This Old Book: 'Lost in the Cosmos'

Walker Percy, a physician and practicing Catholic in the American South, wrote a number of interesting novels, the best-known perhaps being "The Moviegoer," winner of the National Book Award in 1962 (or was it?), beating books by Salinger and Heller. But Percy also wrote some oddball nonfiction, including this one, billed as "The Last Self-Help Book." It seems to have been an attempt to puncture some of the astrological, spiritual and pseudo-therapy books on the market in the 1970s. It is a strange and entertaining read (marred, alas, by the casual homophobia of that time, among other flaws). The book is part humor, part spiritual quest, part a treatise on semiotics before that word was in vogue. It is also part self-help quiz, and part riff on Carl Sagan's popular science book "Cosmos," with one of the best arguments you'll ever read against suicide. You'll find that in the chapter entitled, "The Depressed Self: Whether the Self is Depressed because there is something wrong with it or whether Depression is a Normal Response to a Deranged World." 

     This Old Book is a series of posts about books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades. It used to be a Tumblr, now archived here.

'Ambiverts'

"There are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't." -- Robert Benchley

This recent piece in The Washington Post (via @danbenjamin) reminded me that the world is more than extroverts and introverts. Extroverts have tended to dominate the culture, for obvious reasons, but there has been a quiet and growing appreciation for introverts in recent years. But extreme introverts do have their challenges.

Well, there is a third way of being. There are also "ambiverts," people who display qualities of both groups. Research success they are more successful than the other two types of people. From The Post:

Extroverts can talk too much and listen too little. They can overwhelm others with the force of their personalities. Sometimes they care too deeply about being liked and not enough about getting tough things done.

But the answer — whether you’re pushing Nissans on a car lot or leading a major nonprofit or corporation — isn’t to lurch to the opposite end of the spectrum. Introverts have their own challenges. They can be too shy to initiate, too skittish to deliver unpleasant news and too timid to close the deal. Ambiverts, though, strike the right balance. They know when to speak up and when to shut up, when to inspect and when to respond, when to push and when to hold back.

This Old Book: 'The Dog Is Us'

Marcelle Clements was a hot writer in the 1980s, with essays in Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Village Voice and other soon-to-be fading beacons of the new journalism. The title essay from Rolling Stone in this book is the lament of an ex-hippie who discovers that grown-up worries and responsibilities do not really mix well with a marijuana habit, as euphoria gives way to paranoia. Your high self used to laugh at the silly dog in the dorm room. Now your life is the dog, and it's no laughing matter. Other topics: the rise of the "mutant elite" (I still don't get that one); the evolution of the meaning of "cool"; why no New Yorker should ever go below 14th Street; the lives of anxious professional women in the big city; and other tropes of what people imagine life was like in Manhattan from about 1981 to 1985, when it was still gritty, and somewhat more affordable, and misery was apparently a pose that could sell magazines. She also has interviews with Klaus Kinski, Sting and a woman turned Sandinista guerrilla. It's quite the dog's breakfast, in other words. From the jacket blurb of this rumpled 1987 paperback: "A born social critic unafraid to feel bad about things, Marcelle Clements goes right to the heart of our post-sixties malaise. In this collection of trenchant, sometimes hilarious pieces, she examines..."  Yadda, yadda. I was a dude in my own 20something malaise, but I pored over this book for clues to what life might be like down the road for an aspiring writer. I keep it now as some sort of artifact of that youth, when baby-boomer Clements was watching 40 approach fast. Whatever happened to her? It appears she eventually ventured below 14th Street (ha!), where she was teaching Proust at N.Y.U. Here's an interview from 2003. 

    This Old Book is a series of posts about books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades. It used to be a Tumblr, now archived here.

This Old Book: 'Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp'

Remember zines? Before there was McSweeneys, before "A Staggering Work of Hearbreaking Genius," before The Believer, and so many other Dave Eggers projects, there was Might magazine, which could be found in certain obscure zine shops in the East Village (at least, that's where I found it). I still have most of the full run of Might in a box somewhere, but this 1998 paperback collects the best of its snarky Spy Lite vision. Eggers, the editor, was such an unknown at that point that his name appears nowhere on the cover, though there is an essay in here by him about the F word. Getting top billing is an essay by David Foster Wallace that I had completely forgotten until I just looked closely at this for the first time in a dozen years: "Hail the Returning Dragon, Clothed in New Fire," which tries to look on the bright side of AIDS. Yes, really. Also in here: Ted Rall's "College Is for Suckers." A piece by R.U. Sirius and another by the frontman for Soul Coughing, a band I barely remember. It's a strange little time capsule from the eve of the Internet age.

    This Old Book is a series of posts about books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades. It used to be a Tumblr, now archived here.

Caring for Your Introvert

Here's a 2003 gem from The Atlantic on introverts (via @smc90). I hire a lot of introverts. They make great copy editors. The hard part is getting them past the newsroom extroverts in the interview gantlet. 

Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say "Hell is other people at breakfast." Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring. Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses."

Publishing News From Across the Room

I'm happy to report that my wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, has a book contract from Jaded Ibis Press for her fantasy-memoir "An Unsuitable Princess." I am also happy to report that the memoir section (contained in footnotes) predates when we met.

This Old Book: 'The Illuminatus! Trilogy'

I used to own individual paperback copies of this cult trilogy as a teenager in the 70s, but they were lost along the way. I picked up this omnibus edition sometime in the late 1980s but never got around to re-reading it. A glance at the first few pages makes me think I might not have the patience to revisit it.

Its themes of secret societies and conspiracies, and the absurd or evocative character names (Hagbard Celine, Fission Chips, Mama Sutra), and certain phrases (first line: "It was the year when they finally immanentized the eschaton") remind me of David Foster Wallace, Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, though the prose is not nearly as good. (It is much better than the writing in its trashier descendant, "The Da Vinci Code.")

The authors, Robert Shea and the strange polymath Robert Anton Wilson,  make the most of it, jumping around in time from the political assassinations of the 60s to Atlantis to John Dillinger and the final words of Dutch Shultz. There is a fair amount of right- and left-wing conspiracy theory about freemasons and the Illuminatti, riffs on Sixties radicalism, drugs and sex, numerology, Aleister Crowley, the Principia Discordia, the mystical properties of the number 23, and more. It's a wackadoodle ride on the dark side of the counterculture, mislabeled a work of science fiction, a perfect cultural artifact of the paranoid style of 1975. 

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com.  The Tumblr is probably more readable, until I get around to repairing the imported posts here. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments attempting to figure out why I have held onto them.

Navigating Loss With Poetry

My wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, has been on a roll lately with her poetry. Red Ochre Press has just published her chapbook "The Navigation of Loss." Order a copy here. The money goes to a good cause. 

Experimenting With Storify on Squarespace

Update: October 2024.

A note for posterity. Storify, like so many social media experiments back in the 2010s, died an abrupt death, taking about a dozen posts on this blog with it. The posts consisted of embedded tweets from staffers at The Times, using the @nytimes newsroom staff list on Twitter. from the heyday of Twitter, before Elon Musk came at the platform with a wrecking ball and even changed the name. I’m leaving this stub for posterity but deleting the blank posts that were part of this blogging experiment.

This Old Book: 'Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur'

Ah, Le Morte D’Arthur. This 1970s paperback has been kicking around my collection since high school. I probably bought it after viewing "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," one of the first movies I was allowed to see in a theater without adult accompaniment.

Needless to say, Malory is not really as entertaining. I'm with Dennis the Constitutional Peasant: "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government."

This edition of Malory has a glossary. For example, the questing beast "has the head of a serpent, the body of a leopard, the buttocks of a lion, and the feet of a hart. From its belly issues the sound of thirty pairs of yapping hounds. It is never brought to earth."

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.

Poetry Reading on the Lower East Side

More literary news: My wife Jane Rosenberg LaForge will be the featured poet at a reading from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 16, 2012, at JujoMukti Tea Lounge, 211 East 4th St. (between Avenues A and B). The event is part of the Spoken Word Sundays series hosted by the poet George Wallace, the writer-in-residence at Walt Whitman's Birthplace and the first poet laureate of Long Island. 

Music and Verse

If you like handmade music and poetry, this might be your thing. Have a listen: A Los Angeles musician, Thair Peterson, has set some of my wife's poetry to music.

Some Publishing News

My wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, has won a Red Ochre Press chapbook competition, had a story published this week at Fiction 365 and was nominated by her small press publisher for a Pushcart Prize for one of her poems. She will be participating at a free reading in New York on Saturday, Oct. 20, 2012.

Returning to Stumptown

​Last Sunday, I rode my bike up to Stumptown in Manhattan to pick up some beans. Stumptown's coffee selections are the most consistently good -- and expensive -- around. The vibe in the place is a wee bit hipster-precious.

The baristas wear old timey hats. There are no chairs. It's cash-only, and the lines are frequently trailing out into the Ace Hotel lobby (above).

But if you can get past all that, you're in for a treat. I've been drinking these two all week; the descriptions are on the mark. Personally, I give the edge to the Guatemala Bella Vista.

This Old Book: 'The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes'

I have a bunch of these Calvin and Hobbes books, purchased when Bill Watterson was still creating the strip for newspapers. Part of me wishes he were still plugging away as a cartoonist, but I respect Watterson for hanging it up while the strip was still a perfect work of art, fresh, funny and not tired, the way so many other strips get in their old age. He is sort of the J.D. Salinger of newspaper comics. Attempts to track him down have become something of a genre. He’s not that hard to find, but I imagine he’s tired of talking about something he did years ago.  At least we have the various collections, including this one from 1990. I re-read them every now and then, and my daughter has recently been absorbed by them. I think it’s cool that she is being entertained by a great and funny work of art that I myself loved and bought a decade before she was born. I do wonder if she’s caught on that I learned most of my parenting style from Calvin’s father.

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'Ian Shoales' Perfect World'

I fondly remember the National Public Radio of the 1980s, especially "All Things Considered," because it kept me awake on so many long automobile trips in the wilds of Maryland, Pennsylvania and upstate New York. I must have bought this book after hearing a commentary on the show from Ian Shoales, a member of Duck's Breath Mystery Theater. I'm not entirely sure that it was clear to me at first that he was the fictional creation of Merle Kessler. After a blast of cynical commentary, his trademark sign-off was "I gotta go."  In later years, Kessler has written articles, performed on KQED radio, local theater on the West Coast, kept a blog, and even done some recent podcasting. I can't say that this Reagan-Cold War-era book has aged all that well. So much in our culture, world and society was about to change. A lot of the references seem stale or frozen in time. What might have seemed edgy then has been rendered mild in this age of "The Daily Show," Sean Hannity and The Onion. It is a window on a forgotten era.

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.

An Update on the Coffee Situation

The Krups Espressaria full automatic espresso machine. 

Earlier this year, we moved to Chelsea, and now live I within in a couple of blocks of Cafe Grumpy. It is among the best, if not the best, place for coffee in Manhattan. That has made me exceptionally lazy about seeking out new coffee shops. When I lived in Midtown, I had no choice but to hop on my bike or the subway to get good beans and a cafe vibe.

A couple of months before we moved, my refurbished Jura machine jammed up in some way, and I didn't have time to deal with it. Half of our stuff was in storage while the real estate agents, lawyers, condo boards and bankers toyed with us.

When the dust settled, I decided to treat myself to a Christmas present, this Krups machine. I like some things about it more than the Jura, but it requires a lot more regular attention and cleaning. The bean and water containers seem smaller.

But the more pressing matter right now is that I am almost out of Heartbreaker.  It's time to head to Grumpy.