I do miss independent bookstores. But I’m also lucky because I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the Barnes and Nobles up here are awfully good ones. Still, a person misses a person’s local little bookstore. And a person often ends up ordering books on line. Especially old out-of-print books. And a person sometimes guiltily orders used books that are still in print, thereby cheating the publisher and, much worse, the author!!! of royalties. SO! Now I have discovered a site at which you can order on line to your heart’s content, assuage your royalty guilt, and actually do some good in the world. It is called betterworld.com. They give part of their profits to literacy programs, they rescue books before they end up as landfill, they have free shipping and they also offer carbon-offset shipping. For example, I just ordered Author, Author by David Lodge and it cost me $3.75, free shipping, another 4 cents for the carbon offset shipping. I recently gave away about 100 books to make room for new ones, which is good because I foresee a lot of them appearing on my doorstep in the near future. Go to betterworld.com!

Midnight’s Children won the 2008 Booker of Bookers Prize.(click here) I was thinking of Midnight’s Children, on eof my most beloved novels, yesterday as I watched Ghandi on TV. Reading it, all those many years ago, was a revelation, not just about India, but about novels. Reading Rushdie for the first time was like reading Dickens for the first time: Look what you can do! I was also happy to see that Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda was on the list, although I think his other Booker winner, The True Adventures of the Kelly Gang, is perhaps even better. Carey was a recent discovery for me, and a thrilling one. The others on the short list were JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist and J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. None of which have I read. The shame of it. And the delight. Four new books! Four writers to experience for the first time!

Here is my friend the wonderful writer Ariel Levy on her brand new GREEN ROOF! Don’t you want a GREEN ROOF? I do. It provides excellent insulation and thereby saves energy and money; it helps with storm runoff and so keeps our oceans clean; you now get a tax credit in NYC that covers about 25% of the installation cost. And it’s BEAUTIFUL. This GREEN ROOF was designed and installed by Greensulate(click). I want it!
Warning: Ari not included.

Thank you, 3quarks daily! Yes, you give me poetry and essays about black holes, but you also give me this: click here!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXT2E9Ccc8A

A while ago Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote about Angela Thirkell in his column and I was jealous that he liked her so much because I had tried to read her stuff years ago and found it annoying and twee. But my friend Jeanette recently hunted up a bunch of the novels and passed them on to Janet and me and…they’re so good. One of the things I love that I could not appreciate twenty years ago are the sons. There are so many sons in their early twenties. They come home, leave their tennis rackets and hiking boots and clothes and books everywhere, immediately get on the phone to their friends, disappear after bestowing a distracted kiss on the parental forehead, stay out late, then jump on the back of a friend’s motorcycle and leave. And the mother? She is in ecstasy, gazing at the clothes strewn everywhere with deep, motherly happiness. So on mother’s day, I recommend Angela Thirkell, who understood a lot.

Also, I have discovered a glorious site to buy her books and every other English novel you might might to get your hands on. Anglophilebooks.net

Happy Mother’s Day!

I was staying at a friend’s house when someone emailed me about an article she was translating from Italian into English which quoted some parts of Rameau’s Niece. The translator asked me to check some passages so that she would not be translating back into English from the Italian what had already been translated from English into Italian, if you follow me. Luckily, there was a copy of the paperback of Rameau’s Niece in my friend’s bookcase. When I opened it up, I was able to find not only the requested passages, but also the traces of real book worms. I like it when the basis of a metaphorical phrase turns up. And I found the holes in the book strangely moving. Here are some blurry iphone pictures of their tunnels, which look very cozy.

I have noticed that instead of hearing “no problem” (the uncooperative taxi driver’s mantra) all the time, I have started to hear a much more spiritually melodious phrase: “No worries.” This is the refrain to soothe the anxious Jew. I thought it sounded laid back and Carribean, but Janet assures me it is Australian in origin. As in, “No worries, Mate.” I’m glad it has migrated here. Welcome.

Woof Patrol (click here), a great site all about, what else, dogs, has a link to a pug doing what all pugs really want to do: clean your computer screen. Go there AT ONCE. Your screen will never look better. It’s a thing a beauty! CLICK HERE!!!

I like antiquated locutions that pop up in everyday life, like signs that say “Inquire Within.” Here is a lovely one posted on in an alley in Venice.

I was walking along the other day thinking of common offensive phrases of my youth. When we dropped pillows from on high we used to cheerfully chant, “Bombs over Tokyo!” Charming. And in the family lore of there is the delightful story of a day at my grandparents’ house, some holiday or other, when my little brother of about two was standing idly petting the wall, which was covered, as I remember, with a pale green fabric. My Aunt Norma said something in Yiddish. Ricky, my brother, said, “What?” And I cleverly said, “She said, Get your cotton-pickin’ hands off the walls.”
So, I was walking along the other day thinking that everything about that incident dated it to the 1950s: The aunt speaking Yiddish in a white clapboard Connecticut house, the child knowing the phrase cotton-pickin’ from our housekeeper, a young black woman from South Carolina name Elle. The wallpaper. Times have changed, thought I. Then, as I was making my daily Doonesbury check, I saw this in the “Say What?” section:
“Not a single one of these cotton…[stammering]…these just ridiculous politicians should be the moderator on the issue of race.”
– Lou Dobbs, on Condoleezza Rice
Now I just have to figure out how to say that in Yiddish.

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