MANIFESTO: On Poker Chips, Book Publishing and Health Care Reform

Unless you're color-blind like me (yes, I'm color-blind, and yes, that probably does explain the color scheme here on Literary Kicks), you probably see two different color chips in the photo above.

The New York Times Book Review could surely have found someone who knows something about poker -- say, me -- to review James McManus's Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker. Some common tipoffs that a writer doesn't know anything about poker are that he thinks Texas Hold 'Em actually has something to do with Texas, that he gets a kick out of funny names like Crooked Nose Jack McCall, or that he's more interested in listing which US Presidents played poker than in discussing the game itself.

Four new books I'm happy to recommend to you:



Unwanted Hopeless Romantic Morons by Geoffrey Alexander Parsons

1. Watching the Oscars on TV with Caryn last night, I felt a strange reverberation as the awards for Best Adapted Screenplay were listed. Slumdog Millionaire, it turned out, was based on a novel called Q & A by an author named Vikas Swarup, and something told me I had mentioned this novel years ago when reviewing the New York Times Book Review.

1. Jerome David Salinger was born on January 1, 1919 -- ninety years ago today. Charles McGrath offers some new observations about the relationship between J. D. Salinger and his second most enduring character, Seymour Glass, and wonders what might motivate Salinger's ongoing and unyielding pursuit of solitude and silence.

So I'm at the Hilton Poker Room in Atlantic City last Monday evening, waiting for the late-night Hold'em tournament to start (because that's my idea of fun). And I've got my usual problem -- the 500 chip is a light gray blue, the 5000 chip is a light gray, and since I'm color blind they look exactly the same to me. A couple of other color blind players in the tournament have the same problem, but we're all used to it. There are a whole lot of colors in the rainbow, though, and I really wish the casinos would go to the trouble of picking colors that color blind people can tell apart.

I'm pleasantly surprised to see a prominent full-page review for a new adult novel by S. E. Hinton, Some of Tim's Stories, in today's New York Times Book Review -- not because I spend a lot of time wishing for mature S. E. Hinton novels in the 21st Century, but just because this is a quirky (and generous) choice for the Book Review editors to make. Alas, critic Stephanie Zacharek's review is a dud.

Today's New York Times Book Review is a theme issue again, and again I don't like it. Today we're doing "Bad For You", containing reviews of books about poker, cigarettes, alcohol and Warren Zevon. I have no problem with the topic, nor with the translation theme that dominated a recent issue, but these laudable literary outings just seem like a warm-up for the horrors soon to come. How long will it be before there's another Food Issue?

It was a lyric I loved when I was a teenager, from a song called "Gettin' In Tune", an off-track on the Who's album Who's Next:

I'm singing this note 'cause it fits in well with the cards I'm playing