Specifically, I see that my pal and cartooning colleague Mikhaela Reid, whose political cartoons have recently been collected in book form under the title Attack of the 50-ft. Mikhaela, is making a public appearance in Cambridge tonight (that’s September 28) in the company of her husband and fellow ‘tooner Masheka Wood.

Be prepared to be blinded by Mikhaela’s dazzling red hair as well as her dazzling intellect. (I haven’t yet met Masheka, but I’m sure he’s no slouch when it comes to hair color and intellect himself.)

And now to explain what Books In My Bookcase is all about.

The Friendly Impulse

Many of my friends are, like me, authors. Periodically they publish new books (usually with far greater frequency than I do), and when that happens my impulse is to do what I can to help make the reading public aware of their newborn offspring.

Ignoring the fact that my blog has significantly less clout when it comes to spotlighting new literary works than does, say, Oprah’s Book Club, I choose to behave as if a mention of the book in this space can make a small difference in a work’s commercial fate.

Ideally I would prefer to swing into action soon enough after a new book’s debut to contribute to its initial marketing push (maybe even provide a quotable blurb when my admiration for the book inspires me to compose blurb-level verbiage). Unfortunately, I have such difficulty finding time to simply write blog posts, much less digest entire books, that I inevitably fall behind the marketing curve when I manage to write anything at all. This is a source of great chagrin to me and I shudder to think how many friends I’ve let down over the years by failing to step up to the plate fast enough to conceivably be of some help.

In the past, of course, my uselessness as a volunteer publicist has been aggravated by the fact that I have lacked access to a publication that was itching to help me get the word out about anything, be it books or politics. But now I have my own blog, so what’s to stop me from doing what I can, even if it’s done tardily, to help the world know about what my talented friends are up to? Nothing. So there!

The Compulsion

Whenever I visit someone’s house, be they friend or foe, I can’t stop myself from drifting innocently toward any available bookcase. Having strategically positioned myself, I will stand and chat as if no ulterior motive were at play until my host leaves the room to fetch a beverage for me or see if an entree needs to be plucked from its burner. Once the coast is clear, I go into bookshelf-scanning mode.

I can’t help it. I like seeing what other people choose to stock their personal libraries with.

(By way of reassurance to any of my friends who are becoming alarmed at this point, let me add that there are limits to my nosiness. I would never, for example, go furtively burrowing in bedroom sidetables or under mattresses to see what the household’s preferred varieties of porn are. Your secrets in that arena are safe.)

But to return to a more elevated plane, I suspect that I’m not the only bookcase snoop running loose. So as a service to readers of this blog who share such proclivities, I’ve decided that I will occasionally pluck volumes randomly from my own bookcases and share a remark or two about them with you. Some of these will be books I’ve recently acquired; others will have followed me since my high school days. Some will be ragged; some pristine. Some I have kept because I actively cherish them; some are just too weird or impossibly bad to throw away.

Some of you will find this kind of indulgence entertaining. If enough of you beg me to stop, I will.

I know, I know; I’m letting myself go wild in cheap-shot city! But having scavenged the Internet for Picasso reference in preparation for my Open Studios design, I couldn’t help myself. Once a cartoonist starts getting goofy with cubism, it’s damned hard to stop.

And on top of everything else that’s been going on, I managed to get the first issue of the Cruse Art Newsletter completed and into the hands of my early subscribers on Sunday.

America! Wotta country!

Meanwhile, though, I’m forced to content myself with a few quick notes about my life today just to prevent someone from declaring my blog dead and shipping it off to the mortuary.

But before I begin listing tasks, let me throw in a couple of Gratifying News Flashes.

Gratifying News Flash 1: Rich Thigpen has just published a very touching new review of Stuck Rubber Baby that’s now online at the PRISM web site. My sincere (if rushed) thanks for the warm words about my book, Rich, and my condolences for the loss of your dad.

Gratifying News Flash 2: The "Alabama" installment of the ambitious "Americana" series of art exhibits that I told you about two blog entries ago either opens today (according to the information I was originally given) or opened yesterday (according to the CCA Wattis Institute web site’s current home page). Either way, this show theoretically includes pages of original art from Stuck Rubber Baby. I thought I would remind my Bay Area readers about this in case some of you would like to check the show out.)

Now on to what’s been keeping me so busy….

Task 1: Tonight’s the first meeting of the Cartooning class I’m teaching this semester at MCLA. It’s structured differently this second time around (two evening classes of moderate length every week instead of one galumphing four-hour one). Hopefully the shorter, two-hour periods will leave me and my students less glassy-eyed with exhaustion when classtime ends.

Task 2: I’ve made great progress with my design work for North Adams Open Studios (three print ads and a poster completed so far), but I still have to put together a coherent map showing where the 75-plus participating artists will be showing their work.

Task 3: There’s also the matter of selecting my own artwork that I’ll be showing during the aforementioned Open Studios weekend. This entails rummaging through flat files, making choices, and arranging to have the chosen items mounted and shrink-wrapped for display. (Someday I’ll be able to afford frames.)

Task 4: Several Stuck Rubber Baby pages and a couple of other small drawings are going to be exhibited later this month in Pittsfield as part of an exhange between the Storefront Artists Project in that city and North Adams’s own MCLA Gallery 51.

Task 5: I’m applying for funding from the Northern Berkshire Cultural Council that I hope will allow me to publish a couple more issues at least of the North County Perp.