Paul Bowles died twelve years ago today.

I’ve read most of his cold, asexual and deeply alien/alienated prose. And I would offer him up as one of the great short stories of the twentieth century, next to F. Scott Fitzgerald. His novels though, we must admit, do not improve upon his short fiction by length; and his latter writings lost much of that strange and uncomfortable voice that made him best work so compelling (“Pages From Cold Point” – how creepy can you get? I still remember the sensation I got when I realized what was happening, what that unreliable narrator would never come out and say. I won’t tell you what it is – you have to read it). But that best work, ahh… it was something else.

When I was young, I went to Tangiers, but was too afraid to knock on his door. A pity, because apparently, he would often welcome such random guests.

Not the bird. The book publisher.

And yes, I remember them, too (though not in Woolworth’s – I was born in 1974, the year he found Woolf in a Woolworth’s).

St.  Mark’s Bookshop on the Lower East Side was saved, at least temporarily.

An increase in rent would have forced the iconic bookshop and literary performance space to close down.

Their landlord, Cooper Union, had originally increased their rent to $20,000 per month. St. Mark’s had asked that to be lowered to $15,000 and when Cooper Union refused, an organizing campaign was launched on the bookshop’s behalf.

As a result (one supposes) of the campaign, their new rent was set $17,500 for one year (though after a year, it will presumably go up to the $20,000 that St. Mark’s could not afford in the first place) and their unpaid back rent was forgiven.

Let’s hope that they keep going. You might consider purchasing a book from them, though, in order to help keep them alive. I bought this one.

Just a fun little article arguing for doing one’s creative writing the old fashioned way – with paper and pen.

I do like to write long hand. Though I probably also qualify as one of the notebook fetishists mentioned. I have a large collection of notebooks and I almost exclusively write in them with a fountain pen (which is currently giving me trouble; I would have expected such an expensive pen [I don’t skimp when it comes to this particular fetish] to not be leaking after only a year).

Despite the article’s title, Why creative writing is better with a pen, it’s not really an empirical argument so much as subjective bit of nostalgia.

This article, Take Care of Your Little Notebook, makes a similar point.