Austen Books

January 4, 2026 //
3

No, not books by Jane Austen, though Jeffrey Larkin named his bookstore on Haight Street after Jane, his favourite author. When I shopped and worked at Austen, Jeffrey had two employees in the book shop and three more who ran a novelty shop down the street called Forma. One of the bookstore employees got in a motorcycle accident and I covered shifts for him in ‘91 and ‘92. Austen sold mostly used books, and a small selection of new books. Always fun. We all smoked at the time and smoked in the store, because we still could. We drank coffee that we bought from a shop across the street (Jeffrey taught me to drink mine without sugar because it brought out the bitterness in the coffee) and listened to a lot of Nina Simone and Nick Cave. (A lot of jazz, and blues, and the only music that was off-limits was anything related to the Grateful Dead. It was Haight Street and the element the Dead would bring into the shop was not desirable. We didn’t play any punk either, just because it wasn’t conducive to looking at books.)

I remember in winter, Jeffrey made sure customers took off their gloves to look at the books because ‘it’s impossible to look at a book carefully with gloves on.’ I still think of that when I go into a shop from the cold. And that he didn’t have to ask people of a certain age because they knew better.

Jeffrey died of a heart attack at age 51 or so in 1994. He was gay, but had been mostly celibate since his friends started dying of AIDS. I still dream of Austen Books and Jeffrey about once a year. The sublunary version of Austen was a narrow one-room affair (not counting store room and bathroom) of probably 800 square feet. He and a friend built the floor to ceiling shelves that ran the length of the store on both sides. The dream version of the store tends to be much larger – two rooms at least, with tables full of books as well as much lower shelves. High windows sometimes let in light from outside, and the hues tend to the lavender. It’s always good to talk a little with Jeffrey in these dreams.

Last night I dreamed of the shop again, but a young couple owns it now. They said that Jeffrey had moved on. I woke feeling very strangely about that. Insofar as I believe something of us lives on after we die, I hope that Jeffrey has reached a place that he wants to be.

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Categories 90s, books

Books 2025

January 4, 2026 //
0

I’m usually more on top of tracking my books in Goodreads – just didn’t this year until I noticed a couple of hours ago that I’d recorded two for 2025. Busily added the rest that I’d read/listened to as noted in my journals. Grand total (I think) of 31.

Dutch:
I’ve started reading Dutch kids books that I find in Little Free Libraries. It’s helping a little bit. I’d do myself a greater favour by reading the kranten (newspapers – I learned yesterday the root of this word is ‘courant’ a French term for newspaper also used in English). Anyway:

Wipneus en Pim bij de Trappertjes by B.G. Van Wijckmade

Lotje Met Chimp naar het Circus by Jaap ter Haar

Audio:

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan (highly recommended – fascinating stuff)

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

To Hell With Poverty by Jon King (narrated by the author, a history of the initial run of the band Gang of Four. Andy Gill had passed away before its publication, so can’t argue with King’s general assessment that he was a serious expletivedeleted.)

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang (depressing insofar as the inherent sexism of the Valley hasn’t changed in 40 years and it’s only getting worse. But a great piece of reporting.)

Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn.

Speaking My Mind by Leo Varadkar (Very interesting, but I fear he’s too protective of his own [well-earned, don’t get me wrong] legacy. He could have taken more risks with it. Also: before reading, bone up on the main Irish political parties. He writes for an audience that knows one from another.)

Head On by John Scalzi

Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri

Other stuff:
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis (This is an early 19th C. Brazilian classic read by just about every high school student there – it was recommended to my office book club by a Brazilian colleague. I quite enjoyed it, but what I really wanted to talk about in our discussion of it is how it’s informed by Vita Nuova (see above), Tristram Shandy, and Candide. Which no one else in the group had read. I doubt I’ll make the time to write the essay that ties them all together, but I want to.)

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Light slightly fantastical reading that I enjoyed. Read it for both the office book club and the local expat book club this year.)

Nana and Luna by Delacorta (same main characters as Diva – light reading if you can ignore the 14 year old protagonist’s highly sexualised presentation. The 80s were a different time.)

Guards, Guards by Terry Pratchett (Classic Pratchett.

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis (expat book club entry – interesting but ultimately depressing to me. As a new dog owner, I found the deaths of dogs hard to take.)

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Gorgeous. Highly recommended.)

The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred Year Old Man by Jonas Jonasson. (If you enjoyed the first one, you’ll enjoy this one too.)

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Moreno-Garcia is an excellent writer and this one’s a treat – super-creepy mid-20th century set take on the old gothic novel, with nods to The Yellow Wallpaper.)

The Planets by Andrew Cohen and Brian Cox (Gorgeous tour of the solar system with the depressing notation that the likelihood of other planets like Earth in our galactic neighborhood is very slim.)

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (I enjoyed this one and am likely to check out more – pretty sure I have Daisy Jones and the Six in my TBR. Hugo is an actress from the golden age of Hollywood who contracts a writer for a Vanity Fair-like mag to write her life story. With twists.)

The Fisherman by John Langan (Recommended by my friend Matt, this was a doozy. I don’t do horror, generally, but I was intrigued by his description of it being stories within stories. Langan was meticulous in his construction of this tale. I’m going to read more by him, but this is his only novel. Several short story collections await.

Patti Smith – Just Kids (reread for expat book club – so good, but so sad. While I’m well familiar with the setting and the people Smith talks about, the Dutch members of the club – not entirely expat, come to think of it – and the 28 year-old Ukrainian woman found the name-dropping a little hard going.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick (It’s PKD – if it weren’t weird, you’d be surprised.)

Strange Angels by Andrea Speed (sweet queer fantasy of competition between gods among other things.)

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (Gorgeous and winding and it helps to create a family tree in the first chapters so you know what’s going on later. Very sad but so well done. Roy definitely earned her Booker with this one.)

Unleashed by Emily Kimelman (Sydney Rye Mysteries #1) (Beginner detective takes on the powerful of NYC with the help of a fantastic dog. #2, Death in the Dark, is a novella. I’ve got #3, Insatiable, queued up.)

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Netherlands-set novel of a trio of siblings and the strange history of the house their parents bought after WW2. Also: The best-written sex I’ve come across in ages. Some, but not all, members of the office book club were put off.)

James by Percival Everett (I enjoyed this retelling of the Huck Finn story from Jim’s perspective. A Pulitzer Prize in literature is usually a mark of quality. Amusingly, the woman at Marcus Books in Oakland who sold it to me said that she’d read several other works by Everett and didn’t think this was close to his best.)

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (I missed this when it was in competition with Grisham’s The Firm for the book everyone on Muni was reading, and I think it would have served me better had I read it at 25 or so, but I enjoyed it. Very strange to read a tale of a shepherd boy in search of Truth just before picking up my current reading, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago.)

Categories audiobooks, books, Fiction, Literature

Fave Podcasts #2 – Discord & Rhyme

August 21, 2025 //
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It used to be that my daily listening included audio drama, music discussion, book discussions/audiobooks and a lot of politics. These days I’ve dropped to politics for the most part and have happily found more music discussions.

Discord & Rhyme has been running for seven years (164 episodes as of this writing) and is one of several music panel shows I listen to regularly. The format is usually three or four out of a group of seven regular panelists (plus occasional guests) discuss an album that one of them has chosen for the episode. The person who chose it tells the history of the artist up to that point and why they picked the album. They then talk individually about their histories with the album/artist (if any) and then dive in, talking about the album song by song. Finally, they suggest to listeners where to go next if they liked the album in question.

All of the panelists have a great love for a fairly wide variety of music, though most of the albums they’ve covered are in the pop realm to some degree (with a fair helping of prog – including seven (and counting) Moody Blues episodes). Once they get down to the tracks it’s primarily a matter of ‘I love/don’t love this track, and here’s why.’ And they really dive in – recent episodes run well over an hour. They took two for Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral and over three (divided into two episodes) for Prince’s Sign O’ The Times. The thing that makes this podcast even more interesting for me is the various digressions into the sources of songs, who played what on each track, where a track has been sampled, and so forth.

The discussion of Prince’s The Cross is a good example of the variety of opinion they bring to bear. One panelist commented that he didn’t like the song because there’s no musical development in it – it’s the same short piece of music over and over. Another (John McFerrin, I think) went into how it appeals to him because it accumulates, like Ravel’s Bolero. It starts with something very quiet and then the instruments just pile on one by one until there’s this grand explosion of sound. And I always joke that as a Jew, it’s weird that The Cross is my favourite song on that album. While I’d never thought about it that way, I’m quite fond of that kind of music as well, no matter the genre.

I’ve mostly listened to episodes on albums I know but I look forward to going back into albums I don’t. They clip generously so even a newcomer to an album can get what they’re talking about.

Another interesting thing that comes up in their discussions is what makes a perfect album opener, what makes for a great track two. The idea of a good album having a statement of purpose that sets up what’s to come. For many pop albums this is an ideal rather than something put into practice, but given the entire crew’s love for progressive rock (probably the genre that set the stage for this kind of musical analysis), this comes into their discussions pretty regularly. In considering my own efforts (some on this very blog) into album reviewing, this isn’t something that has come to my mind before. At least not in so many words.

logo of the podcast Discord & Rhyme features a section of a CD to the left of the podccast's name and a section of an LP to the right

I have a variety of responses to their analyses based on how well I know or love an album or an individual track, but that’s not surprising. The hosts are all about my same age (mid 50s) and part of what I enjoy is the common experiences we have with the albums that came out in the 80s and 90s. There’s something comforting in that. Or amusing when one of them might say, ‘My first experience with this album was when that week’s host chose it for this podcast.’ The fresh ears they sometimes bring helps to open my ears to things I may have forgotten.

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Categories Music, Podcasts, rock and roll, Writing

Fave podcasts #1 – Starship Iris

August 9, 2025 //
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I divide my podcast listening between audio drama and music discussions. Currently, we’re into the third and final season of The Strange Case of Starship Iris, one of the best of the SF audio dramas going.

It’s a combination of great storytelling and characterization – these, of course, being the keys to much great audio drama. We can’t see the characters, so we’re dependent on how they talk to one another, right? How well do they do it. There are even two characters in this drama with the same name, and we don’t confuse them. Technically good work, but the storytelling is key.

So what’s it about. In the first episode, Violet Liu is the only survivor of a sabotaged spaceship (the titular Iris). I hope this isn’t a spoiler – we learn pretty early that it was doomed to failure. In Violet’s last minutes, she’s rescued by a team of smugglers operating in the aftermath of a war between Humans and an alien race called the Dwarnians. The crew of the ship, the Rumour, is mostly human, save for the pilot, Krejjh, who is a Dwarnian. The ship’s translator/cook, Brian Jeeter is Krejjh’s partner. Brian studied Dwarnian literature before the war, knowledge that more than once comes in very handy.The crew is also mostly female and there’s a healthy dose of queer.

The first season has the crew running a variety of contraband and trying to keep out of sight of the Earth government. We slowly learn that everyone on the ship has something to hide related to the war. Or reasons to hide (such as: no one was supposed to survive the destruction of the Iris). Eventually we learn how close Krejjh is to the Dwarnian hierarchy (very, but her engagement to a human makes that tenuous).

From very early on we care about this cre and what happens to them and appreciate their qualities and shortfalls and fears.

Also: Did I mention the theme song?: Fear for the Storm always gets to me. It’s refrain, When I go to sea, don’t fear for me, fear for the storm encapsulates the themes of the story: Going up against elemental forces and with the self assurance to say, ‘we’ve beaten unbeatable situations before and we’ll do it again.

Midway through season 3, and we’re totally engaged with all the features of great pulp – the heroes are this close to death in each one and cheating it again and again, as the crew is on an impossible mission to rescue one of their own.

Joe Sam says: Check it out.

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Categories Podcasts, Writing

Pro bono immigration legal services

July 10, 2025 //
0

The Department of Justice still has their page up of immigration legal services, including pro bono immigration attorneys. Good idea to download the list now while the pdfs are still up.

The current source page has a lot of interesting information here: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/list-pro-bono-legal-service-providers

But I’ve also saved the list here: https://joejots.blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/pro-bono-legal.pdf

Immigration lawyers often can help with passport issues too.

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Categories Politics, United States
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