N.B.: We did not put him in there.

So I read The Inferno in junior high. I remember exactly where I got it: Ann’s Gifts and Antiques, a now-defunct bookstore in Hebron, Ohio where we’d always go to stock up at the beginning of vacations in Ohio. I remember handing the paperback to Dad to add to the stack of Mom’s mysteries. What was Dad buying? I think Mockingbird by Walter Tevis.

The Inferno was perfect for junior high. There were so many people I wanted to condemn, and here was a handy guide to let me know in exactly which circle they belonged.

I liked, too, that the translation was by John Ciardi. I felt like I knew him from Cricket.

I remember where I read it: lying in the top bunk at the cottage on Buckeye Lake that we time-shared with a lot of relatives. I decided the introduction was important, so I plunged in before I let myself start reading the poetry. I learned that it was written in “the humble vernacular.” I tried to make sense out of Guelphs and Ghibellines, Beatrice and exile. Why? Well, I had a scheme that I wanted to read everything I thought would be required in college before I was even in high school, so I’d be, somehow, ahead.

It worked and it didn’t. You can get a lot out of The Inferno without intimate knowledge of Italian and ecclesiastical history, but mostly what you get is stuff like OH YEAH THE HYPOCRITES HAVE ROBES THAT LOOK GOLD ON THE OUTSIDE BUT ARE ACTUALLY MADE OF LEAD BECAUSE OF, YOU KNOW, HYPOCRISY! ALSO SATAN TOTALLY ENCASED IN ICE AND EATING THAT ONE DUDE.

I read it over and over. I never called myself a horror fan, but Dante gave me gore and justice.

The young men he found, who held him at gunpoint, were initially concerned that he might be part of a rival Mexican gang. But fortunately for him, and for us, the gang leader, a gentleman referred to within the book as J.T., decided that since Venkatesh had been courageous — and naive — enough to come into his world, J.T. would act as his patron, and let him hang around his building in the Robert Taylor Homes.

Venkatesh began by spending lots of time with J.T. and other gang members, but eventually broadened his research. From the first, it’s clear to me that the residents put up with him for three main reasons: his connection with J.T., the potential that he could do something for them, and the basic human need to tell their stories to an interested listener. I suspect that Venkatesh’s staggering naivete — initially genuine, but later used as a more deliberate strategy — was also key to convincing many people that he wasn’t a threat.

Until, that is, he became one. But I’ll leave that for readers to discover.

Serious Wire fans will be reminded of characters from the show. J.T. is sometimes reminiscent of Bodie, sometimes of Stringer Bell. The good cop, Officer Reggie, made me think of Carver — the post-Hamsterdam, mature Carver. As Venkatesh gets close to other groups within the building and learns the strategies they use to survive, fans will be nodding their heads, too.

Perhaps my favorite moment in the book is when the building manager, Ms. Bailey, calls Venkatesh out on his complicity. I also appreciate Venkatesh’s willingness to include his screwups, and his honesty in assessing his motives.

Like The Wire, Gang Leader For A Day tells compelling stories that aren’t often told, is frequently funny, and reveals uncomfortable truths about American society. I’ll be interested to see how the book is received.

“Celebrities are hot right now.”

…four hours til the wake-up call, six til my flight home.

The tile is embedded in the middle of a busy street. I saw a few similar ones, but they were more fragmentary. Turns out it’s one of these.

Perhaps an honest self-assessment?

Never know who you’ll run into.

Did the paint just happen to peel in the shape of a heart?

AND LEAVE THE BINDER ON YOUR DESK WHEN YOU WALK OUT OF THE OFFICE.

Thanks to Dylan for the heads up!

It’s making me think a lot about, among other things, how to optimize your life for writing. Not just in the obvious ways, like, you know, making time to actually write, but in seeking out the sorts of experiences that can be transmuted into compelling prose.

Yes, I know, like Ellen reminded us at Clarion, you don’t need to have murdered someone to play Macbeth. I did not attend the Siegel Institute for Gifted Youth (which doesn’t exist), I do not live in Forest House (which doesn’t exist) nor am I a member of Flytrap Circus (which doesn’t exist). When you read the story I’m writing for Comic Book Tattoo you’ll see that I’m not a part of that world either.

But I do think that especially as we settle into professions and circles of friends and stable relationships, it gets harder to find new things that shake up our brains and engage us with the world differently. And despite my frequent travel (I’m leaving again on Thursday), I’m drawn to the familiar and comfortable. I want to fight those tendencies, or at least be more aware of them, this year.

I think the above must have been part of someone’s New Year’s Eve outfit. Now they suggest that, given the right weather pattern or incantation, the telephone pole will take flight.

One of the fine baristas at one of my favorite coffeeshops told me: “I have trouble with contemporary fiction. I need some floppy hats or pirates or something.”

It was a fine reminder that people are looking for all kinds of things in books. The people who are looking for anything in books, that is.

…I keep wondering about what to do online.

I have only so much attention, and online, there are so many places to pay it. My Gmail chat status message was always “continuous partial attention;” then I gave up on Gchat entirely. I check Facebook a few times a week, but I don’t facebook, per se; I’m not a zombie, I’ve thrown no snowballs, sent no Hotness points, declared none of my many creative friends to be Most Creative. On MySpace, I log on infrequently enough to have gotten my password phished. I remain stubbornly loyal to LiveJournal for no good reason. Fundamentally, I think the issue is that I don’t want to be always-on. I comment, but I rarely instant message. I’m asynchronous, not synchronous. Now you see me, now you don’t. That’s my comfort zone. But I worry that it’s not enough, that not IMing much or Twittering at all means that I’m out of it in some essential way. And there’ll be new places to be — I’m sure some of you are already there, wherever ‘there’ is — and I’ll have to decide if I want to be there too. How do you all decide where to have online presences?

Man.

You go away from easy Internet access for a week and somebody hacks your dang MySpace. For any of y’all who got bulletins from “me” alerting you to the latest horizontal hijinks of a young lady who I will not name, who is famous for being famous, please accept my sincere apologies. I’ve totally changed my password and reestablished ownership. I think.

It was a very bookish ambiguous winter holiday. I have just added to my obsessive LibraryThing catalog the following:

• The Points of my Compass: Letters from the East, the West, the North, the South, by E.B. White
• The Sound I Saw, by Roy Decarava
• Moomin: the Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip
• Strange Landscape: A Journey Through the Middle Ages, by Christopher Frayling
• The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, by Natalie Angier
• The Edwardians, by Vita Sackville-West
• Washed Up: the curious journeys of flotsam and jetsam, by Skye Moody

Some of them came from the several good used bookstores along US 101 between Lincoln City and Newport, one of which has this excellent poster:

Two of them came from the Visitor Center at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, which I highly recommend. We also purchased a fine rubber octopus, learned a bit about Antarctic whale research, and I took a few pictures. Here’s one:

Some fish you don’t need to work at all to anthropomorphize.

Last but not least! The other thing I did while away from the ever-enticing Internet was to finish writing my story for the Comic Book Tattoo anthology, which a few of you may have heard about already — it’s coming out this summer from Image Comics, and all the stories are inspired by Tori Amos songs. I don’t think I’m allowed to say yet which song is mine, but I’m extremely psyched about the story and the project as a whole.

Happy end of 2007 and beginning of 2008!