Wipe free! Save enough on toilet paper to pay for a steak dinner! The miracle of red meat. Dr. Sean makes an extraordinary claim, that he “could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room and nobody would know.”

Bobby shit, Duffy shit, Vance shit, Lutnick shit. These guys literally think their shit don’t stink. And do they do this at state dinners? Go behind a sheet? Will there be special corners, with gilded sheets, in the ballroom?

So strange, to read this in the New York Times. I think, possibly, there was some hint of irony, but maybe that was wishful thinking.

Let’s all picture it. I think it’s our patriotic duty, to understand where our leaders are coming from. They take and spend our money, they make policy, they send us to war. So, close your eyes and imagine our leaders, behind that gilded screen, squatting. A kind of circle jerk of shit.

“Let them eat cake” was minor league stuff. “Let them shit steak” is the new motto of the ruling class.

A character in a novel I’m writing is a life coach. He just popped into my head while I was reading the New York Times, another story about a young billionaire with space travel pretensions. I didn’t know anything about executive life coaches, or much about billionaires, but the concepts interested me and seemed to coincide, so I hit the library and found some material, including a manual for life coaches, and of course it seems like every super wealthy person has “written” a memoir so I had to go there in the name of research, and morbid fascination.

It turns out I know a little about the super rich, though I didn’t know the personal specifics. There’s a generic power/wealth lust that paints them a shade of pale gray. I understand the dangers of stereotyping, even your enemies (or especially your enemies) but as “visionaries” and “innovators” they seem pretty thin. I’ve read the interviews now, but I’ve heard their blather my whole life. They are plugged into the one big truth of capitalism, that money makes money. Maybe the simplicity of their message, though dressed up in spaceship talk, is the baseline for their con. I’m rich, you’re not. After that it’s banality of evil, on steroids (or ketamine). Anybody with a brain recognizes this, though it probably helps to read a little Marx, or, better yet, a little Brecht.

A little Brecht. I’ve stopped writing poetry, temporarily. As a writer, I’m just thinking in prose this year. As a reader, I’m devouring poem after poem. they can stop time, then reinvent time, a simple/complicated stratagem, done with an old bag of tricks. Spaces, line breaks, interlocking patterns, forms and forms strategically broken. Heart beat and breath. White and aimless signals. Like the poet said.

White and aimless signals. Thinking about the Odyssey after seeing the movie, I realized a that the story means little to me. I barely remember it, and I don’t think I learned much from the narrative. I only vaguely remember the stories. I do remember reading the Latimore translation, at first thinking that the lines seemed clunky but then feeling the rhythm and the structure. I was staying on Karpathos, 1991. Wine dark sea, but I wasn’t inside the structure of the poem. Kept rereading the beginning. At last it kicked in. I could dance to it! OK this is totally hyperbolic and pretentious, but the cement overcoat of modern capitalism was shed, showing me all kinds of possibilities.

All kinds of possibilities, and you can dance to it.

I developed strange reading habits while working in bookstores. Every workday I faced rooms full of books. I was tempted to own them all, but didn’t quite go there. Maybe, as a book buyer, I was warned off by book hoarders I met along the way. Rooms with narrow paths to the bed and bathroom. Caves under tables, avalanches. I’ve tried to avoid that, but I also find it impossible to read one book at a time. I’m currently bouncing around three books of poetry, a crime novel, and a journalistic nonfiction. The prose books are Gary Phillips The Haul (I love caper novels), The Ritz of the Bayou by Nancy Lemann, because the folks at Tally-Ho Books recommended it. It’s Liebleingesque, southern politics, great writing.

But the poetry is taking the top of my head off, like the poet said.

Every so often a Dale Martin Smith poem or book enters my radar. I ordered a copy of Figures of Speech: Wide Infinity from Polis Press. It’s about, or “about” (great poetry encompasses so many abouts that it’s hard to specify) homecoming, loss, a deep dive into the poet’s head and surroundings. I was grateful for the short lines because they allowed me to come up for air, but also to fall into lines as they followed, like a stairway with just the right drop. And then the little poetry miracle, that the depth of the elegiac is transferred, almost wordless though language is the medium, through the swing of the structure.

Mayakovsky’s line “loves vessel crashed on the rocks of the everyday” (there are various translations) does a loop-de-loop, recovers, and flies upside down (no crash!) when I read Steve Orth. I’m reading his chapbook Angel Island & Other Poems. In an Orth poem the everyday is a laugh, and always more interesting if you look closer, or better yet back off a little and check out the irony. Or just enjoy. It’s like being let out of church. Having a Vitamix with you/would be a dream come true./I can make smoothies/and you can make soup./Did you know that?/It’s true. I don’t want to underestimate the seriousness of Steve’s work. There’s deep stuff here, but It’s the kind of goofy fun that can allow us to take in even the grim, and live with it.

I’ve always thought of the arse poetica as the weakest form. I don’t read Latin, and even giving some slack because he’s an ancient, as translated Horace seems like a windbag. Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense is comically effete, so he gets points for being unintentionally funny. MacLeish has couple of good tag lines, and he seems to know that the form needs goosing, but it’s Macleish so it doesn’t age well. And yet, and yet…if you write the stuff, there is the temptation to explain the time and energy possibly wasted on a arguably dying art form, and perhaps to instruct—future poets? on ways to uplift the genre. The Why do I do this factor looms large, considering the tiny audience. And yet, and yet…the poets know, somehow. The poets know, and from the poem, out, ripples have their effect on other media and other receivers.

I have followed Julianna Spahr’s work because it is tough, deft, and full of small and large surprises. Somehow I hadn’t heard of her Arse Poeticas until it won the Pulitzer. I’m retired bookseller, which makes me slower on the uptake. When I saw the title I was a little unsure…

…until I read the first poem. Spahr meets the Adorno quote head on, the one we all try to argue against, at least enough to try and come up with something beautiful, lyrical, maybe somehow useful and respectful. Like, after we figured out how to destroy everything, why make poems. The answer is to make a great poem. Some sort of revival of hope, somehow brought about with rhythm, structure, image.

That Shelly poem that

has hope, that maniac maid, walk out of the fog,

ankle deep in blood, having just slayed all the

assholes

When I came to a section that recalls and quotes and talks about Brecht I teared up, heart beat faster. Brecht just seems like the rock now, everybody, take a look at Brecht. In dark times will there be singing?: Yes, there will be singing: about the dark times.

And how do we write read and appreciate a pastoral during the destruction of nature, earth, flora and fauna. Perhaps by showing a deep appreciation for what is left.

That belief that a poem can meaningfully

insist that someone take a moment and

just bother with beauty…

This is an exceptional, exquisite work. The argument for poetry is the poem.

My reading life is really random. It’s a habit that comes from working in a bookstore. Advanced Reading Copies (gratis to book buyers), new arrivals, used copies of books I should have read years ago, weird stuff with quirky covers. I’d take them to lunch, I’d buy them with my employee discount, I’d leaf through while shelving.

Now, away from the biz, a title will pop into my head. I just need to read (or reread) a certain book. Something out of my past, or a review I’ve read, or a book on the table at Tallly-Ho books on Piedmont Avenue. I woke up one morning thinking about John Steinbeck’s last book, The Winter of our Discontent. I figured, for some reason, that I’d need to keep it in my library, so I special ordered a copy rather than going to the library. The narrator is a grocery clerk, small town in New England. Without giving away plot, Ethan is a last honest man type, but not especially pious about it, just going along, working in the grocery store that his father once owned but lost in a bad business deal. He is disturbed by the dishonesty around him. The story is set in 1960. There is mention of the game show scandals of the late 50’s, with a tie-in to Ethan’s teenage son’s plagiarism, to a crooked land deal in his town, and to other moral lapses that seem tame by today’s standards. As foreshadowed, Ethan makes his pact with the devil.

It isn’t Steinbeck’s best. A little clunky and obvious. But it’s Steinbeck, and so the prose often gets the feeling right. Not anger or moral indignation. An intense sadness that stays with me, that describes a moral lostness, and although it’s probably universal, this form seems especially American. Our fall seems to be from a higher place, or at least a perceived higher place. Beautiful ideals fall hard here, leaving us to grieve.

A little minor league serendipity came my way while reading Steinbeck. I read a review of A Cleanup on Aisle Five by Ann Larson. It’s also about working in a grocery store, this time a non fiction account of workers at a supermarket in Utah during and after the COVID years. I’m interested in any writing by or about retail workers, for obvious reasons. Larson’s book is beautifully written but also pretty typical. How does a liberal arts degree help bring in a living wage? Often the answer is, it doesn’t. She subsidizes her writing “career” by working at a grocery store.

In some ways Larson’s story compares to my experience working many years in a store. It’s tough work, hard on the body, trying to one’s patience, boring at times and yet, it is definitely skilled labor. In other ways my experience was much better than Larson’s and her fellow workers. I worked in Berkeley, a more progressive community, for bosses that, at least on the surface, had to satisfy that community. We were able, after a long fight, to unionize. We had some small say in the way the company was run. Not true at “TGS” in Utah. My heart goes out to the workers there. I know about the carpal tunnel suffering, the back injuries, the customer insults, the bosses who view you as a pawn. This is a must read for anyone who is trying to understand the part that management/labor relations plays in building, tearing down, molding and possibly destroying our collective moral construct.

Trump’s excuse for tariffs, that it was a blow against “forced labor” was a jaw dropper. Maybe it’s time to redefine “forced labor”, or “slavery”. At the grocery store in Utah, an alarm rings hourly, telling the supervisor to have someone sweep the floor. The sweeper carries a device that records the time it takes to sweep each aisle. The worker must press a button after each aisle and be on schedule. And yes, they work for poverty level wages. This is one in a number of examples from the book. Most workers, everywhere, know about this sort of thing, or some equivalent electronic chain. Kafkaesque? Kafka didn’t know the half of it!

Perhaps this country should charge itself tariffs, based on “forced labor”.

Please consider reading Clean Up on Aisle Five. You can buy it here:

https://bookshop.org/lists/owen-s-picks-and-owen-s-books

T

My high school friends were in love with Sally Bowles, as played by Liza Minnelli. We were a small circle, kids who were queer, queerish, and/or in some state of confusion. I would go with my best friend, Dave, to The Windjammer, a coffee shop that shared a wall with a gay bar. It was across the street from the Pacific Ocean. Glass bulbs in fishnets, a ship in a bottle, those little juke boxes at the tables. There was a song from the movie, life is a cabaret. Also Don Ho singing tiny bubbles. Kitsch. We’d get weird propositions, and we thought that was great. A guy once asked Dave if he’d like to go shoot cum on the beach. I don’t remember if he took the offer.

I don’t think I knew about Isherwood until after I graduated. I was living with a girl I’d met at The Windjammer. I think at that point we were sharing a place in Hermosa Beach. Dave was living in Sf, sharing a beautiful apartment in the Haight, near the panhandle, with his girlfriend. Dave was living the life bisexual. As always, I was a year or two behind him on that road. He was reading Gay Sunshine, a journal that featured interviews with gay writers. There was an interview with Christopher Isherwood. I don’t have a copy of the interview, but it impressed me, as all those interviews did. It was brave to come out at that time (mid 70’s), and the writers were, well, writers. That proficiency with language, the thing that I aspired to.

There’s a signed copy of Berlin Stories on my desk. A little beat up. Isherwood didn’t autograph it for me. I found it in a used bookstore for a couple of bucks, maybe thirty years ago. My only personal connection to Isherwood was an interview I did with Donald Bachardy, his long time partner, when I was researching The Annotated Big Sleep. Isherwood and Chandler were close friends. I didn’t get any breakthrough quotes (he’d given lots of interviews) but I did value that small connection to Isherwood. His writing, so pure and unpretentious, chronicles that terrible time in history in achingly human terms. The small tragedies, the personal quirkiness, the sometimes outrageous behavior captivated us in our teen years, but a terror was lurking. A few years, months, or days to enjoy before Isherwood’s (and Liz Minnelli’s Sally Bowles) circle scattered: murdered, on the run, or in the camps. I think we got that, on some level, and on some level engaged with it, or at least worried about it.

Fast forward many years. I’m at Cafe Strada with a few friends. We’re all bookstore people, retired or nearly there. We see each other most Fridays. Turns out we’ve each had a relatively good week. Family stuff, baseball games; the weather in Berkeley is fantastic. Not particularly dramatic or tragic. Those things seem to be happening elsewhere this week. And yet, and yet…the camps are filling up, a war is on…am I being too dramatic? Are we there yet?

I started a literary series at Moe’s, nearly under the radar. I was only clocking in for a couple of extra hours a week, folding most of the work into my buying/selling/shelving day. Management paid little attention. My work experience, in and out of books, is that this is the most likely road to success. I made mistakes, learned from them, talked to others who had done the job, pushed on. Our first reading was Garrett Caples and Barbara Guest. We followed up with Michael McClure, Bill Berkson, Harold Norse, Joane Kyger, Clark Coolidge. The poets were great, easy to work with and, mostly, happy to present their work. After a few months I began scheduling fiction and nonfiction events, with a definite “left” slant. Over the years we presented Rebecca Solnit, Frank B. Wilderson, journalists Antonia Juhasz and Shane Bauer, and authors published by PM Press. Fiction writers included Joyce Carol Oates, Dave Eggers, and Jonathan Lethem. I also tried to pull in literary outsiders like Tom Clark and Ishmael Reed.

Please forgive the name dropping! The point, besides allowing me to sink into old memories, is that, with a piece of real estate, a mic, and a small block of time, you can become a cultural force in your neighborhood.

The series was a success for a long stretch, but after about fifteen years I was burnt out. So many emails! It’s true that there are more poets than poetry readers, but at times this seemed true for all forms of writing. I’m convinced that the series paid for itself in book sales and publicity, but I was also surprised that important work didn’t fill larger venues, that it was up to Indie bookstores and house parties to bring these books to the public. American letters is quite impressive, even now, but audiences are surprisingly small. In my youth I was part of a booking collective that organized punk shows in small clubs and pizza joints. In the early days of punk we we felt like we were part of a secret club. I often felt that way when presenting even “major” authors.

I decided to wind down the series. Management seemed indifferent. My coworkers were mostly supportive of the series, but maybe they also thought it was time to shut it down. They’d rather have me at the counter buying books.

About this time (around 2017) a few new workers were hired. Although I had never stopped loving bookselling I was also, at that point, tired of the biz and of Moe’s management. The new people arrived in the nick of time for me. I was considering spending the last years of my working life as a bartender, cat sitter, clerk at TJ’s, whatever. But these new people were so full of energy. I think some of the older employees were wary, because these book bums didn’t have the same pedigree that we’d come to expect. My generation had come to Moe’s after working in an various chain stores, specialty stores, smaller used bookstores, book distributors… but the farm teams no longer existed to the same extent.

I didn’t care about that. They were full of energy, read books I’d never heard of, were at least as politically radical as the old timers. I remember coming into the store when Kalie or Phoebe were on, thinking “this is going to be fun.” New Moe’s was more diverse, had more woman and queer energy, pushed interesting new titles. Noah shared running the reading series with me, bringing in new poets and writers, and lots of fresh ideas.

Moe’s has a way of perpetuating itself, despite management, but also, owners have a way of messing things up, almost to the point of extinction. I’ve been out of the store for four years but I still worry about this. Indie bookstores are an important cultural anchor. That “literary gathering place” tagline that City Lights uses applies to all of book culture. Zoom calls and Discord discussions are fine, but I still believe that revolutions are made in bookstores, cafes, and library reading rooms. And at the workplace! When a comrade (please excuse that word, can’t think of a better one) slides a book across the counter and says “read this?” the impression is real and physical. Likewise, meeting a friend in the stacks, “what are you reading?” has a nice intimacy to it. Builds solidarity.

Sadly, the class of ‘17 wasn’t appreciated by management. Basically they were pushed out. I’m not going to get into the details because I’m working with the IWW now and I don’t want to mess up any future negotiations, but owner insensitivity and cluelessness (with a dose of sexism) lost them a solid set of workers.

But as sometimes happens in work culture, a new group of book workers are keeping the store relevant, with the help of union protections. I’m thinking of an old John Ford movie now, Mr. Roberts. The setup is that James Cagney is captain of a small navy ship, and he’s a tyrant. Abusive toward the crew, pompous, impossible to reason with. Henry Fonda, an officer, serves as a buffer until he transfers away from the ship. Cagney thinks he’s in charge. Jack Lemmon takes over the Fonda role, but with a vengeance. As always and everywhere, the crew runs the show, when and if they want to.

I fell into the book trade as the result of a temp job. I don’t believe in destiny, but then maybe I do. I’ve always been fascinated with books, not just as a reader. Some of us are drawn to the object, the way others may be drawn to vintage cars, paintings, coins. There are books that give off certain…vibes? And there are those that can feel them, read them, want to own them. That fascination can tip over into addiction for some people. I’m not one of those book lovers that would fill storage lockers, but I get it. In my retirement I’ve cut back to eight medium sized cases due to a lack of space in the apartment. I like to think of myself as a kind of curator, but really I’m not that cold. There are books on the shelves that have no business being there, but the history of owning them stops me from freeboxing. There’s a two volume set of Lafcadio Hearn’s lectures on English poetry, published in 1915, that I’ve lugged from apt to apt for around forty years, bought at a bookstore in Soquel, I think. It’s wonderful, but I won’t reread it for the fourth or fifth time because I’ve pretty much got it memorized. Yet, I’ll never let it go.

That is the major reason why I stayed in the trade, to the point where I was too old and unemployable to do much else. There were other reasons, mostly having to do with other bookish types. As I stayed with it I became more like them, a little too weird for mainstream society but a little too buttoned up to be outlandishly artsy. Early on, when I was trying to latch onto a book job in Berkeley, I spoke to Peter Howard. He treated me like a minor leaguer (I was) and sent me off to get a job at Shakespeare. His rough edges annoyed me, but he was smart and helpful, and had by then become a kind of template for the rogue bookslinger, part of the club that included Moe, Cartwright, Matt Wyse, The “Bobs”, John Wong, a few others.

By the time I came along there was a later generation of book people that had worked with them, also smart to the point of being scary. I guess I was third generation, working to catch up.

Moe’s could run itself without Moe thanks to the people he’d brought into the business. I almost said “trained” but I have little memory of being trained by Moe. Knowledge was passed down, passed around. thrown out, fought over. Training, such as it was, was just paying attention and knowing when to play by or break the rules. And yet, when Moe died the staff seemed lost for a time. The mourning period didn’t last too long, and the business didn’t suffer, thanks to another generation of book bums, schooled by the second generation, and kept just this side of insane implosion by Gene Barone, the manager.

And so, Moe’s continued, post Moe. We really ran things anyway, though without the theatrics. Or I should say with fewer theatrics. There was the occasional shouting match, and even a couple of fistfights. In the anarchist tradition began by Moe everybody acted like the boss, and each individual buyer thought themselves to be the best buyer in Berkeley. Sharp elbows, but also good jokes, intelligent conversation, and a somewhat uncomfortable bonding. Maybe clerks are shy? The new owner would sometimes say “family”, but I know from experience that when a boss refers to the workers as a family it’s time to keep your hand on your wallet, watch your ass, stay mum when near management.

After twenty-something years at the buy counter (mid oughts) I tired of my over-the-counter buyer role. All those boxes, the mostly mediocre books, the disappointed sellers. I took my turn, but paying attention was a chore. House calls, especially the big ones, kept my interest up. I loved walking into a house or a storage space, not knowing what to expect. I’ve seen everything from black mold to junky bestsellers to exquisite, perfectly curated personal libraries. I loved meeting sellers, listening to their stories and examining the collection, feeling the energy that was contained in their books. Often, it was an emotional experience for the seller, books from a loved one who passed, or part of a divorce, a forced move, financial hardship. The life we give our books! Well, some of us.

I loved the teamwork that went into buying a large lot of books. Comparing notes with my coworker, adding up to a fair offer, taking a walk around the block to clear our heads and talk about possible individual titles and possible sale results. I learned tons from this work, often about books that were new to me. College never meant a thing to me, with the exception of a couple of professors. I received my education from my fellow book buyers.

A little after the turn of the century there was an employee meeting. Night business had fallen off. The Avenue was going through a rough (well, rougher) patch and people weren’t coming around after dark. I had wanted to organize poetry readings, somewhere, but had been reluctant to suggest it, Moe’s being more of a used bookstore, not as concerned with new books sales. But that approach seemed to be in flux, so I saw my chance. I pitched a signing/reading/publication party program, then waited for the staff to shoot it down. To my surprise, Gene backed me up, and the Monday at Moe’s series began.

Around nine o’clock p.m. on June 12th my best friend texted me asking, is it down yet? I went back to the New York Times website to check, again. Nope. The article accompanying the photo said that there had been scaffolding erected, taller than seemed to be needed, pizzas delivered, work crew mugging for the crowd and the cameras, but Trump’s name was still there above that of John F. Kennedy. Nine o’clock Pacific time was twelve o’clock Eastern time, and that was the deadline the judge had set for the removal of the letters spelling out Trump’s name. (“Take off the T first!” yelled one of folks who had gathered to watch—a large crowd of people holding picnics and waiting to drink celebratory champagne.)

Asked for a twelve-hour reprieve due, in part, to thunderstorms, the judge granted it and by noon the next day, the head of the Kennedy Center gave the judge a sworn affidavit that the letters were down, but we were still denied the satisfaction of seeing the wall (perhaps somewhat) restored—will there be a line a holes above Kennedy’s name? I suddenly see the line of machine gun bullet holes in the wall of the garage in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre—because now there was a giant striped tarp covering the wall.

Maybe it was just too much for Trump to bear, the proof of a defeat of, as one woman interviewed by the Times tartly called it, his vanity project while elsewhere nearby he was staging his grand birthday with the giant fight cage constructed in front of the White House in which men would wrestle for screaming crowds. Or maybe they were hoping that their next appeal would work and the next judge would say, no, let the name go back to where it was and they wouldn’t have to go to all the trouble of taking down the scaffolding just to have to put it back up again.

What struck me was how gripped my friend and I were with the need to see the wall returned to normal. I kept checking back, the next day too, hoping to be able to send her of photo of the repaired wall. It is a small thing compared to the amount of physical destruction and weird aggrandizement Trump has inflicted upon nearly everything within his continually hypertrophic grasp. As the judgments keep coming—the administration has to return the displays in the national parks that they summarily took down a few months ago; they have to return funding and staff that have been summarily stripped out of departments and institutions—I keep seeing an exasperated parent snapping at a wantonly destructive kid, put that back!

Put that back. What will that look like and how will it happen and how much of it will happen? Take all that awful gold decor out of the White House? Bring back Jackie’s Rose Garden? Rebuild the East Wing? Make the Reflecting Pool reflect again? And that’s just the hyperlocal physical stuff of the presidency. What I understand is that seeing the repaired wall was at once a pitiful and a wonderful need, pitiful in that it is just one small thing in a giant ocean of desecration, but wonderful in that, as I am so often feeling these days, what is going to save us is art, and in this instance what I mean by that is all of it, the letters on the wall, the art that has always taken place inside that building, the people picnicking on the lawn awaiting the letters coming down, my friend and I checking back. Is the tarp down yet? Nope.

Art eludes that authoritarian grasp because it doesn’t travel in defined channels the way politics and news and debates and the military and ICE and so on travel. When stymied or stunted, for example in the way it has been at the Kennedy Center, art just leaves and shows up elsewhere unexpectedly in unpredictable and changeable ways. It’s the most beautiful example of Whac-a-Mole. It can certainly be bought and sold or made then bought and sold but it also just is, just happens, is painted, written, sung, acted, filmed, photographed, woven, sculpted. It spills out of us and cannot be contained.

I think that’s why the Kennedy Center wall, returned to its previous condition, keeps itself at the top of our thoughts, even as it falls further and further down in the column of U.S. news stories. I just checked the New York Times website again so I can tell my friend if the tarp has come down yet. Nope.

June 15, 2026

My first day at Moe’s I received a present from Cartwright—a nice bottle of California red, delivered to the Moe’s counter by one of his employees. It was probably performative, a way to show something to Moe. It was also a nice way to celebrate my first day working in the best bookstore in the country. The stacks were dizzying, even for a veteran book bum. Moe “trained” me that first day, and the staff detrained me after that. Wavy Gravy came in as I was trying to ring up my first sale. Moe pulled me over to introduce me. “Hey Wavy, here’s the new guy!”

The owner of Logos got his book chops from working at Moe’s, so in some ways I knew the system, the difference being that Logos had some semblance of structure. When I try to conceptualize the Moe’s way I imagine a huge marshmallow, puffy and sticky, with granite in the middle. The place was rock-like in its ability to pay enough to get the best books, price them just high enough to pay staff and owners, and pull in a large motley army of book lovers. Aside from that, anarchy prevailed, personalities clashed, and the money flew out and then in with great speed. It frightened me until I got into the rhythm.

Back then (eighties and nineties) Moe’s Books was a festival of TMI. I learned about Moe’s marriage, family problems, old and new fights and rivalries. Smart people can be articulate in the most quotable ways. There were some great story tellers! Gene Barone, the manager, somehow kept things afloat, but the boat was constantly rocking.

I just paused my writing, trying to decide how much of what was, essentially, a dysfunctional family should be out there on Substack. Actually, most bookstores, or most workplaces, are awash in psychodrama, but this one was a doozy. That Tolstoy quote applies equally to the workplace: every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. We learn so much of our behavior from our family, spillover shouldn’t be a surprise. Ownership represents the paternal/maternal (pick your poison). They set the tone. The workers are kids and suffer as such. Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown. Just Moe’s, just Telegraph Avenue, just capitalism, just humanity.

Best I can say is that Moe’s was never dull. Dysfunctional, but a little like the old Oakland A’s. The conflict made for a better “team”. Moe was delightful to work with but he took great pleasure in stirring the turd. Smoking, farting, singing, gossiping, adding a couple of beats to every disagreement. Filters off! and the workers followed suit. My early years were spent as a fly on the wall. I remember Jonathan Lethem, who worked there in the early nineties, complimenting me on my ability to stay out of the fray. I had to do a lot of ducking. And admittedly, I was entertained by the whole scene. I’m a poet. Poems consist of lines. Good poems contain good lines, one atop the other. I was surrounded by quotable zingers. I often felt like the straight man in an absurdist play. I was assured that things were better than before ex-employees had bolted Moe’s to start Black Oak Books in North Berkeley. That period was spoken of as if it was the civil war. Must have been fun!

Two years beaching, bookselling, hiking around. Why leave? I was bored, we were bored. I felt isolated, didn’t have many friends. I appreciate nature, I guess, but I learned then that I truly love the constant buzz of a city.

You could save a nice chunk of money in 1983 in (then) sleepy Santa Cruz. I worked a lot and learned about book buying, also record buying thanks to Russell, an ace music expert. I was a jazz fan, going back to my days living down the street from The Lighthouse (“LA’s oldest jazz club and waterfront dive”) in Hermosa Beach. After being schooled by Russell I could impress customers with “Chambers didn’t actually play on that session. I believe it was Ray Brown.” I’ve lost much of my jazz fan chops, but I was pretty sharp at the time, and if Oliver Nelson comes on the jazz station my eyes glaze over and I’m in danger of causing an accident. Thank you, Russell!

Working the book buy counter and also the record department back of the store I could pile up the hours and sock it away. Carol was working in an orientalist hippie import store with the now-incorrect name of Lilly Wong’s (though run by white folks). Rents were cheap and good music was everywhere. Cheap entertainment. As our savings grew our travel dreams became more elaborate. We left Santa Cruz for many weeks of travel, ending up in Rome.

…and came back broke, as was my habit, into my thirties. We lucked into a room near the Oakland Rose Garden, Piedmont/Oakland line. Snobby neighborhood, but nice housemates. The bookstores weren’t hiring and I needed some scratch. The crooked owner of Columbus Books had a contract to buy/sell textbooks at the City College downtown SF campus. Boring work, lowest possible pay, but, as always in the book biz, smart coworkers. Funny, if a bit cynical. Sometimes cynicism gets a bad rap, but it’s an attitude that produces the best jokes. The workers could be brutal toward the owner, sometimes to his face. Inspiring.

I needed something that approached a real paycheck. I was hitting Moe’s hard, schmoozing Moe Moskowitz and the workers in the store. At the time (and to some extent, still) Moe’s was the Sistine Chapel of used books. Well, the building looked more like a bus station, but the books were/are the best in the biz. Unfortunately, they weren’t hiring. After hanging in Moe’s I would stop in at Shakespeare. & co. I liked the store, shabby as it was. I always found a bargain. The clerks were a rude and surly bunch, but amusing.

Bill Cartwright was once Moe’s partner. They split, and the two stores, across Telegraph Avenue from each other, defined their individual styles. Moe built (with bucks from his wife) a cathedral of books, and turned the counter into a stage, performing his shtick daily. He hired deep knowledge book nerds, a little arrogant but whip smart. Bill’s store was unkempt, dusty, like stores you still encounter in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Shakespeare’s Paris namesake. The workers were an ugly bunch, but just as smart. Berkeley has little use for the uneducated, but, as my grandfather liked to say, there’s no fool like an educated fool.

Cartwright hired me in at 7.50 an hour, at time when the minimum wage was $3.35. I was happy for the work. I caught on pretty quick to his quirky management style and got along well with the characters that manned (no women) the counter. A poet, Tim Hildebrandt, managed the store, though “managed” mostly meant doing Bill’s shit work. Bill also used the counter as his personal stage, bullshitting with his staff and the customers. He fancied himself as bohemian royalty, doling out opinions on politics and culture. I worked one shift with him. I was expected to play straight man, act interested, throw in the occasional remark. He wouldn’t let me price or shelve books. He bored me to smithereens.

My first paycheck was light. He was paying me a dollar an hour less than promised. Claimed “I never said 7.50!” He knew that I knew he was lying. No worker would mishear their wage. I had to go along until the other bookstores started hiring.

I found out that the false wage promise was a regular trick, part of a bizarre hazing. The other was to give the new guy (again, no women) shifts with Gene Hechtman, a local character, going back to Telegraph’s heyday as a bohemian capital. Gene was insulting to the customers (think Edsel Ford Fong—look him up), insulting to his coworkers, disappeared for hours at a time, ate strange smelling herbs, smoked cigarettes at the counter.

We got along famously. I have a soft spot for crusty old guys who take no shit. Turns out it was good training, as I see myself growing crusty and old, although (I think) a little nicer and easier to take. Gene would read me poetry, either Russians (my introduction to Akhmatova) or Philip Larkin. He also like the classics, and was appalled by my lack of knowledge, and that I couldn’t read Greek. My shift with Gene seemed like a breeze compared working with the others. My Friday night co-worker (forget his name) arrived drunk, and often passed out at the counter.

At Shakespeare and Co. I was introduced to a level of sexism that I hadn’t encountered at other bookstores. At Dalton, at Columbus Books, at Logos the gender balance was about 50-50. There was a glass ceiling at Dalton’s, but women ran the show. Shakespeare (and, I assume, around the Berkeley book biz) was a boy’s club. Women weren’t good used book buyers, too easily intimidated, to quick to fold. No, really, I heard this all the time at Shakespeare, and later (and for many years) at Moe’s. That, and women can’t survive the mean streets of Berkeley. I feel a little guilty that I kept my mouth shut. My only excuse was that I felt, for at least the first five years, that I was in a foreign country, and a backward one. I needed to learn their strange ways before I put my two cents in.

​

I had lived in Santa Cruz in ‘78-79. This move would be my second time around. My first move north was to get out of LA, away from freeways and family. I thought I wanted to live in a small town, and I did enjoy it for a time. The beach, walking in the woods, living (mostly) without need for a car. I fell in with some first wave punks, helped form a DIY production company that staged shows in small clubs. I also discovered that residents could use the UCSC library, and that the bookstores rivaled LA. I developed a strange skill there—ice cream maker. I stayed interested for a couple of years, then moved on, looking for something more urban.

When Carol wanted to move back to Santa Cruz I was pretty hesitant. I saw possibilities in being a bookseller. It didn’t pay well, but I could make expenses, and I could spend my spare time with poets, going to SFMOMA, or just enjoying the hum of the city. But love is what it is, and Santa Cruz isn’t exactly a trip through hell. When Logos Books hired me I figured I could learn more about the biz between trips to the beach.

Logos was a beach city version of Moe’s Books in Berkeley. John Livingston, the owner had worked there. His business model, with some beach city modifications, was very close to Moe’s. We worked slower than the big city buyers. This gave me a chance to work with veteran book nerds, taking a close look at every buy.

There was a book bum culture then, probably still is, but with a much smaller population. It’s just harder to make a living now. My young friends who are throwbacks jump to other bookish jobs, librarians, rare book dealers, writer/teachers. As I write this the old timers who I thought of as book stars are doing what old people do, retiring, cutting down to part time, leaving this world. At Logos in ‘82 I “studied” with Ruth Christianson, the manager, and Steve Lacey, the rare book manager. I’ve lost touch with Ruth, but Steve has a bookstore in New Orleans, so, far as I know, he’s still in the game.

At Columbus Books I only knew a couple of book scouts. I guess they sold their wares elsewhere. At Logos they were legion. They would come in from, I presume, the woods, with “rare first editions” and “classics”. Usually alone, sometimes with a partner but they seemed like loners. They looked like sidekicks in a John Wayne movie, or mountain men from the early days of US exploration. The great great grandchildren of trappers and prospectors. They drove tough bargains, told good stories, smelled peculiar. I remember a couple of dropouts from academia, but mostly just dropouts. I liked them mostly, even when they were pushy. We buyers weren’t supposed to. The relationship was supposed to be competitive, and it was, but hierarchies make no sense to me. We were/are all just scuffling. And I loved their archaic tastes in literature. If I really needed to talk about Mencken or Ring Lardner they were right there with me.

My personal library is scaled back now, but I still have few books that I found while buying there. A Season in Hell with Jim Dine etchings, a little worn and in need of replacing, but read and reread for years. Those Harper and Row poetry collections that Tom Clark edited, an Evergreen first of Ted Berrigan’s sonnets, a copy (paperback) of Berlin Stories, signed by Isherwood. When I worked a Moe’s (foreshadowing!) the buyers looked down at Logos, and the selection wasn’t as good at Logos because, still, nothing in the country can beat the stacks at Moe’s.

Working the Pacific Garden Mall was pretty wild at that time. This was before tech money stole its soul and washed it clean. The store closed at 10pm and I would take a bus back to our apt. on Seabright Beach. Wooded places always seem darker, and Santa Cruz produced some A team psycho killers. The “transit center” consisted of a couple of covered benches, usually occupied by local characters, a mix of sixties burnouts, wanna be Hell’s Angels, bottom feeder dug dealers. Waiting for the bus was an adventure. Looking back, these scenes, to a great extent, define my life in the book biz. No, actually, they define my years of employment, and therefore my life from 1974 to 2021. A bookish nerd negotiating the mean streets.

If something really good slipped through I would stash it in a bag that I hid in one of the dank corners of the basement. I’d occasionally show my bag to the manager, who would quote me a price. This was my earliest attempt at book collecting. Our apartment on Knob Hill filled up quickly. Looking at my library now, I don’t see any of those books. I long ago sold some nice old Auden and Eliot hardbacks for a little trade, don’t know where.

I worked my way out of the basement and graduated to the buy counter. There I learned what a fellow buyer called The Bluff. I could, by instinct, judge the worth of a book, or at least ballpark it, but my offer would have to come with a believable argument, even if it came as a gesture. A nod, a shrug, a smile, the stink-eye. Whatever convinces the seller. I learned the give and take, learned the grift, while also learning the real worth of the books. It was a pawnshop game. How does the pawnbroker know the value of a diamond ring, a saxophone, and a radio? As the poet said, you go on your nerve, and you build up a memory bank of what sells, sold, didn’t, and for how much.

The neighborhood was lousy with book thieves. The manager cautioned me against buying too-new looking books, pointed out the usual suspects, gave me pointers on how to refuse hot books without getting my nose broken. A thief would come in with some newish books, probably from City Lights, multiples of the same title, or an alphabetical stack, usually by authors whose books were in the far corner of that store. I would pull a serious face, shrug, say, This isn’t exactly what we’re looking for. Thank you! That would usually work, probably because there was a store on Polk Street that fenced books without shame, though they paid less per book than we did.

First week at the buy counter, early evening, a raggedy man, familiar from the streets, comes in with a fantastic short stack of art books. A Philip Guston monograph, some criticism, an Abrams book on Fra Angelico, profusely illustrated, as they say. Our eyes meet, he looks surprised, You new?

“Yup. Where did these come from?”

“My studio.”

I take a breath, get ready to give him the usual speech, but feel tempted. Nice books. Pay low, price them, buy them with my discount, sell them outside the neighborhood. Nah. I like the job too much. “These aren’t what we’re looking for.”

A look that could kill. I get ready to duck.

“I’m going to speak to the owner about this.” And he crosses the room, goes upstairs, knocks on the owner’s door. Leaves without the books, aims a theatrical sneer in my direction. Gabby, who was shelving nearby, comes over and gives a knowing look. “Buying is risky business here.” Owner walks out, waves, says, “if you need me I’m at Vesuvio.”

Next day the art books are in the window. Repeat, weekly.

Carol wanted to get out of the city for awhile. We had both moved up from Santa Cruz. I wasn’t too hot on the idea at first. I liked the neighborhood, loved San Francisco. But Santa Cruz was really cheap back then. A place by the beach, the sun and sand, nice bars, good bookstores. I had to get out of Columbus Books before fencing stolen goods became a problem. The bookstore on Polk had been busted.

Also, we do things for love sometimes. We struck a deal. If Logos Books in Santa Cruz would hire me we would move. I took Greyhound down, got an interview, took Greyhound one more time, got hired, moved back down the coast.

The store manager seemed bored by the interview. He asked a couple of questions and sent me back downstairs to speak with the assistant managers. Two women, both young but a little older than me. They hired me because they thought I was cute. I know this because they told me. I’d never been hired on my looks, and I was really flattered. They were both nerdy cute, and at twenty-something that’s what screams at you. They gave me a sixteen hour shift, for fours in the afternoon. If I worked out at the register I would be moved back to the info desk or maybe the stockroom. Bare bones wages but I was only paying a hundred a month rent.

It was that kind of company. A crew of young people bumping into each other, getting around the rules as much as possible, a manager with his eyes on the next rung. The Dalton’s on Kearney was going strong due to heavy lunch hour business. This was pre device. People read the Chronicle, magazines, paperbacks on their lunch hours. Maybe grabbed a novel for a gift on the way home. I worked the long lines, and when “promoted” directed people to the latest bestseller. I was mostly bored, we all were. Literary types at a chain store. The Embarcadero store had once tried to unionize but failed. Mostly, people were putting in their time, using the discount to load up on books, flirting, and waiting out closing time.

Only two vivid work memories come out of that job. First, one long afternoon while I was sleepwalking through my shift Philip Lamantia bought a magazine. I don’t remember what it was, but I ignored the line of customers and complimented his work. I loved the selected poems that came out with City Lights. I carried it around with my other Pocket Poets books, Revolutionary Letters and Howl. After that day I had a cafe friendship with him, meeting at Malvina’s and Puccini until I left town, then catching up with him when I moved to back to the Bay Area.

Second memory is of going to a bar called Esme’s on Kearney, where the happy hour snacks were especially good. You could make a meal (and the Dalton clerks did) out of the little pizzas, cheese cubes, olives and pretzels, all for the price of one drink. Drinking in a bar, complaining about the boss, shooting the breeze is an important part of work culture. Do people still do that?

The pay was terrible and the books were mostly bad, business and pop psyche. The hours were too short at payday but otherwise seemed long. I had applied at City Lights but nothing was open. It actually took years to get a call but by then I was doing used books and wasn’t as interested in working there.

Discovery Books, celebrated used bookstore a couple of doors down from City Lights had recently closed and reopened with a new owner under the name Columbus Books. The stock wasn’t stellar, but I would occasionally find a gem. It was still North Beach so the poetry section wasn’t half bad. The manager was a serious book buyer and the staff seemed cool, in that SFAI 80’s way, a real queer punk vibe. The owner looked a little like Ferlinghetti, which seemed too weird. Does someone actually try to look like Ferlinghetti? Tall, bald, Greek fisherman’s cap. He had one of those upstairs offices where he could see the selling floor and watch his employees. Not a good sign. But when he interviewed me he was avuncular, told a couple of jokes, name checked some famous poets, actually lit up a cigar. I figured I had the job. One of the workers was outside, loitering in Kerouac Alley (before it was named).

“How was he?”

“OK I guess. I think I got the job.”

“Did he light a cigar? Because if he did he’s juiced, probably fresh from vodka at Vesuvio. He’ll hire you if he remembers you.”

He remembered. I was assigned four night shifts. Closing time was midnight, and North Beach was wild fun. I worked with a writer type, Gabby. We would read favorite poems and passages to each other and the customers. She introduced me to the work of Lydia Davis, who at that time was publishing in obscure journals. Gabby’s girlfriend worked at City Lights. As I get older and move into the realm of the ignored and out of fashion, I still remember the workers at Columbus Books as the coolest of the cool. Best illustrative anecdote: I was to work a rare morning shift. I arrived on time, as did my coworkers. The owner would open the store because he didn’t trust us with the keys or the till. But on this particular morning he didn’t arrive. We waited a bit then found ourselves a bar. We were nowhere near the store when he opened it. Actually I have no memory of showing up, though I probably did since I kept my job. I don’t remember what went on at the bar (possibly Specs) but it was probably highbrow/lowbrow at it’s most engaging extreme. Art/music/books/sex. Smart young people with wavy boundaries.

I was living on Knob Hill, a grand old building in considerable disrepair. My partner referred to me affectionately as the happy idiot. My commute was a walk downhill on Clay Street, view of the Bay Bridge, then through Chinatown, then a coffee at Trieste, pretending to be Rexroth or Kerouac. Then a job with a bunch of fellow beautiful losers, dinner at Golden Boy or Hunan Homes, a bus up the hill at midnight.

I moved from Santa Cruz to SF in ‘81 and found one of those cheap rents that old folks brag about. A hundred a month for what was once a walk-in closet. Room for a single futon and a low bookshelf that doubled as a desk. Capp Street and 24th, in back of the McDonald’s on Mission. The smell was strong enough to kill a vegan, but it was a classic old San Francisco building and my apt mates were nice, quiet, and did their dishes. Heaven.

In Santa Cruz I had worked as an ice cream maker at Polar Bear on Soquel Avenue. The work took some skill. I figured someone would need a veteran of that work. I put in my application at Double Rainbow, got an interview that seemed to go well, and waited for a call back that never came. My tiny bank account at Pan American Savings was barely covering rent and burritos so I had to get a paycheck fast. There was a health food store where I sometimes bought fresh squeezed OJ. It seemed like an OK place so I asked if they needed a cashier. By the end of the day I was counting change and doling out spirulina shots.

The owner was famous, kind-of, but fancied herself as very famous, what would now be called an influencer. She had a public access TV show called “Brown Rice and Love.” Not making this up! She lived on Knob Hill and took a cab to the store, arriving at around noon. There she would hold court in the back, advising folks about nutrition, vegetarianism, natural healing. I once had to ask her about an order for “natural” potato chips. She was lecturing an old guy on how to cure his baldness. She caught my eye and noted my look, which was a bit skeptical. I think the customer may have caught it too. That was the beginning of the end of my career in holistic healing.

Next day she came in and asked me, as usual, to arrange a load of flowers that she had carried in from the taxi, then, “when you’re finished let’s have a word in the back.”

“You’re the best cashier I have, and the customers seem to like you, but I’m pretty sensitive, and I feel too much dark energy. That sort of negativity can be ruinous to a project like this.” She cut my last check and handed me a large jar of ginseng, to show that there were no hard feelings on her part.

At the time temp work was a good way to pick up a quick payday. If you could type, data entry was the thing. Old files were being tossed or entered, furniture was being moved, big changes, or perceived big changes. I registered with a temp agency. To my surprise I didn’t get too many data entry jobs. They had me doing gruntier work, probably because I was young and had listed a couple of warehouse jobs on my application. Walden Books was opening a store on Market, not far from Powell. Truckoads of bestsellers needed to be deboxed, checked in, and shelved. I was an avid reader, loved haunting bookstores, so this job was more interesting to me. The boss treated us like idiots, “fiction, you know what that is? Stack it over there…” We were ordered to team up, and my shelving partner was a punk intellectual type. He and his girlfriend had just arrived from Columbia and were broke. We hit it off and started having lunch together. He told me about the B. Dalton on Kearney, that they were always looking for people.

The job ended. Apparently we did good because the supervisor was happy. We were told that we could each take one free book. I exchanged a smile with my coworker because we had been freely taking advantage of the old five finger discount, but we thanked the boss and chose our books. For some strange reason there was a Black Sparrow autographed edition of Let It Come Down. Paul Bowles signature! At Walden? Must have been a mistake. I held onto that book for years and years, finally losing it in an apartment fire.

I quit the temp agency, decided to go up to Dalton and put in an application. Began my work in what old timers then called “the book trade”.

I know, there’s Hormuz and Epstein and the war, there’s Truth Social cruelty and billions in graft. I’m obsessed too—checking the phone for the latest outrage, feeling outrage, so much outrage that I’m having trouble zoning in. Just can’t focus!

Then, 4am-ish, the Cava Bag scandal creeps into my almost sleeping brain, and, somehow, I’m comforted. It’s a real, old timey, basic scandal, a crook who looks and talks like a crook (well, many of them do), with a real object in his hands, a bag full of real money, the stuff we rarely use these days. It isn’t a bunch of numbers flying by on a screen, or a brief mention in a congressional hearing (but it’s been that too). It’s a fistfull, several fists full of dollars, and it’s been somewhere, and it goes somewhere, and it’s kind of lost but it’s around, being spent, maybe even on fancy takeout, or on a plane ticket (definitely first class) or several rounds of expensive bourbon. I’m sitting here with three pieces of paper in my pocket, and if I had 49,997 more I could fill a Cava bag, and buy a plane ticket, some fancy take out, several rounds…It’s so real, so retro!

Teapot Dome money traveled by train, some of it carried by the son-in-law of the Secretary of the Interior. I tried to research this, but I couldn’t find out what kind of bag they used. I’m imagining a carpet bag, and I see an image of guys dressed to the nines, stick pins and fob watches and silk ties, passing the bag, like in The Sting. Cloak and Dagger! Nothing like the keyboard madness that allows the President’s sons and son-in-law to fatten the accounts.

Watergate slush funds were a shell game, but bags of cash were involved. How were the break in guys paid? Probably not the 70’s version of a Cava bag. I see plain brown wrappers. Nixon wasn’t a gourmet as far as I know. Maybe a good old MacDonald’s bag?

It’s all so…real! I can wrap my head around it, and I can relate it to my personal finances. Social Security check, 401K distribution , a little editing job, a royalty check that buys a weekend in Point Reyes. Nothing near the Cava Bag caper. For most, this is a poor country. Seems weird to put it that way, but yes it is. And these guys are probably drinking coffee and smoking big cigars in private planes. Surrounded by Cava bags?

And here there was an actual sting! Fifty thousand in green paper, just like the green paper I have in my wallet, though quite a bit more. Someone had their hands on that green paper, it went somewhere. Grabbed the bag, counted the bills. Maybe an evidence lock up? But the DOJ is no longer investigating. Where did it go? The paper, the paper! Who got the plane tickets, the fancy take out, the bourbon!

Journalists, please follow the money. Help me get some sleep!

In that astonishing interview Stephen Miller gave to Jake Tapper at CNN in the first week of the year, he seemed to be advocating the use of all kinds of economic and military force in the relations between the U.S. and other countries, but in retrospect it sure looks like it is his roadmap for the domination of people living in the U.S. as well.

Is it really possible that the Trump administration is consciously, methodically basing its actions on those of the Third Reich? With the murder of another Minneapolis resident it’s beginning to look like (and I can’t believe how impossible this sounds to me) ICE agents have been instructed: we have to kill a few people; try to make it look at least partly justified; don’t worry, no one will be held accountable. And be sure to keep up on your arrest quotas!

One phrase stood out to me in that Miller/Tapper interview. Here is the quote: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Besides the weirdly condescending insert of “Jake” (I’m going to explain to you how it really works), there’s that phrase “iron laws,” which immediately brings to my mind the kind of language used by the Nazis. Strength, force, power, iron laws. It joins words that were already floating around in my mind this month as Trump explained why we needed to annex Greenland, why we needed to suddenly invade Venezuela: lebensraum—living space, the phrase Hitler used to describe why the Germans needed to invade other countries; blitzkrieg—lightning strike, the type of warfare they were using to achieve their goals.

Then I read that Trump himself used that same phrase, iron laws, to explain his invasion of Venezuela. So these guys really are sitting around throwing these words out to each other. Did they decide that the new year was the perfect time to start throwing this kind of language at us? And are the developments in Minneapolis the test run for a plan they hope will obliterate any future considerations of law, courts, elections, civil rights, the Constitution?

The other echo I heard in that quote from Miller, from that insertion of “Jake,” is the ending of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, where a cop, Jake’s friend from his own time on the force, tells him to move on from the scene that had just played out, Faye Dunaway being shot and killed by another cop; he says, famously, “Jake, it’s Chinatown.” Jake, it’s the power, strength, force, it’s the iron laws . . .

I’ve been thinking about that movie a lot lately. Jake is trying to protect Faye Dunaway’s character, Mrs. Mulray, and unravel the mysterious death of her husband and he keeps thinking he is just a few steps from figuring the whole thing out. Meanwhile, Mrs. Mulray is slowly trying to work out if she can trust him and is frustrated by his limited understanding. She tries to tell him how dangerous her father, Noah Cross, is: “You don’t know how crazy,” and he doesn’t. As she is trying to flee, he tells her to leave it to the police and in a final desperate moment of terrified exasperation, she cries out, “He owns the police,” and moments later she is dead and her father is scooping up his daughter/granddaughter and whisking her away.

I think right now, today, we do know how crazy. Even those Republicans in Congress keeping mum know how crazy.

In Stephen Greenblatt’s rather brilliant Tyrants: Shakespeare on Politics, which he wrote in response to Trump’s first term and which is prescient on the ways in which this second term is so much worse, he enumerates (in a chapter called “The Enablers”) the different ways people respond to a tyrannical leader:

Some are “genuinely fooled.”

Some “feel frightened or impotent in the face of bullying and the menace of violence.”

Some cannot keep in mind that the tyrant “is as bad as he seems to be. They know that he is a pathological liar and they see perfectly well that he has done this or that ghastly thing, but they have a strange penchant for forgetting, as if it were hard work to remember just how awful he is. They are drawn irresistibly to normalize what is not normal.”

Some “trust that everything will continue in a normal way. . . . They fail to realize quickly enough that what seemed impossible is actually happening.”

Some “are confident that they will stay one step ahead of the tide of evil or manage to seize some profit from it.”

Some “carry out his orders, some reluctantly but simply eager to avoid trouble, others with gusto. . . . The tyrant never lacks for such people.”

Take every person enabling Trump and find the right slot. Oh, but wait, keep in mind that this is Greenblatt’s description of Shakespeare’s depiction of the reign of England’s Richard III.

I can’t defend this logically but I get the feeling that what will maybe, if we’re lucky, shift things for us is the Republicans in Congress beginning to act. The Supreme Court isn’t properly defending the Constitution or even acting sensibly—see the Citizens United case from 2010 that decided that a corporation is a person. The lower courts are slowly contending with hundreds of cases, some against the Trump administration and some instigated by it, and there have been a number of positive outcomes, funds restored, fired staff brought back, but it is slow and one thing about this administration is that they are on speed. (Or something. On Washington Week with the Atlantic recently, Jeffrey Goldberg, the reporter who was serendipitously mistakenly included in that famous classified chat about bombing in Yemen, said, so quietly that I only heard it because another panel member repeated it while laughing: it’s like they are playing Risk on ketamine.)

I imagine some Republican members of Congress are genuinely high on the world view being acted out by Trump. True believers. The question is how many aren’t, how many are biding their time, waiting for that subtle, or not so subtle, historical shift that will make it safer to say and vote on what they actually believe to be in the best interest of the nation. Like the courts, Congress has been quietly sending funds back into government agencies and scientific research. Administration ideas like let’s prosecute/persecute Jerome Powell aren’t getting wholehearted support. And apparently one of the reasons Trump backed way down about Greenland at Davos was that, besides bad polling numbers and the stock market plummeting, Republicans in Congress, watching those midterms approaching, were furiously back channeling about it to the White House. Now if they could only start front channeling . . .

Of course, if there is even a small Democratic wave in the midterms (and if the midterms, unmolested, take place), the Republicans can continue to duck and let the other side force the whole body into a semblance of sanity. But my hope is that the cover that would give them would allow for a more decisive transformation and we can look back, sooner rather than later, at that whole crazy decade (not an era, not a great depression, not a world war) and think, as a nation, whew, that was close.

When Trump explained that his extreme aggression toward Greenland was because he was snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent quickly called that a canard, as if someone else had accused Trump of it. The quickness and weirdness of that gives me hope. They are nervous. (Also: in his speech at Davos, Trump repeatedly confused Greenland and Iceland. I don’t know why that gives me comfort, but it does. Maybe because it’s the way his attention wanders around. Maybe, for now, Greenland is safe.) A New York Times article about this contained the understatement of the week: “the message injected a new level of uncertainty into Mr. Trump’s thinking.” We can be sure that new levels of uncertainty into Trump’s thinking will be ceaselessly injected until the moment he is one way or another gone.

That one-day general strike in Minneapolis on Friday was so impressive and leads to the possibility of enough momentum to turn that at some point into a nationwide general strike. I remember my mom, when I was a kid, explaining to me that the 1934 Longshoremen’s Strike, which began in San Francisco and led to other Longshoremen’s strikes (including in Minneapolis) and finally to a real general strike, in turn led to the New Deal. Just saying . . .

I wonder how many years will have to pass before the Smithsonian (if it is allowed to continue) will feature an exhibit on the most corrupt presidential administration in U.S. history. The enormous amount of reach and power to force that to not happen will perhaps be whittled down by that magnificent counterforce, time. Can’t you imagine it? The different personalities involved, the timeline, comparisons to previously famously corrupt administrations. The lineages that lead back—Nixon (Roger Stone), McCarthy (Roy Cohn)—the long view, seen, perhaps, at a more dispassionate distance. History. I might not live long enough to witness this but I’m pretty sure it is at some point going to happen, and that, my friends, is today’s bit of optimism about this whole sad, racist, destructive period we are living through.

Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. Norton (2018)

January 4, 2026

In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, sociologist and economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein wrote a series of essays that were collected in a volume, published in 1995 by The New Press, titled After Liberalism. At the same time that Wallerstein was writing these essays, political scientist and economist Francis Fukuyama made a splash with his 1992 bestseller, The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama’s notion was that, with the collapse of communism, liberal democracy was now victorious both economically and culturally and had become the reigning political and economic style for the foreseeable future, perhaps in perpetuity. Within the depths of the US bipartisan foreign policy “deep state,” it was not liberal democracy that had been triumphant but rather the imperial United States of America. The USA would now, the neocons presumed, enjoy unquestioned supremacy in every theater of the globe.

Wallerstein would have none of this. With historical and cultural insight and literary clarity, he detailed how the destruction of the Berlin Wall actually marked the end of liberalism and the entry, not into a supposed New World Order, but rather into a chaotic period after the effective collapse of a world system that had more or less sustained itself since the middle of the nineteenth century when the upheavals of the French and other European revolutions were partially resolved by way of an unwritten compact precariously balancing the interests of aristocrats, capitalists, and workers.

After this chaotic period, this new world dis-order that would last, so Wallerstein guessed, between twenty-five and fifty years, global society will, he thought, come to rest (more or less) in a new world system that might be better or worse than what we had, but would be again relatively stable.

Is there any doubt now but that Fukuyama was spectacularly wrong and Wallerstein (so far) dead-on right? Political and cultural fortunes are now swaying, amid hurricane force winds magnified by internet communication, between

nationalism and globalism and localism, between a resurgent fascism and a reawakened socialism and a new postmodern identity politics. What gives, for heaven’s sake? How can this resolve, with or without violence, even in the long term?

Where are we, in the USA, since 1991? Bill Clinton’s “triumphalism with a human face” failed. G.W. Bush’s “triumphalism plus Jesus” failed, Barack Obama’s “corporate restoration plus identity politics” failed. Trump One’s “chaotic entertainment state” of course failed, but at least it shone a light on the quicksand in which we are thigh-deep. Joe Biden’s weak gestures toward the New Deal were…well, weak. Trump Two’s overt authoritarianism has released demons from centuries-old graves, and it points toward a new world of personality-driven crony capitalism that does not seem remotely sustainable.

So, what is going to happen? The structure of that question presents a problem. That “is going to happen” phraseology is passive. What is going to happen is what human populations will make happen. And populations are made up of individual human beings. It would therefore behoove each of us to develop some idea, in as much detail as we can muster, of the kind of cultural and political and economic worlds that we want to live in. “A world in which I can express my own identity” is an inadequate description, as is “low inflation.” Calling yourself a Marxist or a member of some other club, to my mind, does not meet the challenge of the moment. One has to do the work of envisioning, as best one can. And the vision must be one that starts where we are – it cannot, if it is going to have any effect, simply assume that a miraculous Revolution will be followed by a goal that we all take to be obvious. In 1998, Wallerstein titled another book of his Utopistics – a word that implies both envisioning and pragmatic construction.

I have two caveats to what I just wrote. One is that climate change is going to happen. No matter what, considerable sea-level rise and severe ecological stresses are, at this point, “baked” into our future. An evolutionary bottleneck not just for other species but for our own is within the realm of possibility.

The other caveat is that there may be some overarching, unstoppable mass psychological force, Freudian-like, taking hold in humans that is compelling them to “devolve” toward a simpler, pre-bureaucratic kind of social organization. There have been serious, brilliant thinkers – Murray Bookchin and Jane Jacobs come to

mind – who argued that the nation-state has out-lived its usefulness and who, if they were alive, might think that a devolution to what Bookchin called “libertarian municipalism” (really, a city-based socialism) is a good idea. There are those who think that local efforts to create collectives can be ramped up to where they might be able to replace the edifices of capital. Maybe, but I doubt if something like that is possible under current conditions. Under conditions of wholesale collapse, of course, brought on by whatever causes, all bets are off. But municipalism brought about of necessity by universal devastation would not be pretty – definitely not my first choice of futures.

Very briefly, what I take to be the most likely positive way forward in the United States – admitting that a darker trajectory seems at this point more likely – is an electoral choice for a Green/Justice New Deal. With respect to starting where we

are and heading in an achievable direction, it is notable that a New Deal economic and social program has already existed in the United States in the form of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s democratic socialism. What has already been in America is at the very least possible. FDR’s program would need to be seriously modified in (at least) three respects: (1) Seeing as how the old New Deal was put in place securely within Jim Crow America, the new program must benefit all economic strata, all races and ethnicities, all genders, all places. (That’s the Justice part.) (2) Recognizing the environmental devastation wrought by the old New Deal, such as the rampant building of dams and the single-minded investment in expressways and suburban sprawl, a 21^st century version must be ecologically sound. (That’s the Green part.) (3) In a nod to the libertarian undercurrent (both on the right and left) of our age, investments ought to be financed at the national level while yet designed at the regional and local. Overall, subsidy and regulation should be recognized as vital in the areas of education, health, housing, transportation, environmental protection – all of those at least.

There are large numbers of people, in the current political atmosphere in America, who would be virulently opposed to this notion of the Green/Justice New Deal, and many of those people are collected into regions, scattered around the country but especially within the so-called red states. It is conceivable that a resolution of the present political strife in the US will entail a dissolution into separate autonomous regions. I consider that outcome unlikely but seriously possible.

Immanuel Wallerstein, in his late work, saw social structure and change in terms that he took from chaos and complexity theory. He observed periods of equilibrium (the long 20^th century, even with its horrific wars) and periods far from equilibrium (our present era). In his view, it was precisely within those chaotic stretches of time far from equilibrium when the actions of individuals or small groups could make an outsized difference and change the course of history.

In chaos theory, there is something called the Butterfly Effect wherein a complex system is especially sensitive to small variations from within. Weather systems, for instance, are so complex that a perturbation so tiny as the fluttering of the wings of a butterfly might change the course of the weather days or weeks out. In our current socially, politically, and economically unstable era – a decades-long expanse of civilizational precariousness – creating new ways of being together economically and politically actually has become more possible while yet more harrowing.

We humans, however, have a capability that the lone butterfly faintly disturbing the atmosphere does not. We can organize.

When poets entered my radar they were well known as a scruffy bunch. This was mid-seventies, LA area, where there was the real Bukowski and many Bukowski types, grizzled old-timers (they seemed old to me). There was a real confidence man vibe, like Mr. Norris in an Isherwood story. Their payoff was small change: free drinks, but time and attention, mostly. In return they doled out good gossip, questionable (but interesting) advice, a few good edits. They weren’t part of the academic elite, not by a long shot. Some had teaching jobs, few had tenure. They were somewhat famous. Well, “famous”. Sometimes the best way to learn the things that you feel you need to learn is to allow yourself to get conned a little, and to accept an iffy form of hierarchy. Perhaps that is the definition of education. Information, along with loads of bullshit, are shoveled your way, yours for the sifting.

Carl Wendt, protagonist in Ode to Sunset: A Year in the Life of American Genius would have fit in perfectly as one of my mentors in LA, Santa Cruz, SF, Berkeley. Author Pat Nolan nails the type, bingo. You have to be pretty cagey to survive as a poet. Is anyone less useful? Poets are the poor relations of the art world, a milleu where there are few rich relations. A star janitor probably has more fans, yet Wendt and his kind move through the world at a relatively relaxed pace, piss-elegant and not particularly poverty stricken. The kindness of strangers! and of former/current lovers, sort-of friends, ex-wives. Reading (and deeply enjoying) this book I wonder if there are any Wendt’s around the current poetry “scene”. I have tons of nice poet friends, trustworthy people. Seems like an affront to the old guard. I wonder if our poems suffer, due to the lack of competitive friction. In a genre that depends on operatic levels of drama to win bits of attention, are we too friendly and honest with existence, and each other?

Wendt is all rough edges, not especially trustworthy. The perfect hero for a picaresque novel, he’s a witty observer, watching and commenting. I read, thinking, wow, what happens next? This is an essential element for a (kind of) crime novel, especially one that weighs in at nearly five hundred pages. Starting a book that big is a little daunting, like going to a four hour movie, but if the auteur/author knows their stuff you just sit back and experience the work. I wondered if a non-poet would sink into this book the way I did. I’m guessing that’s a yes, because the people are real, and the sense of place is real. I could feel San Francisco in the prose. Mostly, it’s a good story. You will get to know Wendt and his circle as the novel moves along. And it moves, definitely.

You can buy Ode to Sunset here:

https://odetosunset.com/tag/pat-nolan/

I was struck by that announcement Trump recently made about the Trump fleet—well, I’m always interested to watch the obligatory support group flanking him during these announcements, how they manage to keep straight faces during the most ridiculous wandering ravings; Marco Rubio has the best bland face of the bunch—anyway, I was struck by the way all the men were standing identically, hands in front, fingers interlaced, and, I suddenly couldn’t not see, protecting their genitals or, conversely, signaling obeisance by standing down, as it were, in the presence of the new, great commander of the new, great fleet of ships. I remember reading years ago that the British royal family, while having to stand around some place, will typically do the opposite, linking their hands behind they back, and I have found that useful myself at times. I don’t know how unconscious this hands in front position is for Trump’s minions but since performative sycophancy is required, it looks like the completely appropriate stance for them to take.

Meanwhile, the phrase lame duck is suddenly being tossed around a lot. This condition is a fact, not an indication of popularity vs. unpopularity, just a description of any president’s last term. But the image is so striking and rather cruel if you really look at it (and as Groucho said, why a duck?): sad old duck, waddling and limping away into the sunset.

I love these kind of phrases, and especially clichés; they are so visual. Heads above the parapet, finger to the wind. These have been kicking around in my head lately as a few Republicans have summoned the courage to say things, vote for things, have press conferences about things that go against what Trump demands they do. Some of them are bringing themselves to say and do these things because they are leaving the premises, but not all. There has been pushback on redistricting, ICE raids, Russian sanctions, the Epstein files, the murderous extra-judicial killings off the coast of Venezuela. Those Republican Congresspeople, caught between the unrelenting force of Trump and other threats to themselves and their families, on the one hand, and the fact that their constituents are increasingly vocal about things like, yes, affordability and the cost of health care, on the other, do need to keep consulting their consciences as well as holding their fingers to the wind. Is it shifting yet? Has it begun? Questions we all are having right now.

What happens now if more than a handful of Republicans in Congress begin standing up to Trump and voting against him? What kind of transgressions does it take for them to do that? Corruption and grift? Extra-judicial murder? Tearing down part of the People’s House? What does it take for them to put their heads above the parapet? (And using that phrase makes me think, yes, doesn’t it feel like we have been in a siege for some time now?) Trump wanted the Senate to end the filibuster in order to break the shutdown but the senate refused. Eight Senate Republicans “voiced some concern” in varying degrees about the extra-judicial killings that our military is carrying out in the international waters around South America. And, of course, the recent vote in the House, nearly unanimous, to release the Epstein files, only after Trump said to vote yes, which happened only after it looked like nearly everyone would vote yes anyway.

So amongst the avalanche of anti-democratic, corrupt actions that Trump has taken since coming into office, where do they draw the line?

I’ve thought since the beginning of this administration that the Republicans in Congress who are actively supporting or keeping silent about policies and appointments and political and military actions that are increasingly destructive, unconstitutional, violent—that these politicians are waiting for the wind to shift. It is possible (not for certain, I’m on a seesaw of optimism/pessimism) that at some point in the future (gosh, maybe near future, these reversals of fortune can happen fast; look at Nixon—landslide election win one minute, giving the “V” sign as he departs office the next) it will be necessary for them to have seemed to have objected to Trump’s increasingly unhinged dictatorial behavior, that it’s all a matter of timing.

Will the Epstein files do it? Will it be an election that shifts things? A huge disaster? A stock market crash? A war? Another epidemic? An attack? Trump has so disintegrated the American infrastructure that there are multiple places thin enough that any true emergency (as opposed to the heaps of “emergencies” in his emergency orders) could outstrip even his ability to lie and pretend everything is just fine. And any of these events might be enough to make the Republicans in Congress begin to backpedal furiously on the whole MAGA vision. (I hate the idea that only a hugely destructive event would be enough to effect change of this magnitude. There is that pessimism/optimism thing again.)

Another great, visual cliché: I think maybe Trump has shot his wad. The tactic of flooding the zone (witness the birth of another cliché!), which began Inauguration Day and has continued with an uninterrupted deluge of shocking actions, is beginning to wear thin with a large portion of the country—witness declining poll numbers and those restive constituents back home. Combine that with Trump’s increasingly weird speeches (though sometimes hard to tell, right?, given how weird he started) he is beginning to look like he is (look out, here comes another cliché) losing his marbles.

Presuming that the MAGA / Project 2025 folks are a cabal of sorts (and they sure act as if they would like you to think that), what will they do as Trump becomes a liability instead of an asset? For awhile there was a lot of talk about the possibility, even the necessity, of a civil war but it looks to me like what is looming is more of an active, deliberate all-out class war. And this time around the Project 2025 ideologues, deliberately provoking it, think they can decisively win.

The top twenty percent are spending freely and keeping the economy flowing—luxury vacations, luxury cars, luxury houses. The other eighty percent are increasingly struggling. That movement of wealthy former progressives over to Trump isn’t just to try and protect the sources of their wealth, like their companies or industries, but a recognition that a line is being drawn and that you had better get with the program if you want to stay on this side of the line. For those on the other side of the line? Look to the erosion of rights and law, to the troops in the streets, to financial and legal punishments, to online threats and violence.

Democrats are wringing their hands a little less and looking forward with some hope to the midterms and the 2028 election based on some wins in local and state elections and polling numbers. I’m wondering if from the 2025 Project folks this is all a sort of misdirection, the magician saying, look over here! while the real action is happening elsewhere. So much of that extreme action has to do with demolishing and rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure to guarantee that the twenty percent / eighty percent line is made permanent. And all the insertion of the military into the cities is to practice the mechanism that will be needed if the eighty percent that is losing health care and benefits, that is struggling with paying for groceries, rent, child care, car payments, mortgages, starts to resent and rebel against the twenty percent. The corruption of the election process (New York Times, October 24, 2025: “The president has placed proponents of his false claims into government jobs while dismantling systems built to secure voting, raising fears that he aims to seize authority over elections ahead of next year’s midterms”) is another necessity to keep everything in place for them.

If, driven by AI-created mass unemployment and the intentional near disintegration of the federal safety net, the country descends into another Depression, the 2025 Project people stand ready to concretize the twenty percent / eighty percent distinction. Amazon laid off 14,000 people and UPS 48,000, just in time for the Christmas rush. Both companies named AI as the reason. What is happening is happening fast and might soon create a massive amount of people who cannot find work. This is why I keep thinking the 2026 midterms and the 2028 election are just sideshows for the Project 2025 people. Look over here! Worry about fundraising! while they are presuming things will deteriorate so badly and so fast that it will be yet another “emergency” that will require extraordinary, and extra-judicial, remedies, which they are so happy to implement.

It’s become clear they have no shame, they will stop at nothing (are these clichés?) and the president is quickly becoming our truly mad king, what with the now Donald J. Trump–John F. Kennedy Center and that proposed new sector of Navy ships also named after him. (Aren’t both of these things—memorials and navy ships—named after people who have died?)

It is a fulcrum, isn’t it, as the midterms approach, possibly reversing the course of history, if it tips one way and the Project 2025 guys allow history take its course, or it tips the other way and they double, triple, quadruple down and call out the troops and the false electors and so on to force the continuation of their plans. I wonder whether they are actively debating these things amongst themselves or are they busy pledging fidelity to their vision? It’s clear from their actions so far that they have no faith in democracy, only in their ability to stretch it beyond recognition.

I grew up in Generickville, although Barbara’s Generickville, where Mara Lethem’s novel takes place, may be on the other side of the country, or in another country. I guess that’s why it’s generic. Wherever, I can see the house, and the family unit, and the neighbor who is a character. I’m grounded there, like it or not, grounded, or buried. Soul numbing stuff, but not soul killing. Like the tingler, a soul can sustain itself, on love or anger or just about anything in between.

I can’t pretend to understand all of the motivators for Barbara's anger. Why women bother with childbirth confounds me, and I hear from some that they are confounded too. Houses and children are also foreign to me now. When friends start families my policy is to see them away from home until the kids are in college. I find them (my friends, not the kids) more interesting at that point; tired, reflective, and very often either on meds or happy to be off the merry-go-round, or some combination.

Barbara has an ok life, Barbara is pissed, Barbara is hilarious. As part of her day in middle class (I assume) America she commits a little murder or two. The seedy little underbelly! Really, it’s the most universal part of human existence, and the most entertaining. It’s why Blue Velvet is my favorite Lynch film. When you scratch the surface of normality you get oozing puss. That’s where the fun starts.

And this novel is a romp, funny and perfectly paced. I don’t think I’ve ever called anything (or anyone) arch, because I’m not sure what it means. Also it sounds kind of critic-like, or maybe something you’d say about a 19th century English novelist, and I hate 19th century English novels. But, what the fuck, Mara’s novel is arch. Also irreverent and right-on.

Horton Hears a Who was my favorite book, for a good chunk of my childhood. From it I learned about respecting all beings, about not bullying, about appreciating people of all types and sizes. From A Person’s a Person No Matter How Small, Mara Lethem version, I learned that, yes, we are all persons, but we aren’t necessarily good or interesting persons. Sometimes, you just have to kill one.

A Person’s a Person no Matter How Small by Mara Lethem, available on the Google Play Books app. Read it!