It's Just SO five years ago

A Layered Security System.

No single security measure is foolproof. Accordingly, the TSA must have multiple layers of security in place to defeat the more plausible and dangerous forms of attack against public transportation.

Recommendation: Improved use of "no-fly" and "automatic selectee" lists should not be delayed while the argument about a successor to CAPPS continues.

Recommendation: The TSA and the Congress must give priority attention to improving the ability of screening checkpoints to detect explosives on passengers.

Those are quotes from the 2004 report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

And as a quick alternative reading recommendation... Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post isn't one of my must-read columnist but her column's (you may need to register at the site) about as good as any I've read in discussing last week's airplane incident.

Now, security and I have a kind of ambiguous relationship. I've ranted about the idiocy of requiring photo IDs when you check into a hotel. I'd really like to see a grass roots movement formed to protest that. Waiting on line to show a photo ID to get a visitor badge to enter any run of the mill NYC office building is a ridiculous stupid time tax that should be obliterated off the face of the earth.

But I'm also not a privacy purist. NYC has random bag checks on the subway system that do something to harden a very soft target without being silly or imposing an unacceptable time tax on three million people a day. And don't get me started again about the baseball teams that let you bring in a factory-sealed water bottle, but not an empty water bottle.

The main problem with the whole airplane thing is that there's a huge time tax imposed on lots of people that wastes goodness knows how many billions of person hours every year, and it still doesn't work. The system is so inefficient and awful that I'm tempted to say we should just do away with the whole thing entirely. But then sanity rears its ugly head. The system is an outgrowth of a bona fide problem with hijacking planes, and if we could all just cart a fire arm on to a plane... I don't want to make it so easy for people to pop on to airplanes with explosives, either.

But yet, the system we have is layered in the worst possible way. It's layered like my office IT had been two years ago. I had a system that barely worked when I started it, then kept adding on to it to do no things and more things, and bit by bit I had a system so bad that I don't think my business would have survived 2009 if the IT hadn't been un-layered in 2008.

Once upon a time we had a system that just scanned everyone very quickly for metal, so we couldn't keep on with open season for hijackers. And you know what, that actually mostly worked, there were way fewer hijackings, and if the system even then wasn't perfect (plastic guns, hijacking without guns, etc.) it worked well enough. Then we started with checking the boarding passes so that only people actually getting on flights were allowed in. Then we started with checking the photo IDs. Well, OK. Photo IDs can be counterfeited, and so can boarding passes, but OK. 9/11 happens, and we start to add more layers at the security checkpoints because we realize we need to worry about things other than just guns. Like knitting needles and nail clippers. Well, OK, some of the most vibrant idiocies of this era were eventually dialed back. But then we get the shoe bomber. Now we all need to take off our shoes, and we have the liquid rules. For a time, I couldn't even bring an empty bottle past security and then fill it up from a water fountain, and again some of the most vibrant idiocies were eventually curtailed, but the end result was still yet another layer. Now we have the Qaeda Underpants Bomber, and I'm sure some of the most vibrant idiocies of the past week will eventually be rolled back but we'll still have another layer.

Well, this isn't going to work.

The enemies of western civilization have already achieved a victory in adding all of these new layers to the process, increasing the friction and time tax to airline travel with each new layer. The ability to move from place to place on an airplane instead of being limited to the horseback riding of the typical fantasy novel is a big part of contemporary western civilization. Even high-speed train travel has its limits, and if we had only that I'm sure the bad guys would try and make that untenable as well (recent bomb on Moscow/St. Petersburg train in Russia). We can't make flying so miserable that nobody wants to do it at all.

But at bottom, I think we need to start over from the beginning, ask what we're really trying to do, and find some way that doesn't require everyone to wait on line, take off their shoes, take off their jacket, take off their belt, put the laptop in a separate tray, but the 100ml bottle of Prell into a little plastic baggie, put all of this thru a metal detector, wait around to go thru the explosives detector.

Clearly, there always has to be a chance that some people will need to do something like this, because an element of random security isn't such a bad idea. But maybe one hour it just needs to be everyone on some flights, and some other hour some people on every flight. Maybe today you get screened at the entry to the gates and tomorrow you get screened at the gate and the day after that at the bottom of the jetway and occasionally no place at all. And maybe it's a hand pat one day, a full screening of everything the next, and an interrogation about your travel plans the day after that. And you know what, Granny Wither Walker and Artie Fish Alney will need to be screened every so often, because if the bad guys know neither of them are ever going to be screened, they'll find themselves a Granny or an Artie.

But what we have now is a farce.

I know a lot of people right now who are flying less or not flying at all because they're just not comfortable with the process. I fly because I like going places, but I like the screening routine less and less with each passing flight (I did go thru a next-gen body scanner flying back from Miami in August). Now, happily, we did away with the policy where everyone who was on a one way flight, and everyone who paid cash, and everyone who didn't check baggage, was going to get the once-over. But somebody who does all three, who's on the radar of intelligence and security forces in multiple countries, and we're all being good boys and girls taking off our shoes and our belts and our jackets, and this still happens?

We've got to do better, and when the experts talk about layered security, the layers we've got going now just can't be what they have in mind. I think we'd probably be safer and more secure with less security than we have now.

Honey, I Shrunk the Blog

Some of you may have noticed that the blog went without posting for over three months...

Well, for good chunks of August and September, JABberwocky was working at half capacity. I'm in LA. Eddie is at WorldCon. I'm in Florida. Eddie is on vacation. The intern is on summer break.

In mid-September, I buy a new apartment, which I might not actually move into for a few months yet. Why? Well, I see the apartment as kind of building my dream home and want to move in when my home is ready. Some think I have a mental block against actually moving. In any case, selecting paint colors and looking for ceiling fans and designing a big built-in bookcase and getting appropriate new furniture and talking to contractors and figuring out how to light the bookcase and all sorts of things like that, some of which I've done infrequently if ever and am hardly expert at, enter my life. It's a little part-time job to go along with my full-time job.

We return to usual attendance levels just in time to get huge stacks of royalty paperwork from DAW, Penguin and other publishers. October and April tend to be the big crunch months for this. I'm actually quite pleased with how efficiently we process these big stacks of paper.

And all the while, we are very busy selling books to lots of people in lots of places, which means lots of contracts and other paper to push around the office.

So even though we're getting it done, there's a real cost. When I head off to Bouchercon in Indianapolis in mid-October, I have lots of reading for my train ride, because I haven't had a lot of time to do anything other than work. And the trip is really nice, and recharges my batteries, but there are all the e-mails I'm saying "well, that will have to wait until I'm back in the office." And then we did such a nice job processing the US royalty statements, but then there's the second wave of foreign statements that start to pour in. Cutting one check doesn't take a lot of time. Cutting checks when you have money coming in from 3 different places each for 6 different authors for a total of 18 payment items going to 10 authors gets to be a bit of a to-do as you be sure all the pieces match up and balance out. So there's a week in the office between Bouchercon and World Fantasy. The three weeks between World Fantasy and Thanksgiving looked so invitingly long, but let's just say no real let-ups. And then I take an extended break for Thanksgiving and actually read a book for pleasure for the first time in over a year (Agassi's Open) and recharge a little, and at least Thanksgiving most of my clients aren't working either but the foreign publishers don't seem to know it's a holiday. So it's around a week and a half of finally catching up after Thanksgiving.

In the midst of this we expanded the staff by adding a 20 hr/week part-timer who is helping out quite wonderfully, but in the meantime it's two months without doing anything on the apartment so when mid-December finally arrives and work finally seems to have died down I get to really start focusing on that. And work does get quiet in December, but we have all the year-end/year-beginning stuff to work on over the holidays and a little this and a little that.

But one thing I realized in the midst of this was that I really did miss the blogging. Some people are really pressuring me to do the Facebook thing, which I'm just not interested in, but I emerged from this busiest-ever stretch in the job with a renewed desire to try and keep the blog going. And I'm still feeling a little guilty on that, because think of all the manuscripts I could have read with the time I've spent making December 2009 my record month for blog posts. But this is the part of the contemporary age when you're supposed to blog and social network and do that modern internetty stuff that I want to try and be doing. I am trying to keep some posts a little shorter, and I'm also trying to look harder for business-y blogging topics that won't get me in trouble. Maybe I should try and track the blog traffic, but why do I think that would just end up depressing me?

Who knows what the future will bring, but I'll be trying to keep up. And as I try and do more posts, maybe some reports on some of these things I was up to from August thru November will make their way in.

Up in the Air

It was nice to see a movie on the big screen at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, which celebrated its 15th birthday this fall. My first film there was on the Loews Screen (Aud. #1), and that's where I was Sunday night for Up in the Air.

Which is a very good movie, one instance in which the generally enthusiastic critical reception is spot-on. It's the third very good movie in a row for director Jason Reitman after the excellent Juno and Thank You For Smoking. It fits George Clooney perfectly. It joins Jerry Maguire and In Good Company, perhaps Office Space, in the pantheon of great corporate culture movies of the past two decades.

I suspect most people are familiar with the basic concept. George Clooney is a modern day road warrior who works for a downsizing consulting firm. His job is to fly around the country firing people for bosses who don't have the guts to do it themselves. He could soon be on the chopping block himself. A young hotshot Natalie has come along with the idea to take the company's road warriors off the road and do the firing by teleconference. Clooney has to take her on the road with him so she can see how it's done in person in order to better do the job by remote. At the same time, Clooney starts a road fling thing with another road warrior played by Vera Farmiga. I haven't previously been impressed by Farmiga, not even in her role in Scorcese's The Departed a few years back which earned her some hosannas, but I'll have to reconsider after this because she's pitch-perfect in the role. Clooney doesn't carry much physical baggage -- carry-on, carry-on, nothing but carry-on -- but he carries some emotional baggages, somewhat estranged from his family and with a relative who's about to have a wedding, which good chunks of the Clooney character would just as soon ignore.

To a large extent, the movie goes along familiar paths. Would anyone be surprised if I said that the wedding does become an opportunity for Clooney to reconnect with his family? I mean, this is a high-gloss star vehicle for George Clooney, it's not an overrated indiepic 23rd comeback vehicle for Mickey Rourke like last year's The Wrestler. (Gee, anyone notice that a year's gone by and we haven't really heard from Mickey again?)

But the dialogue is so sparkling especially over the first two-thirds of the movie, the writing so insightful, most of the lines in the screenplay, most of the readings so true, and most of the atmospherics of the movie so true, that it doesn't matter. If you're riding through beautiful scenery you don't need the road to veer off in unexpected directions in order to admire what you see with each curve in the road. At the same time, let me be clear that the movie doesn't sparkle because of one of these elements but because of the combination. Every once in a while the movie delivers itself a lob, and then returns a line that really is obvious, but the line is a perfectly written line that takes advantage of the lob and it's always delivered impecabbly. When the movie should hit something out of the ballpark, it does. Always.

And no, the final third wasn't as good as the first two thirds. The family business does get really obvious and borderline treacly. The ending just drifts along into a suitably happy conclusion that isn't quite as incisive or sharp as what we've seen in the first section of the movie. But on the other hand, there's a devestatingly sharp pre-ending that cuts to the bone. It's not a complete surprise, but it's very close. I sensed where the script was going around two seconds before it actually got there, but it was only two seconds beforehand while in a worse movie I would have seen this coming from a half hour away.

Right before Up in the Air, I went to see Me and Orson Welles at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas (Aud #3). I hate this theatre, I've always hated it, I hardly ever go there, but the movie's been out a few weeks and this was the only option in Manhattan. It was playing on one of the three original screens which are at least better than the three added on later, but small screens and a very poor rake in the auditorium so you're guaranteed screwed if you don't have an empty seat in front of you, have never done it for me. Let me say, though, that they did have some nice-looking high end cakes and muffins at the concession stand.

Me and Orson Welles was a pleasant movie, but it didn't do much to keep me from napping.

On the plus side, Christian Mackay has been praised widely and deservedly for his performance as a young Orson Welles, directing his Mercury Theatre Company in a production of Julius Caesar. He is spot-on. You can see Mackay walking off this set, on to the set of Citizen Kane, and nobody would know it wasn't Orson Welles himself. It's a truly amazing piece of work.

Also, Zac Efron is smooth and likeable as a young actor who gets a small role in the production. A lot of times when a hot young actor like Efron does a role in a movie like this to get some street cred, he can look a little look stacking up Bugsy Malone against Don Corleone. Not here. Efron holds his own. You don't see him straining to act, just like you don't see Clooney straining to act in Up in the Air. But he's not holding the screen just on account of being a pretty boy teen idol two years removed, either. He's demonstrating some real acting chops, and I'll be curious to see what choices he makes in the next few years and where he lets his looks and his talent take him.

But it's just a very small movie, and not all that interesting. It's the definition of a movie that will play a lot better on TV than it does in the theatre, so I'd recommend Netflixing it at some point, but not rushing right out to go see.

And I'll put in a plug for Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Sunset had some of the best romantic tension of any movie I've ever seen, but you need to have seen Sunrise to fully enjoy Sunset. Linklater is a little inconsistent to my eyes, with these little gems side-by-side on his filmography with the overrated Dazed and Confused, the fun School of Rock, and a variety of other strange little films, more of which I've seen than not.

Calling the roll

We've just finished the last holiday season for B. Dalton. The last 50ish are closing, with one or two (the Union Station, DC location may be one) that will stay open as a B&N.

Once upon a time, these were where we shopped for our books. It's my (correct) recollection that the chain was owned by Dayton Hudson, the department store chain that eventually became Target, and was sold to Barnes & Noble in the mid-1980s, just about the same time that I started my literary agent career. This was a minnow swallowing whale sort of thing. B&N used the Dalton cash to fund its move into superstores (modeled after Borders; though B&N likes to pretend it was first, Borders was already starting to open its large-format stores here and there around the country), was much more aggressive in shuttering its mall format stores than Borders was about downsizing Waldenbooks, and within another month or so will have exited the business completely. B&N also purchased the mostly smaller Doubleday and Scribner brands and folded them into Dalton.

I hereby remember the following Dalton/Doubleday/Scribner locations, and also the little B&N bookstores that were what B&N once was:

WA: Southcenter Mall (also had a Waldenbooks that was replaced with a Borders)

CA: Embarcadero Center, SF; Farmers Market, LA; downtown LA (the one I couldn't visit but looked longingly at two summers ago bedecked with the old old old logo)

MI: Briarwood Mall, Ann Arbor (right off center court, a frequent stop in my college years)

TX: Houston (I visited in 1979, walking over from my hotel on a Saturday during my bus tour, in the basement of an office complex shopping complex); Austin, the mall where Elizabeth Moon used to go with her son for ice skating.

MA: South Shore Mall (also a sole survivor breathing its last)

CT: WestFarms mall (also a multi-store mall, now with one of the last 200 Waldenbooks, and where my younger brother once worked); Doubleday WestFarms; Hartford Civic Center mall;

NYC: The B. Dalton, the one that moved into the Orange Plaza Mall in the mid 1970s and which became my home book store, the B. Dalton where I happily got gift certificate for my Bar Mitzvah, the B. Dalton where I spent my first Caldor paycheck buying Gene Wolfe's Citadel of the Auturch in hardcover; the B. Dalton at the central entrance with the sf section in the back corner; the big and bright and airy B. Dalton that will always be mine.

Elmhurst across from the Queens Center mall; 8th St. and 6th Ave., (turned into a B&N); 5th Ave. and 52nd St. (the flagship B. Dalton, which I loved dearly, which occupied the space now taken up by the NBA store; this was a great, great bookstore); Doubleday 5th Ave. and 53rd St. (the sf section you could only reach by riding an elevator; Scribner 5th Ave. and 48th St. (where I cajoled by father into buying me Orson Scott Card's Songmaster in hardcover; Doubleday 57th and 5th, once open to midnight, their flagship, and many evenings late at night a street band would set up across the street; Doubleday 3rd Ave. and 49th St.

the B&Ns on B'way & 73rd, B'way & 80th; Times Square; lower B'way; Park Row; 47th & 3rd (closest to the SMLA offices), 57th & 7th; 86th & Lex; Grand Central; 33rd & 7th; 8th St. @ 6th Ave.; Albee Square Brooklyn; Forest Hills

and some more B. Daltons: SmithHaven Mall (also once a 2-store mall); Roosevelt Field (once very big then much smaller spot a few doors down and now a sole survivor that is about to close);

NJ: Bergen Mall (a little chunk of where the Whole Foods is now); Paramus Park Mall (when I saw an entire shelf of Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion paperbacks at this store some 20 years ago, that was then it dawned on me that she was going to be my first really successful client; the mall is now about to lose its Waldenbooks;); B&N Essex Green;

The DC Area, which was once blanketed with B. Dalton locations: The Shops at National; Union Station, which moved from a little tiny hole to a big airy location and which may be re-branded as B&N; Chevy Chase Pavillion; K St., a block from the 18th&L Borders; 2 at Crystal City, a big and a little; Springfield Mall (once a 2-store mall, now its Waldenbooks is about to close); Lake Forest Mall (once a 2-store mall, now its Waldenbooks is about to close); Ballston Commons; Scribner in Fashion Centre at Pentagon City

This list is almost certainly not a complete list of every B. Dalton that I've visited. The chain peaked at 800 stores in 1986, which is 23 years ago. Some I visited only once a long, long time ago; and others I may have visited more times than that but all those visits so long ago that the memories are in distant recesses of my mind, with my forgotten knowledge of calculus. I'll update the post as some of those resurface.

But these places were where all of us used to shop for our books. If there's a Dalton or two you remember, I hope you'll make mention of it in the comments section. As the book business moves inexorably to an electronic future, let's light a few candles for what once was and what will soon be no more.

Avatar

I went to see Avatar on Saturday with Myke Cole, Peter V. Brett and Laura Anne Gilman. (At the AMC Loews Lincoln Square Aud #9 (Majestic).

I liked it least.

To get one thing out of the way, right away: the 3D is amazing. We saw in RealD digital 3D. This is the third movie I've seen recently in 3D, after Bolt a year ago and then Up, and this was the first one where the movie just seemed made for 3D, where it was an integral thing making the movie something more than it was, and not just doing it for the visceral thrill of having stuff come at you. It's still not exactly comfortable to wear the RealD glasses over my real glasses, but it wasn't a huge bothersome thing, either. We were in one of the mid-sized screens at the theatre and not one of the much larger and bigger, but the glasses still provided some sense of panorama instead of making it too much like watching TV, which was something I hated very much about Imax 3D circa mid 1990s.

But...

For all the exotic alien surroundings and languages and marvelous images and etc. etc., we managed to have one character telling another "at first I was only following orders, but then it really did become love that I was feeling for you, true real genuine love, and you have to understand that." That doesn't match the technology in the trailblazing department.

I can understand why Roger Ebert is quoted in the ads as saying, and in fact does say, that this gave him that Star Wars feeling all over again. Because the movie is kind of a mirror image of Star Wars. There are people attacking the Death Star, only this time the good guys are occupying the Death Star, and the bad guys are trying to get in their one good shot, and we're rooting for them to fail. Because this is a good Death Star. Kind of like how some other movie had a good witch and a bad witch, this is the good sacred hard-to-attack place that we cannot see destroyed.

All these gazillion dollars spent on the movie and they couldn't re-dub Sam Worthington's lines so he wouldn't lapse into an Australian accent. All the time. I mean, all the time. I don't know if I've seen another review to comment on this. I guess it must be different reviewers than were complaining in Season One of True Blood that the actors couldn't keep their accents, because those actors didn't have problems with their accents, while Sam Worthington is doing a Full Dundee constantly.

We all felt the movie seemed very, very long. This is one of those things where I don't quite understand why everyone I went to see the movie with professed to mostly love it, even as they all agreed it seemed long. Good movies don't seem long. I may have been a little more length sensitive than everyone else, because I was doing the Full ToeTapping every time Sam Worthington was doing his Full Dundee, and I was looking at my watch only constantly. But I'm sorry, great movies don't seem long while you're watching them, really and truly they don't.

Most of the characters ended up as archteypes if they didn't start out that way. No, cliches is probably a better word than archetypes. Bad military dudes, bad corporate dudes, valiant scientists.

The music annoyed me. I like staying for the end credits, listening to a John Williams put all his themes into 3:49 of good music over the end credits. Here, it was bad music, over credits that were put together so tightly that you couldn't really read them, and part of me was ready to bail before the credits were over because it totally wasn't doing anything for me.

We discussed afterward some of the various plot holes, though talking in the after-dinner event with a couple of Peter's friends, maybe many of those were covered in the dialogue. So perhaps it's not full of plot holes. But we could still see exactly what was going to happen when the film cuts back and forth from the struggling good guy to the struggling heroine who seemed down for the count, but guess what maybe she isn't and she'll get back into the game just in time to save the good guy's bacon. I'd say this is a spoiler, except anyone who's ever gone to a movie will see what's coming from several minutes away.

Part of me wants to go on trying to go into more detail on why I don't think this is a very good movie, but there's this other part of me that's already working overtime trying to forget I spent three hours of my life squirming and toe-tapping and waiting desperately for Avatar to end.

I'll close with a quote from Bull Durham:

Come on rook, shows us that million dollar arm, ’cause I got a pretty good idea about that 5 cent head of yours

Because Avatar's exactly that. It's got a five cent screenplay to go along with its million dollar arm, and I'm not going to give it a pass.

I will give higher marks to our dinner afterward. We stumbled/meandered our way from place to place near Lincoln Center with too long a line and then decided to head down 9th Avenue. We settled on a restaurant called Whym. The food was good, the desserts outstanding. Many restaurants have nice-sounding desserts that end up looking like they came from Sweet Street but I don't think I've had anything quite like their S'mores-wich, and the Apple Pie Spring Rolls were also quite good. In both instances I've seen items like on many many menus, but rarely with the execution. I'm tempted to go back right now and see how the Banana Cream Pie holds up. Definitely a place I would consider going back to. And reasonably close to the Random House building... Hmmm, maybe it's time to start trying for some more lunches with my friends at Random House.

Holiday Traditions The Second

I think I kind of fell into my Dec. 24 tradition, two or three parts of me merging into something bigger than the sum of its parts.

1983: I start to eat at Pizzeria Uno, and it kind of sticks. Occasional bad service aside, it's still comfort food for me 26+ years later.

1986: I move into NYC, on the fringe of a neighborhood that has a decent quantity of attached and/or single family houses where people can put out Christmas lights. Or, as I refer to them internally in an interfaith-y kind of way, Holiday Lighting Displays. I realize there are worse things to do than walk around on a December evening admiring the Holiday Lighting Displays.

Early 1990s: Barnes & Noble opens a superstore in Bayside, kind of distant from me and in what is then a "two fare zone" because you need to take a subway to a bus to get there and there are no free transfers. It is a mile or so away from a Pizzeria Uno.

1991: I move to a new neighborhood that's almost all apartment buildings, so it's really hard to get a good Holiday Lighting Displays experience.

So I like to visit the B&N every so often, in part because it's a different market and a different feel than the Manhattan stores are.

So some Dec. 24, it's not like there's anything happening in the office, I have lots of time, so why not go to Bayside. Did I walk all ten miles the first year? Did I take the #7 to Flushing and then walk? Did I just go the B&N on that first visit or do both Uno's and B&N? Details, details, all lost in the haze of time. But I decide to walk back from the B&N to catch the #7 at Main St. Flushing, around a four-mile walk, and then it's a "My God it's full of stars" moment as I realize that I'm walking through a neighborhood full of single family homes, which are full of Holiday Lighting Displays, and I just can't resist admiring them, and admiring them, and admiring them. And it's such a much bigger neighborhood than where I'd lived before.

Whatever happened the first time, the tradition eventually developed its firm elements. If possible, you walk all ten miles from your apartment to the Uno's on Bell Blvd. Sometimes, I may have walked even more by first going down Queens Blvd. to the recently closed Entenmann's outlet store. Leave around noon, get to Uno's before 3pm, so you can have the express lunch. Stay an hour or so, no need to rush, maybe walk along the Bell Blvd. commercial strip before heading down to Bay Terrace shopping center and the B&N. Get to the B&N 4:30 or 5, stay a while, enjoy the panicky announcements that we are closing at 6 and you better get your last minute items or else, enjoy the atmosphere. And then sometime between 5:30 and 6, you leave. You meander the 4 miles to Main St. to catch the #7, except tonight it isn't 4 miles. Because you just go down whatever block you feel like, wherever the Holiday Lighting Displays seem to be the most colorful, most interesting, most alluring. You have all the time in the world. Savor it. Soak it in. Enjoy it. Enjoy the lights. Enjoy the people pulling out and pulling up, arms laden with packages. Enjoy the lights on the trees, and the trees inside visible thru the bay windows. Enjoy the quiet and serenity and uniqueness of this one night. And then enjoy that last hubbub on Main St. as everyone else is heading one way home from the subway station and you are heading the other way.

Some minor variations, maybe. The Cake Box bakery in Bay Terrace went out of business, but then you discover D'Aquila Pastry Shop. Stop and smell the ravioli at Durso's. Try the heavenly hash at Lazar's?

I didn't get out of the apartment on the 24th until 12:26, which makes it a little tight to get to Uno's by 3pm. So in this case, I walked 3.5 or 4 miles to the 103rd St. subway stop, the took the subway 3 stops to Main St. I hoped this might gain me time to buy something at Durso's instead of just smelling the ravioli, but the line was so so so very long that I decided I would make a special trip to Durso's at some point because I really should actually finally buy something there. The walk to 103rd St. was delightful. Not quite the full way to Flushing but certainly the interesting part of it, and I hadn't done it in so very very long so I just looked around as I walked buy, taking in some of the small changes. The very different walk from Flushing to Bayside was a delight. I hadn't done it in so long. Here's an apartment building being fixed up on Roosevelt Ave. There's the IHOP on Northern Blvd and the McGoldrick branch of the library. The old UA Quartet theatre that was a drug store and furniture store for not very long is now an ethnic supermarket. The left turn onto Crocheron Ave., the meander after the Clearview Expressway to the Uno's.

After lunch, it's been so long since I've been in the neighborhood that I decide to take the very scenic route to the B&N, and go down Northern Blvd. to the Joe Michaels Mile along Little Neck Bay. The added distance makes up for the subway ride earlier. The last dribs of sunset reflect from houses on the other side of the Bay. It is getting dark so I can't go to Ft. Totten and double back, so I leave at the Marina for 28th Ave. and up to Bay Terrace. Hey, it's nicer on a crisp fall day or gorgeous glorious spring day, but those opportunities ain't coming so often any more.

No, the lines at the B&N aren't like once upon a time they were. But the announcements are as frantic as always. Hey, there's somebody in the sf section buying Simon Green's Hell to Pay, and they're buying #7 in the series because she's read and liked #1-6. Sweet!

And then I meander. There's always something new in the Holiday Lighting Displays, and this year it's the lettered Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays signs I see in a lot of windows. Of course next year most of those will be gone, like we don't see all of the American flag ornaments I remember on the walk in 2001, but this year everyone has to have one. I set off at least six motion detector lights on houses as I'm walking along. There's a Homer Simpson Clause at this house, a little music going on at that one. More snow-globe type things than I remember Someone calls me on my cell phone and disturbs my serenity to make plans for seeing Avatar. I start thinking we need to finish a filk that starts "Hrathen got run over by a Mistborn, walking home from Vasher's Christmas Eve. You might think there's no such thing as Stormlight, but as for me and Brandon we believe." Durso's was mobbed like always, but there's nobody at D'Aquila's. It's been getting slower and slower there over the years, no twelve people line like I remember. I don't really like Italian pastry that much but for this one night during the year it's nice to do something different. It's a warm enough night that in a concession to age, I rest in Bowne Park for ten or fifteen minutes before doing the final 30-minute walk to Main St. Usually the meander stops at Bowne Park because I'm getting tired and the neighborhood slowly more urban with less to see.

Unlike the 23rd, I enjoyed every single part of this trip as much as ever I had. There's something special about Christmas Eve, just like there was something special 25 years ago to walking along the deserted Diag at U-M on Thanksgiving night. The walk, the lunch, the store, the Holiday Lighting Displays.

I added another element this year, so infused with the spirit, and came home and put in the entire Back to Mono box set, ending with the holiday album.

And the knees that seem to want to get older a little bit quicker than the rest of me are coming up out of the last dip and don't seem to mind the walking from store to store yesterday, or the 18 miles I must have put on the pedometer. No, not something to do every day, but when I rest them up a little bit by doing the bike or the elliptical instead of a walk, I'll feel like I'm rewarding them for a job well done.

Holiday Traditions The First

As my business has grown and I've gotten busier, it's become harder and harder to do a lot of the things I used to do. After a year with more growth, more busy-ness, more challenges both good and bad to what I used to do and used to be, I decided it was important this holiday season to make the time for my two pre-Holiday rituals of yore. I had to touch base with my roots.

Back before Bookscan, I tried to keep tabs on the books I sold, and at some level on the publishers who were publishing them, by running JoshuaScan. I would visit most of the bookstores in Manhattan and a few in Queens, and rigorously track the performance of my titles by eyeballing the shelves and such. The system was fairly accurate, though also subject to ridicule. Publishers could dismiss the information as anecdotal, or fail to recognize that if you poll 1739 people in the US you can predict a presidential race, hence visiting 2% of the B&N superstores in the world was not a bad glimpse into B&N. After Bookscan became available to me, I essentially ran both systems in parallel for at least a year. As the Bookscan info proved to track JoshuaScan pretty nicely, and I had more experience with Bookscan, and my time got more precious, the bookstore visits slowly dwindled. Enough visits to enough stores so I can keep track of things like orders on Bk #2 in a series vs. sales on Bk #1, or what the minimum take was looking like (the minimum take may be the single most important indicator of buyer enthusiasm and publisher-paid placement).

But in any case, one of the things that JoshuaScan eventually evolved into was a Dec. 23 ritual of visiting bookstores in Manhattan from mid-afternoon until the stores closed. I could walk into a busy bookstore and look at a long line and pretend all of those people were buying JABberwocky books. Which was a nice thing to pretend when I was getting by, but not all that much more. I could take the pulse of the list for the holidays. The day would include a visit to the Pizzeria Uno at either E 86th St. or sometimes if I got an early start from the office and could visit the E 86th St. stores and then walk to the west side, the Uno on W. 81st St. And I enjoyed this quite a bit.

Alas, having returned to the tradition this year after skipping (I believe) the past two, I don't think I'll feel an aching desire to keep this tradition going. It started out nicely enough; I got a late start from the office, but the subway was good and I got to the 86th St. Uno's a few enough minutes before 3pm to have the lunch special, which has been part of my life since 1983. But the lines seem less long with each passing year. Fewer shoppers? More registers?? The stores were busy but not mobbed; I didn't find people lingering in the sf section to hand-sell to. The old Lex/86 B&N that was one of the first (and way too small) B&N kind-of superstores is gone now, replaced by a much bigger store that opened in the summer. This was only my 2nd visit after one a few days after opening, a testatement to how I'm not doing the stores the way I used to. As I went from there to the B&N on 82nd/Bway to 66th/Bway to Borders Columbus Circle to Borders Park Ave. to B&N/Citicorp to Midtown Comics (not an official stop!) to B&N 46/5th to Borders Penn Plaza, I slowly came to realize that I was doing all of this solely for the sake of the tradition.

As John Crowley says in the closing lines of his masterful Little Big:

The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.

The only thing that gave a frisson of past excitement was finding out that Borders had put in its orders for the mass market of Peter V. Brett's Warded Man rather earlier than expected, so if I asked at the info desk "when is this book coming out," I could be rewarded. In the good old days of JoshuaScan and lots of time, eagerly-awaited orders might have put my plans for a Sunday afternoon aside so I could eagerly add data to my data set. Now, even though I'm still eager, I don't have the time and can say to myself "well, the book will be out in two months, so it's not like I can't get some of the orders into the data set next month." But with a little second wind after strolling down to the Chelsea Whole Foods and getting 1.18 lb at the hot buffet in me I decided I'd walk crosstown to the Borders at Kips Bay to get one more piece of data into me.

But overall, the day just confirmed that my pleasant visits to bookstores are now more and more likely to be when I'm traveling, in less well-trod ground, maybe with a little bit more time just to poke around. My life moving forward won't be what it was looking back...

On the other hand, my Dec. 24 tradition held up very nicely, and that post shall follow anon...