About a week ago, after manic amounts of book-reading this summer, the One-Man Book Club unanimously approved a moratorium (1 in favor; none opposed) that prohibits even the cracking-open and general perusing of any book on the “to read” stack until the club confronts and discusses the entire backlog of already-read and partially-read books.

This is sort of a relief. Many of the One-Man Book Club’s members are employed as full-time television critics and are getting ready for a heap of nonsense known as FALL TELEVISION. Brains must rest, or try to.

Oh, the books: It’s a 60-mile Chinese traffic jam here. Let’s get things moving, quick, before the “fall books” start doing their dances of the seven dustjackets. Also, the One-Man Book Club is going to experiment this time with a ratings system, based on the concept of “lurve.” (Do we lurve the book? Do we sorta lurve it? Do we un-lurve it? Hmmm.)

• • •

First up, You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup, by Peter Doggett. The author is a British music journalist and the book is about the Beatles. It was released last year in Britain and now it’s here, with such a better jacket design. (And an Annie Lennox blurb! Sweet dreams are made of that.) (Would she lie to you? Would she lie to you, honey?)

Maddeningly, it arrives with Brit punctuation intact — periods and commas outside the quotes; single quotes used when someone is being quoted, double quotes for a quote within a quote. (Insane. ‘Copy editors’, he said, ‘proceed cautiously, or “bring Advil” ‘.)

Let me tell you about books about the Beatles: They aren’t just written for Beatles nuts, who will just quibble them to death anyhow. A lot of Beatles books are dulllll, written by men who can’t see the Norwegian Wood for the trees and therefore sacrifice story to trivia and second-hand news. I don’t know what it is about hefty tomes about the Beatles, but for some reason I can’t quite convey, I’m drawn to them. It’s not like I’m any more of a fan of the Beatles, than, say, the rest of the world. I don’t rush out to buy reconfigured and remastered albums or any of that.

What it is, for me, I guess, is the naive improbability of it all: How John knew George and George knew Paul and eventually they had to hire Ringo; how fast they became so, so famous. But mostly I remain stunned by how much work they accomplished between 1963 and 1969, and on drugs, no less.

I like the world they inhabited: communiques by Telex, airplane tickets, rotary telephones, escapes through kitchen entrances, susceptibility to Maharishis and other whack-jobs, women who were called “birds” and “luv,” press conferences, flashbulbs going off, gallery openings, haberdashery, sunglasses, Abbey Road sessions (EMI recording engineers in white labcoats!), publicity stunts for peace staged in four-star hotel rooms. All of that.

My friend David Segal, when he was the pop critic at the Washington Post (he’s now a marquee business-section writer at the New York Times), said something at lunch one day, about six years ago, that has always made perfect sense to me. I don’t know if the insight belongs to him originally, but maybe it does, and it goes something like this:

Elvis fans desire memorabilia. Beatles fans desire information.

That is not to say that Elvis fans don’t like information, and at the same time, many Beatles fans can go cuckoo for memorabilia rarities. But Beatles fans most want to know every last thing there is to know, to the point now where almost every hour in the Beatles’ lives between 1962 and 1970 can more or less be accounted for — travels, recording sessions, meetings, acid trips, etc.

So if a Beatles book looks interesting, I’ll give it a shot. The last one that I got really absorbed in was Bob Spitz’s The Beatles: The Biography; I’m sure someone out there can list all sorts of problems with that book, but I thought it was a great epic for the casual reader, and really brought out the good, bad and ugly of the band’s life. I got through all 992 pages (even the notes!) and wished there’d been another 300 or so. But not all Beatles books are created equal; I tried to read Philip Norman’s Lennon bio last year (snore) and also bailed on a McCartney bio recently — books about individual Beatles aren’t as good.

Caught celebrating the filing of another lawsuit, no doubt.

Now, You Never Give Me Your Money. What’s brilliant about this one is that it begins in 1969, when everything is going to shit for the Fab Four. We just skip the Irish immigration stories, no motherless John, no public art schools, no skiffle jams, no Hamburg, no Ed Sullivan, no Sgt. Pepper sessions. We start with the disastrous (but wondrous!) Abbey Road sessions and the stillbirth of Let It Be; the insinuation of Yoko and Linda; the slammed doors and lack-of-quorum meetings in executive suites.

Meet the Beatles: Manic tax evaders.

The book really dissects the horrible Apple Corps business idea that ruined the Beatles and went on ruining them (financially, emotionally) forever. Though the writing is not perfect, the reporting is about as sincere as you can hope for in a Beatles tome. By the time you get done (in present day) you won’t like the Beatles, personally. Just when you think you hate Paul more, you’ll decide John’s entire story and reputation (and talent) has been way overblown. Peter Doggett is especially good at examining the ways Lennon’s murder created a St. John Lennon who never quite existed. And you can tell this was hard for Doggett, who loves them as we all do, making this is a true work of critical analysis and fair reporting.

It’s taken almost 40 years (and counting) for the Beatles to break up. They and their survivors still — still! — can’t come to terms on everything. If you want a taste of that, simply go try to buy a Beatles album on iTunes.

You Never Give Me Your Money: A big LURVE. (Lurve is all you need.) Someone option the movie! Lawyers be damned!

• • •

Next up, Hitch-22, a memoir by Christopher Hitchens.

H E  I S  P O I S O N wrote a friend, when I told her what I planned to read on vacation.

Which might well be true, for people who’ve had to drink a whole vial or two of him over the years. (And these days he’s literally filled with poison, undergoing aggressive treatment for cancer. Which he just wrote a very nice and frank column about, as he enters the whole cancer culture and quickly advances to the most frightening stage of it.)

I am one of those so-called Washington media elites who happily elude each and every one of the circles in the Hitchens Venn diagram. There’s no possible way I could ever be invited to play with that crowd. Hitchens lives nearby and yet he is no more or less real to me than he is for Vanity Fair readers in the Midwest.

Anyhow, I like his poison in tiny drops on the tongue. I also like his courage to take on organized religion and some of God’s more egregious poseurs. (Yes, like Mother Theresa. And Pope Benedict.)

And Hitch-22 is a pleasure to read, just for the language alone. It’s basically a report from another planet, as delivered by the spongiest, most erudite plant-form on the surface. Suicidal mother, cold father; homoerotic encounters in boarding school, dalliances with socialism; falling for America, learning to write, the life of a professional intellectual … all sustains me for about exactly as long as it ran. Minus the chapter on Salman Rushdie, because, I’m sorry about the fatwas and all, I don’t care about Salman Rushdie. People who’ve read Salman Rushdie and think he’s a genius are all over there somewhere, in another room, having a drink and a smoke with Christopher Hitchens.

I marked one thing that has really stuck with me for the last few weeks. It’s about Israel and Palestine. This passage is a trademark example of the Hitchens way of being at once inflammatory and yet totally, gently sensible. Here it is:

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building — as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago — and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation?

My own reply would be a provisional “no,” but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can’t, in other words, be “leap, leap, leap” for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. “Making the desert bloom” — one of [my mother] Yvonne’s stock phrases — makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.

In the mid-1970s, Jewish settlers from New York were already establishing second homes for themselves on occupied territory. From what burning house were they leaping? …

That may or may not be sort of how I feel about it. Actually, you know how I feel about that issue? I feel like it’s going to eventually kill us all — especially those of us who have to occasionally put on our serious hats and read op-eds about it, in a struggle to “get it,” or pick a side, because we were raised white and Christian and oblivious in Oklahoma and would just as soon not be part of a nuclear apocalypse caused by who gets to vacation in Tel Aviv and who doesn’t. All over some real estate that, frankly, from the pictures on the news, looks to me like either end of El Paso.

If Israelis and Palestinians could just work it out, you know what a one-state solution would look like?

I know, because I’ve been there, many times: It would look like any afternoon at the Grove/Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles.

Drop til you shop.

Hitch-22 gets a qualified LURVE, and strong hopes (not prayer) for Hitchens’s improved health.

• • •

And now, briefly, the dreaded list of those who failed the 50-page test: four books I started and ditched this summer (and some reasons why). I promise you, this is not my favorite part of One-Man Book Club.

The club has even thought about killing this feature, but the authors in the group (one, me) ultimately felt that he, er, I would probably, in most cases, like to know at what point (and why) potential readers bailed on my own book. Yes, even if it’s hard medicine to encounter into during a self-Googling.

[I find pooh-poohs of Tinsel pretty frequently online, btw. And if it hurts, then it's my fault for asking Google and Twitter to go look for them.]

So then … the theme this time is DRYNESS. Note to all editors at New York publishing houses: do something about dryness, won’t you?

<< The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live, by Ted Conover. Wonderful idea but stultifying execution: Conover explores ancient and modern roads on several continents and talks about their immeasurable contributions to civilizations, then and now. I gotta start paying closer attention to books in the store and less to the jacket copy and NPR mentions. I snapped this up because it looked interesting — though the too-earnest subtitle should have shooed me away. About 70 pages in, I realized I was reading a collection of magazine pieces that have been padded out, in a prose style that was weirdly disengaged, by a writer who seemed interested in stories about all the things he saw that wouldn’t interest me.

Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness, by Willard Spiegelman. Seems like a perfectly nice man (English prof at SMU in Dallas) and I’ve enjoyed his pieces in D magazine before. His book explores these seven simple joys: reading, walking, looking, dancing, listening, swimming, and writing. I’m for all of them. But the book reads like a term paper, which I do not count among even the top 100 pleasures, and I wasn’t getting any smarter as I struggled to find his groove. Bailed out after p. 56, skimmed around, then bailed for good.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. Completely and totally unobjectively, I like and recommend Hamlet’s Blackberry a lot more. In an effort to recover braininess, this one discovers dryness.

In fact, cardboard prose is the real bugaboo overall. The other book I ditched was How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood, by William J. Mann, which is such an interesting idea — a Liz Taylor book that is not a biography but instead an examination of the ways she set the template for modern celebrityhood and the self-maintenance of stardom.

But gosh, does the writer prefer the sound of dead leaves. The wit, when it comes, is that sort of obvious, unoffensive wink-wink humor you get from watching Robert Osborne on TCM. It’s a fussy sort of entertainment-biography language; makes me think of stale popcorn and Rex Reed. So I really started skimming it, well beyond page 50, but not in a way that I can claim to have thoroughly read it all.

I paid closest attention the chapter about the making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which very nearly approached the kind of engagement one gets from reading Mark Harris’s excellent Pictures at a Revolution. But soon enough I was skimming again, and left the book for future readers, on the living-room shelf of our vacation rental in Provincetown, where I am sure it will find a new (and truer) friend.

I’ve solved a major problem (pictured, right) that was really the bane of all existence backstage at Tonsil. Thanks to the smart people at AuthorBytes, I’m once again feeling like maybe it’s time to blog. Honestly the junk that collected in the comments pile was so depressing, I’d taken a break from logging-in to WordPress at all. I’m sorry to say that the roto-rootering that’s been going on behind the scenes may have eliminated comments from legitmate readers. If that was you, DRAT. Try again?

But now, freedom! If you’re new here and you submit a comment (and I hope you do), you’ll be asked to answer a very easy question designed to elude evil robots.

If you’re reading this, you are part of the resistance.

Meanwhile, oy, summer is ending and does the One-Man Book Club have some books to review, or what? MANY. With that long trip up to Cape Cod, then out to L.A., then to New Mexico, I have lugged some tomes around. I’ll get busy on it.

Meanwhile, please enjoy this Mark Ronson video. I do.

Mark Ronson The Business INTL – Bang Bang Bang from Olivier on Vimeo.

This Real People clip of a valley-girl competition in 1982 in the Sherman Oaks Galleria (RIP) hurts in about a hundred different ways. All those Beths and Lauras and Laurens and Loryns and Lauries and Loris — to think (on birthday eve), they’re all in their 40s now, regretting the many afternoons they slathered up in baby oil and laid out. Now the doctors have to literally bag their faces and zap off the melanomas.

I loved the valley girls then and I still do, and may I just add: It never went away. You can hear it across, like, generations now. You can hear (I hope just a trace of) it every time I open my mouth.

(Am thinking fondly of Derba’s mom, the great Winnie McCall, who never quite got the ’80s lingo down. “Gag me with a spoon,” translated into Winniese, became “Go get me a spoon.” Which still cracks us up.)

This is not a jet-set post, I swear, but once in a weird while, I find myself standing on a beach, dreamily contemplating one ocean …

And then a day or so later, I get to contemplate another:

Summer is rushing by, and I offer the usual apology of negligent bloggers who feel some odd compulsion to explain their absences to their almost-nonexistent readerships. Michael and I got a nice week off in Cape Cod (seen above, as the first tourists arrive in Provincetown, 1620, and immediately open an art gallery to sell paintings of lighthouses). We had bicycle rides, good food, lots of sleep, minimal drag queens. Everything seemed to calm down. I finished reading four (!) books, and wound up skimming another for quite a chunk. All of which the One-Man Book Club will discuss as soon as a quorum can be reached.

Was home for a day, and am now in Los Angeles — here’s Saint Monica herself (also above) keeping watch over her town, humming “Mad About You,” which she hasn’t been able to get out of her stony head since 1986.

The weather is perfect. But this is not neener-neener-I’m-in-Cali time. I’m here for some very serious business about the fall TV season. As I type this, Tom Selleck is doing his best to sell the TV critics of America on his new cop drama on CBS. (How old do you think he is, off the top of your head? Guess. Readers, he is 65, according to IMDb. He was born the same year we nuked Japan — yet he has no stoop, no creak, no spread. Those are some strong bones. Strong mustache too.) Tomorrow, I’m sitting down with some (or all?) of the Real Housewives of D.C. (”Buckle up” a publicist advises.) Oh, and I’m still filing current TV reviews, from one time zone to the next. Here’s a re-consideration, just posted, of Jersey Shore.

After several days of this, I’ll be spending a few more days in New Mexico, working on something exciting and new.

Got a lot of responses to the giveaway of two copies of William Powers’ Hamlet’s BlackBerry. Congrats to B. in LA and T.E. in B’more. And, due to demand, I’m sharing a galley copy with M.C. in Placitas, N.M.

May everyone else find some sort of sanity in this hyperconnected mania we live in! Start with Hamlet’s BlackBerry!

Okay, everyone, settle down, and stop your goddamn clickety-clicking and distracted surfing!

I have analog media to promote (look, a book!), or, if you must, some kindling for your Kindle, an iBook to get your little greasy fingerprints all over. This is the full Tonsil blog endorsement of Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers. It just came out. I got to read a galley a while back. You’ll soon be reading about it in all the right places.

‘Cause there’s a movement afoot, and books to go along with it (such as the slightly, faintly similar The Shallows by Nicholas Carr), and it is this: Everyone slow the fuck down. Where are we going in such a hurry? Are we sure want to go there? What will happen when we get there, besides the death of thinking, writing, keeping, knowing? Is it too late for our crazybrains? Have we already lost contemplation, rumination?

This book gets at all that. It’s a combination of essay, history, and some smart suggestions for unplugging just enough to breathe and consider. William Powers is a friend I’ve never spent time with. I know his wife, Martha Sherrill, better. They both served in the trenches of The Washington Post Style section and wrote tons of great stories, and even long after they left, came to my aid when I had to write “The List” of ins and outs. They now live this tranquil-sounding life on Cape Cod (year round) with their son. From the snowdrifts, they send lovely hand-drawn Christmas cards that cause in me a sort of longing and admiration for their happiness. (It’s okay, I love it.) Check out Martha’s ongoing blog about the local neighborhood dump. No, don’t! Focus on THIS. Stop being so skittish and webby.

Hamlet’s BlackBerry offers a window on life at the Powers-Sherrill household, where there’s an “Internet sabbath” in effect from Friday night to Monday morning. I think a lot of people are able to (or try to) manage that sort of habit — blogger culture has been especially good about upholding a weekend and holiday ethic (”blogging will be light — I’ll be making apple pies for the holiday and swimming in the river and you shouldn’t be online anyhow! See you Monday” etc), if only to project an image of holistic living, i.e., I’m too busy kayaking to blog now.

Alas, for me, too many weekends are spent in some terribly pointless web surfing, blogging, e-mailing, YouTube watching, etc.

William Powers

One of my favorite things Bill wrote (and apparently one of David Carr’s favorites, too) was about the onslaught of “Did You See?” that infected our culture in the mid-2000s. (I like to write it as Didjusee?) It was about the beginning of the Internet all-you-can-eat buffet and the end of people actually reading or considering all the links they were clicking on or re-linking (now called retweeting). It no longer mattered. The question was only  “Didjusee what so-and-so wrote on Slate?” “Didjusee the Lindsey Lohan video on TMZ?” “Didjusee what Mitt Romney told the Times?” Didjusee? Didjusee?

Ah, but did you read it as well? Usually no.

This is a gentle book that describes what’s happening to paper and to life. It starts with Bill musing on what the Internet has done to us, and can any of it possibly be undone, or done better?

Then he even-more-gently walks us through some moments in history when thinkers and writers had to accept technological changes: Socrates had to accept that Gen Y’ers like Phaedrus liked to keep discourses and speeches on scrolls, so they could carry them around read them again and again, without all that talking. In Shakespeare’s world, people had to get used to the new annoying habit of everyone carrying scratch pads around, to take notes and jot down information. (i.e., Hamlet’s BlackBerry, which sort of sounds like one of these.) Gutenberg gave us a world where we could disappear into books and newspapers and tune out the world. (Are you even listening to me? etc.)

Finally, Hamlet’s BlackBerry seeks some ways in which we can make use of our new technologies and still have a life with one another. It’s a beginner’s guide for training oneself to survive the current renaissance — a tumult I think won’t be settled until long after we’re all dead. Forget jobs and media and making a living; I would just like to survive this revolution with my brain intact. Wouldn’t you?

So, hooray for Hamlet’s BlackBerry. I was sent two copies from the publisher and have pressed them into the duties of book promotion. However, I’ve purchased an additional two copies, one for me to keep AND ONE THAT I’M HAPPY TO GIVE TO A DESERVING SOUL. Simply e-mail me here (go to “contact” in the nav bar) before July 16, 2010 and tell me why you want it. (Like we did with Kim Severson’s book.)

PS: Bill’s on tour. If you live in Washington, go see him at Politics & Prose on July 20!

No intro, no explan, nothing but books. Just trying to just say, yep, read ‘em and here’s what the entire book club (still just the one member) thought. Need to clear it all out before the real summer vacation reading starts later this month.

First up, Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis. This is a re-reading, 25 years or so after the fact.

Actually, 23 Julys ago, I think? Here is the cover of the very same copy I read back then and have kept on various shelves in various apartments and dwellings all these years — still smelling faintly of Bain de Soleil and Sun-In and a waft of one’s completely manufactured angst on a semesterly break home from one’s gruelingly existential life at a private college…

You know what? It’s kinda good. It might even be better than you remember it being — even though the final third of the book is a real drag, which I believe may have been the point: the monotony of drugs, wealth, clubs, palm trees. I wasn’t surprised to find it feeling fresh; I was and still remain one of those American Psycho apologists, who admire that novel for its indictment of ’80s consumer culture, or as satire, or as anything besides something worth staging a Take Back the Night march for. Less Than Zero really deserved everything it got, including the haters and the pans, and especially including the bad movie. (Really, an egregious act of adaptation.) I decided to re-read it after all these years, mostly because I’m thinking of reading the overwhelmingly poorly-reviewed Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis’s Zero sequel-of-sorts, when I go on vacation soon. I wanted another looksee.

This time I was struck by how Clay and his world functioned without computers and phones. It’s like reading about pioneers. They were all about instant gratification — the point of the novel is that instant gratification had ruined them (all of us!) forever — and yet they spend pages waiting for one another’s phone calls, pulling over to use pay phones, checking answering machines. I really feel someone should make an incredibly faithful movie version of Less Than Zero now, with 1980s L.A. replicated down to every last detail (using David Fincher Zodiac-style CGI if need be). Sort of the way Rich Linklater did Dazed and Confused and nailed the ’70s in an overlooked way. I guarantee you this time, done right, a Less Than Zero movie would look almost like a comedy. I’d laugh, anyhow.

The only other thing you’d find, reading it now, is the way that Less Than Zero presupposed a world of Kardashians, Lohans, Hiltons, Bachelors and Bachelorettes. Dig this little bit from Ellis’s interview in Details last month:

Q: Years ago people could have read some of your books and said, ‘Oh, this is just nihilism. These people don’t exist! There’s nobody that rich and stupid and narcissistic!’

A: Ha ha ha! Surprise!

• • •

Up next, two books that got reviewed together somewhere — I forget where; Salon? Well, feel free to look it up — but here’s proof that a twinned review of two different titles can actually sucker the book consumer into buying both!

Both of these books try in different ways to get at our national obsession and heartbreak around home ownership, mortgages, domesticity, debt. One’s a memoir, one’s a novel.

The memoir: Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, by Meghan Daum. I thought this book moved along okay up to the point where the author settles down with a nice man and buys a house she really seems to like, and we’ve still got 75 or 100 pages or so to go. Then it becomes sort of like watching HGTV every night. (Which Michael and I often do. Aren’t we all more interesting when we don’t have what we want?)

So, the first half was much more engaging — after all, the tale is always taller when you’re broke in the big city and living in shitty apartments and working at shitty jobs and all of the sudden feeling … shitty. People have said this book is good because of Daum’s “courage” to tell it like it is.

But, as a reader, I was miffed by one area in which she held back on telling it exactly: a memoir like this cries out for actual numbers, personal financial data — and I’ve noticed that a lot of these Great Recession and real-estate boom/bust memoirs expect readers to be satisfied with phrases like “mid six figures” or “some money I had in a savings account.”

From Daum, I wanted not only the prices of the L.A. dream houses taunting her from the real-estate listing websites, but her own history of depressing equations, with all the plus signs and the minus signs. Such as: her salary of that first job in the 1990s? The monthly rent on her fondly and not-so-fondly remembered apartments? Credit-card balances at life’s nadir? The precise amount of the advance she got for her novel, which enabled her (at last) to buy real estate? (For a first novel? Does not compute.) I’d even consider putting copies of her tax returns for all the years discussed in this memoir in the back, as Appendix A.

You want to write a memoir about real-estate envy? We need to see the paperwork. Otherwise, it’s like writing a sex memoir with the covers pulled up to your chin.

Meanwhile, the novel is called The Hole We’re In, by Gabrielle Zevin. I stuck with it, even though I started disliking it midway. The author digs herself quite a hole here. It’s got an epic scope that reminded me of Michael Cunningham’s Flesh and Blood, stretching from 1998 into the 2010s. It’s about a religious family in the suburbs, who are up to their eyeballs in McMansion-style credit-card debt. One daughter is a bridezilla; the son runs away to New York for film school; the youngest daughter is disowned and winds up serving in Iraq, and eventually comes home to the ruburbs, where she ends up working in a Walmart analogue. It’s called (unfortunately) “Slickmart.” And Slickmart is locally-owned, instead of being a corporate box store. Slickmart is just one of many wha-hunh? sort of botched details in The Hole We’re In. Zevin’s observational lapses  on details like these disturbs the careful reader, or anyone who’s ever driven across America and paid attention.

Also, the family’s religion is off, in terms of believability. They’re not megachurchers, but instead the author calls them “Sabbath Day Adventists” (which is actually the name of a black church started in New York, sez Wikipedia) and so, instead, they’re a mishmash of evangelical vegetarians who preach an anti-consumerist streak (refusing to shop at Slickmart, e.g.), but are in credit-card debt all the same? It doesn’t add up. Even for a novel. It felt like the author had only read here and there about modern American Christianity and consumer culture. Back to the writers’ workshop for The Hole We’re In, with a suggestion to cut about 10,000 words.

But also? I read The Hole We’re In to the end, so that’s a form of praise. As demonstrated by the cruel, Fifty-Page Test, the One-Man Book Club is fickle.

• • •

Couldn’t help myself, ’twas too curious, and picked up a sale copy of The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee, by Sarah Silverman. (I’m allowed! Look, if the rest of the world can sequester itself with Stieg Larsson mysteries and Twilight novels, can I not spend a day or two reading a half-good celebrity memoir?)

I didn’t want this book for any great reason other than she has intrigued me — funny sometimes, strange always, and willing to say stuff no one else says. I appreciated this spunk, on the fourth page:

I’m not a literary genius. I’m not Dostoyevsky, whoever that is — I’m pretty sure I just made that name up. I’m only thirty-nine years old, with most of my final two years of show business still ahead of me. … I have never struggled with addiction and I was never molested. Tragically, my life has only been  moderately fucked up. I’m not writing this book to share wisdom or inspire people. I’m writing this book because I am a famous comedian, which is how it works now. If you’re famous, you get to write a book, and not the other way around, so the next Dave Eggers better get on a TV show or kill someone or something. …

She’s right, you know. Let’s have another look at some of the list of top-selling nonfiction books (with sales numbers) as of late last year, shall we? Amid all the self-help and Sarah Palin and Teddy Kennedy sales, the eye scans downward, through the top 100 …

Time of My Life. Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi (320,000 copies)

Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin. (201,000 copies)

Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea. Chelsea Handler (200,000 copies)

High On Arrival. Mackenzie Phillips. (170,000 copies)

Mommywood. Tori Spelling (146,000 copies)

Here’s The Deal. Howie Mandel (100,000 copies)

You ask: Are those good sales numbers? Let me assure you: FUCK, YES, at least for book authors. Good money for semi-famous comedians, too, I would guess.

Anyhow, the first half of The Bedwetter is as good as any weirdo-girl memoir I’ve ever read, and the back half is exactly as padded out and aimless as any celebrity book I’ve ever read. I loved her guiding moral principle of “make it a treat” (i.e., a modern twist on “everything in moderation”) and there’s a remarkable dose of honest storytelling about her family, especially her funny father. Oh, and she included a photo of a writer from her TV show wearing a co-worker’s hair clip on his dick.

But she really lost her nerve, though, when it came time to describe her relationship (and breakup) with Jimmy Kimmel. She decides, it seems, to turn it into the strangest little two-page allegory about putting a pet cat down. (Pussy euthanasia?)

Best not to think it through too much.

• • •

Wilson, by Daniel Clowes. I hadn’t enjoyed an expensive, hardbound comic book in a while (graphic novel — does it really apply here? I guess so), and Clowes is still pleasingly misanthropic. And, I’ve always liked his strong, commercial-art styleline. And Wilson is jam packed with angry observation.

Like when Wilson is waiting for a flight and asks the man next to him:

What do you do?

Man: Hmmm?

Wilson: Your job? JOB?

Man: I’m in senior management at a small equity firm. And I do some consulting for various–

Wilson: Glaze. No, I’m just kidding. Go ahead.

Man: Well, I–

Wilson: But not with all the mumbo-jumbo. I want to know what you actually DO. Like the physical tasks of your daily life.

Man: Well, like I said, a lot of it involves consulting, with a focus on how to best implement managerial strategies in–

Wilson: Jesus! Listen to me, brother — you’re going to be lying on your deathbed in 30 years thinking “Where did it all go? What did I do with all those precious days?” Some shit-work for the oligarchs? Is that it?

Man: Look, I’m proud of what I do, and I work very hard to–

Wilson:

Wilson’s great, but I wonder if David Boring, a copy of which I gave away ages ago, was a tiny bit better. All the reviews seem to agree that Wilson is Clowes’s masterwork — and there’s something deliciously mean about it. All those New Yorker covers really pay off — probably no better way for a comics artist to achieve legitimacy. Even Michael Dirda seemed taken by it, but his review makes it seem dull, as only Dirda can do. Might do better to enjoy Sam Lipsyte’s review from Sunday’s NYT on this one.

• • •

Finally, Hotel Theory by Wayne Koestenbaum. This 2007 book is two books in one, really, printed side-by-side in a two-column page format: On the left side of the page is Hotel Theory, which is Wayne Koestenbaum the essayist, doing a brilliant rumination on, and deconstruction of, the idea of hotels (life in hotels, what are hotels, who are we when we check into hotels; hotels in literature, cinema, television; hotel as a state of mind). Koestenbaum is always a dazzling read on this kind of thing — like his book about opera, or his book about Jackie O.

Then comes the other book, on the right-hand side of each page, called Hotel Women, which is written by Wayne Koestenbaum the experimental poet. It’s a darkly comic novella imagining Lana Turner and Liberace and some other folks trapped for life in a glamorous but terrifying place called Hotel Women. Koestenbaum wrote this part without ever using the words “a,” “an” or “the.” Which makes it all the more beguiling to read.

An excerpt, from the Hotel Women side:

In Hotel Women, Lana Turner and Wallace lay together on mussed sheets, windows open.

“You’re impotent,” said Lana.

“I know,” said Wallace.

“I came to Hotel Women to revive our love life. I brought along your pornography. What else can I do?”

“I’m despicable. I’m more impotent here than in your hacienda.”

“Your impotence is no joke. It’s not cinema, carnival, or concept. It’s genuine tragedy. It’s something wrong with you and therefore wrong with me.”

“If we talk about my impotence, maybe it will go away.”

“We’ve tried therapy, we’ve tried vacation.”

“Do you think this place is bugged?”

She put Wallace’s useless penis in her mouth. Lime Naugahyde furniture seemed powerful in comparison.

“You needn’t continue,” said Wallace. “Maybe I should reciprocate.”

“Don’t bother. It’ll depress me.”

She planned compensatory assignations tomorrow, one man after another, at MGM.

Do you ever get done reading a book and have the realization that, no matter how much you’ve enjoyed it, there is no one to share this particular book with? Sure, I can (and did) go online and find like-minded reviews of Hotel Theory in places like the Believer and Bookforum. But it has recently occurred to me that those people are never my people. Not anybody I actually know, anyhow.

I cannot think of a friend who would want to read Hotel Theory or talk with me about Hotel Theory, but it’s just as well. I can’t think of anyone I would foist Hotel Theory on and say “you must read this and we will talk about it.” Because then they’d have to avoid my questions about whether or not they read it or liked it, and then I’d “owe” them, in a sense, and have to read something they like that I’m not interested in. Sometimes reading Koestenbaum is like reading Gertrude Stein — or Rebecca Brown, D.J. Waldie or George Trow — or one of those authors I’ve just had to puzzle out and find delight in all on my own. Too much has to happen. I might not even recommend Hotel Theory to myself, but I’ve already read it, and thought each little piece of it was exquisite or almost-perfect in one way or another.

And that’s why this is a One-Man Book Club.

• • •

Vacation looms! For the summer dip, I’m considering the aforementioned IMPERIAL BEDROOMS, HITCH-22, DEAR MONEY, THE ROUTES OF MAN, and STATE BY STATE. Any other suggestions?

The members of the One-Man Book Club have been reading ‘em faster than all the members (total: one) can get on here to blogscuss ‘em. I’m going to try to clear out all the One-Man Book Club recent selections this week, and include some selections where the membership couldn’t finish the book. Ready? Chug!

To start, here’s a book I liked very much and recommend to others: Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction, by Jake Silverstein, which came out in the spring. I dug it deeply, starting with the title and alluring jacket. But another journalist I know (someone who is really keen about innovation in nonfiction), said he dropped out after page 40 or thereabouts. So there’s that.

Silverstein is the new(ish) editor of Texas Monthly. This book ingeniously and even bizarrely weaves together some of his longer non-fiction pieces (from Harper’s magazine in the ’00s) and short fiction stories (all new), which are all essentially about a young man who’s just trying to find great stories and sell them to big New York magazines.

What is true? What isn’t? I know that sounds like a dreary exercise made for journalism ethics seminars, but there’s something subtly original in how he makes it work, and I’m sad that this book didn’t get a lot more attention when it came out.

Silverstein turns himself into a narrator, a “Jake Silverstein,” who is in his early 20s circa 1999 and, having given up on dreams of becoming a poet, moves to far West Texas to work at a small newspaper and learn to be a journalist. The eight chapters in Nothing Happened and Then It Did are evenly split (and labeled in the contents) as “fact” or “fiction,” and Sliverstein stitches them into a dreamy recollection of what it’s like to be a wannabe writer stuck way out in the middle of the nowhere. My favorite chapter is a fictional one, where the narrator accepts a job driving a famous photographer around the Midland/Odessa landscape that defined presidential candidate George W. Bush; the photographer (irritable, European) has to make one singular photo that will run with an campaign-related story in the New Yorker, which has already been reported and written by a Susan Orlean-like writer whom Silverstein envies from terribly afar.

And I especially admired the tight introduction, in which Silverstein recounts how the Spanish explorers — e.g., Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza, circa 1530 — were so mesmerized (or intimidated, or mentally dislocated) by this landscape that they returned with fabricated accounts of what happened to them on their journeys through it. Silverstein writes:

Why did the friar lie? Historians have chewed on this for centuries. … “Since the rarefied atmosphere of the southwestern deserts is very deceptive,” explained a pair of New Mexico historians in 1928, “it may be that the pueblo appeared much larger than it really was.”

A long sojourn in the Southwest provides another explanation. It is unquestionably true that the desert is deceptive, but this may have more to do with its giant solitudes than its refractive atmospheric phenomena. To travel for hours over hundreds of of miles of treeless flatland without seeing a soul is to be forcefully reminded of your inherent aloneness in the world. … I can confirm that is not unusual, in such situations, for the curtain between the real and the imaginary to lift. …

Same goes for <<”Jake Silverstein,” who comes down with a case of gringo-style magical realism and inherent aloneness. He leaves the newspaper job in West Texas for New Orleans, then Mexico, then back to West Texas, always in a clunker Toyota: He is taken with the desolate world around him and half-motivated by a comically deluded sense of self. It’s Don Quixote, cub reporter, adrift on the highway.

There are stories about searching for Ambrose Bierce’s grave site, the grand opening of a McDonald’s in the Mexican interior, a hunt for doubloons in the Louisiana gulf islands and a cross-country road race in Mexico. It’s not trippy, hallucinogenic gonzo journalism stuff in the Hunter Thompson sense.  I’ve never met Silverstein, and now I want to, but my hunch is he may be only somewhat like the “Jake Silverstein” of this book — a castabout who is clearly not on his way to becoming the editor of Texas Monthly.

Halfway through, I no longer cared what was real and what wasn’t and stopped checking the table of contents for confirmation. Biography? Journalism? Coming-of-age novella? Nothing Happened and Then It Did is the first time I felt willing to throw away the carefully tended fences between fact and fiction. His prose isn’t highly stylized (it could be more so), and I skimmed through a couple of the “real” stories I’d already read in Harper’s, but Silverstein’s writing has great momentum. As it went along, I related to his loneliness and his drive (literally, miles and miles) to get a story he never gets. The better stories are the ones he makes up. By the end, as “Jake Silverstein” is deciding to give up journalism, I wanted to know the author a little better than he reveals. This recent Austin Chronicle profile helped with that.

• • •

Next, an example of a journalist doing rural Texas much more straightforwardly and therefore a bit more tediously: Welcome to Utopia: Notes from a Small Town, by Karen Valby.

Valby is a reporter for Entertainment Weekly. In 2006, in an uncharacteristic break from its wall-to-wall Harry Potter and Lost coverage, the magazine asked Valby to find a “town without pop culture,” or, at least, a town without the steady bitstream/shitstream of celebrity-logged pop culture that was quickly taking over American society in the mid-2000s.

Valby wound up in Utopia, Texas, which is up in the hill country near San Antonio. I sort of remember that story when it ran in EW; one of the great failings of Welcome to Utopia is that it doesn’t include the full, original article for us to see how this all began, which is the whole reason for the book. True to form, the townsfolk weren’t too pleased with what happened when a big-city magazine writer came to their town to write an arty-cull about them. Once again the great middle-of-America inferiority complex announces itself — we are so offended that you would take time out of your life to come write about ours, you good-for-nothing writer from somewhere else, you.

But Valby decided to return to Utopia (which I think translates to: she sold a book proposal based on the article) and sit among the Utopians for a longer spell. She’s determined to understand Utopia for reasons never quite known. The original premise (a town without pop-culture addictions) quickly dissolved with better phone coverage, Internet access and satellite TV. Without that, I didn’t ever sense what the real theme of Welcome to Utopia is. All books should be able to answer that question, in two parts:

A: What is This Book About? The answer to that should be a couple hundred words, very detailed, sort of like a slightly less advertorial version of the flap copy inside a book jacket and THEN …

B: What is This Book REALLY About? That answer needs to be one very short, very amazing sentence.

I don’t think Valby really gets a handle on part B of the question. Her discoveries aren’t profound, though she does respectfully portray her subjects, including the group of old men every small town has, who meet for coffee in the local convenience store at the crack of each dawn; a black teenage girl at the mostly white local high school; a mother whose sons have all gone to war; a restless teenage boy. Valby either transcribed a mountain of taped interviews and ride-alongs, or she’s extremely good at taking dialogue down in her notes. This is all a lot harder than it looks, and no matter what you end up writing, it will always be the tale of the outsider who visits the natives. I salute her determination to spend several months in Utopia and get to know those people on an intimate level.

But I could only admire that for so long. Welcome to Utopia can be moving, but it starts to drag as it fails to find or make a statement. An old-school editor would say it’s a very long feature story without a nutgraf; Augusten Burroughs compares it to To Kill a Mockingbird. (!!) I wonder if Valby was too worried about projecting a too-strong of point of view — which is my main criticism of so many works of nonfiction. I started skimming along in the last 100 pages, even as Utopia grapples with the idea of a black president. At the morning coffee group, the lone liberal in the bunch regretfully announces he’ll have to vote for McCain. He just can’t vote for a black man.

• • •

SIDE RANT: Like all books about or set in Texas, including my own, both Nothing Happened and Then It Did and Welcome to Utopia must work extra hard to seem “interesting” to people in, let’s just say, New York.

Notice how it never works in reverse; we non-New Yorkers are required to remain eternally interested in (and purchasers of) novels, memoirs and non-fiction books about: New York, Manhattan, a whole lot of Brooklyn; New York real estate, the New York immigrant experience way back when and right now, the rituals/customs/experiences of New York Jews, and, less frequently, the rituals/customs/experiences of New York Catholicism, especially in the Italian and/or mafia sense; recollections and roman-a-clefs about East Coast college days followed by a move to New York; the New Yorker; New York media, the world in relation to New York; New York food, New York business, New York garbage, sewers, bridges, sex, marriage, divorce, children, politics, crime; New York history; What Would Happen if There Ceased to be New Yorkers on Manhattan island?, etc.

But don’t get me started on this. It’s a big bugaboo right now, and if I get going on it, we’ll be here all fucking night.

• • •

So much praise and <<bestseller glow (and now an Alan Ball/Oprah Winfrey/HBO movie deal) has been heaped on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, that there’s little else I feel I can add or should hurt my fingers typing here. So, some general thoughts:

• It’s as good as the reviews say it is. It’s a scientific page-turner that is also a heart-wrenching family epic. And while it’s perfectly organized and manages a chronology that goes forward and backward, some of us in the One-Man Book Club wondered if the prose sometimes falters. Frankly, too much stylishness probably would have gotten in the way of the story, and the bestseller list would indicate that it hit the sweet spot between literary journalism and CSI.

Skloot made all the right choices, including the parts where she details her quest to get closer to Henrietta Lacks’s children and grandchildren. As much as anything, it’s a book about a determined reporter and a determined batch of cells.

• More than once, the story of the HeLa cells (and the woman who unwittingly donated them) made me think of batty Eileen Welsome and her unstoppable devotion to uncovering and telling the “Plutonium Experiment” stories when we were both working as reporters at the Albuquerque Tribune. Eileen spent, what, seven years or so on that story, plus another six or seven working on a book version. Skloot’s got her beat by a little — 21 years passed between the biology class where Skloot asked her first questions about the origin of HeLa cells and the publication of this book.

• Finally, my biggest overall thought was this: Waitaminnit. I was a terrible biology student, but I was surprised, about midway through The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, to realize the obvious: the HeLa cells are CANCER CELLS. They are the cells of the disease that killed Henrietta in 1951. They are part of her, as cancer insidiously took over her body on a cellular level, but they are not “her,” at least not the same way that her blood cells are.

And anyhow — all human genome mapping developments to the contrary — I don’t easily draw a line from my “cells” to the essential “me”-ness of me. You can clone me, but here I fall back on the philosopher Heraclitus talking about the same-foot-in-the-same-river thing. There is such a thing as a soul, or whatever you want to call it, and it eludes the Petri dish.

I was therefore sort of saddened by all the mythological thinking — the premise of this book — that orbits the origin story of the HeLa cells as the years go by: Her family thinks the cancer cells are their mother, almost in a Frankenstein sense, and who can blame them? But, in a way, the scientists also speak strangely (for scientists) about immortality here, of Henrietta’s ongoing contribution to science. They hand out awards to honor her and her family, mainly in order to minimize the fact that Johns Hopkins took Henrietta’s diseased cervical tissue without her permission and started reproducing the cells and selling them.

The scientists (and Skloot) seem all too willing to play metaphorical make-believe about a poor black woman who, in a way, posthumously travels all over the world, helps science cure diseases, and even takes a ride to outer space. (Also worrisome is how the HeLa cells, unchecked, contaminated other samples and possibly set cancer research back several years in the 1960s; it slightly negates the principal narrative of a book about HeLa’s contributions to science.)

Whether talking to researchers or to Henrietta’s daughter and sons (who struggled with the basic science), Skloot makes that thematic point over and over: Henrietta lives on. I don’t quite see it like that. A form of Henrietta’s cancer lives on. Or did I miss something?

• • •

Before I knock off for the night, let me get three books off the table that failed the One-Man Book Club’s FIFTY-PAGE TEST. That’s right — the books that failed to keep me going after page 50.

Never the fault of the book, of course. I rarely let a book into the house that didn’t interest me in some way — either from a review, or publicity (an NPR interview, e.g.), or an attractive jacket, or the recommendations of people I trust. So failing the Fifty Page Test is almost always the fault of the fickle, difficult One-Man Book Club…

<<The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. So sue me. Tried FOUR TIMES since 2007 to get into this novel and just can’t. But it’s so wondrous, you say, and it won a Pulitzer. Fine. But I need to move on.

Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life, by Michael Greenberg. See my rant above about New Yorky books by New Yorky New York writers. This was wrongly touted (to me, anyhow) as a moving memoir about the ups and downs of the writing life. It’s actually a collection of short columns the author penned for the Times Literary Supplement. Redundant themes in p. 1-50: He didn’t get along with his tough, workaholic father. There’s nothing like New York. He’s just a man, a man making his way every day in the word-business of New York. Writing is a bitch but he can’t let her go.

Etc., etc. Zzzzzzz.

<<American Voyeur: Dispatches From the Far Reaches of Modern Life, by Benoit Denizet-Lewis. My thinking here was that, if I read Denizet-Lewis’s feature stories collected in once place, I would see something special about them that had eluded me when they ran in the New York Times Magazine. After a rather dry and perfunctory introductory essay, the stories all started to feel like homework and I checked out. This book is in every way the opposite of Nothing Happened and Then It Did, which for me has set the new gold standard for getting people to read one’s old magazine pieces.

The House of Tomorrow, by Peter Bognanni. It came highly recommended and I set it aside for a rainy Sunday when I was free and needed to jump into a good debut novel. This one is about a kid and his grandmother who live in a Bucky Fuller dome and museum. I didn’t get too far past p. 50. It was just going too slow for me; the characters were exhibiting a weirdness that seemed too much like fiction-class weirdness. It’s a real bummer when someone you admire and like insists you read a new, very good novel, and she even arranges to have it sent to you from the publisher; then I let down that trust and enthusiasm by not being able to get into it. Part of my deep guilt complex is feeling somehow responsible for that, which is crazytalk.

This is why we drink at the One-Man Book Club.

MORE TO COME THIS WEEK, if there’s time: Sarah Silverman’s THE BEDWETTER! Megan Daum’s LIFE WOULD BE PERFECT IF I LIVED IN THAT HOUSE! Gabrielle Zevin’s THE HOLE WE’RE IN! Daniel Clowes’s WILSON! William Powers’s HAMLET’S BLACKBERRY! And a 25th anniversary re-reading of LESS THAN ZERO!

The young man pictured here comes to us courtesy of the Mary Degnan Archives. (Mary was inspired to re-examine a box of old photos after seeing her work on this particular subject matter here at Tonsil a month ago.) This picture was taken in the spring of 1987, when I was 18 and a freshman at Loyola University in New Orleans.

Don’t be afraid of the dilated stare and the sharp knife — it’s just another Wednesday production night at the offices of the Maroon. I was good with an X-acto.

I miss layout. It was probably the only crafty, tactile skill I ever mastered — starting in the journalism room in high school. I miss the waxer, the long strips of freshly developed type set in column inches, the bordertape, the pica poles, the photo reduction-ratio wheels, mitering my corners, the Zip-o-Tone Zip-a-Tone [thanks, Nancy], the 20-percent gray screen half-tones, the light-tables; writing headlines from count orders (”they need a 3-36-1 in 19-pica column width, and don’t forget that flitj only counts for half a character”). I miss the monstrous and cantankerous photostat machine. I miss light blue Copy-Not pens. I miss being able to fix a typo with a knife instead of a reset.

I miss the satisfaction of moving the page flats over to the “finished” side of the boards, where we would burnish them silly and would then hold them up to the light and put masking tape behind the stray X-acto nicks. I miss piling into Tim Watson’s car to drive the flats down to Dixie-Web press off Tchoupitoulas Street at 3 a.m. (Or 4 a.m. Five a.m., on really bad weeks.) I even miss the heartbreak of seeing the paper 24 hours later and noticing all the bad nicks and crooked lines.

All of those skills are now completely obsolete.

I think I derived the same joy from laying out a newspaper that quilters derive from quilting bees. It required concentration, measurement, technique, artistry — but it never distracted you from conversations and gossip and laughs with your collaborators. No matter what sort of worries I had in life (it seems unthinkable to me that I had any worries in 1987, but of course I did), there was nothing more gratifying than a long, hard night of layout, with WTUL on the radio (or a mix tape). The paper came out Friday mornings. We’d close (or try to close) the features and op-ed pages on Tuesday nights, and then the news and editorial pages on Wednesdays — as late as it took, but our printer deadline was technically midnight. We’d usually get the flats there by 3 a.m.

(These pictures, from somebody else’s newsroom backshop, sort of dial the time machine a little too far in reverse, but you’ll get the idea.)

The beginning of the end.

Around the same time Mary took that knife-in-mouth picture of me, we started converting from Compugraphic typesetting machines to the newfangled Apple Macintosh Plus computers (with 80 MB hard drives!). Although Loyola’s Apple team insisted we’d be able to entirely paginate the paper, no sweat, it was something of a disaster for many semesters. We had to cobble together a system on a flimsy “Apple-Talk” network, by which we “typeset” our stories into columns using a “laser” printer. As production manager that semester, I started tentatively experimenting with building boxes, column sigs, and folios on the screen, using Aldus PageMaker or MacDraw.

Laying out a page (or a poster or a book jacket or a brochure) on the screen also has its pleasures — as millions of present-day graphic designers in all forms of media will attest. But it’s hard to match the feeling of laying something out by hand. I guess this is really just more nostalgia for the idea of slowness, craft, the physicality of media.

Not just a bit phallic, eh?

I wish I could start a Layout Club, for people of a certain age who used to love doing this. We could be like those people who rebuild old video game consoles and whatever else. We would banish all forms of desktop publishing technology prior to 1985. We could hunt down and restore an actual typesetting terminal and developer. We could cobble together some waxers, X-acto knives, other supplies; find or build light-tables and boards. We could meet in someone’s garage. We could put music on and just run out type and lay out a newspaper that would never even have to get to printed. We would miter corners and do color-separation flips. Mostly we would just trade stories and laugh and go home and discover stray strands of “Harvard-rule” border tape in our hair.

Does that sound like a fun time or what? I’ll bet hipsters would love it, just for the retro feel.