Hello and a happy new year to everyone. As the most feeble blogger on record, I feel it incumbent upon even me to check in once before the end of 2011 and to post some pictures of a few of the places I visited in 2010/2011, in all of which I met the most wonderful book sellers and book buyers and book readers and book writers. No one will be offended, I think, if I say that my favorite place was the isle of Capri. Do you remember in Blazing Saddles when Hedley Lamarr says to the the group of cigar smoking politicians, “We have to protect our phony baloney jobs, gentleman!”? Well, sometimes in Capri where I was honored to be a part of a lecture series called “Le Conversazione,” those words came to mind. So, thank you Anronio Monda and Davide Azzolini for dreaming up such a dreamy event. Above is the view from our window. And for those many, many months, years or decades or lifetimes when one cannot be on Capri, I highly recommend Extraordinary Women by Compton Mackenzie and South Wind by Norman Douglas. Below, left to right, a few more places: San Francisco from a Berkeley window; Tucson; Birthplace of Motown; the Watergate at dawn.

NOW I DO HAVE GET ONE…

The New York Public Library is doing a fantastic Candide exhibit with a lot of online stuff, to which, if I can write something worthy, I’m going to contribute. But check out this 2 minute Candide. It’s brilliant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk0XY199svk

A happy dog cruisin’ in California on his way to Thanksgiving dinner.

When we got back to the city, all the leaves had been summarily removed from the trees and deposited on the ground, making Riverside Park look gray and wintry and dull. And the idea of moving to California seemed like a brilliant incontrovertible idea. But then…the tree that blooms every December 1st…

and then I heard a red tailed hawk and looked up and there were two of them sitting in the trees, Here is a bad iphone picture of them.

As for this storied move, it hasn’t yet happened. The apartment is not yet sold, and so we live in limbo, which is to say we live exactly as we have been but we have to make the beds every day.

Most important of all, for me, is that I have just read My Antonia for the first time! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am so lucky to have grown up so illiterate. This is a book most people read in junior high school. I was much too pretentious in junior high school to understand this subtly simple book. Now on to O Pioneer! I think. Maybe we should move not to LA but to Nebraska. Waddya think?

A female cardinal landed on our balcony today and wanted very much to get in. There are birds you just fall in love with and the female cardinal is one, partly because as a child I watched one hatch her eggs in a nest visible from our porch (the cat unfortunately ate all her babies), partly because they are just so beautiful, so subtle and elegant in their plumage and then, pop!, that orange bill.

When I went to take the dog out tonight, the elevator door opened and three teenage boys were huddled around something I imagined must be a joint until they moved apart to make room for Hector and me and I saw it was a book. They were hulking in that teenage boy way and they smelled of beer.
“No, listen, Crime and Punishment was published in 1866. There was so much going on then with him…”
“Just back from Siberia…”
“1866, man.”
They all shook their heads in grave agreement and held the door for me as I exited. I love boys.

That scruffy being above is a cairn terrier, which would be quite enough to make me turn to Justin Smith’s wonderful piece on 3quarks daily, but the piece itself, about dogs and philosophy, is fascinating. click here to read it.