CENSORED GRAPES

This year's reading has been all about The Box Of Paperbacks Book Club over at The A.V. Club and my subscription to the Library Of America, which sends me hardbound omnibus editions of major American authors. I love the books and I like the randomness of the subscription service. One day I don't own any Willa Cather novels. The next I own five of them in one meticulously presented volume, complete with slipcover for that added touch of class/pretension.

Because I got a lot of Steinbeck when I first signed up I've consequently been reading a lot of Steinbeck, including The Grapes Of Wrath for the first time since high school. It held up well, but read a little saltier than I remembered. That's because it was a little saltier than I remembered. My edition restored some cuts made by Viking upon its original publication. A note at the back details the changes and provides some awkward comedy when read on its own.

Most puzzling entry? I vote for, "Joan Crawford."

ONE SENTENCE THAT PARTLY EXPLAINS WHY I CAN'T STOP READING MARK HARRIS' PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION: FIVE MOVIES AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD


Describing a scene during pre-production for Dr. Dolittle in which director Richard Fleischer met with Rex Harrison and his actress wife Rachel Roberts:
"Fleischer, Harrison, and Roberts then went out to a local restaurant called the White Elephant for an evening that ended in utter chaos when Roberts, who had been indulging her penchant for barking like a dog as soon as they entered the establishment, brandished a knife at her husband, and Fleischer hurried them out and poured them both into a cab."

The Mysteries Of Chicago: The identity crisis bookstore
On Belmont St. over by the old Onion office there's a fine little bookstore that, for as long as I can remember, has done business under a sign saying "Town Cleaners."

I can't even remember the real name most of the time since it's pretty dull. It's The Gallery Bookstore I've always thought of it as the Town Cleaners Bookstore. It reminds me of a character from Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol named Danny The Street. Danny was a transvestite street. On the outside he featured Guns and Ammo stores and other macho fixtures. But on the inside he was all nice boutiques.

I'm pretty sure the Town Cleaners Bookstore was just too cheap to have the original sign removed, however.

MY DAY: JANUARY 4, 2006
Because when there's nothing else to write about, there's always today.
• Between a minor head cold and the nasty weather it's been hard to get out of bed lately and today was no exception.
• Stopped at Whole Foods for a muffin on the way in to work. The usual homeless guy who calls me "big guy" was not there.
• Heard a rumor from Stevie, who heard it from someone else, who heard it from a "reliable source" that Dick Cheney would soon be stepping down to be replaced by Condoleeza Rice. I'm putting this here just so I can brag about it later if it comes true.
• Listened to the new Shins album. It did not, as Zach Braff promised, change my life. Yet. But I've listened to it more than once now so we'll see.
• Finished up the bulk of my posting for Slate. I'm sorry to see it end. I just hope I held my own.
• Ate dinner alone at Big Bowl and read Rob Sheffield's book Love Is A Mixtape. I was alone because I had to go to a night screening of Smokin' Aces. Not so smokin'.

THE BIG BOX OF PAPERBACKS PROJECT, BOOK 5:
THE SEEDLING STARS, BY JAMES BLISH (1957)

On June 10, 2006, I purchased a box of 75+ vintage paperbacks, mostly sci-fi and adventure books, from a Half-Price Books And Records in Lincolnwood, IL. I am reading all of them. This is book 5.)

This going to be a short entry since i read this before the bloglapse of the past few months and my memory is a bit hazy. Before reading The Seeedling Stars I only knew James Blish's name from the covers of all those Star Trek paperbacks I'd see at the Englewood Public Library growing up, the ones with names like Star Trek 4 and Star Trek 7 and so on. They adapted episodes into prose stories and apparently provided Blish with a nice income in his waning years. He was writing number eleven when he died in 1975. His wife finished it for him.

Blish won a Hugo in 1959 for A Case Of Conscience and found a following with his four Cities In Flight novels. I know little about either but I think I might be hitting some of them further down the line in this project. He also apparently coined the phrase gas giant, unintentionally amusing schoolkids for decades to come.

But back to the book at hand: The Seedling Stars is less a novel than a series of short stories, some of them quite long, that build off one another. All concern "pantropy"—presumably another Blish coinage—the practice of adapting the human body to live in alien environments. One story deals with tree-dwelling descendents who feat the ground, another with humans reduced to cellular size who live, and war, with single-celled organisms underwater. Conceptually it's all quite strong. Narratively, it's all a bit too protracted. The ideas in the stories are more interesting than the stories themselves. Which, I guess, is one of the main complaints people who don't read science fiction make about science fiction in general. I guess sometimes it's true.