It was from this table that I plucked Stephen Brijs’ The Angel Maker. The selling point? According to the blurb, the Brijs’ variation on themes featured in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, of an outside world looking in and failing to understand the true meaning (and importance) of events that unfolded behind closed doors. The Angel Maker reflects mightily on this argument between appearance and reality through the story of Dr. Victor Hoppe, a victim of biology and circumstance.

Dare one discuss any aspect of this book without ruining its plot? This is no small challenge for a novel that literally throws the mystery of its story in the reader’s face on the first page when the good doctor arrives in his boyhood hometown after a long exile with three tiny and terribly ugly children in tow. Hoppe is barely communicative on the why and wherefore of his absence, his return, and origin of the little deformities. As the story switches back and forth among narrators, from local townsfolk to the children’s nurse, from Hoppe’s colleague to the good doctor himself, the wall between what is hidden within and suggested without is breached for the reader and, presumably with truth in hand, we are set free.

In Jekyll and Hyde, that truth is ugly and Darwinian. Beneath every top-coated and becaned Edwardian lives a murderous, club-wielding simian. What Utterson and the reader will reckon with by the novel’s end is a science recast as evil-smelling green, smoky potions little different from the mood-altering opiates of sunny England's shady dens, threatening civilization as they knew it. It is the science of the Gatling and Maxim gun, of exploded bodies from long-range munitions. A pretty picture it was not in Stevenson’s time and, as we look back, all seeming just a run-up to the atrocities of World War I.

The Angel Maker suggests an equally ugly future, albeit with a little less science fiction sturm und drang. At first, readers are drawn to think Brijs is berating us with a novel of biotechnology run amok when placed in the hands of the misdiagnosed and mistreated. But scientific prey is not what is being stalked, although there are perfunctory jabs at scientific careerism. No, the true culprit of The Angel Maker is religious ignorance, and Hoppe’s ancestral home of Wolfheim is rife with it, from the parish priest and local abbess to Hoppe’s housekeeper and the triplets’ mother. The ignorance of basic biology, largely replaced by Christian palliatives, reveals the dependence of Wolfheim’s natives on an education that has no basis in the scientific understandings of the late 20th-century, an education that precipitates all of the disasters that ensue, from Hoppe’s Frankensteinian experiments to the untimely deaths and literal bodily misuses of those who come within his reach.

What most disturbs the American reader of Brijs’ condemnation of religious parochialism is how shockingly universal that ignorance may well be. As an addict of left-leaning blogs, I’m too familiar with the remarkable stupidities of America’s true believers (favorite bumper sticker alert: “Dear Jesus, please save me…from your followers”). What I know less well are the dangers associated with Europe’s own breed of religious tunnel visionaries. Is Brijs’ Wolfhem of the 1980s a literary convenience? Has the appalling lack of knowledge of reproductive biology been done away with in the more rustic climes of the European Union? Or does such ignorance prevail today, perhaps gaining in ferocity as in the U.S., paving the way for European versions of Texas school boards and Creation Museums?

At a minimum, Brijs answers Stevenson when he suggests our better angels are not the moral credos of religion done right. While there is at first reason to think The Angel Maker a profoundly religious book because of the energy with which it takes up its Christian themes, it is, if anything, a profoundly anti-religious work—and not specifically anti-Christian at that—because it holds nothing but disdain for the education in misperception any religious weltanschaung demands.

HBO’s crown jewel ushered in an era of self-consciously literary television, capitalizing on the shifting, ambivalent viewer involvement that long-form narrative demands. David Simon of The Wire compares his magnum opus to Greek tragedy and Shakespeare; hip college professors are inclined to agree. “David Chase is Dostoevsky for television,” Blake Masters once said of The Sopranos’ creator. This was a high bar for Masters’ own show to live up to.  But though Brotherhood—a little-known Showtime series that fuses elements of mob drama with the best of urban dejection—ran for only three seasons from 2006-2008, it is an indispensable stop on the line from the metropolis to a smaller, post-industrial enclave just an Amtrak ride away.

Brotherhood takes place in Providence, Rhode Island, a city more like our own New Haven than perhaps any of the other TV-drama settings. Its neighborhood of focus is a fictional, but insistently particular, place called The Hill, a working-class Irish Catholic stronghold struggling with lay-offs, new immigrants and gentrification. In terms of literary comparison, the show conjures up nothing so epic as The Brothers Karamazov or King Lear: the larger-than-life gangsters of The Wire’s “Bodymore, Murdaland” are replaced by the day-to-day headaches of low-level ambition. In its unrelenting interrogation of what it means to be from somewhere, Brotherhood is more like Saul Bellow’s Chicago novels: to be from a place means to “stick to your guns”—to know it before and against signification.

Brotherhood’s creator is from New England, and it is evident in the way he treats both the show’s financially beleaguered city—which he likened in an interview to the world’s biggest high school—and his two main characters. Michael and Tommy Caffee are at the top of their game, on opposing teams: one is a local mob boss, and one is a rising star in state politics. They both do some bad things and wind up in good places, and they both do some good things that don’t lead to much. It’s a narrative constructed as all means, no end, and major events seem to happen at random. Even Michael’s return from years of exile to kick off the series is oddly humdrum—he simply shows up one night for Sunday dinner and pulls up a chair around his mother’s dining room table.

The characters in Brotherhood develop, but the plot refuses to arc: when mobster Michael kills an FBI agent in one of the show’s most brutal scenes, he does it because he’s pissed off. He is not the victim of grand social injustice that we are privy to while he is not, and we shake our heads in dismay rather than bristle with indignation. There’s no symmetrical interweaving of anti-heroes on either side of a blurred ethical or institutional line, like in The Wire’s finely wrought structure. This leads to a show that is grim but convincing, and which commands admiration for its refusal to mythologize the condition it brings to life.

It may be this hermetic quality that kept Brotherhood from catching on, in spite of its strong acting and a soundtrack that had me rewinding just to sit and soak it up (one episode closes with a suicide and the Martin Sexton lyrics, “I’m tired, scared and wide open…to the rest of my life”). And while Meadow Soprano lands at Columbia to begin her climb into Manhattan’s good graces, the Ivy League university of Providence is as far off the Caffee family radar as the tri-state glitz of Mad Men. We know this city’s problems link it with others like it, but we don’t quite know how. It is a testament to the nuance of Masters’ writing that the stakes we do experience keep us focused on what he shows us.

For better or worse, then, Brotherhood is a peephole into life as it is, not life as it aspires to be. It’s about a city whose troubles define it from inside, because the people there aren’t trying to get out. It’s neither galvanizing, nor glamorized, nor likely all that eye-opening to the viewers it would probably appeal to most. But the show does satisfy, showing that small places have big stories to tell.  And even if that’s the whole point, right there, getting that story right makes Brotherhood worth a look.

A native of Meriden newly transplanted to Boston, Jeanne-Marie Jackson is a doctoral candidate at Yale, working in Russian and Afrikaans fiction.

If only it were that simple!

No, selecting stories for Listen Here is a far more complicated affair than first meets the eye. Like any “program,” Listen Here has a well-defined structure, and any object that is “structured” is, ontologically speaking, defined by limits. The limits of Listen Here are very real and are what ultimately shape the criteria upon which I depend for selecting stories

The most important criterion for selecting stories is quality, and while we all might agree that quality is a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient one. Selection depends heavily on the taste of the selector—that’s me—and I like to think that I have pretty good taste in stories. But I’m hardly infallible (papal authorities aside, who is?). Guidance from others is not only useful but efficient. Translation: weeding through the short story collections of individual authors can be an enormous time-waster. Each season of Listen Here requires approximately 24 stories, which means I’ll normally read at least twice that number.

But rest assured, I’d be running through many more if I didn’t depend in turn on other literary tastemakers. Lack of infinite reading time demands the pre-screening offered by short story anthology editors, and so to them I am often eternally grateful.

Short story anthologies come in several flavors. My preference runs to contemporary story collections. For these I commonly look to the latest annual collections of Pushcart Prize winners, O Henry Prize recipients, and Best American Short Stories selectees. What I like most about these collections is the opportunity to read short stories of merit by authors of no reputation…but more on that later. Another anthology type I place within this camp is that of the little magazine that has compiled its ostensible best, whether we’re talking Granta, Story, or McSweeney’s. Since both types tend to draw from the same well, I’ve not found much distinction between the two.

A less preferred but nonetheless useful type of anthology is that organized by subject, genre or geography. These can vary considerably. For example, my collection of 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories has yielded two or three really good reads while the rest founder under the conventions of the genre. On the other hand, Brad Morrow’s literary The New Gothic, with only 20 or so stories has been a real gold mine because the stories on average are just, well, better.

Unevenness aside, anthologies organized by a common theme or trait aid in organizing the each night’s reading, where stories are brought together in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes not. So Irving and Ilana Wiener Howe’s collection of classic collection Short Shorts provided everything I needed for the night we had devoted to extra short stories (ranging in reading length from 8 to 15 minutes). Or the aforementioned anthologies of tales of terror have taken care of our Halloween week readings.

The one type of anthology I rarely read is that devoted to a single author. Doing so can, in fact, lead to some mighty discouraging results. For example, my copy of the Complete Short Works of Mark Twain has made it pretty clear that Mark Twain was not much of a short story writer. (On the other hand, he is a master of the short sketch, which is not the same as a short story.) Others whom I’ve tried and failed include Arthur Conan Doyle (too long and and Ray Bradbury. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes’ tales are the only ones worth reading but these are often too long for the program and, upon re-reading, many of them just aren’t as good as they originally seemed when I first read them in high school; Ray Bradbury—another writer whose stories I read voraciously—presents different problems: at times, too stridently lyrical or downright cutesy, others too obvious in ending or lightweight in overall effect. Now don’t get me wrong: there are winners from these gents: Doyle’s “The Red Headed League” is still a great story, in part because its absurd premise manages to be so weirdly humorous, too; Bradbury’s “Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!” is still one of my favorite tales of humor (and don’t even get me started on The Martian Chronicles, which, even dated, is still one of the most powerful, thematically rich, best-written works of science fiction).

But I am not convinced that plowing through the nearly 30+ stories of the superhuman Holmes or the over 100+ stories of the bountiful Bradbury is an apt use of precious time when variety of author and topic at a constant level of quality is required—which is why in the end story selection ends up being a fundamentally communal endeavor. For nearly all of my selections depend upon the some editor who had the good sense to whittle down stories that he, she, or they (if a board did the selecting) thought worthy of republication. In brief, I couldn’t do it without them.

So here’s to those literary tastemakers. Without you, Listen Here would not have been possible.

Most know Le Carre as the most revered of spy novelists.  James suggests that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the first novel to feature spymaster George Smiley as a main character, is actually a mystery—an idea that got my attention, especially since the novel had been sitting on my bookshelf for a few years. In fact, it was one of several Le Carre novels in my possession that for years I had been meaning to get to but never set aside the time to actually read.  Now I was intrigued.

Although Le Carre’s earliest breakout novel was The Spy Who Came in the From the Cold, it is Tinker, Tailor that lets the curious peer at the clockwork of a British spy agency (referred to throughout as “the Circus”).  I let no cats out of bags by pointing out how this 400-pager has, at its center, the story of ferreting out a mole who has corrupted nearly every one of the Circus’ covert operations.  Like most locked-room mysteries, there are five suspects and Smiley, as Le Carre’s Hercule Poirot, has set himself to the task of uncovering the mole’s identity.

It all works as far as the tropes in spy novels and detective fiction go.  But there is something more to LeCarre—something with which his readers are already familiar and for me was a bit of a shock to discover, albeit a pleasurable one.  In brief, the life of a spy is a shabby one.  Not morally shabby…well, that, too, of course…but materially shabby.

Through Tinker, Tailor—and you see this repeated in Le Carre’s Looking Glass War—there are interminable complaints about lack of funds for necessary resources.  The spymasters are always looking over their shoulders to make sure that there is enough data to show their superiors, enough action to be had to justify next year’s budget.  Even as the mystery reader in me consumed pages in Tinker, Tailor to see who that damned mole was selling British assets (human ones, that is) up the river, the culture critic noted how the success of the mole and the support unknowingly granted by others in his artful mendacities were all the direct result to keep budgets intact by supplying higher ups with a steady flow of information (or “intel,” as today’s wonks call it).

There’s no getting around how much the novel’s actors are driven by the filthy lucre.  There are drafty rooms, unpainted walls, old file cabinets, dirty teacups, and never, never enough coal for the fireplace.  The offices of the Circus are not even close to the squeaky clean hallways and super-secure labs of Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible’s or the more mundane, but still nicely situated glass-walled offices of the Bourne Ultimatum.  For the staff of the Circus, piles of paper, undusted shelves, and peeling paint reflect the daily drudgery of the spy trade, which involves mostly a lot of bureaucratic wrangling for the spymasters and twiddle-your-thumbs waiting for the agents.

Still LeCarre manages to make it all work because of these quotidian realities.  To be blunt, it’s almost impossible nowadays—for me at least—to watch any of the spy shows and their now-ridiculous comic spoofs, from the newest James Bond flicks to Spy Kids, and not in the end be bored by the unreal and usually ridiculous exploits (Transporter 2 comes to mind, having done laundry through it a few days ago).

It’s rare to find books and movies clearly enmeshed in a genre (in this case, “spy thriller”) that are brave enough to deflate our culturally projected fantasies.  I like the Bourne movies (they’re actually better than the books) because they try, albeit feebly, to “humanize” Jason Bourne.  But they are still kung fu fighting fantasies, ones where we admire the Jackie Chan-like ingenuities of battle from the flung ashtrays to rolled-up magazines-turned-truncheons.

Perhaps the best cinematic equivalent to what Le Carre did to the spy novel—an essential defrocking of the genre—is Steven Spielberg’s Munich.  Here is a movie about spywork where everything that can go wrong does, without the film devolving into comedy.  In Tinker, Tailor, the same can be said for the participants of the Circus, who show themselves to be preening careerists with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge.  By the novel’s finish, you can’t help but feel that the true “spymasters” are not the agency’s directors—in Tinker, Tailor the former agency director brought down by the mole is ironically named “Control”—but the accountants who keep the books and have the power to dry up the resources that make possible the spy fantasies that we indulge in the act of reading books of this ilk.

And yet what has come to fascinate me most respecting this reading binge is not the literary qualities of Dick’s prose (it’s pretty workmanlike, truth be told) or the depth of his philosophical insights (they run quite deep—scary deep, in fact), or the theater of the absurd plotlines.  These aspects of his work have their respective merits—and demerits—but I’ll leave those for others to ponder.

No, what has caught my attention is the fact that all of Dick’s writings are still in print!  We’re talking here, folks, about some 35 novels and short story collections.

This is no small matter for a science fiction author or indeed any author operating in a “pop” genre.  As a long-time reader of science fictions—coming up on 30 years, in fact—the observation over time of what manages to stay on the shelves or what gets pulped offers more than enough opportunity to comment on and complain about our economic, educational, an cultural tastes and inclinations.

Dick has become such an opportunity. It’s not that he’s bad.  It’s more a question of is he that good. But let me contextualize…

I first realized all of Dick’s work were in print when I headed into the Barnes & Noble on the north end of Union Square to pick up novels by a British contemporary of his, a writer whose own febrile imagination struck similar chords.  At the time, the only novel I owned by John Brunner was a chewed-up edition of Last Stand on Zanzibar.  Re-reading it, I noted how easily the passions that Dick poured into his works on the politics and technologies of mind control were matched by Brunner’s acid reflections on overpopulation and government bureaucracy.

Part of the “New Wave” movement in British science fiction, spearheaded by writers like Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss, Last Stand is a true sci-fi tour de force: chapter titles are “coded,” while multiple storylines are heavily interlarded with narrative experiments, from disjointed newsfeeds to floating conversations run together. Despite the distinctly 1960s-ish characters and their concerns, you can’t help but admire the sheer energy of the novel’s Herculean effort to immerse the reader in the—for lack of a better term—freneticism of the world Brunner imagines.

The world has been overrun by bodies—human ones, of course--precipitating explosive acts of mass violence by those gone over the edge who try literally to clear the physical space around them. Before there was going postal, there standing on Zanzibar.  In the hubbub of disembodied party banter and screaming news flashes that weave in and out of the more straightforward story of a dormant spy who, without warning, is “activated,” Brunner’s experiments in writing do more than describe lonely crowd effects: after all, why show you a world on edge when he can have you feel it?

Does it work?  Sometimes, and sometimes not, but Brunner is ambitious, which explains my decision not only to replace my ratty version of Last Stand but to see if I could also get hold of his other major novels, Shockwave Rider and The Sheep Look Up.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, where’s your science fiction section?”

“Top floor, on the far right wall as you come off the escalator.”

“Thanks. Ah, here we go.  Ok, let’s see: A…A…Anthony, Asimov, B…B… Bradbury, Brin…C…  What the hell?  No Brunner…?  Let me check again. Well, how do you like that? No Brunner.  I wonder what else is here.”

“Whoa…”

And that’s when I saw it. An entire shelf and a half given to books all  similarly trimmed, bound, and designed: apparently every novel published by Philip K. Dick.  Some I knew from reputation already: the ones I listed, as well as Ubik and VALIS.  But there were any number that I had not heard of.  But that didn’t seem to matter.  Someone at Vintage Press and the estate of Philip K. Dick saw gold in them thar hills and decided to put all of his novels—good and bad—in print.  Most, if not all, did not even have their type reset, but instead were little more than scanned pages from earlier printings, resized and newly covered to fit the collector’s edition effect.

Personally I can’t help but admire a good marketing tactic when I see one.  It certainly has kept all of Philip K. Dick’s novels in print (and me buying them). But I mourn for John Brunner, whose better novels deserve better fates.  So I guess it’s off to the American Book Exchange for me.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, teen reads were not so easy to find. High school reading for non-honors courses comprised Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton, and Paul Zindel. For more smart-alecky students, the diet consisted of traditional classics, ranging from Charles Dickens' seemingly interminable (then!) David Copperfield to John Steinbeck's overlong (then!) Grapes of Wrath. The geek crowd—among which I number myself—floated into Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and the newly arrived Orson Scott Card or William Gibson. But among the authors of slightly straighter fiction that had a special cachet for high school overachievers, none stood higher than J.D. Salinger (with Kurt Vonnegut and Herman Hesse often trailing in his wake).

Salinger was the Seinfeld of his day: ideally suited for the semi-cosmopolitan children of middle-class parents with more smarts than money. While Catcher in the Rye was as inevitable then as it is today—notwithstanding recent claims of its early death in the pages of the New Yorker—the aforementioned overachievers not uncommonly preferred the pleasures of Salinger's Nine Stories and his one other published novel, Franny and Zooey, to his paean to post-pubescent adolescence.

There are some awfully pleasant associations I still have with the Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey, making it impossible for any re-reading of these works not to be colored by feelings of high school smugness. (Look at me! See how smart I was reading these as a high school sophomore rather than the prescribed Catcher!)

But my continued fascination with re-reading as a 40-something books that so impressed me in my 'teens continues unabated, and while Pride and Prejudice, in my humble opinion, continues to ride high, my experience with other works has not withstood the tests of time as well. Salinger may be a case in point. For the Nine Stories, I have to confess that, by and large, these have held up well—certainly much better than many short stories of the same period. Franny and Zooey, however, does not.

It's not that it's a bad novel. It isn't. It's still pretty good. It's just, well, a little overdone, a little contrived, a bit pretentious, the kind of stuff likely to feed the ego of a precocious teen reader. One can't help but suck up the mysteries of the disturbed wunderkind, the elusive Seymour—eldest of the Glass children— whose shadow and genius hang over the novel, and particularly Franny, like a wet blanket woven from the threads of an existential angst born of reading too many Tolstoy novels and Zen maxims. Salinger is not so dumb as to ignore that fact when brother Zooey rails at sister Franny: "We're freaks, that's all. Those two bastards [eldest Seymour and next in line Buddy] got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards." The freakish standards at issue boil down to Franny's discontent with—how does one put it?—the petty qualities that in some way are exactly what make us human—which is, of course, Zooey's point.

Notwithstanding inevitable triteness of Zooey's moralizing about how to accept people for who they are, warts and all, the novel irresistibly draws us into it, turning us into the very freaks with freakish standards Zooey deplores. In fact, reading the book in high school inspired the same act of freakishness that Franny has taken on of hauling around a copy of the anonymously authored The Way of a Pilgrim, the first-person narration of a wanderer who devoutly recites the "Jesus Prayer" ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner"). In Franny's knapsack is The Way of a Pilgrim; and in ours then was Franny and Zooey—at least, until the end of sophomore year when SAT exams became more important.

In the 1970s and 1980s, at least, the greatest irony of Franny and Zooey was an entirely unintentional one: namely the postmodern trick of its transformation into an exemplar of what it condemns. Even as Zooey lectures Franny—and presumably readers—on the pretension of judging too harshly all the non-"whiz kids" out there, we can't help but nod our heads with the all-too-wise Zooey and sympathize with the well-meaning Franny. Hey, smart people like Franny—and ourselves—make these kinds of mistakes all the time, and it's good thing that we're smart enough to read books like this by J.D. Salinger to teach us better.

But let's be honest, how much would we have listened really if we weren't at the same time all jazzed up by the "beaverboard" nailed up on the back of the door to Seymour and Buddy's childhood room, on which "every inch of visible surface of the board had been decorated with four somewhat gorgeous-looking columns of quotations from a variety of the world's literatures"? And there you are: lengthy quotes from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Kafka for you Western traditionalists' pearls of wisdom from Issa, the "Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna," and Mu-Mon Kwan for you intellectual mystic types into Alan Watts and Thomas Merton. If this isn't the height of pretentiousness, I'm not sure what is. And yet let's all just admit that it's cool, too. I even remember how during summer camp as a counselor in training I and others had taken to the habit, in clear imitation of this bit of intellectual self-puffery, of tracking down suitable quotes and writing on the walls of our bathroom stalls bits of geinus from Dostoyevsky and I.L. Peretz. It all certainly made for more interesting reading that "Here I sit hear broken-hearted..."

I ought perhaps add at this juncture that in some ways I repeat the criticisms leveled at the novel by Mary McCarthy in her 1962 review of the novel ("J.D. Salinger's Closed Circuit"), a wonderfully smart reading of the novel and no doubt better written and more insightful than this.

But McCarthy's criticism bears repeating, albeit contextualized by two realities: first that Franny and Zooey is a pretentious novel because its appeal is built on precocity, and being precocious is hardly a bad thing in itself. I recommended the novel to my teen daughter, and I have no qualms doing just that when I consider some of the competition, from Stephanie Meyer's teen vampire soap operas to Cecily von Ziegesar teen sleaze (she's author of the just plain awful Gossip Girl novels). Second, McCarthy wrote before she would realize how strongly the novel would tap the need of smart kids to feel smart. This is a reality that cannot be batted away and Salinger's novel, in some sense, grasps that fact. Franny and Zooey is the Jesus Prayer of the smart and sensitive soul (not the nerd, who represents an entirely different type as smartness goes). Smart kids, in their way, need their Franny and Zooey's (today these tend to be Junot Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao): books that bespeak their intellectual curiosity and which, in their being carried about, signal to others that their search for other intellectually curious types. And that ain't a bad thing either.

This is a little paperback that I remember my parents having a copy of in the late 1980s. I don't think I ever looked at it then but I do remember throwing it out when they moved out of their apartment downtown. The edition I remember -- and which is now sitting on the desk next to me -- is from 1989 and was published by Sledge and Fayen as East Rock Press, Ltd., and it is a fine little guide to the city with some really lovely prints. I found a copy of it a couple of Saturdays ago. I had spent the day at the Institute Library, a wonderful quiet place to go when you need a place that's wonderful and quiet, and on leaving, I went into the English Building Market, which is a couple of doors down. I cruise the place fairly regularly but hardly ever do I look at the books; however, this book caught my eye: I thought, "Oh, what the hell," and bought it.

So let me tell you: reading a guide to New Haven from 1989 is a trip. It's really a strange experience. I found myself remembering shops that I had really and truly forgotten about, though they were once landmarks of downtown New Haven. Scribbles, a shop on Chapel Street, beneath the Yale Center for British Art: you went there for stupid doodads, stickers, obscene greeting cards, and other things no sane person would spend money on. I'd forgotten all about that place. And what makes that awful is, I actually worked there briefly. For about two days. The job was so deplorable that, at the age of 16, I phoned them and said, "Yeah, hi, I won't be coming in. No, I don't need to pick up the paycheck. Keep it." I never wanted to set foot in there again.

How could I have forgotten about Scribbles? And yet I did.

The guide mentions Gentree's, a fairly dignified restaurant that used to be on York Street, in a building that no longer exists because Yale tore it down. It was on York near Chapel, a site now housing the new part of the Art and Architecture school. Gentree's was originally a men's clothing store; I own an overcoat from there, which I acquired at a tag sale on Orange Street simply because I wanted an article of clothing with the Gentree's label. The men's shop closed, and somehow Gentree's was re-conceived as a restaurant, the kind of place where you could get decent burgers and serious drinks. Plants; dark wood; 80s yuppie heaven. Gentree's closed, and I was sad; it wasn't that it was such a great restaurant, but it was reliable. Fitzwilly's, which was on the corner of Park and Elm Streets, was a similar establishment, but much larger, and I was very sorry when they closed, too.

And the Old Heidelberg! Which is now a Thai restaurant! How can it be that the Old Heidelberg is a Thai restaurant? Well, it is the case, my friends. Been that way since 1991. Which means that the Old Heidelberg has been gone for almost twenty years. Which means that there's at least one generation of people to whom that space has "always" been a Thai restaurant.

A sobering thought.

New Haven is, I suspect, no different from any other small city, or even town, in this regard: any business establishment that opens and then lasts longer than three to five years becomes, simply out of its survival, an institution. Some institutions are more entrenched than others: Rudy's may thrive in its new spot, but it won't be Rudy's, really; it'll be something else -- but even so, you know that for the next ten years, there will be people sitting around bars around town going, "Man, remember Rudy's, that night when...." I know that's how it is with the Grotto, a club on lower Crown Street that closed in I think 1988 or maybe it was 1989. New Haven is filled with sentimental chumps like me who remember every club, every restaurant they ever ate at, every store where they ever bought shoes, and lament their closings. If you don't believe me, there is proof on Facebook, even about the shoe store: Cheryl Andresen's shop Solemate, which started on State Street and moved to York Street, is much missed by many. I still wear shoes I bought from Cheryl and her shop closed in 2000. Are people more sentimental in New Haven than in other places? I have no idea. But when I meet someone who has been here a long time, inevitably our first conversation includes a litany of "do you remembers": the Daily Caffe; the Willoughby's on Chapel Street; The Moon on Whalley; the Third World International Cafe... it's always sort of romantic, actually, these conversations. We woo each other with our memory banks of the Nine Squares and the streets that radiate from it. Tight friendships are born out of these shared memories of places long gone.

Mamoun's is still here. Mysteriously, Clarie's Corner Copia is still here. Ashley's is here. All true.

But I miss Thomas Sweet. I miss the pancake restaurant that used to be on York Street. (Not the crepe place; I mean the pancake place; it was where Bangkok Gardens is.) And don't even get me started on the bookstores.