Moe Moskowitz, the co-founder of Moe’s Books in Berkeley, was known for a lot of things: his omnipresent cigars; his appalling dancing (sometimes to Cab Calloway on the store’s turntable); his political activism; and especially the way he held court at the cash register, riffing like Jackie Mason at a Friars Club podium.
The more you know about Moskowitz (1921-1997), who opened the store in 1959, the Beatnik era, with his wife, Barbara, the more you want to know. He was brusque and a bit of a slob. He drove his sports car like a maniac. One of his former employees has written about his “famous flatulence.”
Octopuses, for example, have been seen unscrewing jar lids to get at hidden food, carrying coconut shells to use as armor, barricading their den with stones, and squirting jets of water to deter predators or short out aquarium lights.
But why did they become intelligent in the first place? Why did this one group of mollusks, among an otherwise slow and dim-witted dynasty of snails, slugs, clams, oysters, and mussels, evolve into creatures that are famed for their big brains? These are hard questions to answer, especially because cephalopods aren’t just weirdly intelligent; they’re also very weird for intelligent animals.
It is a terrible thing to read a Paul Tremblay story.
Terrible because you know, going in, that it's probably going to mess you up. That his stories and his words have this way of getting under your skin. Of crawling inside you like bugs and just ... living there. They become indistinguishable from memory. They become a part of all the cells and goop that make you you.
It's terrible to read these stories, but you do it anyway. I do it anyway. Like smoking cigarettes or driving too fast late at night, I know they're bad for me, dangerous, but that's part of the allure, I guess. They're fun because they're dangerous. Because, word by word and title by title, I can feel the damage accruing. The scars.
Of course, we’ve no shortage of gruesome writers, particularly in the thriller genre, but that’s not Jones’s technique. She excels, instead, at drawing us into tender sympathy with her characters even as she coolly subjects them to the most monstrous treatment. The result is hypnotic — like staring into the serpent’s eyes just before it strikes.
What made “The Starry Night” a star? What elevated Vincent van Gogh from an unknown to a phenomenon? The ready answer is genius, but unlaureled genius is axiomatic. In Clare Clark’s terrific new novel, “In the Full Light of the Sun,” the story of van Gogh’s posthumous rise to fame bursts from history like a spurt of the artist’s beloved chrome yellow from a tube of paint.
All swimming pools, however, deal in the unnatural. Southern California is the modern heartland of this glorious folly. Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), in which the diversion of water away from Owens valley to Los Angeles is likened to an incestuous act of rape, still resonates. The city is now precariously fire-whipped, yet remains irrigated by dreams of oases in the desert as architectural firms woo their clients with rippling designer status symbols, above all the almost ubiquitous infinity pool that seeks to shimmer away the very boundary between earth and heaven.
Two new books invite us to reimagine the pool’s evolving cultural status. Splash is a clinically luxurious boutique of contemporary pool design, in which people are almost wholly absent and there are in fact no splashes. By contrast, The Swimming Pool in Photography is an astonishingly rich album of boisterous visual pageantry, documenting those who frolicked about the pools of the 20th century.