Parents called. Didn’t mention the letter, but obviously got it.

Campfire OK, Strange Like We Are. They’re not that strange and they’re not that OK. They sound tired and strained. When a song starts slowing down, they take it as an invitation to slow it down further with sluggish picky guitar solos and harmonies that follow and prolong the lyrics. The repetitive fade-outs can drive you nuts. Someone like Neil Young can make some of these affectations work, but it’s not OK for their Campfire churls.

Swallow by Tonya Plank

With such a memorable title, and such a distinctive a name as “Tonya Plank,” Swallow was an irresistible Kindle 99-cent pick-up for me. The novel’s won a bunch of awards and is head-and-shoulders (and, in this case, throat) above most of the romance-novel bargains which Kindle pushes.

That’s because Swallow is really a mature coming-of-age novel masquerading as chick lit. Its protagonist, Sophie Hegel (get the philosophical undertones?) is succumbing to high pressures on all fronts: she’s getting married, she’s starting out as a lawyer in New York, she’s naturally withdrawn and she can’t handle a lot of the people she has to deal with on a regular basis. The title “Swallow” refers to a psychological issue which creates what Sophie colorfully describes as a “fist-ball” in her throat which keeps her from digesting things. Her family and friends naturally mistake this for an eating disorder, and the inability to swallow also interferes with courtroom decorum.

She has constant awkward encounters with family members, co-workers, defendants and shopkeepers, so the fist-ball just keeps clenching. It’s a terrific device, which adds a sort of Stephen King element to the proceedings. The book’s finish is predictable yet satisfying, but the real enjoyment is in the social stress meter provided by that throbbing throat.

The huge pair of metal eyeglasses which rests outside The Study at Yale hotel are back. Some weeks ago, they just vanished—for massivce midterm test-cramming, we imagine.
The specs loom large in the The Study’s logo and are a big part of its bookish personality, so we were overjoyed to see them back. We can relate. We lose our reading glasses all the time.
Here’s a photo I found on tripadvisor.com:

Spinner.com has compiled a list of “Occupy Wall Street Protest Songs” which the site subtitles “A List for the 99 Percent.” The selections are 99 percent obvious, from famous worker sing-alongs such as “This Land is Your Land” to pop songs that happen to be about money (“All About the Benjamins,” “Money for Nothing”) to rock anthems about not backing down (“Won’t Back Down”).
Here’s some they missed. Yes, some are worker sing-alongs and some are pop songs that happen to be about money, but at least they’re not as obvious. Some of them even have a positive message.

1. “Capitalism,” Chris Butler. An incredible distillation of the capitalist philosophy into one selfish guy’s workplace ritual.
2. “The Wall Street Shuffle,” 10cc. “Oh, Howard Hughes, did you money make you better? Are you waiting for the hour when you can screw me?”
3. “It’s Money That I Love,” Randy Newman. Simplifies greed and financial status to the point where it’s baldly ludicrous.
4. “Conservative,” Iggy Pop. Spinner picks Pop’s 1999 tune “Corruption,” but this is Mr. Osterberg’s most articulate first-person screed about systemic social problems.
5. “Killed My Boss,” The Presidential Targets. This Connecticut mock-rock band has a slew of working-class rants in their repertoire, but this one goes directly to the point, defenestrating the administrative evildoer.
6. “Give Me Some Money,” Spinal Tap. A simple and direct have-not plaint.
7. “A Song for Occupations,” Walt Whitman. A poem, but he calls it a song, and asks all the right questions about society’s feelings about work, government and power.
8. “Sure as I’m Sitting Here,” Three Dog Night. Sitting yourself down and figuring out what’s important.
9. “Spread It Around,” Johnny Paycheck. “If you’ll hand it to somebody and help him when he’s down/Tell him some good news, spread it around.”
10. “That’s What I Want to Hear,” Phil Ochs. A call to action that’s framed as rant against apathetic bitching and whining.
So you tell me that your last good dollar is gone
and you say that your pockets are bare.
And you tell me that your clothes are tattered and torn
and nobody seems to care.
Now don’t tell me your troubles
No I don’t have the time to spare.
But if you want to get together and fight, good buddy
That’s what I want to hear.

Think indie rockers hate dance music? Hate is the wrong word. They’re allergic to it.
Bobby Boon of the conversers did a little trot on the Bullfinch stage the other night, fell, and broke his nose.
Last month, Fussy of the Kiss Me Kates tried to demonstrate a step he’d seen on a video, kicked a bruiser at the bar by accident, and got beaten up.
We’ve heard many tales of ripped crotches in jeans, ruined workboots, sweatstains and other dancefloor humiliations.

No dancing required to enjoy Vision of the Apocalypse, American Document and Imagined Wing at the Bullfinch… Dark Meadow and the well-named Adolescence at Hamilton’s… One More Gaudy Night (that’s a format, not a band name) With Deep Song at D’ollaires. Errand Into the Maze opens…

Parents called. Didn’t mention the letter, but obviously got it.

Cold Cave, Cherish the Light Years. It’s hardly a new sound—it’s that heavy fast-yet-bloated ‘80s dark-pop, with the low vocals and the supplementary synths—but in today’s lo-fi and throwback-rock world it comes across as meaningless and offputtingly arrogant. I feel as if someone is trying to shove me around a nightclub against my will.

A Kindle I’d just gotten in June withered and froze over the weekend, and by Wednesday Amazon had already gotten me its replacement. That was the quick part. The laborious part is “transferring your library,” as the Kindle calls it; redownloading your purchases from your permanent library in the ether to the new device, so you can access your fave titles when your WiFi isn’t on.

When I moved to my current home 11 years ago, from an apartment around the corner where I’d lived for the previous 12 years, “transferring my library” meant sorting through some 6,000 books and magazines, carting hundreds of boxes to the new place and distributing the rest to friends, Never Ending Books and elsewhere. The process took about six months, and I loved every minute of it.

Same with the Kindle. Shifting stuff from the amorphous archives to the plastic machine is virtually immediate. Sorting, howeverm, takes time. I found I could move my “collection” headings from my previous Kindle but not their contents. Stayed up late in bed reconstituting collections and creating new ones.

I think I enjoy organizing and ordering things on my Kindle even more than I enjoy reading on it.

Herewith, my “Kindle Collections”:
• Comics (Kindle anthologies of Krazy Kat, Out Our Way and Barney Google, plus newer strips such as The Norm)
• Old British Magazines (Blackwood’s, The Tatler, Punch)
• Scripts (lots of Elizabethans at the moment, but also PDFs of things upcoming at Long Wharf and the Yale Rep)
• Children’s book (Obama’s book for this daughters, the complete Wizard of Oz canon, many others)
• Latin (vulgate bible, some grammar, some humor, Apuleis’ Golden Asse…)
• Poetry
• Twain (the autobiography, the complete works, various tacky sequels to Huck Finn by other writers)
• Westerns (Zane Grey mostly, but also Bret Harte)
• About Theater (autobios, histories, mystery novels with theater themes)
• Boswell (by which I mean Johnson)
• Kindle (various guides on how to use the thing, or publish to it. All hail Stephen Windwalker!)
• Silent Movies (memoirs by Chaplin and Fairbanks; William Thomas Sherman’s vast Mabel Normand Source Book)
• Mythic (Bullfinch, Aesop, Atlantis)
• Jazz Age (Fitzgerald, duh, but also Don Marquis, Ben Hecht, Ring Lardner, Franklin Adams..)
• Swingin’ ‘60s (Terry Southern, a couple of tributes to Peter Cook, the Man from O.R.G.Y. spy parodies, garage-band histories and more Cold War coolths.)
• Dunwich (as in horror: Lovecraft, Gaimin, Konrath, and Lydia Dare’s perfectly titled horror romance Certain Wolfish Charm)
• Gumshoes and Loafers (detective fiction, from Max Allan Collins’ Nate Heller to John Buchan’s Richard Hannay. Leslie Charteris’ original Saint books are strangely still not on Kindle, but Burt Barer’s Capture the Saint is.)
• A Thousand Eyes (mid-20th century paranoid suspense pulp fiction by the masters: Cornell Woolrich, Fredric Brown, Philip K. Dick).
• News Media (Game Change, but also Charles Dudley Warner’s American Newspaper and Hillaire Belloc’s The Free Press).
• Contemporary Comedy (Gideon Defoe’s Pirates! Books, Gilbert Gottfried’s memoirs)
• Yellow Bookish (Wilde, Beerbohm, Huysman)
• Hawthorne (love the Tanglewood Tales and Wonder Tales!)
• Outdoor Adventure (Five Tarzan novels and a guide to the British agricultural soap opera The Archers)
• New Novels (still haven’t finished Franzen’s Freedom)
• Dictionaries
I also subscribe to my own blogs—this one and New Haven Theater Jerk—on Kindle. It’s usually the only place where I catch typos in them. It’s a focused and reading experience… assuming that one can stop sorting in order to read.

I saw a kitten bounce yesterday. Early Steve Martin juggling routines be damned. This was one of the most horrific events I’ve ever witnessed, and luckily my head was turned for the worst bits.
A woman in a red Toyota sped down Edgewood Ave., by the corner of Day Street, yesterday around 3:45 p.m. and, without slowing down, tossed three small kittens, one after the other, out of the car window.
One cat was saved by a woman who was at the right spot on the street at the right time and was blessed with extraordinary timing. She grabbed a kitten as it fell, wrapped it in a blanket, and presumably now has a friend for life.
The other two died. They hit the ground hard, though not hard enough to kill them immediately. The sight of a kitten with a smashed face flipping around the street like a flounder on a hook, spraying blood, is not easy to shake.
This was at the height of school-bus time, at a corner where not only a dozen different buses stop but where a new school opened just this fall. I was able to steer my own daughters home without them having any idea what had happened. Other parents had some tearful talks ahead.
Day Street is a block away from Kensington St., a neighborhood which birthed a notorious street gang. Some would claim that such neighborhoods become immune to violence. That’s not what I saw in the aftermath of the hurtling kittens. A corps of extraordinary women attempted to chase the car, screaming at the driver. They watched over the dying kittens while phoning for help and banging on the door of the nearby police sub station. For a quarter of an hour they diverted traffic around the dead kittens, until a Liveable Cities representative arrived to move the bodies.
The women were incensed, involved, apoplectic with rage at the inhuman monster who could toss living creatures blithely from a car to their doom. One of the women told of how she’d rescued a kitten from a similar fate once, finding it in a box on a street and taking it home.
Hope and community amid the horror. Glad I don’t have to be back at the bus stop for a few days, but will have some great people to talk to when I do.