Just wanted to give a shout out to the winner of our second Omnivoracious giveaway: Renee Hall of Cottage Grove, Oregon. A box of our editor's picks for April is headed down I-5 to lovely southwest Oregon as I write.
Thanks everyone for entering and subscribing. We'll be doing more of these throughout the year (expect the next one in early July when we announce our annual Best of the Year So Far list...). --Tom
I hope this doesn't sour the weekend of those of you counting on Dame Fortune to send you a big box of springtime reading, but we have selected the winner of our first Omnivoracious sweepstakes. Congratulations to Helena Manley of San Jose, CA, to whom a (heavy!) box of our top 10 editors' picks for 2008 is on its way.
And thanks to all the people who signed up for our email digests in March (and via that, for the sweepstakes as well). We had a great time doing our first contest and hope to do more like it here soon. Hope you enjoy the emails in the meantime (and Helena, hope you enjoy the books). --Tom
YA Wednesday fans: just a shout out that our own Heidi Broadhead has also debuted as the BookNerd at Publicola, a new news-and-culture site here in Seattle that's started up to fill the gap left by newsroom cutbacks. (Full disclosure: it's run by a very good friend of mine whose own booknerdism runs heavily toward the Federalist Papers (hence the site's name) and the late '60s NBA.) She'll be posting every Sunday on whatever bookish thing she pleases, beginning with this account of what it was like to go back and read The Second Sex way after it was cool:
--Tom
Just a reminder that our very first sweepstakes, which offers the prize of a complete set of our Editors' Top 10 books of 2008 to one fortunate reader who subscribes to the Omnivoracious email digest, closes for entries next Monday, March 23, 2009. You can find the entry form and all the rules here, and read more about the contest (and those favorite books) in my introductory post last month. We've had a great response so far (and we've been doing our best to make those daily emails a worthy consolation prize, even if you don't end up winning that lovely stack of books). Thanks. --Tom
People starting getting their Kindle 2s yesterday, and the first media reviews ran yesterday too, so I'm hardly the first to report in, but I did get to spend an afternoon with the little machine a little while ago, and here are my first impressions, for what they're worth. (And you should be reminded that they may or may not be worth much to you, since I am, after all, employed by the people who make the Kindle, although I haven't had anything to do with its development. And further disclosure: I'm am at best a medium-adopter, and I don't yet have a Kindle of my own. For now, I'm sticking to the old pulped-wood books--even if that means throwing 15 or so--including all 1,000 pages of The Kindly Ones!--in my bag for a week's vacation, like I did last week.) For some other early views, check out David Pogue in the New York Times ("The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now"), John Biggs on CrunchGear ("10 Reasons to buy a Kindle 2 ... and 10 reasons not to": I love reason 7 on the second list: "Flight attendants will tell you to turn it off on take off and landing. You can't explain that it’s epaper and uses no current. You just can't. It's like explaining heaven to bears."), and, to really get an inside look, iFixit, where they got out their little screwdrivers and took the whole thing apart.
When I took the first Kindle home for a test run a little over a year ago, before it was announced to the world, it was a mystery: the first time Amazon had made a product of our own, and an experiment in a field--the e-book reader--that had been coming for so long that it was starting to seem like it might never get here. When I tried out the Kindle 2 (for an afternoon in a conference room this time), it was a different story. The Kindle has caught on, even, I think, beyond the expectations of the people who made it, and the question is no longer whether people will ever read e-books, but how will they read them. Using the first Kindle was almost a philosophical moment (what is it like to read a book on a machine?). Using the second (unless you've never tried the first!) is more practical (hmm--what's new this time?).
So what is new?
Those are the main differences I could see between K1 and K2, but the biggest difference is still between K and what came before. There were I think four elements to what made Kindle work well from the beginning: the quiet, no-glare eInk screen (which it shares with some other e-readers), the storage (which lets you take a year's worth of reading wherever you go), the selection (see above), and the constant (and free!) wireless connection (which lets you zip a book to your machine in about 15 seconds from almost anywhere in the country). Those are the real game-changers, and they are the things, elegant new package and audio capabilities aside, that will still wow someone who's never picked up a Kindle before. --Tom
P.S. What did I read this time? Last time I ordered Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red. This time, having read so much about Donald E. Westlake, and especially his alter ego Richard Stark, after his death in December, I decided to order one of his recent Richard Stark/Parker novels, Nobody Runs Forever. Needless to say, Kindle fans and Parker fans, I had the book in 15 seconds, and about 15 seconds later Parker had killed his first man, a stranger at an underworld poker game who, it turned out, was wearing a wire.
That's right: like soda pop companies and magazine distributors, we at Omnivoracious now have our own sweepstakes. This month, to celebrate our new daily email digest (and to encourage you to subscribe to it), we're offering the prize of a complete set of our Editors' Top 10 books of 2008 (as seen in our Best of 2008 store) to one lucky reader who subscribes to the Omnivoracious email digest by March 23, 2009. (If you've already subscribed, first of all, bless you, and second, you can make yourself eligible too by filling out the entry form with the same email address you subscribed with.) You can find the entry form and all the rules here.
But what about the prize? It's a fat stack of fantastic books--I know because they were sitting on the floor behind my chair until they took them away to take the picture--4,592 pages worth, to be exact. You'll find Sheffielders in the '70s, Franklins and Orthogonians in the '60s, seducers of the innocent in the '50s, and anarchists in the '00s. You'll go to Dublin, Northern England, Iraq and Afghanistan, Greenwich Village, San Clemente, Chicago, rural Wisconsin, and the mountains of North Carolina, and on road trips through eastern Europe and the American West. You may decide, like one customer, that The Forever War, our #4 pick, will "become the classic book of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars," or you may agree with another customer that our favorite book of the year, The Northern Clemency, was "irritatingly dull." Either way, you won't have paid a cent!
Here's exactly what our fabulous prize includes (here's my original post announcing the list in November):
If you're really feeling lucky, or just want more Amazon editors' posts delivered in your in-box every day, visit the other Amazon blogs listed on the bar at the top of any Omnivoracious page: we're also giving away DVDs, CD box sets, an Elmo, and some insane and crazy gadgets I can't even understand. Best of luck to you, and thanks for reading. --Tom
Our plane tickets to NYC for the launch of Kindle 2 must have gotten lost in interoffice mail, but GalleyCat was there, and they corralled Stephen King, who joined Jeff Bezos at the announcement to read part of his new Kindle-exclusive novella, "UR" (in which the Kindle itself plays a major role--not, we hope, Christine-style. Wait, who am I kidding? Wouldn't that be cooler to be the villain in a Stephen King story?), for this short interview on whether books are going the way of CDs and why he wrote a story about a Kindle for the Kindle.
--Tom
The Kindle 2 isn't our only big announcement on Amazon this morning. Big (to us at least) is that you can now subscribe to get a daily email digest of Omnivoracious (or any of the Amazon blogs on the bar at the top of this page). Sign up by clicking on that little box in the upper right of this page. --Tom
[Ed.: Charlie Huston's latest book, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death (Amazon's pick as Best Book of the Month
for January), descends into the grisly underworld of crime scene
clean-up, appropriately inscribed with his indelible signatures:
hilarious, inappropriate dialogue; outrageous supporting characters;
and another bloody wreck at the intersection of Money and Violence.
Honoring the theme of the novel, Charlie has been posting on Omnivoracious
all week, sharing "true stories about messes I've seen, helped clean
up, and made." See more posts, and get
more at his blog, pulpnoir.com.]
The worst messes don't clean up.
Bartending is also an education in intimacy with strangers.
I know things about people I barely know, secrets I'd be uncomfortable to know about anyone I am friends with. It happens. It doesn't have to be a barroom confidence, although there are those, it's just what happens in front of your eyes when people are drinking. You don't have to eavesdrop, it just happens. You can try not to know, but it just happens.
The spills you want most to wipe up, the ones that don't make for dramatic or comic storytelling, those are the human messes at the bar.
The fluid on most copious display is heart's blood.
They spill it every night.
That sounds maudlin? Like a bad song on a juke box? A country and western cliche?
F--- you.
It's just how it is. Alcohol is a depressant. And it loosens inhibitions. People do and say things. Wallow in their misery. I've not just been a spectator at this sport, I've played. And it may not make you feel any better, but it's a good enough substitute most nights.
There's no SOP for these messes. Each one is unique, without precedent, and comes with no instructions. You learn as you go, hope you don't make the mess worse.
Mostly that means staying out of the way.
Which is not always an option.
LJ was a mess. Drunk. Recovering junkie. Then a relapsed junkie. Recovering. Relapsed. Recovering again. Shots of Scotch and bottles of Bud. In and out of the bar all night long. He had a job that suited his lifestyle, and a wife. He loved both.
I don't know why he took on a mistress.
The quiet one at the end of the bar, well dressed, a little too young and pretty for the place, white wine instead of beer or booze, nearly prim in style. There is a barfly like this in every bar. Rarely what they seem. But not what you might think, either. Just people.
I kept my distance. To me she screamed, "CAR CRASH!" I knew her name, what she liked to drink, who she socialized with at the bar. Little else.
There were others at the bar who's outward appearance suggested imminent physical danger, people with whom I had warm business relations. You learn to feel the crazy, and give it a wide berth. It will sink you.
I have no idea how it started. No idea how long it was going on before I became aware of it. From my point of view it was suddenly happening, LJ and the Prim One were f---ing.
I buttoned up and gave her more distance. Gave LJ more of a buffer than I had before. There was going to be a huge mess, one that couldn't be cleaned. I didn't want to slip and fall down and get covered in it.
You cannot clean some messes. You cannot clean certain messes.
You can only get dirty yourself if you try.
I don't know what happened. There was sudden tension between LJ and Prim One. He relapsed again. They were together at the bar some nights. Not together other nights.
One of the customers dealt in unset stones and jewels.
One night he came in with a package for LJ. A pearl choker. LJ showed it to me, beaming. A birthday gift for his wife. Her birthday was the next day.
I think it was the pearls that did it.
I was out of the place for a few days, something had happened. The pearls had sparked something. I believe there had been a confession. Promises maybe. Something.
LJ was in the bar. Prim One was in the bar. Separate from one another. Tension.
The wife came in.
I'd only met her once before. She never came around. Out of preference, or to give LJ his space. She never came around.
Everyone knew who she was. She knew who everyone was.
She ordered a drink. A beer? I don't remember. I wish I could remember what she was drinking. I brought it to her. She offered me money. I shook my head.
I heard the word bitch muttered with intentional volume from down the bar. It was Prim One.
There are messes that cannot be cleaned up. They can only be avoided.
There was about to be a huge mess.
I leaned toward LJ's wife. We'd gotten along the one time we'd met before. She remembered my name, used it when she sat at the bar.
I put my hand near hers.
"I need to ask a favor. It isn't fair, and it isn't right. I'm not asking it because of one person or another. I'm not asking it for anyone here except me. As a favor to me, to make my job a little easier tonight, will you please leave?"
There are messes you cannot clean up.
She said she would not. She said she had a right to be there. She said she'd pay for her drink. And I agreed with her. I told her I was not kicking her out. I told her I was asking a favor. I told her that if she stayed there would be trouble and I didn't want it in the bar. She said she wasn't there to cause trouble. She was just there to have a drink.
I looked at her.
"Yes, you are here to cause trouble. You never come here. You came here to provoke something. And I won't kick you out, but you are the one who came in looking for trouble. Everyone else here, whatever else they do, tonight they were just sitting where they always sit. You never come in, but you're here now. And I need you to do me a favor and leave."
And she left.
I never thought she would, but she did. And I was so grateful. She'd been honest with herself, and compassionate toward me. And she'd left.
Soon after, within minutes, the word bitch was again being heard from Prim One's end of the bar. LJ decided it was time to defend is wife's honor. They engaged verbally. People moved to keep space between them, I moved to eject them from the bar, and before I could LJ shook his head, turned, and left.
Walked out. Just flat left. Surrendered the field and blew.
And Prim One picked up a full pint of beer from the bar, walked to the open front window, and threw the contents into his face as he walked past.
He came back in, went at her. I remember people were holding her, keeping her from clawing his face, but unable to stop her from kicking. Someone had hold of his arm, to prevent him from jerking out the fistful of her hair in his hand. I remember forcing his fingers open one by one, untangling them from her hair. Both of them screaming at one another the whole time.
Separated, I got LJ to the door. He didn't need much urging. He was gone.
Prim One wanted to stay. She was crying. When I told her to get out, regulars started objecting. I told them to shut the f--- up and mind their own f---ing business. I'd never talked like that to them before. I told them it had been over. Prim One had thrown a drink out the window at LJ when he was leaving, the mess had been cleaning itself up and she'd kicked over the bucket. She was not a wounded party. She had to go.
Fight in a bar, get kicked out. It's not negotiable. It's how civilization is maintained.
I got her out. I don't remember how. I remember her calling me a cold son of a bitch, and thinking how unlike me that sounded. But we don't know ourselves.
LJ came back around that night. He'd fixed and was blissful and mellow. When I told him he was 86ed, could never come back in the bar, he looked so sad. Regretful.
I gave notice the next day. Those were messes I was unequipped to clean. Puke, piss, spit and blood, I could handle those. Not this.
My own life was upended before I could work my final shifts. The night I 86ed LJ was my last. I became a human mess in my own right for awhile. Learned to clean puke and piss and spit and blood from my clothes and bedding.
A couple years later I ran into one of the regulars from that place. I asked after a few people. I asked after LJ.
She was still for a moment.
"You didn't hear. Yeah, we lost him. He's gone."
I asked if it was junk.
She nodded.
"Yeah, OD. Yeah. He wasn't doing good. Yeah."
Some messes you cannot clean up.
I'm Charlie Huston, I wrote a book about messes that can be cleaned up, called The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. This week I've been telling true stories about messes I've seen, cleaned up, and made. I kept some names to myself, embellished a bit for a laugh where I could, but it all happened pretty much like I said.
Keep clean,
-c
[Ed.: Charlie Huston's latest book, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death (Amazon's pick as Best Book of the Month
for January), descends into the grisly underworld of crime scene
clean-up, appropriately inscribed with his indelible signatures:
hilarious, inappropriate dialogue; outrageous supporting characters;
and another bloody wreck at the intersection of Money and Violence.
Honoring the theme of the novel, Charlie is posting on Omnivoracious
all week, sharing "true stories about messes I've seen, helped clean
up, and made." See more posts, and get
more at his blog, pulpnoir.com.]
The guy with the mop at the bottom of the stairs looked up as I came through the basement door and held up a cautioning hand.
We didn't speak one another's language, but the message was clear, "I just mopped the stairs, be careful."
So I was careful, I took hold of the banister, stepped out to place my foot on the first tread, and my legs went out from under me and I was suddenly riding my ass down a flight of wet stairs.
It hurt.
But not while it was happening.
While it was happening it was terriifying.
At the bottom, I didn't move. The guy with the mop stared at me with bug eyes, said something I didn't understand. I still didn't move. The door at the top of the stairs opened and someone stuck their head in and asked if everything was OK.
The guy with the mop pointed at me.
"I told him."
The owner came down the stairs.
"Mr. Charles, can you move, Mr. Charles? Did you hit your head?"
I could move. I hadn't hit my head. He helped me up. Things were starting to hurt now. My ass. He led me to the office, a room that also accommodated liquor storage. He got me a drink, brandy, a traditionalist. He gave me a cigarette.
I had the drink and the cigarette.
He came back and asked me, worry in his eyes, if I could work. I nodded. The worry left his eyes, he'd not be short-handed on a Friday night.
I limped all night, told the story to the regulars, the waiters told it to their regulars. After closing, over shift drinks, I told it again, the owner told about opening the door and seeing me unmoving at the foot of the stairs, how his heart had stopped, how the guy with the mop had looked up.
"I told him, he said. Motherf---er, he told him. I'm thinking the a--hole is dead at the bottom of the stairs, but the motherf---er told him, so it's OK."
We all laughed. Got pretty drunk. It was a good night.
Ten years later the restaurant celebrated an anniversary. The place was packed. Customer, former employees, vendors, neighbors. Packed. A speech. Brass plaques set into the bar at the stools of the two most beloved regulars. Food in unbelievable quantities. Liquor likewise.
Some of the people are family. From the first year, from the days of twenty-dinner nights, before the reviews, before the place was a staple of the street, before people waited on the sidewalk to get in. We worked three jobs each, at once. A waiter was useless if he or she couldn't run food and bus tables. A bartender was a punk if he or she couldn't do service, cash bar, handle the till, and work the door. The owner had started his days at 3am, getting up to hit the fish market, produce, wine merchants. No deliveries, he picked up everything, hand-picked the best, at bargain prices. He built the place. A landmark building, he'd wanted a picture window where there was none, fought the preservation committee to a deadlock, and said f--- it. Inches behind the outer wall he'd installed a huge steel-framed window, sandwiched it between sheets of plywood. In the middle of the night, weeks before opening, he parked a truck on the sidewalk out front, ran chain from the trailer hitch to eye hooks he'd driven into the wall, got behind the wheel, put it in first, and applied the gas. The outer wall came down, revealing the new picture window. Piling bricks into the back of the truck, he looked up to see a police can pull around the corner.
He spent the night in jail. There was a fine. But he kept his window.
Some of us at the party had been around. The stories. Too many.
The Vegas trip. Perky. The exterminators. The couple who wouldn't pay. The night the owner broke the door with that guy's head. First Mother's Day. The night I told the guy I'd smash his face in if he snapped his fingers at me one more time when all he was doing was snapping his fingers as part of a story he was telling his date. Weddings. Showers. Poker games. Thanksgiving. Fourth of July. The night R was punched by the fireman. S and the owner screaming at one another, hurling obscenities in the kitchen, clearly audible in the dining room. The girl who threw the bottle. The Friday Night Sandwich Pickup.
We'd been there.
We were waiting for the party to die down. We were waiting for it to distill to its essence. An intimate group, around a table littered with plates and bottles and glasses, telling the stories we all already knew.
Then Senate fell down the stairs I'd already fallen down ten years before.
But he did it good.
Someone came up to me, years now after I'd managed the place, whispered.
"I think Senate fell down the stairs."
I rolled my eyes, looked at my wife. Just like old times. Here we go.
I went to the door that led into the basement, opened it, looked down, and saw Senate on his back on the concrete floor at the foot of the stairs, his head resting in a thick pool of his own blood, a pool deep enough it would splash if you dropped a penny into it, his wife kneeling next to him.
He did not look well.
A one-time drunk, Senate had cleaned up his act over the preceding years. But during the party, at the scene of many past crimes, with a crowd that knew him only in the context of a man who inhaled cheap bourbon and exhaled cigarette smoke, he'd had one too many.
One bottle too many.
At the foot of the stairs I asked him to move his legs. He did so. And his arms. He demonstrated his hands by flipping me off. There was a large dark stain on his crotch. He said he was fine.
"Watch this."
He lifted his head and banged it back against the concrete with a squelch. His wife and I winced. I told him not to do that anymore. He said he was fine again. I pointed out that he was so far from fine that he'd pissed his pants. This seemed to worry him.
The door at the top of the stairs opened.
"Motherf---er!"
The owner came down.
"Motherf---er. Mr. Charles, Mr. Charles, the same f---ing stairs."
The EMTs arrived.
For the amount of blood, I found their examination cursory.
"Can you move? You feel like you can sit up? OK, let's go."
They say him up, slapped a huge pad of cotton over the dent in the back of his head, wrapped several yards of gauze, and helped him up the stairs, clearly relieved that they didn't have to try and get a gurney up and down the fuckers.
The emergency room was fun.
In an utterly not fun way.
By which I mean it was no fun at all.
Senate kept going through a cycle that began with declarations that he was fine and wanted to go home, transitioned into claims that he wasn't even that drunk, segueing to questions as to just how serious this really was, fear coming into his eyes, ending when his eyes went fuzzy, he forgot where he was, and we started from the top.
It seemed clear that he was concussed.
We stayed a few hours, made sure he wasn't going to die, kept his wife company until a doctor manifested and assured everyone that it looked far worse than it was, and took a cab home.
I don't remember washing my hands. I must have. There was so much blood. I must have washed my hands. But I don't think I could have been too worried about it anyway.
I knew Senate. We'd done some shit together. His blood didn't scare me.
He called the next day.
I picked up the phone and he started talking before I knew who it was.
"So, seventeen stitches and a radical new Flock of Seagulls haircut later, I'm feeling a little embarrassed about my behavior last night."
Somewhere in the middle, I'd worked at another place. A three story restaurant. Working the door, you ran up and down those stairs during the rush, seating and beating, asses in and asses out. Theater District style. I bit it on the stairs one night, landed on them flat-backed, no slide, feet out and up, whole body slam down. And froze there. I didn't know if I could move. Was afraid to try. But I could.
The owner got me into the office, offered me a drink that I declined. I no longer smoked. He asked me if I could work. I said yes.
The bruises on my back, thighs, ass and one arm were ruler-straight. As if I'd been smacked by boards. No blood. No stitches. No Flock of Seagulls haircut. Just a fall. No story.
Just a thing that happened.
Senate let me feel the scar on his scalp, hidden by the hair after it grew out.
I didn't have one to show him.
Bastard.
I'm Charlie Huston. I wrote a book about trauma scene cleaning and family. It's called The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. I'll be here all week telling true stories about messes I've seen, helped clean up, and made.
Be well,
-c
