Speaking of the library, the day after I borrowed The Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book my brother had recommended, The Museum Guard (Knopf), also by Norman, arrived in the Geist office. For some reason I chose to read The Museum Guard first, even though The Bird Artist had a due date, and I’m now paying for that decision.

After the salt men pass a certain rock they all speak the salt language. Women are not allowed to hear this language, nor are they allowed to look in the direction of the lake where the salt language is spoken....The film is called The Salt Men of Tibet, and it was made by the Swiss filmmaker Ulrike Koch in 1997.

Halfway through The Amateur, An Independent Life of Letters by Wendy Lesser (Pantheon Books), I stopped reading long enough to tell a few people that this was a great book of essays. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut because from that point on I enjoyed Lesser’s essays less and less, and even though I persisted to the end of the book, I could not recapture the sense of intense engagement I had enjoyed during the first half.

In 1987 in the British Museum, George Qulaut of lgloolik discovered a photograph of his grandmother in an archive of photographs taken by Geraldine Moodie in the Canadian Arctic in 1904. Nine years later the same photograph appeared on a poster announcing a conference called Imagining the Arctic: The Native Photograph in Alaska, Canada and Greenland, at which George Qulaut was the keynote speaker. Last year a collection of papers and photographs presented at the conference appeared as Imaging The Arctic, a big volume published by UBC Press, University of Washington Press and the British Museum—and George Qulaut’s grandmother is on the cover.

The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship is the latest of Charles Bukowski’s posthumously published books, of which there are at least five in the world (and possibly still more to come from the estimable Black Sparrow Press of Santa Rosa, California). The press release accompanying the review copy of The Captain Is Out describes the book as a collaboration between Bukowski, who died in 1994, and Robert Crumb, who created the illustrations during 1995 and ‘96—so the collaboration, if it can be called that, was one-sided to say the least.

Speaking of the library, the day after I borrowed The Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book my brother had recommended, The Museum Guard (Knopf), also by Norman, arrived in the Geist office. For some reason I chose to read The Museum Guard first, even though The Bird Artist had a due date, and I’m now paying for that decision.

My grandmother’s picture stares down from the wall. She is very young and newly sexual. After reading Hanna’s Daughters (Orion), I thought this woman might exist in me.

Although I am not a woman, did not grow up in the late ‘6os just a few blocks up from the infamous Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and am not the child of enlightened parents who strove against mainstream American materialism, I jumped two-footed into Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (Viking Canada). I knew something about the cultural expectations and perverted societal values which Naomi Wolf and her friends speak in their testimonies of adolescent life.

In Her Own Words: Women’s Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada & the United States (Vintage), edited by Jill Ker Conway, is a book that invites browsing. All twelve of the memoirs here are excerpts of longer works, so many of the paragraphs end with ellipses to indicate that we are going to move right along.