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.

Almost burned them, but didn’t.

About a cup of cocoa powder
About half a cup of margarine
Six eggs
A tablespoon of vanilla
A little salt
Two cups sugar
A third of a cup of corn syrup
One cup white flour
One-third cup whole wheat flour
One a half cups tiny marshmallows.

Melt the cocoa with the margarine in one bowl and add the dry stuff. Froth up the wet stuff in another bowl. Blend them together. Add the marshmallows last.
Bake at 350 degrees for around half an hour, but these brownies WANT to burn, so watch them carefully.

Waiting for a streetcar, or a trainwreck. When it takes three hours for a show to happen, you can’t help but have expectations. Waiting around a place even as pinball-happy D’ollaire’s can grate. Especially when the unready, unsteady band in question has some questionable conceptual fixation with controlling all aspects of the show.
There was no jukebox music, or other any sounds produced by other bands, allowed before the egregiously delayed set. We were out of quarters and drink tickets over an hour before showtime. And who do we ever want to talk to at D’ollaire’s?

Location B at the Bullfinch, with Bottles & Cans… Watch the… (their ellipses, not ours) at Hamilton’s with The MTA Band…

Regretted mailing it.

Surfer Blood, Tarot Classics EP
There’s a preparedness and precision to this band that undercuts some heartfelt lyrics. Crisp, clean, lullingly repetitive even when it rocks, this is what New Wave did to punk in order to sell records to college students and not just drop-outs. History’s repeating, since Surfer Blood is opening for The Pixies Oct. 29 at the Waterbury Palace.

The Race
By Clive Cussler and Justin Scott.
I made the same mistake with The Race that I made with Cussler’s previous three Isaac Bell adventures: I blew through the first half of it in one sitting, then put it down and someone didn’t get back to it for weeks. Call it Cussler syndrome. He grabs me, drags me into the ocean, I break free, I gasp for air. Then I remember I forgot something and plunge recklessly back in.
The Bell books—The Chase, The Spy, The Wrecker and now The Race—are outstanding because they’re upstanding. The hero is loyal to his friends, would never cheat on his liberated-woman fiancée, loves his country and can smell a terrorist half a continent away. He’s Yale-educated. Thanks to a flash-forward coda in one of the books, we know he lives to a ripe old age and has a long and faithful marriage.
How could this goodie-two-shoes derring-do not be boring? Because Isaac Bell’s world-saving exploits happen at a time when the world was becoming connected in ways it never could be before. The adventures occur in and around steam locomotives, ocean liners and (in The Race) airplanes. Bell represents an old ideal of self-reliance. He’s battling Robber Barons, industrialists, inventors and other new breeds of power-hungry scoundrel.
I love knowing that Bell will never succumb to the charms of the comely lasses in distress who bat their eyes at him in every book. It makes for a whole other sort of conflict than what you’d find in a James Bond book. It also provides a momentum that is respite-free, just derring-do after derring-do without any derring-don’ts.

Think longterm. Think rematch. Think encouragement for future underdogs. Think that nobody has gotten much more than a token 30 percent against DeStefano in the 18 years he’s been in office, and that Kerekes got 45.
I have no great kick against the incumbent—he’s enacted some progressive policies that you’d be hardpressed to find even in other liberal cities. With a viable opponent for a change, the mayor had to defend the main thrusts of his government style, and discuss the company he keeps, adding to our knowledge of how the city is run.
What sours me still is the nastiness of the DeStefano campaign, smearing his opponent with obvious stretches of truth and distasteful social stereotyping (“landlord,” “Tea Party-like”) and offering only lame excuses when challenged by press watchdogs on the accusations. This was DeStefano’s manner as well when he was the underdog, not the overdog he was here (and with different campaign advisors), in the gubernatorial race against Jodi Rell a few years ago.
One last kvetch of a long, drawn-out election season, where a host of candidates changed affiliations so they could reenergize and keep on running: Where was the excitement in the media? If you peered at the top half of the front page of a New Haven Register in a vending box yesterday, you would have had no idea it was Election Day: not even a reminder above the masthead, or a little box on the side. It’s as if they didn’t want you to vote.
The Yale Daily News, by happy contrast, headlined its top story “Polls Open for Election Day.” For a student paper, the YDN has admirably balanced coverage and doesn’t forget what day it is. The campus also seems to have a fervent interest in the Democratic process. There’s hope.